The fur-bearing seal is only one of many species belonging to the family. Some of them are very large animals, the largest being the great elephant-seal or sea-elephant, a creature which sometimes measures as much as thirty feet in length, and fifteen or eighteen feet round the largest part of the body, so that it is much larger and heavier than the real elephant. They are polygamous, like the animals we have just been speaking about; and it must be a still more wonderful thing to see such huge creatures fighting. This the males do with the greatest fury; but the first descriptive word upon our title-page receives a better illustration in the love and devotion which they show towards the females. They will not desert them when they are in any danger, and this fact, so much to their credit, is taken advantage of by the brutal seal-hunters, who attack the females first, and the males, who remain with them, afterwards. Were they to reverse the process of destruction, the harem belonging to any male that was killed would immediately take to the sea and disappear. Whilst he lives, however, they connect their safety with his presence, and so continue to crowd about him until he breathes his last. My authority for this statement is the Rev. J. G. Wood, but I have not been able to find anything bearing upon it in the accounts of those having personal experience of the habits of these animals, which I should have liked to have done. If true, then we have here a striking instance of affectionate solicitude in an animal, as contrasted with that callousness and deadness of sympathy on the part of man, which the slaughter of beasts always and necessarily produces.
The sea-elephant is enormously fat, and the boiling of its fat down into oil, with the subsequent sale of this, is the industry with which its slaughter is connected. Some time ago this industry was not known, and some years hence it will have ceased with the life of the species. The world, therefore, will have gained nothing permanently by the oil, whereas it will have lost for ever an interesting and wonderful creature. The sea-elephant is a denizen of the southern seas, and used once to be very plentiful on the coast of California and Mexico. Now, however, owing to the persecution to which it has been subjected, one is scarcely ever to be seen there.
Next, perhaps, to the sea-elephant in size, comes the great morse, or walrus, of the arctic and antarctic oceans. The principal peculiarity of this huge seal—the sea-horse as it is sometimes called—is the pair of long tusks, reminding one of those of an elephant, which it carries in its upper jaw. The length of these tusks is about a foot, and sometimes they weigh ten pounds apiece. The Esquimaux use them in the making of fish-hooks—for the fish-hooks of all savages are very different-looking articles to our own, and made in a very different way, though the principle is the same. But what does the walrus itself use them for? Wielded by an animal of such vast size and strength, they must, no doubt, be formidable weapons of offence, but they cannot be used to give a direct thrust forward, as the elephant uses his tusks, since they hang down from the jaw instead of projecting horizontally beyond it. Were one male walrus, however, to succeed in rearing his head over the neck or shoulder of another, he could inflict, it is evident, a formidable wound by stabbing downwards with his two curved ivory stilettoes. It would seem, however, that it is mostly as an aid to the procuring of its food that the walrus uses its great tusks. With them it digs and scrapes amongst the sand and shingle on the bottom of the sea, along the coast, thus stirring up various molluscs and crustaceans, on which it principally feeds. In climbing up upon the rocks or slippery shores, too, it finds its tusks useful to hook on with, as has been related by various eye-witnesses and denied by various professors.
The regions where the walrus dwells are equally the abode of the white, or polar, bear, and it is possible that these two great creatures sometimes come into collision. Not that the walrus would ever interfere with the bear, but, in spite of its size, the converse may sometimes be the case, when the latter is pressed by hunger. In such an encounter I should think, myself, that the walrus would have the best of it. With his thick skin and still thicker blubber underneath it, he could hardly be very much injured by the teeth and claws of the bear, whereas a dig of his own tusks might well put the latter hors de combat, or even terminate his existence. For large and strong as a polar bear is—and he exceeds even the grizzly in size—he is inferior in both these particulars to the vast bulk and huge, though unwieldy, strength of the walrus. Doubtless he is aware of this fact, nor have I ever heard of such a combat being witnessed. Still, as I say, it might occur, and then what a sight it would be! What mighty blows and buffets! what horrible growlings and roarings!—the bear, no doubt, reared on its hind legs, striving to tear at the throat or neck of the walrus as the most vulnerable part. The great seal, however, swinging its huge head from side to side, would shake off, each time, the grasp of its shaggy assailant, and at length seizing an opportunity to which the methods of the latter would perhaps have contributed, might transfix his neck or shoulder with a terrific downstroke of its tusks; crushing him at the same time on to the ice or hardened snow, now all bloodstained with the conflict. But we will not pursue further an imaginary picture.
But though they can defend themselves when the necessity arises, walruses are not of a combative disposition. They go in herds, the members of which are much attached to each other, so that an attack upon any one arouses the resentment, and may even provoke the retaliation, of the rest. When tamed, too, walruses have shown themselves as affectionate towards human beings as any dog could be. One brought alive from Archangel to St. Petersburg, in 1829, became deeply attached to its keeper—a lady, Madame Dennebecq by name.
One might expect that an animal thus capable of forming friendships would also show great parental affection. Accordingly we find this quality highly developed in the walrus, and the usual sportsman has given the usual account of how he witnessed it. A female, in this case, being wounded, placed her right fore fin or flipper about the body of her young calf, and endeavoured to shield it from the harpoon, against which its years were no protection, by the constant interposition of her own body. The terror of the calf, with the look of anxiety upon the mother’s face, accompanied with a reckless disregard of her own danger, were, we are told, most affecting, but did not, unfortunately, affect the result, both the poor animals being slaughtered. Walrus-hunters do not often let their feelings get the better of them, they prefer to get the better of the walruses, through their feelings, which are tenderer. Thus, having caught a young one, they induce it to grunt, when the herd come to its assistance and are shot or harpooned.
It is, however, to its habit of going in herds that the walrus owes much of its safety. Even though half famished, a polar bear would hardly venture to attack one—even if only a young one—under these circumstances. Indeed, though so large an animal, the polar bear contents himself, for the most part, with the smaller kinds of seals, which he catches when they are asleep on the ice—perhaps, sometimes, even in the sea: for he is a wonderful swimmer, though not shaped quite so much like a fish as is a seal, and with feet only, and not flippers, to swim with. So much is said about the great size and strength of the grizzly bear that one might think it was the largest of all the bear family, but this is not the case. The largest of all bears are the polar bears, and this proves that they get quite enough to eat, even though they live in the cold, bleak north, where there are no great forests full of birds and monkeys and all manner of creatures; no plains or prairies with antelopes, or bisons, or herds of wild horses or zebras bounding over them, but only desolate icefields or dreary wastes of snow. Life, indeed, in the far north or south, is poor in species, but it is—or, at least, it was, until civilised man came there to make it a solitude indeed—abundant in individuals. The ice has its own herds in the shape of numberless seals that lie upon it asleep or resting, enjoying what sun there is, during the short summer. Even in the winter, as these creatures must have air to breathe, they are accustomed to come out of the sea through holes in the ice, which they manage to keep open by constantly coming up in the same place, and so always breaking the ice, before it has time to get thick. The polar bears watch at these seal-holes, as they are called, and seize the seals as they come up, or else they wait till they have crawled out, and stalk them as they lie asleep.
A Brave Mother.
The wounded walrus endeavoured recklessly to protect her young calf from the harpoon.