Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  The broad-winged hawks called buteos, which used to soar everywhere over forests and clearings, have been substantially reduced. They are still being persecuted by ignorant men who will not understand that these hawks have always been the farmer’s friends, depending, as they do, mainly on rodents for their daily bread. The swift-winged Cooper’s hawk is now so rare as to be endangered, and the largest of North American owls, the great grey, seems to be no better off.

  Some few bird species have profited by the European invasion, particularly seed-eaters that thrive in open fields and clearings but are small enough to avoid becoming targets for sportsmen’s guns. However, most of the smaller species of the northeastern region whose diets consist mainly of insects have suffered appalling losses in recent years from insecticide and herbicide spraying. Many of the chemicals kill small birds on contact but, if not directly lethal, kill indirectly when the birds eat contaminated insects. Predators and carrion-eating animals in turn are poisoned when they eat the poisoned birds.

  I walked through a mixed forest in south-central New Brunswick one fine spring day in 1973 and, quite literally, could find no living creature. No bees buzzed amongst the blossoms, no squirrels chattered. During several searching hours, I heard not one syllable of birdsong. Later, I learned why that forest had become a silent sepulchre. The New Brunswick forest service had subjected it to aerial spraying two days earlier to control a suspected outbreak of spruce budworm. The insecticide had killed most insects and had either killed or driven away every bird.

  Such spraying is routinely conducted over huge areas of New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia every year, despite the overwhelming preponderance of evidence testifying to the fact that it is destroying life on an enormous scale (including, probably, some human life) and is self-defeating in that it kills the natural enemies of the very pests it is intended to control. After thirty years of annual spraying, New Brunswick still has a severe spruce budworm problem. And few birds sing.

  The record of our dealings with the birds is black indeed. But there are some shafts of light in view. During the latter half of this century more and more people have become enamoured of the living bird, in its own living world. A spring weekend on the Atlantic seaboard now brings many thousands of men, women, and children to the woods, the marshes, and the shores—not to kill, but to watch with wonder and delight the urgent ebb and flow of the migrating flocks.

  Belatedly we seem to be learning to like these creatures for themselves, not for their feathers or their flesh. Perhaps we are beginning to narrow the abyss our recent forebears opened between our species and the avian kind. If so, perhaps there are grounds for hope that we may be able to find our way back into that lost world, where all life was one.

  Part II | Meat, Hides, and Fur

  Birds take to the air to escape from man. Fish retreat to the depths of ocean. Terrestrial mammals have no such avenues of escape from one of their own number who has become the most ruthless and intractable destroyer of all time. Therefore, it is no surprise to find that the roster of the vanished and the vanishing should contain so many mammalian species.

  They have suffered so heavily as to prompt a contemporary biologist to write, “No large mammal species has survived in the eastern part of North America without man’s help.” Rephrased to avoid the circuitous thinking that encourages us to evade recognition of the consequences of our actions, this translates as: Every large mammalian species in the eastern part of America has been destroyed by modern man—except those he has chosen to protect for his own selfish purposes. These, as we shall see, are few enough.

  Nor have our depredations been limited to the bigger beasts. Large or small, all suffered crushing devastation if any profit was to be gained thereby; or if they seemed to pose even the threat of competition with our rapacious appetites. Meat, hides, and fur were the initial rewards attendant on the slaughter of most of the animals whose stories follow. Today a new motivation overrides those older ones: the slaughter keeps its bloody pace, largely in the name of recreation for mankind.

  6. White Ghost

  As a neophyte naturalist of fourteen years of age it was my good luck to go on a field trip to the northern Manitoba coast of Hudson Bay with my great-uncle, Frank Farley, who was a noted ornithologist. In those days, ornithologists spent most of their time amassing collections of specimens, and Uncle Frank was no exception. His collection of birds’ eggs was famous and, as his acolyte, I was expected to add to it.

  Early one June morning he sent me off to reconnoitre the Bay shore in search of hawk nesting sites. These proved few and far between, and it was not until mid-afternoon that I came to a massive snout of rock that seemed superbly suited to a hawk’s aerie. Sure enough, in a cleft some fifty feet above the beach was the uncouth stick-and-seaweed construction of a pair of rough-legged hawks. While the great birds wheeled disconsolately overhead I stole their eggs, wrapped them in cotton wool, and stowed them in my haversack. That done, I looked around.

  Below me the icy waters sucked and seethed, but to the eastward a rust-red object emerged from the grey sea. My field glasses revealed the shattered remnant of a stranded ship. Hawks and eggs were instantly forgotten, for few things will fire a boy’s imagination so hotly as a wreck. This one consisted of the forward half of a small coastal freighter. I climbed through a maze of twisted plates until I was standing high on the angled rise of the bow. Then I discovered I was not alone.

  No more than a hundred yards away, three ivory-white bears were ambling toward me. The leader of the trio seemed unbelievably huge though its followers were not much bigger than a pair of spaniels. It did not need a naturalist to realize that here was a female and her cubs. Comprehension terrified me. “Always stay clear of a sow bear with cubs!” was a maxim that had been dinned into me by all the trappers and backwoodsmen I had ever met. Though they had been referring to the relatively small black bear of the northern forests, I felt the warning must apply in spades to the monstrous apparition padding toward me with such fluid ease.

  I thought of fleeing, but to move would have been to reveal myself and I had no stomach for a race. The light breeze was in my favour and so I had some hopes the trio would pass by without ever realizing I was crouching in abject fear in the eyes of a dead ship.

  They were within ten yards of the wreck when, for no apparent reason, the female stopped abruptly, reared back on her ample haunches, and extended her forelegs for balance so that her immense paws hung down before her, revealing their long, curved claws. Perhaps I moved. She looked up and for a moment our glances locked. Her black nose wrinkled. She sniffed explosively, then, with a lithesomeness that was astonishing in so huge a beast, she slewed around on her haunches and was off at a gallop in the direction she had come, closely followed by the pair of awkward, bouncing cubs.

  My own departure was almost equally swift. I retreated so precipitately that the eggs in my pack had become an omelet by the time I reported back to Uncle Frank. He was annoyed about the eggs and incredulous about my reported encounter. However, when I prevailed upon him to return with me to the wreck (armed this time), footprints on the beach the size of dinner plates convinced him of the truth of my story. He had never, so he told me, heard of a polar bear accompanied by cubs being seen so far to the south, and he intended to report the occurrence to some esoteric scientific journal.

  For him, my encounter was only an unusual record. For me, it was the forever memorable first meeting with one of the most magnificent, least understood, and most persecuted animals on earth.

  At a weight of 1,200 pounds or more and a length of up to eleven feet, the white bear is one of the largest terrestrial carnivores extant. It is unmatched in agility and strength. Ernest Thompson Seton describes one capturing a 100-pound seal in the water, then leaping up onto the edge of an ice floe “with his prey in his teeth, like a Mink landing a trout.” It has been seen to kill a beluga, weighing about two tons, in
the whale’s own element, then drag the carcass above tide line.

  A long-lived animal, it can attain an age of forty years. It is equally at home on solid land or floating ice where its flowing, loose-limbed gait can carry it along at thirty miles an hour. It can leap ten-foot crevasses and scale nearly sheer cliff faces and ice pinnacles. Its performance is equally astounding in the water. Layered with fat that not only provides it with insulation and flotation but can also sustain it for weeks during a time of food shortage, it is equipped with a thick coat of water-repellent hair enabling it to withstand prolonged immersion in icy seas that would kill other members of the bear family. Its enormous paddle paws, up to a foot in diameter, can propel its sleekly streamlined body through the water at six knots. Ships have encountered white bears swimming strongly 300 miles from the nearest land and showing no signs of distress.

  Most of us are familiar with the creature through that hoary media cliche, the photograph of a white bear lolling disconsolately in the concrete pool of a city zoo during a heat wave. That image is perhaps intended to ease the discomfort of sweating humanity by suggesting that what we endure is as nothing compared to the misery of an animal that is only comfortable in perpetually frozen realms of ice and snow. For this, as the caption tells us, is the polar bear.

  The name is an historic misnomer, adopted as recently as the 1800s. Prior to that, the animal was almost universally known as the white bear.1 First-century Romans were familiar with it by that name, which was used in simple contradistinction to the brown bear found throughout Eurasia. From well before the Christian era, captive white bears ranked amongst the proudest possessions of kings and tribal chieftains. In mediaeval times, even Christian bishops kept them in their elegant palaces. Indeed, white bears seem to have been revered as touchstones of superhuman power throughout the north temperate zone of Eurasia since time immemorial. According to Imperial Japanese records dating to AD 658, they were kept at court both in Japan and Manchuria where they were venerated as agents of the supernatural. Lesser luminaries would settle for a pelt, for teeth, or even for one of the great, curved claws. All three were believed to be talismans of extraordinary worth.

  * * *

  1 Some maritime peoples also called it sea bear or water bear. When science first recognized its existence, in 1774, the Latin tag chosen for it was Ursus maritimus, not Ursus polaris.

  Where did these captive white bears come from? Certainly not from the polar regions to which the species is now restricted, for this was terra incognita in those distant times. All the evidence suggests that the European ones were trapped as youngsters along the Norwegian coast as far south as Bergen, or on the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea. Eastern bears seem to have come from Japan’s (now Russia’s) Kuril Islands, where a remnant wild population survived until as late as the 1690s. The Norwegian and Baltic bear clans were not so lucky. Both had been exterminated before the tenth century began. Thereafter, captive animals and pelts came first from Iceland and later from Greenland. In 1253, King Henry III had a live white bear from Greenland in the Tower of London and considered it one of his greatest treasures.

  It is clear that, in times past, the white bear was not restricted to polar regions either in Europe or in Asia. Nor was it in America. In fact, the animal most often singled out for notice by early voyagers to the northeastern coasts of the New World was the white bear. As the historic record clearly shows, this was not due to its novelty but to the fact that it was one of the commonest large mammals to be seen.

  The sagas of Norse adventurers who sailed the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts around AD 1000 all mention the white bear, and only that species. Thorfinn Karlsefni even named an island off southeastern Labrador in honour of it.

  Although almost everything else relevant to John Cabot’s 1497 voyage has been lost, a map from that period showing Cabot’s Prima Terra Vista still exists. It carries this legend: “[Here] there are many white bears.” Another reference comes from the results of a later voyage by Cabot’s son, Sebastian. “He [Sebastian] says there are great numbers of bears there, which eat codfishes... the bears plunge into the midst of a shoal of these codfishes and... draw them to shore... this is thought to be the reason why such large numbers of bears do not trouble the people of the country [because they had so much fish to eat].”

  Many discoveries made by early Portuguese explorers are also preserved only on ancient charts. Such a one is the so-called Munich-Portuguese map that bears the following legend inscribed to the westward of Newfoundland: “This land Gaspar Corte Real... first discovered [in 1501] and brought home men of the woods and white bears.”

  The earliest account of encounters with white bears is in Jacques Cartier’s voyage of 1534. A white bear was found on Funk Island, where it had presumably been living the life of Riley on a diet of great auks. The following day, Cartier’s ship overtook a white bear swimming in the open sea and his men killed it. While reconnoitring the Gulf of St. Lawrence a short time later, Cartier found bears on Brion Island in the isolated Magdalen archipelago. These, too, were almost certainly of the white kind, enjoying the abundance of seals, walrus, and seabirds then inhabiting the Magdalens.

  Two years after Cartier’s first voyage, the English expedition of Master Hore was wrecked in a fiord on the south coast of Newfoundland. Richard Hakluyt, who interviewed some of the survivors, tells us that they saw “Stores of bears, both black and white, of whom they killed some and took them for no bad food.” It is notable that this is the first mention in the early annals of black bears, which, being forest animals, were only occasionally to be encountered on the coasts. Hore’s people, however, seem to have penetrated rather deeply into the country, up a fiord that may well have been the one that to this day is called White Bear Bay.

  Its name is by no means unique. At least twenty White Bear Bays, Lakes, Rivers, Coves, and Islands still dot the map of Newfoundland. Together with a good many more in Labrador, they testify to the one-time presence and abundance of their majestic namesake throughout this region.

  That the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence was also white bear country is attested to by the misadventure of Marguerite de La Roche. This young French noblewoman accompanied her relative, La Rocque de Roberval, in 1542 on a voyage of intended settlement bound to Quebec. However, Marguerite and her lover behaved “immorally” during the long Atlantic crossing, which so incensed Roberval that he had the guilty pair cast away, together with a maidservant, on Île des Démons, which is one of the Mecatina group. Two years later Marguerite was discovered there by some French fishermen, her lover, maid, and a child born to her on the island having died. We are told that one of the several problems she had to contend with was “bears, white as an egg.”

  Île des Démons was not the western extremity of the white bear’s range. This extended at least as far as the estuary of the St. Lawrence River. Indeed, as late as the 1930s, an old female white bear was reportedly killed near Lac St-Jean at the head of the Saguenay River.

  Some light on how far south white bears ranged may be shed by the story of David Ingram. Although he was apparently never north of Nova Scotia, he spoke of “beares, both blacke and white.” Even in early colonial times white bears are reputed to have ranged south to Delaware Bay, and one was killed in the Gulf of Maine in the eighteenth century.

  The white bear may only have been an accidental visitor to the land of the Delawares, but it was uncomfortably common in the countries of some of the more northern tribes. Writing of the Gulf of St. Lawrence region about 1575, André Thevet reported that white bears so “infest their houses that the [native] inhabitants make pits which they cover with leaves and branches”—presumably in an effort to conceal and protect their food supplies.

  Nor were the aborigines the only ones to be so plagued. Mid-sixteenth-century Basque whalers fishing the Gulf found them a nuisance as they prowled about the tryworks where the oil was re
ndered helping themselves to whale meat and blubber as if it was theirs by right. But, as Anthony Parkhurst reported from Newfoundland in 1574–78, the plethora of white bears was not without its advantages. There was, he said, such a “plentie of bears everywhere... that you may kill them as oft as you list: their flesh is as good as young beef.” However, he added, “the Beares also be as bold [as the local foxes and] will not spare at midday to take your fish before your face, and I believe would not hurt anybody unless they be forced.” That Parkhurst was referring to the white bear is evident not only from his description of their behaviour, but also from the testimony of Stephen Parmenius, who briefly visited eastern Newfoundland in 1583 and noted: “Beares also appear about the fishers stages of the Country, and are sometimes killed, but they seem to be white as I conjectured from their skins.”

  This boldness has always been one of the white bear’s most notable and, as far as Europeans are concerned, disturbing characteristics. Yet its audacity seems to be based not on brute arrogance so much as on the calm belief that it has no enemies and therefore can go where it pleases with impunity. In the days when contact with it was restricted to native peoples, this confidence was usually well placed. Although primitive man could and did kill white bears, he usually chose to avoid conflict, partly because discretion was the better part of valour and partly due to an admiration for the animal that amounted to something close to veneration. For their part, the bears reciprocated by adopting a live-and-let-live attitude toward mankind. This lack of aggressiveness seems to have surprised early explorers but, on the whole, they did not reciprocate it.