by Farley Mowat
Pregnant females begin the winter in the security of maternity dens, some of which have been in use for centuries. These earth-dug homes often boast several rooms, with ventilation shafts. Here, during late December or early January, the young—usually twins—are born as naked, unformed little things about the size of guinea pigs, which are not mature enough to leave the dens until late March.
The winter seal hunt, mostly for bearded and ring seals, is the nomadic time; but studies using radio collars have shown that these bears are nomadic only in a very limited sense. Their winter range seems to be generally restricted to the ice of southern Hudson Bay, and the tagged animals seldom wander more than a few hundred miles from home. In other words, they go no farther afield than is necessary to find food. Since food is evidently in good supply, these southern bears are generally healthier, larger, and live in much greater density than their cousins in polar regions.
Some mammalogists who have participated in studies of the lowland bears now privately concede that the white bear may also have once flourished as a permanent resident in the Sea of Okhotsk in the western Pacific (it is known to have bred on the Kurils, Sakhalin, and Kamchatka), the Aleutian Islands, and southeast Alaska... and even along the northeastern Atlantic seaboard, including the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In view of the accumulated evidence, such a conclusion is difficult to avoid.
During the first decade of the seventeenth century, Europeans began pushing northward from their own continent in an avid search for train oil—the black gold of their times. The Spitzbergen archipelago was soon discovered and, by mid-century, scores of whaling ships were working its waters. These were the precursors of a burgeoning fleet that bloodied the northern oceans during succeeding centuries with an unparalleled massacre of marine mammals, something we will be looking at in ensuing chapters.
Chief amongst the victims were whales, walrus, and seals, but whalers and sealers early learned that as much as twelve gallons of good train could be rendered from the carcass of a big water bear. Moreover, the vast, shaggy pelts commanded high prices from aristocratic Europeans who coveted them as rugs for their chilly, stone-floored mansions and castles. Thus, from the start of northern voyaging, white bears were killed whenever opportunity offered; but until near the end of the eighteenth century they had not been systematically hunted, partly because firearms were not yet effective enough to inspire confidence to face the great white bear. But, by the early 1800s, the availability of new and much deadlier guns helped give the white bear prime-target status.
As the other marine mammals were hunted to scarcity, bears became increasingly sought after. Some skippers visited places especially favoured by them, systematically slaughtering all that could be found. An effective ploy was to place well-armed men in ambush near the carcass of a whale. On one occasion the crew of a Norwegian sealer in the East Greenland ice killed thirty ice bears, as they called them, using a dead whale as bait.
The magnitude of the slaughter mounted with the passing years. New England whalers working the Labrador coast during the 1790s killed every white bear they could find and traded for bear pelts with the Labrador Inuit, whom they provided with guns and turned into year-round bear hunters. By the early 1800s this had had a dual effect: the Inuit were reduced to about half their former numbers through disease acquired from the whalers; and Nanuk, as the Inuit called the white bear, became a vanishing species along the whole of the Labrador coast where, only half a century earlier, Cartwright had found it in abundance.
The Inuit were not alone to blame. Increasing numbers of fishermen, fur trappers, traders, and even missionaries were now invading the Labrador and most of them killed white bears on sight. By 1850, few were to be seen, and those few were usually sighted along the barrel of a rifle. There is one reference to a pair of young cubs captured alive at Square Island in south Labrador, which suggests that a handful may still have been breeding there as late as 1850. But soon thereafter, there were none.
The once vigorous and abundant white bear population that had occupied the coasts of the northeastern approaches to America had been annihilated. By then, mass destruction was being visited on the white bear almost everywhere it lived. With the virtual extinction of the bowhead whale, Arctic oilers turned upon the bear with terrible effect. In 1906, the crew of a Norwegian vessel in Greenland waters killed 296 ice bears during a single summer. During the 1909 and 1910 “fishing seasons” British whalers in Canada’s eastern Arctic waters butchered 476 and rendered their fat into train oil. Meanwhile, Yankee whalers in the North Pacific were wreaking equal havoc on white bears there.
The end of Arctic whaling brought no great relief to the remaining bears. Norwegian, Scottish, and Newfoundland sealers working the harp and hood seal herds off Newfoundland, Labrador, and Greenland killed every ice bear they encountered. Nor were they the only scourge. As early as 1820, a mania for Arctic exploration gripped Europe and America as expedition after expedition went north: some to seek the legendary Northwest and Northeast Passages; some to try to reach the Pole; some in the name of science; and some for sport. All took it for granted that any living creatures they might encounter were theirs to do with as they saw fit.
In 1909 Ernest Thompson Seton had this to say about their treatment of the white bear: “It has been the custom of Arctic travellers to kill all the Polar Bears they could. It did not matter whether the travellers needed the carcasses or not. In recent years this senseless slaughter increased, since more travellers went north and deadlier weapons were carried. One Arctic explorer told me that he personally had killed 200 Polar Bears and had secured but few of them.”
The behaviour of Robert Peary, one of the two American claimants to the discovery of the North Pole, is typical. He used such larger animals as caribou, walrus, musk ox, and bear as the principal source of food, fuel, and clothing for an exploration machine that, in its final stages, included platoons of Inuit dragooned into his service, together with hundreds of sled dogs. Furthermore, he compelled both his own men and the Inuit to trap or shoot any and all furbearers whose pelts were salable in the United States, including especially white bears.
The destruction brought about by Arctic expeditions of the never-abundant mammalian life of northwestern Greenland and Ellesmere Island was on such a grand scale that entire regions were denuded of large animals; in consequence, some bands of Inuit starved to death. The treatment meted out to the bears by Peary’s expeditions alone resulted in the destruction of at least 2,000 of them. Indeed, racking up a big score of polar bear kills became an attainment in itself for many self-styled explorers. In private yachts and chartered vessels, rich gunmen from Europe and the United States found their ways to most of the known retreats of the white bear, shooting all that they could find.
Some of them wrote heroic accounts of derring-do against the “ferocious white killer of the North.” This helped father a new fashion. As the twentieth century unfolded, polar bear rugs, complete with the stuffed heads gaping in long-toothed snarls, became status symbols for people of pretension and kindled a new kind of commercial hunt. It still continues and may even be gaining in intensity because of its extreme profitability. In 1964, a good polar bear pelt, untanned, fetched $1,000. Today, such a pelt commands a good deal more. By 1964 the combined commercial and trophy hunt employing ski-equipped aircraft and snowmobiles had become so destructive that even some of the dullard minds in government bureaucracies began to feel faint stirrings of alarm about the future of the bear that had, by then, become a polar bear in fact as well as name. With the exception of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the polar region was the only area where it still endured.
The following year, the First International Scientific Meeting on the Polar Bear was convened by those nations with white bear populations—Canada, the U.S., the Soviet Union, Denmark (for Greenland), and Norway (for Spitzbergen)—to see if there really were grounds for concern. Among the weighty conclusions reached by
the experts was that “Intensive polar bear hunting by whalers and sealers since the 17th century has probably resulted in a reduced population.” There was no agreement as to how great that reduction might have been and, more to the point, none on how many white bears might remain alive. American scientists offered a figure of 19,000; the Soviets countered with an estimate of 8,000.
Statistics on the annual kill were even less precise. Canada’s delegates thought it might “approach 600” within their territory. The figure for the U.S. kill, which was mostly made from aircraft by sportsmen and commercial hide hunters on the ice packs off Alaska, was thought to be about 1,000. Norwegian experts professed to have no idea how many were killed by their nationals.
With a single exception, none of the polar bear countries thought the creature’s survival was threatened. The exception was the Soviet Union, which a decade earlier had become convinced the bear was endangered and, as of 1957, had placed it under full protection.
The decade following the congress saw the slaughter continue unabated in Alaska, Greenland, Canada, and Spitzbergen as well as, and particularly, on the ice in international waters. By 1968, it had reached an admitted total of 1,500 white bears a year with a real kill probably well in excess of 2,000. Such depletion of a species whose females only give birth every third year, and whose total world population was no more than 20,000, threatened eventual extinction. Nevertheless, most of the polar bear nations remained unconcerned.
As late as 1976, a Canadian government publicity release insisted that polar bears were still “abundant and adequate... Despite international controversy concerning the decline in populations there is a harvestable surplus in Canada.” Nevertheless, the statement continued peevishly, “it has been increasingly difficult for Canadians to export the valuable polar bear hides because of restrictions by other nations”—a reference to embargoes on the import of the skins of endangered species, which many western nations now considered the white bear to be. “Canada’s position,” the release concluded, “emphasizes sound management principles rather than a rigid form of protection.”
The head of the Canadian Wildlife Service’s Polar Bear Project added his opinion that a ban on the killing of white bears would be “protectionist overreaction.” Adopting such a course, he explained, would make it difficult for scientists to carry on useful research and adequate management, by preventing the collection of biological specimens (read: dead bears). As things stood, he emphasized, Canada was leading the way in determining the future of the polar bear.
The nature of that future was spelled out in another government publication of the same period. Raw polar bear hides, it jubilantly reported, were fetching from $500 to $3,000 each on the international market. Consequently, the annual permissible harvest of 630 Canadian bears, as recommended by management scientists, was worth over a million dollars in pelts alone, plus at least half that much again in fees and services charged to hunters from the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. Good economic sense together with good science dictated that the harvest should continue.
It has continued. Although in 1972 the U.S. banned polar bear killing in Alaska except for subsistence hunting by native people and, a year later, Norway followed the Soviet Union’s lead by banning all polar bear hunting in its territory, Canada continues “harvesting” the bears, as does Greenland. Since 1973 the commercial killing of white bears has been effectively a monopoly held by these two countries. It is a very lucrative one. In 1984 Canadian quotas will allow the killing of about 700, and Greenland will kill about 300. The Japanese, who now buy up to 95 per cent of these “novelty” furs, will pay as much as $5,000 for an especially good one, and South Koreans will pay up to $3,000 for a dried polar bear gallbladder, which they use for medicinal purposes. Furthermore, sport hunters will each pay an average of $15,000 for the privilege of killing a bear.2
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2 To Canada’s publicly expressed indignation, the United States has now declared the polar bear an endangered species and has forbidden the import of its hides, which may discourage American trophy hunters from killing it.
There is some good news. Ontario, which controls much of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, has established the Polar Bear Wilderness Park on the west side of James Bay, and the resident bears are fully protected there. Manitoba, which is now reaping a good return from tourists travelling to Churchill to see wild white bears, has forbidden the killing of them except by native people. In the Soviet Union, the bear population has increased so dramatically that, in some places such as Wrangell Island, it may be approaching aboriginal levels. The image of the great white bear has become a symbol of enlightened conservation in the Soviet Union where, as elsewhere, those who believe that non-human forms of life deserve the right to exist are frequently at odds with those who believe they were placed on earth to be used or, as it may be, abused by man as he sees fit.
Along the northeastern seaboard of America the white bear is now little more than a fast-fading wraith. Since 1960 perhaps two dozen have come south on the pack ice, but at least fifteen of these have been intercepted by Norwegian sealers off Newfoundland and killed “in self defence.” In the spring of 1962, one that escaped the sealers walked into the outport village of Rose Blanche on Newfoundland’s southwest coast. First seen emerging from the village cemetery, its appearance caused such panic that all hands fled for the safety of their houses. The bear paid them no heed. Making its way to the water, it swam off toward the harbour entrance where it encountered two men in a dory. They deflected it with yells and by banging their oars against the gunwales. The bear thereupon changed course toward the opposite shore of the harbour. By dint of frantic rowing, the men reached their fishing store, snatched up their guns, and were in time to shoot it dead as it stood, perplexed, in the landwash, unsure of which way to go.
A more recent visitation took place in eastern Newfoundland on May 9, 1973, when a young bear, already wounded, walked into the outskirts of the village of New Chelsea, near Heart’s Content. It threatened no one and no thing but, like all of its kind over the long years, it was met with gunfire.
“Comin’ down the road there, he looked like a bloody big ghost!” remembers one of those who saw it die.
Indeed. A great White Ghost.
7. The Brown and the Black
Once upon a time there were three bears. There was a white bear, a brown bear, and a black bear...
We have seen what happened to the white one. Here is what has happened and is happening to the others.
If the one-time presence of the white bear on the Atlantic seaboard has been largely ignored by history, another ursine giant who was the white bear’s peer has been totally forgotten. When Europeans began arriving in the New World, an enormous brown bear roamed the continent from Mexico to Alaska; eastward over the whole of the Great Plains to the Mississippi and Manitoba; and across the entire Arctic mainland from Pacific to Atlantic. Since it was absent from the eastern forest regions, it was not encountered by the invaders of the lower continental mainland until they reached the Mississippi country about 1800; but, at least a century earlier, traders into Hudson Bay had met the great creature and named it the “grizzled bear.” It has since borne many names, such as silver-tip, roach-back, and grey bear, but grizzly is the enduring one.
Grizzlies were so named because a mantle of light grey or “grizzled” fur composed of silver-tipped hairs covers their huge, squat heads and massively humped shoulders. Ranking with the white bear as the largest carnivore on the continent, an adult male grizzly may weigh 1,000 pounds and can be a fearsome spectacle as it rears back on its haunches to peer down upon mere man from a height of seven or eight feet.
Usually tolerant of human beings, unless wounded, cornered, or protecting cubs, the big bears were nevertheless treated circumspectly by most aboriginal peoples who, before the coming of firearms, took care to avoid provoking them. However, European settlers reg
arded all bears as inherently treacherous and dangerous beasts that ought to be killed on sight, and the grizzly seems to have especially inflamed their animosity.
It was remorselessly pursued, shot, trapped, or poisoned by ranchers who accused it of being a sheep and cattle killer. The charge was, and is, grossly exaggerated. When such accusations have been investigated, it has often been shown that the grizzly was simply scavenging the carcass of an animal that had died of natural causes or had been killed by some other predator. However, even had this truth been accepted, the settlers would probably not have altered their attitude. The great bear drew upon itself to a singular degree modern man’s malevolent hatred of any other creature that seems capable of challenging our dominion.
Within less than a hundred years of its discovery in the West, the grizzly had been exterminated wherever agriculturalists settled. Today it continues to exist—precariously—mainly in national parks and a few remote wilderness areas. It is one of the most sought-after prizes of trophy hunters—that peculiar breed whose chief pleasure seems to lie in slaughtering large animals in order to hang their stuffed heads on rec-room walls as macabre testimony to machismo.
Another major element in the destruction of the great bears was the killing of enormous numbers for “scientific purposes.” As an example of the atrocities committed in the name of science, the fate of the grizzly can hardly be bettered.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, an American mammalogist, Dr. C. Hart Merriam, was the acknowledged “supreme authority” on North American bears. He earned this eminence by spending a professional lifetime in the employ of the U.S. Biological Survey, collecting and examining the skins and skulls of grizzlies with a view to subdividing them into a complicated system of species and subspecies. In 1918, he published his findings.
