Kaishō

The walrus is a recurring but peripheral figure in the book’s visual record of the Arctic. In William John Huggins’s painting Harmony, its small, plaintive presence faces the viewer amid a scene of whaling, while an eighteenth-century natural-history illustration places walruses among the region’s other animals—and a sea serpent. These images show how Arctic wildlife could be made visible through pictures that joined observation, drama, and invention.

In Huggins’s Arctic scene

In Huggins’s 1829 painting Harmony, a baby-eyed walrus bobs in the water and seems to address the viewer. Nearby, three narwhals flee with their tusks raised; a sailor stands over a seal with his club, and a bowhead whale bears two harpoons. The walrus is not shown as a hunter’s prize or as the scene’s main subject. Its direct, plaintive presence instead gives the surrounding violence a witness: the animal appears to look out from within the Arctic world being assaulted.

The painting’s title invokes the whaling barque at its centre, but the scene offers little actual harmony. A pair of whale jawbones tied around the ship’s masts forms a trophy arch, while a ribboned garland marks a May Day shipboard rite. The contrast places the walrus within a picture of both violence and customary maritime life. For nineteenth-century Hull, the hunt represented material security as well as slaughter; in the book’s account, that economic perspective sits uneasily beside the animals’ visible vulnerability.

Within an illustrated Arctic fauna

A frontispiece for Oliver Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, first published in 1774 and later reissued for younger readers, assembles animals of the frozen world, including walruses. Its artist drew substantially on William Scoresby’s account of the Arctic, borrowing scenes of whales and narwhals. Yet the same composition also includes a sea serpent swimming among the region’s wildlife, as though it belonged there. The walrus thus occupies a visual catalogue in which documented animals and legendary beings share the same apparent natural-history setting.

That mixture matters to the book’s treatment of Arctic imagery. The walrus is not identified as a creature of legend; rather, its presence helps establish the breadth of the represented polar fauna. The sea serpent’s inclusion exposes how an image claiming to show the known natural world could also absorb marvels from earlier natural histories. Illustration here records wildlife, but it also reveals the imaginative habits through which readers pictured a remote and little-known environment.

A small figure in a larger history of seeing

The two images give the walrus different roles: in Harmony it is a particular animal, given an expressive face within a scene of hunting; in the frontispiece it is one element in a crowded inventory of Arctic life. Neither passage supplies biological detail about the species. Instead, the walrus’s significance lies in how it is made visible: as a vulnerable presence among hunters in one picture, and as part of a supposedly comprehensive polar world in another.

Across the book, images of whales and other marine life are treated as products of limited access to living animals and of the conventions used to represent them. The walrus’s brief appearances belong to this wider concern with the difference between an animal and its image. In Huggins’s painting, its apparent address to the viewer interrupts the spectacle of the hunt; in the natural-history frontispiece, its place among familiar and fabulous creatures shows how readily representation could blur the boundary between observation and invention.