Chapter One

When Richard Hakluyt was forty years old, he sat one day in his study in London with a walrus tusk in his hands. The year was 1591 or 1592. Hakluyt's friend Alexander Woodson had sent the foot-and-half-long tusk to Hakluyt from his home in Bristol, about one hundred miles west of London. Though Hakluyt neglected to mention its origin, the tusk came from the North Atlantic, quite possibly from Iceland, a frozen wasteland surrounded by dangerous beasts. Woodson, a physician and mathematician, thought that the tusk could be ground down and used in medicines for his patients. He believed that its powder was as effective as any unicorn's horn in treating victims of poison.

That idea, and the tusk itself, might have seemed odd to many in London. But not to Hakluyt, an expert on natural phenomena, who had read about walruses in the French explorer Jacques Cartier's account of his journey to modern-day Canada in 1534. These were "beasts as great as oxen, which have two great teeth in their mouthes like unto Elephants teeth, and also live in the sea." Hakluyt could testify from his own experience about the size of these creatures. The hides he had seen have been "as big as any Oxe hide, and being dressed I have yet a piece of one thicker then any two Oxe or Buls hides in England. The Leatherdressers take them to be excellent good to make light targets against the arrowes of the Savages; and I hold them farre better then the light leather targets which the Moores use in Barbarie against arrowes and lances, whereof I have seene divers in he