As met with on the coast of Spitzbergen, this animal is found of the length, ordinarily, of twelve to fifteen feet, and eight to ten feet in circumference. But specimens elsewhere found on the coasts of some Arctic countries, are represented as extending to twenty feet in length. The Spitzbergen animal, full grown, is about the bulk of an ox; its weight, as I have estimated it, being from fifteen to twenty-four hundredweight. But a twenty-feet walrus could hardly weigh less than three tons.
Though the tusks, the fat, and the skins, have a fair commercial value, the animal is never sought after as a special object of enterprise by the whalers, except incidentally, and very few are taken. Large captures, indeed, were occasionally made of sea-horses, in the early periods of adventure after the discovery of Spitzbergen; but these animals have seldom been met with by our modern whalers in any considerable number together, and their capture, consequently, has very rarely exceeded half-a-dozen in a voyage. No summary mode of killing them, indeed, had been prevalent or understood by which due advantage might be taken of any extraordinary opportunity. If met with in the water, where they might be attacked with muskets or lances, the chance of capture was but small, as the wounded animal would generally dive and escape. Formerly, I remember, harpoons of a _small_ kind were provided expressly for the sea-horse; but with the whale harpoon, now only used, the tough skin of the creature is hard to be penetrated. If met with on shore or on ice, lances and muskets were more available, and in such positions the principal, though scanty, captures of modern times were wont to be made.
My Father’s enterprise, therefore, in the case now referred to, was the more remarkable, not only because of the unusual number captured, but because of the novelty adopted in the mode of attack, by which mainly the success was gained.
Being on the coast of Spitzbergen, in the Fame, in the summer of 1819, when no incumbrance was met with from ice, my Father was induced to stretch into one of the fine picturesque inlets with which this remarkable region abounds, Magdalena Bay, where an extraordinary sight on the beach attracted his attention. Hundreds, if not thousands, of animals, which on their near approach proved to be sea-horses, were seen congregated on the sloping shore, thickly huddled together, basking in the bright sunshine and genial warmth of the sheltered position.