A Whale for the Killing

by Farley Mowat

  “They was t’ousands of the big whales on the coast them times. Companies of them would be fishing herring at the Penguins whilst we was fishing cod. Times we’d be the only boat, but the whales made it seem like we was in the middle of a girt big fleet. They whales never hurted we, and we never hurted they. Many’s the toime a right girt bull, five times the length of our dory, would spout so close alongside you could have spit tobaccy down his vent. My old Dad claimed they’d do it a-purpose; a kind of a joke, you understand. We never minded none, for we was in our ileskins anyway.

  “And I’ll tell you a quare thing. So long as they was on the fishing grounds along of we, I never was afeared of anything; no, nor never felt lonely neither. But after times, when the whales was all done to death, I’d be on the Penguin grounds with nothing livin’ to be seen and I’d get a feeling in me belly, like the world was empty. Yiss, me son, I missed them whales when they was gone.

  “’Tis strange. Some folks says as whales is only fish. No, bye! They’s too smart for fish. I don’t say as what they’s not the smartest creatures in God’s ocean.”

  He paused for a long moment, picked up the telescope and gazed through it.

  “Aye... and maybe out of it as well.”

  4

  MOST ASSUREDLY WHALES ARE NOT fish, although until a century ago most people, including those who knew them best, their hunters, thought they were. Whales and men trace the same ancient lineage through creatures born in the warm waters of the primal oceans who exiled themselves to the precarious environment of the dry land. They continued to share a common ancestry through the long, slow evolution that began with the amphibians and eventually led to the mammals. But whereas our mammalian fathers stayed ashore, about a hundred million years ago the mammalian forbears of the whales chose to return to the mother of all life—the sea. The descendants of the whale forefathers now number about a hundred species which man, the great cataloguer, has divided into the families of the toothed and the baleen whales.

  The toothed whales are the more primitive but the most various, for they include all the porpoises and dolphins, the sperm, killer and white whale, and that unicorn of the sea, the narwhal. Except for the sperm, which grows to sixty feet, most of the toothed whales are relatively small, some being less than four feet long.

  There are only eleven species of baleen whales, but they rank at the top of the whale’s evolutionary tree. About eighteen million years ago, when our own ancestors were abandoning the forests to awkwardly start a new way of life as bipeds on the African savannahs, some of the whales began abandoning teeth in favour of fringed, horn-like plates (baleen) that hang from the roof of the mouth to form a sieve with which the owner strains out of the sea water immense quantities of tiny, shrimp-like creatures, or whole schools of little fishes. It seems a paradox that the largest beast in the world should prey on some of the smallest, but the system works surprisingly well. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, for the baleen whales are the most stupendous animals that ever lived. They include fifty-foot greys and sei whales; sixty-foot right whales and humpbacks; eighty-foot finners; and the giant of all time, the blue, which may grow to a hundred and fifteen feet and weigh almost two hundred tons.

  Although they bear a superficial resemblance to fishes, whales have little in common with the scaly tribe. When they returned to the sea they brought with them an intelligence of a radically new order—one that had evolved as a direct consequence of the ferocious difficulties which all terrestrial animals must face in order to survive, and which reached its peak in the mammals. This legacy was shared by the ancestral whales and by the nameless creatures who were to become the progenitors of man.

  In the case of our forbears, intelligence continued to develop along terrestrial lines in order to cope with the original stringent need which called it forth: the need to survive under competitive and environmental conditions of appalling severity. From this fierce struggle man ultimately emerged with the most highly developed brain of any land animal, and he used it to become the most ruthless and destructive form of life ever to exist. Intellectual supremacy allowed him to dominate all other forms of life, but it also enabled him to escape the restraints—the natural checks and balances—which had prevented any previous species from running hog-wild and becoming a scourge unto life itself.

  It was a different story with the whales. When their ancestors returned to the sea it was to an environment which, compared to the land, was positively amiable. Instead of having to scrabble for survival on the dry, restricted, two-dimensional skin of the planet, split as it was into fragments separated by impassable seas, they returned to the wet, three-dimensional and interconnected world of waters which surrounds and isolates the land-islands. Here they were free to go where and when they pleased. They were restored to a womb world where the climate was more stable; where there was no shortage of food; and where there was no need to occupy or defend territory. Because the ancestral whales returned to this water world endowed with the survival skills so hard-won on land, they were as superior to the old, cold-blooded residents of the seas as time-travellers from some point millions of years in the future might be to us.

  Pursuing their advantage over other sea-dwellers, the whales underwent a leisurely evolution extending over many millions of years during which they achieved near-perfect adaptation to the sea environment.

  On the other hand, the emerging human stock had to battle desperately for survival in a bitterly rigorous environment, not only against an array of other animals which were often physically and functionally superior, but against the organized and warlike competition of their own species. The human stock would surely have been eliminated if it had not used its developing brain to invent ways of redressing the balance. Faced, as he so often was, with an intolerable climate, man learned to build shelters, use fire and make clothes. Faced with physically superior animals of other species, and with deadly competition from his fellows, he made weapons. Faced with the constant spectre of starvation, he made tools with which to cultivate his own food supplies. Bit by bit he stopped relying on natural evolution to keep him alive and in the race, and came to lean more and more heavily on artificial substitutes. He had invented, and had become a slave to, technology.

  Whales never needed technology. Going back to the sea enabled them to survive successfully as natural beings... yet they were beings who, like proto-man, were endowed with a great intellectual potential. What did they do with it... with their share of our mutual legacy? We simply do not know. Despite our much-vaunted ability to probe the secrets of the universe, we have so far failed to probe the mystery of the mind of the whale.

  Such studies as we have made suggest that the more advanced whales have brains comparable to and perhaps even superior to ours, both in complexity and capacity. It is clear that their power to think has steadily increased, even as ours has, over the millenniums. There can only be one reasonable assumption from all this: whales must use their minds, and use them fully, in some direction, in some manner, for some purpose which evades our comprehension. For it is an immutable law of nature that any organ, capability or function which is not kept well honed by constant use will atrophy and disappear... and the brain of the whale has certainly not atrophied.

  So whales and men diverged from the common ancestry, one to become the most lordly form of life in the oceans, and the other to become the dominant animal on the land. The day came when the two would meet. The meeting was not a peaceful one, in mutual recognition of each other’s worth. As usual, it was man who set the terms—and he chose battle. It was a one-sided battle where man wielded the weapons, and the whales did the dying.

  THE BLOODY TALE of men and whales has its beginnings in forgotten times when a few coast-dwelling tribes began putting to sea in skin boats or dugout canoes to test their hunters’ skills against the monsters they first encountered as mountains of fat and meat when dead whales washed
up on their shores.

  In the northern hemisphere, such primitive people were hunting the Biscayen right whale, and probably the now extinct Atlantic grey whale, off the coasts of Portugal at least as early as 2000 BC.

  In North America, aboriginal people of the Thule culture hunted the Arctic right whale, while Indians on the Pacific Coast pursued the grey whale, and still other Indians on the Atlantic Coast took both greys and humpbacks.

  In all cases the methods used were essentially the same. Paddlers in open boats tried to approach a whale close enough to let one of their number strike it with a barbed-bone or flint-headed harpoon, to which a rawhide line and a skin float were attached. Frequently the shallowly embedded weapon would break off or pull loose; or the boat would be swamped in the flurry as the whale sounded; or the line would part; or the float would be carried far beyond the range of the hunters to pursue it.

  Rarely (and it must have been very rarely indeed), the hunters were able to stick with the whale, festooning it with more and more harpoons and floats until, eventually, it tired and they could pull alongside and try to kill it with thrusts from fragile lances. Since they could seldom hope to penetrate to a vital spot, they literally had to bleed it to death, a dangerous procedure during which the frenzied animal might not only crush their boats but might well crush them too. If they did succeed in killing the giant, they still had to tow it to the nearest beach, a task which, under adverse conditions of wind and tide, might take many hours or even days, or prove impossible.

  Tribal traditions, together with the scarcity of whale bones in ancient kitchen middens, make it clear that any primitive whaling community which managed to kill two or three whales a year was doing rather well for itself. There was no need to kill more anyway. These people killed only to eat, and it took a long, long time for a handful of families to eat a whale. Consequently, early man posed no real threat to the continuing prosperity of the whale nation.

  Nor was there much danger from modern man either until, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Europeans began building ships that could keep the sea. One of the earliest uses to which such ships were put was for pelagic, or open ocean, whaling; and, apparently, the first people to dare this chase were the Basques, who “fished” for the Biscayen right and the Atlantic grey whale, not only because these were common in their waters but because they were slow-moving and rather unwary and, what was essential, did not sink when killed. With luck, a Basque ship could sail close enough to a grey or a right whale so that the harpooner poised in the bows could strike into it with a heavy wrought-iron harpoon made fast to the ship by a strong warp, which not even a whale could easily part. The drag of the ship would eventually exhaust the animal and it could then be lanced to death with little risk.

  The Basques still towed dead whales to shore for disposal, but there had been a momentous change in the purpose for which they were being killed. These new whalers did not catch them for food. Instead they stripped off the layers of blubber and cut out the baleen plates. Then they turned the monumental carcasses adrift into the sea.

  Only the oil and baleen were wanted now; the oil to fuel the lamps of an increasingly urbanized European society, and the baleen for the manufacture of “horn” windows and utensils. Thus the whale had been transformed from edible game into an article of commerce. When that happened man ceased to be a pinprick irritant to the whale nation and became a deadly enemy. From this time forward whales were slaughtered without quarter and with every weapon and by every method the planet’s most accomplished killers could devise.

  The Basques were already efficient enough. By the end of the fifteenth century they had so reduced the Biscayen right whales that the species was hardly worth the hunting, and they had evidently exterminated the eastern population of Atlantic grey whales. However, far to the northward lay an even larger population—the arctic right, bowhead or Greenland whale, as it was variously called. In pursuit of this immensely abundant species (it is estimated there were more than half a million arctic right whales before the great hunt began), the Basques had invaded Greenland waters by 1410 and were whaling off Labrador and Newfoundland by 1440. They still relied on shore stations established on the as yet officially “unknown” coasts to which they towed their catch for “cutting-in” and rendering the blubber. However, near the end of the fifteenth century, the Basques made another great stride forward. They invented and perfected ship-borne tryworks so whales could now be cut-in and rendered at sea.

  From that day pelagic whaling exploded into a rapacious, world-wide slaughter of all those whales which were slow enough to be caught by sailing ships, and fat enough not to sink when killed. These were primarily sperms, humpbacks, greys and rights. By the mid-1800s there were as many as two thousand ships mercilessly sweeping the North and South Atlantic, both Pacifics and the Indian Ocean, every year. They sailed from New England, Holland, the Baltic States, Norway, France, England and a score of other places. They earned huge fortunes for the moneymen at home, and by 1880 they had reduced to scattered remnants the once vast population of the great whale species which they pursued.

  The slaughter had been so tremendous that, as the ninteenth century began to wane, it appeared that the hunt was coming to an end for want of whales... or, more accurately, for want of whales that men could catch.

  There were still—and this was something which infuriated whalers and businessmen alike—enormous numbers of great whales in the sea. These were the baleen whales of the group called rorquals—blues, fins, seis and a few lesser species. The rorquals included the largest, swiftest and undoubtedly the most intelligent of whales.

  Quite apart from their wariness and the fact that most of them were capable of speeds of at least twenty knots, their relatively thin blubber layer failed to give them the positive buoyancy which had proved so fatal to the greys, humpbacks, rights and sperms. Consequently if, by exceptional good luck, a sailing ship managed to catch and kill one of the rorquals, the monster promptly sank, and that was that.

  For a brief time it looked as if the rorquals would remain out of man’s reach; but then the Norwegians, the most ruthless sea-marauders of all time, and by far the most accomplished killers of marine life, stepped in and took a hand. In about 1860 they turned their hard blue eyes upon the rorquals and put their Viking minds to work. Within ten years they had found the means to doom not only the rorquals, but all surviving great whales in all the oceans of the earth.

  They attacked with three new weapons. First was the whale gun: a cannon which fired a heavy harpoon with a line attached, deep into the whale’s vitals, where a bomb exploded, ripping the animal apart internally and setting the broad barbs of the harpoon so they could not tear loose. The second was the steam catcher: a small, steam-powered vessel of great speed and manoeuvrability which could match the rorquals’ speed. The third was a hollow lance which was thrust deep into the dead whale and through which compressed air could be injected until the whale inflated and became buoyant. With these inventions the Norwegians took virtual control of worldwide whaling.

  By the turn of the century their shore stations (for processing the carcasses) had spread like a pox along almost every coast in the world near which whales were found. In 1904 there were eighteen such factories on the shores of Newfoundland alone, processing an average of 1,200 whales, most of them rorquals, every year!*

  * * *

  *Not all the hunting of rorquals was done with the newly devised harpoon gun. During the first decade of the twentieth century Norwegians were killing seis and fins in a fjord near Bergen by a method so barbarous that it is hard to credit. The whales were driven into the long fjord by boats and the entrance was barred off with nets. The great animals were then speared with lances whose blades had been dipped in the rotting flesh of whales killed earlier. Infection set in and the trapped whales died horribly of septicemia or gangrene.

  The world-wide slaughter
was enormous and the profits even more so. By 1912 all the great whales, including blues, both species of rights, fins, sperms and humpbacks, had nearly vanished from the North Atlantic and, with the addition of the greys, from the North Pacific as well.*

  * * *

  *Grey whales were finally exterminated in Atlantic waters sometime toward the end of the eighteenth century.

  It is likely that several of these species would have become extinct in the northern hemisphere had it not been for the outbreak of the First World War, which gave the surviving whales in northern waters a brief surcease, though not enough time to recover. The remnant survivors would have been quickly finished off if the Norwegians had returned heavily to the attack after the war was over.

  That they did not do so was due to the discovery by the Norwegians in about 1904 of an immense and hitherto untouched population of whales in the Antarctic Ocean. Here, during the decades that had almost emptied the other oceans of great whales, a sanctuary had existed. When the Norwegians nosed it out, fleets of swift, merciless catchers swarmed southward to begin a new and even more thorough butchery of the whale nation from shore bases in the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

  Then, in 1922, a Norwegian named Carl Anton Larsen, whose name deserves to be forever remembered in equal opprobrium with that of Sven Foyn, inventor of the harpoon gun, brought about the ultimate refinement in commercial whaling. He invented the modern factory ship. In its essential form, this is a very large cargo vessel with a gaping hole in her stern through which a hundred-ton whale can be hauled up into a combined floating abattoir and processing plant. With her coming, away went the pressing need for shore stations and the long, time-wasting tows to land. Accompanied by fleets of catchers, buoy boats and tow boats, and stored for a voyage of six months or more, the factory ships could penetrate far southward to the edge of the Antarctic ice itself and could range the whole expanse of the Antarctic seas.