The Monotonous Desolation of the Alaskan Arctic Coast.—Dreary Expanse of Low Moorlands.—Diversified by Saddle-backed Hills of Gray and Bronze Tints.—The Coal of Cape Beaufort in the Arctic.—A Narrow Vein.—Pure Carboniferous Formation.—Doubtful if these Alaskan “Black Diamonds” can be Successfully Used.—Icy Cape, a Sand- and Gravel-spit.—Remarkable Land-locked Lagoons on the Beach.—The Arctic Innuits.—Point Barrow, Our Extreme Northern Land, a Low Gravel-spit.—The Buttercup and the Dandelion Bloom here, however, as at Home.—Back to Bering Sea.—The Interesting Island and Natives of St. Lawrence.—The Sea-horse.—Its Uncouth Form and Clumsy Life.—Its Huge Bulk and Impotency on Land.—Lives entirely by Clam-digging.—Rank Flavor of its Flesh.—The Walrus is to the Innuit just as the Cocoa-palm is to the South Sea Islander.—Hunting the Morse.—The Jagged, Straggling Island of St. Matthew.—The Polar Bears’ Carnival.—Hundreds of them here.—Their Fear of Man.—“Over the Hills and Far Away,” whenever Approached.—Completion of the Alaskan Circuit.

An Innuit village is in plain sight on the low shores of Cape Kroozenstern, which forms a northern pier-head of Kotzebue Sound, and its inhabitants greet your vessel as it passes out and up the coast with the usual dress-parade—climbing upon the summits of their winter houses, and by running in light-hearted mirth along the beach. A most dreary expanse of low moorland borders the coast as the little schooner reviews it, swiftly heeling on her course to the north. Not until the bluffs of Cape Thompson are in sight does a noteworthy landmark occur. This is an abrupt headland capped by carboniferous limestone full of fossils, shells, corals and the like, which are peculiar to that age. It is also traversed by veins of a blackish chert varying in thickness from six inches to three feet or more, causing a decided network tracery to appear very plainly on its gray-white face. Half-way down from the top, the limestone is succeeded by blue, black, and gray argillaceous shades, the colors of which alternate in layers of horizontal strata, six or eight feet in thickness, nearly down to the base; it is then composed of black carboniferous shales alone, which abound in organic remains and are occasionally interstratified by limestone much deflected. This contortion is so great as to form two regularly banded arches. Several tiny snow-water cascades tumble down its ravines and boldly plunge over the bluffs, which are about four hundred feet high in their greatest elevation.

This chert is that which the Eskimo of the entire Alaskan arctic region (before the coming of white men) used for tipping their lance- and arrow-heads when ivory was not employed. They, aided with a small piece of bone, were able to “flake” it off in slices that were easily reduced to the desired forms. They still work a little of it up every year, in a desultory or perfunctory manner, however, more for amusement than anything else, since they have a profusion of iron and steel now in their possession. The fashion in which they chip it gives ample evidence of their full understanding of a flat conchoidal fracture peculiar to flint, and of which they take advantage.

To the northwest of Cape Thompson the coast runs out abruptly as a low spit, projected into the Arctic Ocean for a distance of twenty miles. This is Port Hope. The beach everywhere is principally formed of dark basaltic gravel. To the north of a considerable stream not far from this point, and on a low and diluvial shore, is a large hamlet of Innuits, who have covered the turfy thatches on their winter houses with heavy blocks of angular clink-stones picked up from the sea-beach. The whole surface of the interior country here is raised several hundred feet above tide-level, and is diversified with saddle-backed hills of gray and bronzed tints, separated by wide valleys in which a rich green summer verdancy is characteristic. Here and there conical eminences and perpendicular shelving cliffs arise from a general evenness of the whole landscape. These cliffs seem to be composed of limestones, while their acclivities are of slate and shale.

As we near Cape Lisburne a jutting range of bluffs, stratified in bands of grayish-brown and black, receive the full wash of the sea, and are called Cape Dyer; but Cape Lisburne is the striking landmark, and a most important one for the navigator to recognize. It is composed of two remarkable promontories: the southwestern one rises abruptly from the surf, is covered with loose gray stones, divested of the smallest traces of vegetation. The northeastern one rises gradually, and, although but thinly clad with verdure, it forms a pleasing and marked contrast with the gray head of the other. The first is elevated from the sea in distinct strata, with a southwestern dip, and consists of layers of impure chert in its central and most prominent projections, and of a soft, friable slate and shale in its worn and more retiring sides. The front of the second is rugged and shelving, with very indistinct bandings; it is partly covered with tundra vegetable-growths, and with fallen masses of gray flint. Both points to this double-headed cape of Lisburne are easily accessible; they are about one thousand feet in height from the shore of the ocean, and both stretch their ridges away inland far to the southeast.

The highly elevated country here ceases at once to the northeast of Cape Lisburne, where the entire coast-line, away on and off to Icy Cape, and beyond again, forms a deep and extensive bay skirted by a dark, low beach. A gravel-flat fronts this again, filled with shallow estuaries and lagoons. The land of the interior rises from that beach in a series of low, earthy cliffs and in gradual acclivities.

The coal-veins, which Beechey visited in 1826, are about fifty miles to the eastward of Lisburne, embedded in a ridge some three hundred feet high where it juts into the ocean. This point is known as Cape Beaufort. A narrow vein of pure carboniferous coal is exposed there, about a quarter of a mile from the beach. “It was slaty, but burned with a bright, clear flame and rapid consumption.” Again, at a point about midway between Beaufort and Lisburne, directly at the surf-margin, the officers of the United States Revenue Marine cutter Corwin mined a few tons of this same coal in 1880-81. But no harbor for a coaling ship is near by; the steady north and westerly winds of summer, which blow right on shore almost all of that short time in which a vessel can navigate the Arctic, make it very doubtful whether these remote mines of Alaskan “black diamonds” will ever be of real economic value.

That sand- and shingle-spit ahead of us, which the whalers have named Icy Cape with perfect fitness, is in itself almost invisible, since it is a mere continuation of the outer rim to a remarkable lagoon which borders this coast from Cape Beaufort to Wainright Inlet, over one hundred miles in length, and varying in width from five to ten miles, with an average depth of two fathoms. It is spanned by occasional sand-bars, some of them entirely dry, so that it is not navigable except for those small boats and oomiaks of the natives, who haul these craft across as they journey, thus safe and snug, up and down a desolate coast. This lagoon of the Arctic Ocean has several openings to the sea itself. Small schooners can run in and escape from ice-pack “jams,” if they draw less than eight or ten feet of water. The coast-line of the mainland at Icy Cape is a series of low mud-cliffs, varying from ten to fifty feet in height above a shingly beach, which is everywhere composed of fine, minutely comminuted, pebbly bases of granite, of chert, of sienite, and of indurated clay, the last being a predominant form.

From this point clear around to the boundary of our Alaskan Arctic coast at Point Demarcation that country presents the same appearance which we note here. It is low and slightly rolling, and falls in small cliffs of mud or sandstone at the sea-shore. During the midsummer season it wears a hue of gray and brown, with little patches of bright green where the snow has melted early in sunny, sheltered spots. The lines of many streams, as they course in carrying off melting snows, are plainly marked over a dreary tundra by the dark fringes of dwarfed willows, birches, and alders which only grow upon their banks.

All along this cheerless northern sea-shore are small and widely scattered settlements of our Innuits, who burrow in their turfy underground winter huts, and who tent outside in summer-time upon these shingly gravels and clink-stones of the Arctic coast. They then live upon the walrus and kill an occasional calf-whale. For the better apprehension of these animals they erect lookouts on the beach by setting up drift-wood scaffolds, and climbing as lookouts to an elevated platform thus made. In the winter, when the weather permits, they net a ringed seal (Phoca fœtida) under the ice, make short inland trips, where they camp for weeks at a time in rude snow-houses, hunting reindeer, which are shy though abundant, and they trap a few wolves and foxes. Every July and August they expect the visit of a few whaling-vessels at least, and they are seldom disappointed, for such craft are compelled by ice-floes to hug this shore very closely, in order to get as far to the eastward as the whales are found; sometimes, in spite of all the wariness and skill of our own hardy whalemen, great floe-booms, of icy make, suddenly shut down on that land so quickly from the north as to catch and crush the staunchest ships like egg-shells under foot. Then, indeed, is the sadness and the distress of the white men sharply contrasted with that great joy and happy anticipation of an Innuit who feasts his eyes and gloats in fancy over the abandoned vessels as they lie riven by ice upon those shallow strands of Icy Cape or Point Barrow.

It is more than sixty years now since Captain Beechey[163] camped upon and located Point Barrow, our extreme limit of northern landed possession, and in that time few changes, other than depopulation of the natives, have taken place on this coast. That same village of Noowuk, which he graphically described, still stands there on the tip of a low gravel-spit which extends out from the mainland twelve miles into the chill flood of an Arctic Ocean. All the land at its extremity not inundated by the sea in storms is now, as it was then, occupied by the winter houses of the natives. Blooming here in the short summer of July, on those desolate moors adjacent to Point Barrow, is the same dandelion and buttercup which filled the Englishman then, as it does us now, with thoughts of meadows at home, and some bright little poppies still nod their yellow heads again to us, as they did to him, on this low north end of Alaska. A tiny golden butterfly flits from flower to flower, and as they fade, it, too, disappears over frost-bitten swales.

Big ice-fields seldom ever fail to threaten the coast here, even when they relax their grasp in July. In a few short weeks, however, they return to stay for the rest of the year and best part of the next. Such brief intervals for navigation in the Arctic Ocean during every July and August are those which lure whaling-ships, and the dark lanes of open water in white ice-floes are the last refuge of many hard-hunted whales, unless they dive, and rise to breathe again in that conjectured clear yet frigid flood of a polar sea, far away under the north star.

There is nothing more to see, or noteworthy to learn, at or beyond Point Barrow, even were you to live and drag out a wretched year’s existence in looking for it, so you gladden the heart of your skipper and his hardy crew by telling them to shape a course homeward. Back through the Straits of Bering, wrapped in a chill thick fog, the little schooner heels, with a singing northwester on her quarter that holds her canvas just as taut as if made of tough wood. She fairly scrapes by the Diomedes—the walls of Noornabook loom up high in a cold, gray fog-light, as though its bold, gray cliffs were right over her spars—but the crew know at the time that they are more than two miles away from that surf which noisily thunders on the dark rocks of these islets. That same chill wind, and gloomy fog-surrounding, follows them into Bering Sea—not a glimpse of all the land and mountain, which they so plainly discerned going up, have they caught going down.

What trifles often determine our success or failure in life! Had it not been for a sudden sunburst from the gloom of a leaden fog which shrouded all about it in its misty darkness, and thus lighted up a lofty russet head of the East Cape of St. Lawrence Island, a little vessel bearing the author would have been piled up and thrown into foaming breakers which beat upon a low, rocky reef that reaches out from its feet. This gleam of light reflected from that headland warned a startled man on the lookout just in time to have her wheel put hard up, and thus luff our light trim craft in season to shave safely by.

St. Lawrence is the largest island in Bering Sea. It is directly south of Bering Straits, one hundred and eighty miles distant from the Diomedes; it is eighty to eighty-five miles in length, with an average width of fifteen or twenty. The sea has built onto it quite extensively, in very much the same manner as it has filled out and extended the coast of St. Paul, of the Pribylov group. At Kagallegak, on the east shore, the island is made up of coarse feldspathic, red granitic flats and hills, with extensive lagoons and lakelets. The skeleton of this island seems to have been originally one of low hills and ranges of granite, with volcanic outbursts everywhere manifested at their summits, especially on the north shore. Between them stretch long, low plains, or gently rolling uplands, and perfectly smooth reaches of sand and gravelly beaches that border the sea everywhere not so marked by bluffs.

At Kagallegak your eye sweeps over extensive level plains to the northward, upon which a green-stalked and white-plumed tundra grass (Eriophorum) principally grows everywhere on the wet and boggy surface, while, on those sand-beach margins, the “wild wheat” (Elymus) springs up most abundantly, short and stunted, however. These extended low areas of moorland so peculiar to this island are made up of fine granitic drift and clays, lined at their sea-borders with a low, broad sand-belt. The hills and hill ranges of St. Lawrence are rich in color, with dark blue-black patches interspersed which indicate a location of trap-protrusions. No shrubbery whatever grows upon these wind-swept tundra and hills save dwarfed and creeping willows; yet, a series of characteristic rock-lichens color such bare summits in their bright relief which we have just noted. The rocks themselves are reddish, coarse-grained, shining granites, with abundant trap-protrusions, that weather out and fall down upon the flanks of the peaks and ridges in dusky patches and streaks, so as to contrast, from a slight distance, very sharply with the main ground of pinkish rock, which is moss- and lichen-grown, and colored here and there with areas of that peculiar and characteristic greenish-russet tinge of sphagnous origin. This dark marking of those trap-dikes appears like the presence of low-growing shrubbery from the vessel, as an observer sails by. Snow and ice lie all the year around in small bodies within the gullies and on the hill-sides.

The lower plains have a richer, warmer, yellowish-green tone than that cold tint of the uplands, while the sand of the sea-shore is a bright light-brown. Small streams flow down from these hills, and twist and turn sluggishly through the tundra as they lead to lakes or empty directly into the sea—a few parr, or young salmon, being the only fish in them that can be found; most of the fresh-water lakes and lagoons are, however, fairly stocked with familiar-looking mullets (Catastomus), but nothing else.

The entire expanse of these lowlands of St. Lawrence are precisely like all of those vast reaches of Alaskan tundra—they are great saturated, earthy sponges, filled and overrunning with water in midsummer—the chief and happiest vegetation upon them being that same beautiful tufted or plumed grass which we noticed at Michaelovsky, since the white and silken tassels of its feathery inflorescence never fail to charm even tired and travel-worn eyes. This grass, in conjunction with several rank-growing mosses, the trailing runners of the crowberry-vines, and little patches of the humble arctic raspberry (Rubus chamæmorus) make up that conventional tundra color of russet-green (flecked with grayish-blue spots on the slopes of stern northern exposures) which mark these great marshy tracts of Alaska, and under which eternal frost is found, even in midsummer, a foot or two only from their surfaces. Small white shells of a land-mollusk (succinea) are scattered thickly over these moorlands.

On the flats of the east shore of St. Lawrence a great abundance of drift-wood was piled in much confusion. Here the natives had a wood-cutting camp, hewing and carving; its chips were scattered all along the beach-levels for miles. There are places, here, where the ice in some unusual seasons has carried large logs and pieces of drift-wood far back, full half a mile from the sea, and a vigorous growth of tundra vegetation now flourishes in between; and there they lie to-day deeply embedded in the swale, settling down in decay—that slow, hungering eremacausis of the Arctic.

The Innuits, living here as they do, some three or four hundred in number, are great walrus-hunters. They enjoy a location that enables them to secure these animals at all seasons of a year. In winter the sea-horse floats on big ice-fields; but during summer-time the “aibwook” hauls up to sun and rest his heavy body in and on the inviting peace of those beaches of St. Lawrence. A famous spot for this landing of the walrus is on the rocky and pebbly shores of Poonook (three small rocky islets), just five miles east of the summer tents of Kagallegak. These tiny, detached fragments of St. Lawrence stand in the full sweep of those air- and water-currents which keep broad ice-floes in constant motion, and thus bring walrus-herds into range of Mahlemoöt hunters, who have a winter village dug deep into sandy flats of “Poonookah.”

Naturally enough we regard the walrus with more than passing interest, for it plays so large and so vital a part in sustaining the life of human beings who reside in these arctic and subarctic regions of Alaska. Perhaps the only place in all this extended area in which these clumsy brutes are found, where the creature itself can be closely observed and studied, is that unique islet, six miles east of St. Paul (Pribylov group) and about four hundred miles south of St. Lawrence.

Here the morse rests upon some rocky, surf-washed tables characteristic of this place without being disturbed; hence the locality afforded me a particularly pleasant and advantageous opportunity of minutely observing these animals. My observations, perhaps, would not have passed over a few moments of general notice, had I found a picture presented by them such as I had drawn in my mind from previous descriptions; the contrary, however, stamping itself so suddenly and decidedly upon my eye, set me to work with pen and brush in noting and portraying such extraordinary brutes, as they lay grunting and bellowing, unconscious of my presence, and not ten feet away from the ledge upon which I sat.[164]

Sitting as I did to the leeward of them, with a strong wind blowing in at the time from seaward, which, ever and anon, fairly covered many of them with foaming surf-spray, therefore they took no notice of me during the three or more hours of my study. I was first astonished at observing the raw, naked appearance of the hide: it was a skin covered with multitudes of pustular-looking warts and large boils or pimples, without hair or fur, save scattered and almost invisible hairs; it was wrinkled in deep, flabby seam-folds, and marked by dark-red venous lines, which showed out in strong contrast through the thicker and thinner yellowish-brown cuticle, that in turn seemed to be scaling off in places as if with leprosy; indeed, a fair expression of this walrus-hide complexion if I may use the term, can be understood by the inspection of those human countenances in the streets and on the highways of our cities which are designated as the faces of “bloats.” The forms of Rosmarus struck my eye at first in a most unpleasant manner, and the longer I looked at them the more heightened was my disgust; for they resembled distorted, mortified, shapeless masses of flesh; those clusters of big, swollen, watery pimples, which were of a yellow, parboiled flesh-color, and principally located over the shoulders and around the necks, painfully suggested unwholesomeness.

On examining the herd individually, and looking upon perhaps one hundred and fifty specimens directly beneath and within the sweep of my observation, I noticed that there were no females among them; they were all males, and some of the younger ones had considerable hair, or enough of that close, short, brown coat to give a hirsute tone to their bodies—hence I believe that it was only the old, wholly matured males which offered to my eyes such bare and loathsome nakedness.

I noticed, as they swam around, and before they landed, that they were clumsy in the water, not being able to swim at all like the Phocidæ and the Otariidæ; yet their progress in the sea was wonderfully alert when brought into comparison with that terrestrial action of theirs; the immense bulk and weight of this walrus, contrasted with the size and strength of its limbs, renders it simply impotent when hauled out of the water on those low, rocky beaches or shelves upon which it rests. Like the seals, however, it swims entirely under water when travelling, but it does not rise, in my opinion, so frequently to take breath; when it does, it blows or snorts not unlike a whale. Often have I heard this puffing snort of those animals (since the date of these observations on Walrus Islet), when standing on the bluffs near the village of St. Paul and looking seaward; on one cool, quiet morning in May I followed with my eye and ear a herd of walrus, tracing its progress some distance off and up along the east coast of the island by those tiny jets of moisture or vapor from its confined breath which the animals blew off as they rose to respire.

Mariners, while coasting in the Arctic, have often been put on timely footing by a walrus fog-horn snorting and blowing as the ship dangerously sails silently through dense fog toward land or ice-floes, upon which those animals may be resting; indeed, these uncouth monitors to this indistinct danger rise and bob under and around a vessel like so many gnomes or demons of fairy romance, and sailors may well be pardoned for much of that strange yarning which they have given to the reading world respecting the sea-horse during the last three centuries.

When a walrus-herd comes ashore, after short preliminary surveys of the intended spot of landing, an old veteran usually takes the lead of a band which is so disposed.

Finally the first one makes a landing, and no sooner gets composed upon the rocks for sleep than a second one comes along, prodding and poking with its blunted tusks, demanding room also, thus causing the first to change its position to another location still farther off and up from the water, a few feet beyond; then the second is in turn treated in the same way by a third, and so on until hundreds will be slowly packed together on the shore as thickly as they can lie—never far back from the surf, however—pillowing their heads upon the bodies of one another: and, they do not act at all quarrelsome toward each other. Occasionally, in their lazy, phlegmatic adjusting and crowding, the posteriors of some old bull will be lifted up, and remain elevated in the air, while the passive owner continues to sleep, with its head, perhaps, beneath the pudgy form of its neighbor.

These pinnipeds are, perhaps, of all animals, the most difficult subjects that an artist can find to reproduce from life. There are no angles or elbows to seize hold of. The lines of body and limbs are all rounded, free and flowing; yet, the very fleshiest examples never have that bloated, wind-distended look which most of the published figures give them. One must first become familiarized with the restless, varying attitudes of these creatures by extended personal contact and observation ere he can satisfy himself with the result of his drawings, no matter how expert he may be in rapid and artistic delineation. Life-studies by artists of the young of the Atlantic walrus have been made in several instances; but of the mature animal, until my drawing, there was nothing extant of that character.

As the walrus came ashore they made no use of their tusks in assistance; but such effort was all done by their fore flippers and the “boosting” of exceptionally heavy surf which rolled in at wide intervals, and for which marine assistance the walrus themselves seemed to patiently wait. When moving on land they do not seem to have any real power in the hinder limbs. These are usually pulled and twitched up behind, or feebly flattened out at right angles to its body. Terrestrial progression is slowly and tediously made by a dragging succession of short steps forward on the fore-feet; but if an alarm is given, it is astonishing to note the contrast which they present in their method of getting back to sea: they fairly roll and hustle themselves over and into the waves within an exceedingly short lapse of time.

When sleeping on drifting ice-floes of the Arctic Ocean, or on rocks at St. Matthew’s or Walrus Island, they resort to a very singular method of keeping guard, if I may so term it. In this herd of three or four hundred male walrus that were beneath my vision, though nearly all were sleeping, yet the movement of one would disturb the other, which would raise its head in a stupid manner for a few moments, grunt once or twice, and before lying down to sleep again it would strike the slumbering form of its nearest companion with its tusks, causing that animal to rouse up in turn for a few moments also, grunt, and pass the blow on to the next, lying down in the same manner. Thus the word was transferred, as it were, constantly and unceasingly around, always keeping some one or two aroused, which consequently were more alert than the rest.

On Walrus Island a particularly large individual walrus was selected and shot, out of a herd of more than two hundred. This was done at the author’s instance, who made the following memoranda: It measured twelve feet seven inches from its bluff nostrils to the tip of its excessively abbreviated tail, which was not more than two and one-half or three inches long; it had the surprising girth of fourteen feet. An immense mass of blubber on the shoulders and around the neck made the head look strangely small in proportion, and the posteriors decidedly attenuated; indeed, the whole weight of the animal was bound up in its girth anteriorly. It was a physical impossibility for me to weigh this brute, and I therefore can do nothing but make a guess, having this fact to guide me—that the head, cut directly off at the junction with the spine, or the occipital or atlas joint, weighed eighty pounds; that the skin, which I carefully removed with the aid of these natives, with the head, weighed five hundred and seventy pounds. Deducting the head and excluding the flippers, I think it is safe to say that the skin itself would not weigh less than three hundred and fifty pounds, and the animal could not weigh much less than a ton, from two thousand to two thousand two hundred pounds.

The head had a decidedly flattened appearance, for the nostrils, eyes, and ear-spots seem to be placed nearly on top of the cranium. The nasal apertures are literally so, opening directly over the muzzle. They are oval, and closed parallel with the longitudinal axis of the skull, and when dilated are about an inch in their greatest diameter.

The eyes are small, but prominent; placed nearly on top of the head, and, protruding from their sockets, they bulge like those of a lobster. The iris and pupil of this eye is less than one-fourth of its exposed surface; the sclerotic coat swells out from under the lids when they are opened, and is of a dirty, mottled coffee-yellow and brown, with an occasional admixture of white; the iris itself is light-brown, with dark-brown rays and spots. I noticed that whenever the animal roused itself, instead of turning its head, it only rolled its eyes, seldom moving the cranium more than to elevate it. The eyes seem to move, rotating in every direction when the creature is startled, giving the face of this monster a very extraordinary attraction, especially when studied by an artist. The expression is just indescribable. The range of sight enjoyed by the walrus out of water, I can testify, is not well developed, for, after throwing small chips of rock down upon the walruses near me, several of them not being ten feet distant, and causing them only to stupidly stare and give vent to low grunts of astonishment, I then rose gently and silently to my feet, standing boldly up before them; but then, even, I was not noticed, though their eyes rolled all over from above to under me. Had I, however, made a little noise, or had I been standing as far as one thousand yards away from them to the windward, they would have taken the alarm instantly, and tumbled off into the sea like so many hustled wool-sacks, for their sense of smell is of the keen, keenest.

The ears of the walrus, or rather the auricles to the ears, are on the same lateral line at the top of the head with the nostrils and eyes, the latter being just midway between. The pavilion, or auricle, is a mere fleshy wrinkle or fold, not at all raised or developed; and from what I could see of the meatus externus it was very narrow and small; still, the natives assured me that the Otariidæ had no better organs of hearing than Rosmarus.

The head of the male walrus, to which I have alluded, and from which I afterward removed the skin, was eighteen inches long between the nostrils and the post-occipital region; and, although its enormous tusks seemed to be firmly planted in their osseous sockets, judge of my astonishment when one of the younger natives flippantly struck a tusk with a wooden club quite smartly, and then easily jerked the tooth forth. I had frequently observed that it was difficult to keep such teeth from rattling out of their alveoli in any of the best skulls I had gathered of the fur seals and sea-lions, especially difficult in the case of the latter.

Its tusks, or canines, are set firmly under the nostril-apertures in deep, massive, bony pockets, giving that strange, broad, square-cut front of the muzzle so characteristic of its physiognomy.

The upper lips of this walrus of Bering Sea are exceedingly thick and gristly, and its bluff, square muzzle is studded, in regular rows and intervals, with a hundred or so, short, stubby, gray-white bristles, varying in length from one-half to three inches. There are a few very short and much softer bristles set, also, on the fairly hidden chin of its lower jaw, which closes up under a projecting snout and muzzle, and is nearly concealed by the enormous tushes, when laterally viewed.

The thickness of the skin of the walrus is a marked and most anomalous feature. I remember well how surprised I was, when I followed the incision of a broad-axe used in beheading the specimen shot for my benefit, to find that the skin over its shoulders and around the throat and chest was three inches thick—a puffy, spongy epidermis, outwardly hateful to the sight, and inwardly resting upon a slightly acrid fat or blubber so peculiar to this animal. Nowhere was that hide, upon the thinnest point of measurement, less than half an inch thick. It feeds exclusively upon shell-fish (Lamellibranchiata), or clams principally, and also upon the bulbous roots and tender stalks of certain marine plants and grasses which grow in great abundance over the bottoms of broad, shallow lagoons and bays of the main Alaskan coast. I took from the paunch of the walrus above mentioned more than a bushel of crushed clams in their shells, all of which that animal had evidently just swallowed, for digestion had scarcely commenced. Many of those clams in that stomach, large as my clinched hands, were not even broken; and it is in digging this shell-fish food that the services rendered by its enormous tusks become apparent.[165]

I am not in accord with some singular tales told, on the Atlantic side, about the uses of these gleaming ivory teeth, so famous and conspicuous: I believe that the Alaskan walrus employs them solely in his labor of digging clams and rooting bulbs from those muddy oozes and sand-bars in the estuary waters peculiar to his geographical distribution. Certainly, it is difficult for me to reconcile my idea of such uncouth, timid brutes, as were those spread before me on Walrus Islet, with any of the strange chapters written as to the ferocity and devilish courage of a Greenland “morse.” These animals were exceedingly cowardly, abjectly so. It is with the greatest difficulty that the natives, when a herd of walruses are surprised, can get a second shot at them. So far from clustering in attack around their boats, it is the very reverse, and a hunter’s only solicitude is which way to travel in order that he may come up with the fleeing animals as they rise to breathe.

On questioning the natives, as we returned, they told me that the walrus of Bering Sea was monogamous, and that the difference between the sexes in size, color, and shape is inconsiderable; or, in other words, that until the males are old the young males and the females of all ages are not remarkably distinct, and would not be at all if it were not for their teeth. They said that the female brings forth her young, a single calf, in June usually, on the ice-floes in the Arctic Ocean, above Bering Straits, between Point Barrow and Cape Seartze Kammin; that this calf resembles the parent in general proportions and color when it is hardly over six weeks old, but that the tusks (which give it its most distinguishing expression) are not visible until the second year of its life; that the walrus mother is strongly attached to her offspring, and nurses it later through the season in the sea; that the walrus sleeps profoundly in the water, floating almost vertically, with barely more than the nostrils above water, and can be easily approached, if care is taken as to the wind, so as to spear it or thrust a lance into its bowels; that the bulls do not fight as savagely as the fur-seal or the sea-lion; that the blunted tusks of these combatants seldom do more than bruise their thick hides; that they can remain under water nearly an hour, or about twice as long as the seals, and that they sink like so many stones immediately after being shot at sea.

I personally made no experiments touching the peculiarity of sinking immediately after being shot. Of course, on reflection, it will appear to any mind that all seals, no matter how fat or how lean, would sink instantly out of sight, if not killed, at the shock of a bullet; even if mortally wounded, the great involuntary impulse of brain and muscle would be to dive and speed away, for all swimming is submarine when pinnipeds desire to travel.

Touching this mooted question, I had an opportunity when in Port Townsend, during 1874, to ask a man who had served as a partner in a fur-sealing schooner off the Straits of Fuca. He told me that unless a seal was instantly killed by the passage of his rifle-bullet through its brain, it was never secured, and would sink before they could reach the bubbling wake of its disappearance. If, however, the aim of a marksman had been correct, then its body was invariably taken within five to ten minutes after the rifle discharge. Only one man does the shooting; the rest of such a crew, ten to twelve white men and Indians, man canoes and boats which are promptly despatched from the schooner, after each report, in the direction of a victim. How long one of the bodies of these “clean” killed seals would float he did not know; the practice always was to get it as quickly as possible, fearing that the bearings of its position, when shot from a schooner, might be confused or lost. He also affirmed that, in his opinion, there were not a dozen men on the whole northwest coast who were good enough with a rifle, and expert at distance calculation, to shoot fur-seals successfully from the deck of a vessel on the ocean. The Indians of Cape Flattery do most of their pelagic fur-sealing by cautiously approaching from the leeward when these animals are asleep, and then throw line-darts or harpoons into them before they awaken.

The finest bidarrah skin-boats of transportation that I have seen in this country were those of the St. Lawrence natives. These were made out of dressed walrus-hides, shaved and pared down by them to the requisite thickness, so that when they were sewed with sinews to the wooden whalebone-lashed frames of such boats they dried into a pale greenish-white prior to oiling, and were even then almost translucent, tough and strong.

When I stepped, for the first time, into the baidar of St. Paul Island, and went ashore, from the Alexander, over a heavy sea, safely to the lower bight of Lukannon Bay, my sensations were of emphatic distrust; the partially water-softened skin-covering would puff up between the wooden ribs, and then draw back, as the waves rose and fell, so much like an unstable support above the cold, green water below, that I frankly expressed my surprise at such an outlandish craft. My thoughts quickly turned to a higher appreciation of those hardy navigators who used these vessels in circumpolar seas years ago, and of the Russians who, more recently, employed bidarrahs chiefly to explore Alaskan and Kamchatkan terræ incognita. There is an old poem in Avitus, written by a Roman as early as 445 A.D.; it describes the ravages of Saxon pirates along the southern coasts of Britain, who used just such vessels as this bidarrah of St Paul.

These boats were probably covered with either horse’s or bulls’ hides. When used in England they were known as coracles; in Ireland they were styled curachs. Pliny tells us that Cæsar moved his army in Britain over lakes and rivers in such boats. Even the Greeks used them, terming them karabia; and the Russian word of korabl’, or “ship,” is derived from it. King Alfred, in 870-872, tells us that the Finns made sad havoc among many Swedish settlements on the numerous “meres” (lakes) in the moors of that country, by “carrying their ships (baidars) overland to the meres whence they make depredations on the Northmen; their ships are small and very light.”

Until I saw these bidarrahs of the St. Lawrence natives, in 1874, I was more or less inclined to believe that the tough, thick, and spongy hide of a walrus would be too refractory in dressing for use in covering such light frames, especially those of the bidarka; but the manifest excellence and seaworthiness of those Eskimo boats satisfied me that I was mistaken. I saw, however, abundant evidence of a much greater labor required to tan or pare down this thick cuticle to that thin, dense transparency so marked on their bidarrahs; for the pelt of a hair-seal, or sea-lion, does not need any more attention, when applied to this service, than that of simply unhairing it. This is done by first sweating the “loughtak” in piles, then rudely, but rapidly, scraping with blunt knives or stone flensers the hair off in large patches at every stroke; the skin is then air-dried, being stretched on a stout frame, where, in the lapse of a few weeks, it becomes as rigid as a board. Whenever wanted for use thereafter, it is soaked in water until soft or “green” again; then it is sewed with sinews, while in this fresh condition, tightly over the slight wooden skeleton of the bidarka or the heavier frame of a bidarrah. In this manner all boats and lighters at the islands are covered. Then they are air-dried thoroughly before oiling, which is done when the skin has become well indurated, so as to bind the ribs and keel as with an iron plating. The thick, unrefined seal-oil keeps the water out for twelve to twenty hours, according to the character of the hides. When, however, the skin-covering begins to “bag in” between the ribs of its frame, then it is necessary to haul the bidarrah out and air-dry it again, and then re-oil. If attended to thoroughly and constantly, those skin-covered boats are the best species of lighter which can be used in these waters, for they will stand more thumping and pounding on the rocks and alongside ship than all wooden, or even corrugated-iron, lighters could endure and remain seaworthy.

The flesh of the walrus is not, to our palate, at all toothsome; it is positively uninviting. That flavor of the raw, rank mollusca, upon which it feeds, seems to permeate every fibre of its flesh, making it very offensive to the civilized palate; but the Eskimo, who do not have any of our squeamishness, regard it as highly and feed upon it as steadily, as we do on our own best corn-fed beef. Indeed, the walrus to an Eskimo answers just as the cocoa-palm does to a South Sea islander: it feeds him, it clothes him, it heats and illuminates his “igloo,” and it arms him for the chase, while he builds a summer shelter and rides upon the sea by virtue of its hide. The morse, however, is not of much account to the seal-hunters on the Pribylov Islands. They still find, by stirring up the sand-dunes and digging about them at Northeast Point, all the ivory that they require for their domestic use on the islands, nothing else belonging to a walrus being of the slightest economic value to them. Some authorities have spoken well of walrus-meat as an article of diet. Either they had that sauce for it born of inordinate hunger, or else the cooks deceived them. Starving explorers in the arctic regions could relish it—they would thankfully and gladly eat anything that was juicy, and sustained life, with zest and gastronomic fervor. The Eskimo naturally like it; it is a necessity to their existence, and thus a relish for it is acquired. I can readily understand, by personal experience, how a great many, perhaps a majority of our own people, could speak well, were they north, of seal-meat, of whale “rind,” and of polar-bear steaks; but I know that a mouthful of fresh or “cured” walrus-flesh would make their “gorges rise.” The St. Paul natives refuse to touch it as an article of diet in any shape or manner. I saw them removing the enormous testicles of an old morse which was shot, for my purposes, on Walrus Island. They told me they did so in obedience to the wishes of a widow doctress at the village, Maria Seedova, who desired a pair for her incantations.

Curiosity, mingled with a desire to really understand, alone tempted me to taste some walrus-meat which was placed before me at Poonook, on St. Lawrence Island; and candor compels me to say that it was worse than the old beaver’s tail which I had been victimized with in British Columbia, worse than the tough brown-bear steak of Bristol Bay—in fact, it is the worst of all fresh flesh of which I know. It had a strong flavor of an indefinite acrid nature, which turned my palate and my stomach instantaneously and simultaneously, while the surprised natives stared in bewildered silence at their astonished and disgusted guest. They, however, greedily put chunks, two inches square and even larger, of this flesh and blubber into their mouths as rapidly as the storage room there would permit; and with what grimy gusto! as the corners of their large lips dripped with the fatness of their feeding. How little they thought, then, that in a few short seasons they would die of starvation, sitting in these same igloos—their caches empty and nothing but endless fields of barren ice where a life-giving sea should be. The winter of 1879-80 was one of exceptional rigor in the Arctic, although in the United States it was unusually mild and open. The ice closed in solid around St. Lawrence Island—so firm and unshaken by the giant leverage of wind and tide that all walrus were driven far to the southward and eastward beyond the reach of those unhappy inhabitants of that island, who, thus unexpectedly deprived of their mainstay and support, seemed to have miserably starved to death then, with an exception of one small village on the north shore: thus, the residents of Poonook, Poogovellyak, and Kagallegak settlements perished, to a soul, from hunger; nearly three hundred men, women, and children. I recall that visit which I made to these alert Innuits, August, 1874, with sadness, in this unfortunate connection, because they impressed me with their manifest superiority over the savages of our northwest coast. They seemed, then, to be living, during nine months of the year, almost wholly upon the flesh and oil of the morse. Clean-limbed, bright-eyed, and jovial, they profoundly impressed me with their happy reliance and subsistence upon the walrus-herds of Bering Sea. I could not help remarking then, that these people had never been subjected to the temptations and subsequent sorrow of putting their trust in princes; hence their independence and good heart. But now it appears that it will not do to put your trust in Rosmarus either.