The Voyage Of The Vega Round Asia And Europe Part 11

The 11th/1st of August 1556, the year after the publication of the work of Olaus Magnus, a West European saw for the first time some actual walruses, which had been killed by Russian hunters at Vaygats Island. No description of the animal, however, is given, but from that period all the members of the English and Dutch north-east expeditions had opportunities of seeing walruses in hundreds and thousands. It was now first that man learned actually to know this remarkable animal which had been decked out in so many fables. To this period belongs the beautiful and natural delineation of the walrus which is given above.

A peculiarity of the walrus may be mentioned here. The hide, especially in old males, is often full of wounds and scratches, which appear to be caused partly by combats and sc.r.a.ping against sharp pieces of ice, partly by some severe disease of the skin. Mr.

H.W. Elliot has remarked this of the walrus in Behring's Sea[85].

The walrus is also troubled with lice, which is not the case, so far as I know, with any kind of seal. Ma.s.ses of intestinal worms are found instead in the stomach of the seal, while on the contrary none are found in that of the walrus.

With reference to the other animals that are hunted in the Polar Sea I am compelled to be very brief, as I have scarcely any observations to make regarding them which are not already sufficiently known by numerous writings.

There are three kinds of seals on Novaya Zemlya. _Storsaelen_, the bearded seal (_Phoca barbata_, Fabr.) occurs pretty generally even on the coasts of Spitzbergen, though never in large flocks. The pursuit of this animal is the most important part of the seal-fis.h.i.+ng in these waters, and the bearded seal is still killed yearly by thousands. Their value is reckoned in settling accounts between owners and hunters at twenty to twenty-five Scandinavian crowns (say 22s. to 27s. 6d.).

[Ill.u.s.tration: YOUNG OF THE GREENLAND SEAL. After a drawing by A W. Quennerstedt (1864). ]

_Groenlands_ or _Jan-Mayen-saelen_, the Greenland seal (_Phoca Groenlandica_ Muller), which at Jan Mayen gives occasion to so profitable a fis.h.i.+ng, also is of general occurrence among the drift-ice in the Munnan and Kara seas.

_Snadden_, the rough or bristled seal (_Phoca hispida_, Erxl.) is also common on the coast. These animals in particular are seen to lie, each at its hole, on the ice of fjords, which has not been broken up. It also many times follows with curiosity in the wake of a vessel for long distances, and can then be easily shot, because it is often so fat that, unlike the two other kinds of seals, it does not sink when it has been shot dead in the water.

_Klapmytsen_, the bladdernose seal, (_Cystophora cristata_, Erxl.) the walrus-hunters say they have never seen on Novaya Zemlya, but it is stated to occur yearly in pretty large numbers among the ice W.S.W. of South Cape on Spitzbergen. Only once during our many voyages in the Polar Sea has a _Klapmyts_ been seen, viz, a young one that was killed in 1858 in the neighbourhood of Bear Island.

Of the various species of whales, the narwhal, distinguished by its long and valuable horn projecting in the longitudinal direction of the body from the upper jaw, now occurs so seldom on the coast of Novaya Zemlya that it has never been seen there by the Norwegian walrus-hunters. It is more common at Hope Island, and Witsen states (p. 903) that large herds of narwhals have been seen between Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BEARDED SEAL. Swedish, Storsal (_Phoca barbata_, Fabr.) THE ROUGH SEAL. Swedish, Snadd. (_Phoca hispida_, Erxl.) ]

The white whale or beluga, of equal size with the narwhal, on the other hand, occurs in large shoals on the coasts of Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya, especially near the mouths of fresh-water streams.

These animals were formerly captured, but not with any great success, by means of a peculiar sort of harpoon, called by the hunters "skottel." Now they are caught with nets of extraordinary size and strength, which are laid out from the sh.o.r.e at places which the white whales are wont to frequent. In this way there were taken in the year 1871, when the fis.h.i.+ng appears to have been most productive, by vessels belonging to Tromsoe alone, 2,167 white whales. Their value was estimated at fifty-four Scandinavian crowns each (about 3_l_.). The fis.h.i.+ng, though tempting, is yet very uncertain; it sometimes falls out extraordinarily abundant, as in the spring of 1880, when a skipper immediately on arriving at Magdalena Bay caught 300 of these animals at a cast of the net. Of the whales thus killed not only the blubber and hide are taken away, but also, when possible, the carcases, which, when cheap freight can be had, are utilised at the guano manufactories in the north of Norway. After having lain a whole year on the beach at Spitzbergen they may be taken on board a vessel without any great inconvenience, a proof that putrefaction proceeds with extreme slowness in the Polar regions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WHITE WHALE. (_Delphinapterus leucas_, Pallas) After a drawing by A.W. Quennerstedt (1804). ]

With its blinding milk-white hide, on which it is seldom possible to discover a spot, wrinkle, or scratch, the full-grown white whale is an animal of extraordinary beauty. The young whales are not white, but very light greyish brown. The white whale is taken in nets not only by the Norwegians at Spitzbergen, but also by the Russians and Samoyeds at Chabarova. In former times they appear to have been also caught at the mouth of the Yenisej, to judge by the large number of vertebrae that are found at the now deserted settlements there. The white whale there goes several hundred kilometres up the river. I have also seen large shoals of this small species of whale on the north coast of Spitzbergen and the Taimur peninsula.

Other species of the whale occur seldom on Novaya Zemlya. Thus on this occasion only two small whales were seen during our pa.s.sage from Tromsoe, and I do not remember having seen more than one in the sea round Novaya Zemlya in the course of my two previous voyages to the Yenisej. At the north part of the island, too, these animals occur so seldom, that a hunter told me, as something remarkable, that towards the end of July, 1873, W.N.W. of the western entrance to Matotschkin Schar 20' to 30' from land, he had seen a large number of whales, belonging to two species, of which one was a _slaethval_, and the other had as it were a top, instead of a fin, on the back.

It is very remarkable that whales still occur in great abundance on the Norwegian coast, though they have been hunted there for a thousand years back, but, on the other hand, if we except the little white whale, only occasionally east of the White Sea. The whale fis.h.i.+ng which was carried on on so grand a scale on the west coast of Spitzbergen, has therefore never been prosecuted to any great extent on Novaya Zemlya; and fragments of skeletons of the whale which are found thrown up in such quant.i.ties on the sh.o.r.es of Spitzbergen, are not to be found, so far as my experience reaches, either on the sh.o.r.es of Novaya Zemlya, on the coast of the Kara Sea, or at the places on the north coast of Siberia between the Yenisej and the Lena, at which we landed. The sacrifices which were so long made in vain in the endeavour to find a pa.s.sage to China in this direction accordingly were not compensated, as on Spitzbergen, by the rise of a profitable whale fishery. Meeting with a whale is spoken of by the first seafarers in these regions as something very remarkable and dangerous; for instance, in the account of Stephen Burrough's voyage in 1556:--"On St. James his day, there was a monstrous whale aboord of us, so neere to our side that we might have thrust a sworde or any other weapon in him, which we durst not doe for feare lie should have over-throwen our s.h.i.+ppe; and then I called my company together, and all of us shouted, and with the crie that we made he departed from us; there was as much above water of his back as the bredth of our pinnesse, and at his falling down he made such a terrible noise in the water, that a man would greatly have marvelled, except he had known the cause of it; but, G.o.d be thanked, we were quietly delivered of him."[86] When Nearchus sailed with the fleet of Alexander the Great from the Indus to the Red Sea, a whale also caused so great a panic that it was only with difficulty that the commander could restore order among the frightened seamen, and get the rowers to row to the place where the whale spouted water and caused a commotion in the sea like that of a whirlwind. All the men now shouted, struck the water with their oars, and sounded their trumpets, so that the large, and, in the judgment of the Macedonian heroes, terrible animal, was frightened.

It seems to me that from these incidents we may draw the conclusion that great whales in Alexander's time were exceedingly rare in the sea which surrounds Greece, and in Burrough's time in that which washes the sh.o.r.es of England. Quite otherwise was the whale regarded on Spitzbergen some few years after Burrough's voyage by the Dutch and English whalers. At the sight of a whale all men were out of themselves with joy, and rushed down into the boats in order from them to attack and kill the valuable animal. The fishery was carried on with such success, that, as has already been stated, the right whale (_Balaena mysticetus_ L.), whose pursuit then gave full employment to s.h.i.+ps by hundreds, and to men by tens of thousands, is now practically extirpated. Thus during our many voyages in these waters we have only seen one such whale, which happened on the 23rd June, 1864, among the drift-ice off the west coast of Spitzbergen in 78 N.L. As the right whale still occurs in no limited numbers in other parts of the Polar Sea, and as there has been no whale fis.h.i.+ng on the coast of Spitzbergen for the last forty or fifty years, this state of things shows how difficult it is to get an animal type to return to a region where it has once been extirpated, or from which it has been driven away.

The whale which Captain Svend Foeyn has almost exclusively hunted on the coast of Finmark since 1864 belongs to quite another species, _blaohvalen_ (_Balaenoptera Sibbaldii_ Gray); and there are likewise other species of the whale which still in pretty large numbers follow shoals of fish to the Norwegian coast, where they sometimes strand and are killed in considerable numbers. A _tandhval_, killer or sword-fish (_Orca gladiator_ Desm.) was even captured some years ago in the harbour of Tromsoe. This whale was already dying of suffocation, caused by an attempt to swallow an eider which entered the gullet, not, as the proper way is, with the head, but with the tail foremost. When the mouthful should have slidden down, it was prevented by the stiff feathers sticking out, and the bird stuck in the whale's throat, which, to judge by the extraordinary struggles it immediately began to make, must have caused it great inconvenience, which was increased still more when the inhabitants did not neglect to take advantage of its helpless condition to harpoon it.

[Footnote 60: The name _stormfogel_ is also used for the Stormy Petrel (_Thala.s.sidroma pelagica_, Vig.). This bird does not occur in the portions of the Polar Sea with which we are now concerned. ]

[Footnote 61: At Bear Island, Tobiesen, on the 28th May, 1866, saw fulmars' eggs laid immediately on the ice which still covered the rock. At one place a bird sitting on its eggs was even frozen fast by one leg to the ice on the 31/21 August, 1596. Barents found on the north part of Novaya Zemlya that some fulmars had chosen as a hatching-place a piece of ice covered with a little earth. In both these cases the under part of the egg during hatching could never be warmed above the freezing-point. ]

[Footnote 62: It deserves to be investigated whether some little auks do not, like the Spitzbergen ptarmigan, pa.s.s the winter in their stone mounds, flying out to sea only at pretty long intervals in order to collect their food. ]

[Footnote 63: The quant.i.ty of eider-down which was brought from the Polar lands to Tromsoe amounted in 1868 to 540, in 1869 to 963, in 1870 to 882, in 1871 to 630, and in 1872 to 306 kilograms. The total annual yield may be estimated at probably three times as much. ]

[Footnote 64: There are, however, various other song-birds found already on south Novaya Zemlya, for instance, _lappsparfven_, the Lapland bunting (_Emberiza lapponica_, L.), and _berglaerkan_, the sh.o.r.e-lark (_Alauda alpestris_, L.). They hatch on the ground under bushes, tufts of gra.s.s, or stones, in very carefully constructed nests lined with cotton-gra.s.s and feathers, and are not uncommon. ]

[Footnote 65: Hedenstrom also states (_Otrywki o Sibiri_, St.

Petersburg, 1830, p. 130,) that the ptarmigan winters on the New Siberian Islands, and that there it is fatter and more savoury than on the mainland. ]

[Footnote 66: The hunters from Tromsoe brought home, in 1868, 996; in 1869, 975; and in 1870, 837 reindeer. When to this we add the great number of reindeer which are shot in spring and are not included in these calculations, and when we consider that the number of walrus-hunting vessels which are fitted out from Tromsoe is less than that of those which go out from Hammerfest, and that the shooting of reindeer on Spitzbergen is also carried on by hunters from other towns, and by tourists, we must suppose that at least 3,000 reindeer have been killed during each of those years. Formerly reindeer stalking was yet more productive, but since 1870 the number killed has considerably diminished. ]

[Footnote 67: When Spitzbergen was first mapped, a great number of places were named after reindeer, which shows that the reindeer was found there in large numbers, and now just at these places it is completely absent. On the other hand, the Dutch and English explorers during the sixteenth century saw no reindeer on Novaya Zemlya. During the Swedish expedition of 1875 no reindeer were seen on the west coast of this island south of Karmakul Bay, while a number were shot at Besimannaja Bay and Matotschkin Schar. When some of the companions of the well-known walrus-hunting captain, Sievert Tobiesen, were compelled in 1872-73 to winter at North Goose Cape, they shot during winter and spring only eleven reindeer. Some Russians, who by an accident were obliged to pa.s.s six years in succession somewhere on the coast of Stans Foreland (Maloy Broun), and who, during this long time, were dependent for their food on what they could procure by hunting without the use of fire-arms (they had when they landed powder and ball for only twelve shots), when the three survivors were found and taken home in 1749, had killed two hundred and fifty reindeer (P.L. le Roy, _Relation des Aventures arrivees a quatre matelots Russes jettes par une tempete pres de l'Isle deserte d'Ost-Spitzbergen, sur laquelle ils ont pa.s.se six ans et trois mois_, 1766). ]

[Footnote 68: During the wintering of 1869-70 on East Greenland, Dr.

Punsch once saw a female bear with quite small young (_Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt_, Leipzig, 1873-74. Vol. II p. 157). ]

[Footnote 69: W. Scoresby's des Jungern, _Tagebuch einer Reise auf dem Wallfischfang. Aus dem engl. uebers_. Hamburg, 1825, p. 127. ]

[Footnote 70: _Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt_, Vol. I. p. 465. ]

[Footnote 71: _Gronlands historiske Mindesmarker._ Kjobenhavn, 1838, III. p. 384. ]

[Footnote 72: Ramusio, Part II., Venice, 1583, p. 60. ]

[Footnote 73: Ol. Magnus. Rome edition, 1555, p. 621. ]

[Footnote 74: It is stated that wolves also occur on Novaya Zemlya as far up as to Matotschkin Sound. They are exceedingly common on the north coasts of Asia and Eastern Europe. ]

[Footnote 75: That is to say, not on Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya, for it is otherwise on the coast of the mainland. In West Greenland the mosquito as far north as the southern part of Disco Island is still so terrible, especially to the new comer during the first days, that the face of any one who without a veil ventures into marshy ground overgrown with bushes, becomes in a few hours unrecognisable. The eyelids are closed with swelling and changed into water-filled bladders, suppurating tumours are formed in the head under the hair, &c. But when a man has once undergone this unpleasant and painful inoculation, the body appears, at least for one summer, to be less susceptible to the mosquito-poison. ]

[Footnote 76: As the _only_ Chrysomela, which von Baer found at Matotschkin Schar, played so great a _role_ in Arctic-zoological literature, I shall here enumerate the species of coleoptera, now known--after Professor Maklim's determination of the collections which we brought home with us--to exist on Novaya Zemlya. These are:--_Feronia borealis_ Menetr., _F. gelida_ Makl., _Amara alpina_ Fabr., _Agabus subquadratus_ Motsch., _Homalota sibirica_ Makl., _Homalium angustatum_ Makl., _Cylletron (?) hyperboreum_ Makl., _Chrysomela septentrionalis_ (?) Menetr., _Prasocuris hannoverana_ Fabr., v. _degenerata_. From Vaygats Island we brought home seven species more, which were not found on Novaya Zemlya. The insects occur partly under stones, especially at places where lemming dung is abundant, or in tracts where birds'-nests are numerous, partly in warm days on willow-bushes. ]

[Footnote 77: Echini occur only very sparingly in the Kara Sea and the Siberian Polar Sea, but west of Novaya Zemlya at certain places in such numbers that they almost appear to cover the sea-bottom. ]

[Footnote 78: Compare Malmgren's instructive papers in the publications of the Royal (Swedish) Academy of Sciences and Scoresby's _Arctic Regions_, Edinburgh, 1820, i., p. 502. That the walrus eats mussels is already indicated in the Dutch drawing from the beginning of the seventeenth century reproduced below, page 160. ]

[Footnote 79: Implements of walrus-bone occur among the Northern grave _finds_. ]

[Footnote 80: Compare note at page 48 above. ]

[Footnote 81: I saw in 1858 a _Phoca barbata_ with tusks worn away by age, which in its reddish-brown colour very much resembled a walrus, and was little inferior to it in size. ]

[Footnote 82: Albertus Magnus, _De animalibus_, Mantua, 1479, Lib.

xxiv. At the same place however is given a description of the whale-fishery grounded on actual experience, but with the shrewd addition that what the old authors had written on the subject did not correspond with experience. ]

[Footnote 83: This drawing is made after a facsimile by Frederick Muller from Hessel Gerritz, _Descriptio et delineatio geographica detectionis freti, &c._ Amsterodami, 1613. The same drawing is reproduced coloured in Blavii _Atlas major_, Part I, 1665, p. 25, with the inscription: "Ad vivum delineatum ab Hesselo G.A." ]

[Footnote 84: The drawing is taken from a j.a.panese ma.n.u.script book of travels--No. 360 of the j.a.panese library which I brought home.

According to a communication by an attache of the j.a.panese emba.s.sy which visited Stockholm in the autumn of 1880, the book is ent.i.tled _Kau-kai-i-fun_, "Narrative of a remarkable voyage on distant seas."

The ma.n.u.script, in four volumes, was written in 1830. In the introduction it is stated that when some j.a.panese, on the 21st November, 1793 (?), were proceeding with a cargo of rice to Yesso, they were thrown out of their course by a storm, and were driven far away on the sea, till in the beginning of the following June they came to some of the Aleutian islands, which had recently been taken by the Russians. They remained there ten months, and next year in the end of June they came to Ochotsk. The following year in autumn they were carried to Irkutsk, where they remained eight years, well treated by the Russians. They were then taken to St. Petersburg, where they had an audience of the Czar, and got furs and splendid food. Finally they were sent back by sea round Cape Horn to j.a.pan in one of Captain von Krusenstern's vessels. They were handed over to the j.a.panese authorities in the spring of 1805, after having been absent from their native country about thirteen years. From Nagasaki they were carried to Yeddo, where they were subjected to an examination. One person put questions, another wrote the answers, and a third showed by drawings all the remarkable events they had survived. They were then sent to their native place. In the introduction it is further said that the s.h.i.+pwrecked were unskilful seamen, by whom little attention was often given to the most important matters. A warning accordingly is given against full reliance on their accounts and the drawings in the book. The latter occupy the fourth part of the work, consisting of more than 100 quarto pages. It is remarkable that the first Russian circ.u.mnavigation of the globe, and the first journey of the j.a.panese round the world, happened at the same time. ]

[Footnote 85: _A Report upon the Condition of Affairs in the Territory of Alaska._ Was.h.i.+ngton, 1875, p. 160. ]

[Footnote 86: Hakluyt, first edition, p. 317. ]

CHAPTER IV.