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We found no indication of this part of the island having been inhabited, unless the narwhal's horn be considered as such. The wind continued light and variable till half past eight A.M. on the 3d, when a breeze from the northward once more enabled us to make some progress.
Sometimes a narwhal has two tusks, but generally only one on the left side. The females have none at all. You know the unicorn is always represented with a narwhal's tusk? One of the early travelers, Sir John de Mandeville or Marco Polo, I forget which, brought back a narwhal's tusk which, he had been told, had been taken from a kind of horse.
These are really huge porpoises, allied to the narwhals, but without the narwhal's exaggerated tusk. He decided to lay up his ships here for the winter, and to pursue the rest of his western explorations in his boats.
They are "complementary"; one is the reflection, as in a mirror, of the other. Why the narwhal's tooth does not conform to this rule is a mystery. It is a remarkable fact that only a few whales and porpoises eat fish or the flesh of other whales. The large toothed-whales, including the cachalot or sperm whale, and also the Ziphius-like beaked whales, live upon cuttle-fish.
These reflections secured me a night during which I rediscovered how, from purely mental causes, a man can be physically sick; but the sickness was bliss compared to my dreams when the birds waked. On my departure, M'Leod gave me a beautiful narwhal's horn, much as a nurse gives a child sweets for being brave at a dentist's.
In the case of the spear-fish it is bony, being a prolongation of the skull; in the case of the swordfish it is horny, and horns, as you probably know, are formations of skin rather than bone. Now the narwhal's tusk," he continued, "is again an entirely different thing." "That's a tooth, isn't it?" "Yes," was the reply, "it seems to be the mark of the male narwhal.
Ere we could make it fast it had me jammed against the mast. Well, well," he added, looking round at the walls of the room, "here are all my old curios, the same as ever: the narwhal's horn from the Arctic, and the blowfish from the Moluccas, and the paddles from Fiji, and the picture of the Ca Ira with Lord Hotham in chase.
How I had chafed and longed for the wonders of town, and yet, now that I had seen more than my wildest dreams had ever deemed possible, my eyes had rested upon nothing which was so sweet and so restful as our own little sitting-room, with its terra-cotta- coloured walls, and those trifles which are so insignificant in themselves, and yet so rich in memories the blow-fish from the Moluccas, the narwhal's horn from the Arctic, and the picture of the Ca Ira, with Lord Hotham in chase!
The gnu of Africa is another possible ancestor of this creature, a belief in which goes back to the time of Aristotle; but the horse-like animal with a narwhal's horn that frisks on the British arms never existed.
Several heads of the musk-ox were picked up, and one of the Hecla's seamen brought to the boat a narwhal's horn, which he found on a hill more than a mile from the sea, and which must have been carried thither by Esquimaux or by bears: three or four brace of ptarmigan were killed, and these were the only supply of this kind which we obtained.
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