by Farley Mowat
The year is 1565, and the place is Buterus, so named by its Basque founders who come from Guipuzcoa and Viscaya in northern Spain. Buterus is only one of many similar settlements these men have established along the shores of the narrow waters separating the northern finger of Newfoundland from Labrador, but it is perhaps the largest.
Sleet slices horizontally across the harbour, dissipating the pervasive stench of rancid oil and rotting offal shrouding the settlement. The weather is so miserable that no man cares even to stick his head out of the windowless barracks where all hands huddle. So none is aware that the 500-ton San Juan has begun to drag. Having torn her anchors free of the bottom, the ponderous, high-sided carrack, laden to her marks with a cargo of barrelled oil and baled baleen, swings broadside to the gale and begins to pick up way, driving down into a smother of foam on the weather side of the island.
Nothing can stop her now. With a rending of oak on rock, she strikes. Then the storm takes her for its own, heeling her down until her rails are awash. Deep in the hold, heavy oil casks begin to break adrift and thunder to the lee side. She lurches, and rolls still farther, until she is lying on her beam ends and is flooding fore and aft. Slowly she begins to settle back and slips to her final resting place five fathoms down.
She lies there yet.
In the autumn of 1978, archaeologists discovered San Juan’s remarkably well-preserved hulk at the bottom of Labrador’s Red Bay. The place is so named because Newfoundland fishermen who settled it in the nineteenth century found the foreshore littered with soft red stones they supposed to be of natural origin, and which their children used as chalk for drawing pictures on the surrounding granite rocks. These new inhabitants had no way of knowing that the red stones were weathered fragments of clay tiles that had been carried across the Atlantic from Spain centuries earlier to roof cabins, sheds, and tryworks of which no recognizable traces still remained. They had no way of knowing that the bones of San Juan lay at the bottom of their harbour in company with the bones of thousands of great whales that had been butchered here to enrich men of another world, another time.
The Basques are a people shrouded in mystery. Descendants of a neolithic race who were never assimilated by the Indo-European invaders, they defied the changing ages within a bastion of rugged coasts and mountains at the western end of the Pyrenees. Here they remained as an enduring remnant of a forgotten epoch through some thousands of years after their erstwhile contemporaries elsewhere in Europe had been submerged and lost to view under successive waves of new peoples from the east.
Through the shadowed ages they had an abiding affinity with the sea. Consequently they entered historic times with an intimate knowledge of and feel for it and its inhabitants. An extraordinarily secretive and reclusive people, they continue to survive in, but not of, a world that has long tended to regard them and their incomprehensible language as uncouth and alien. Historians have only recently begun to realize how major was the role they played in the early exploitation of the seas; and that it was the Basques who lit the flame that was eventually to consume the mighty hosts of the whale nations.
Their war against Leviathan began at least 16,000 years ago, by which time the “strand-lopers” of the Bay of Biscay (Bay of the Basques) were actively whaling from small dugouts or skin-covered boats using bone- and flint-tipped harpoons and lances closely akin to those employed into our own times by such neolithic cultures as the Chukchee and the Inuit. Indeed, the very name “harpoon” is theirs, coming to us through the Spanish arpon from the Basque arpoi, which translates as “stone point.”
For thousands of years they practised subsistence whaling directed at securing food for their own needs. However, as early as the fifth century AD, the Biscayans began trading whale products for other peoples’ goods, and by the tenth century they were making a good business of it. So the Basques became the first commercial whalers of record. They were to retain their supremacy as such through the succeeding 600 years.
The prehistoric Biscayans originally learned their trade in pursuit of a whale their descendants called otta sotta, the species we know as the grey whale. As whales go, it was rather small, up to forty-five feet in length and rarely weighing more than forty tons. An inshore whale by preference, it sometimes stayed so close to shore that its belly was on the bottom while its back was in the air. It bore its young during the winter in warm-water lagoons and bays. Spring sent it sculling north. By mid-summer, most otta sotta were probably cruising the icy waters of the Norwegian Sea and the upper reaches of the Baltic. In early autumn, they turned south again.
It is to be assumed that, in the beginning, only a few of the more courageous strand dwellers dared attack the lumbering behemoths as they wallowed through the surf of the Bay of Biscay on their spring and fall migrations; but as success attended those early efforts, the innovators were joined by others, and still others, until most Biscayan coastal communities were whaling regularly. They did so to such effect and through so many centuries that by as early as the fourteenth century, the otta sotta had been hunted to virtual extinction in European waters.
Its destruction did not bring an end to an enterprise that had become a way of life to the coastal-dwelling Basques. Foreshadowing modern precepts, they sought new targets. These they found in the whale known as sardak baleac—the herd whale, so-called because at certain seasons it gathered in huge schools. The sarda or, as we know it now, the black right whale was a giant, sixty to sixty-five feet long, weighing as much as seventy tons. Its thick coat of blubber could produce three times as much oil as the otta sotta, and it carried more and better whalebone (baleen). Although more of an offshore animal than the otta sotta, it too sought inshore shallows in which to mate and bear its young.
Initially the Basques hunted sarda as they had otta sotta, from marvellously swift and agile open boats. After a whale had been successfully harpooned and lanced to death, the carcass was towed for processing to the nearest of the scores of shore stations scattered along the Bay coast. However, this system limited the hunt to the three or four months of the year when sarda stayed close to land. As the European demand for whale products increased during the Middle Ages, the Basques began using small sailing vessels that could stay at sea for several days and range a hundred miles or more from shore. Although the corpses still had to be towed home for “cutting in,” offshore whaling was such a success that vessels as large as 300 tuns were harrying sardas far at sea.
By 1450, a fleet of more than sixty Basque deep-sea whalers was seeking and killing sardas from the Azores all the way north to Iceland. They wrought such havoc that, before the new century began, the sarda, too, were verging on extinction in European waters. At this crucial juncture for the future of their whaling industry, the Basques became aware of a vast and previously untapped reservoir of “merchantable” whales in the far western reaches of the North Atlantic.
A prodigious effort of the imagination is required to visualize the variety and abundance of whales that swarmed in New World seas when the European conquest of the region began. It must have been at least comparable to the stunning plethora of whale life that abounded in the seas bordering Antarctica before twentieth-century whalers turned those waters red with blood.
Whales were so abundant on the northeastern seaboard and their presence was so all-pervasive that they posed problems for early voyagers. A record penned by an anonymous mariner of the mid-1500s complains that the worst risk to navigation in the New Founde Land was not fog, ice, or uncharted rocks—it was whales of such size and in such numbers that collision with them was an ever-present danger. In the early 1600s one French missionary reported testily that whales were still so numerous in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that “they became very tiresome to us and hindered our rest by their continuous movement and the noise of their spoutings.”
When the Mayflower lay at anchor in Cape Cod Bay in 1620, her crew “every day saw whales plying hard by us;
of which, in that place, if we had instruments and means to take them we might make a very rich return.” Richard Mather, newly arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1635, reported seeing “multitudes of great whales... spewing up water in the air like the smoke of chimneys and making the sea about them white and hoary... which [sight] now was grown ordinary and usual to behold.” And as late as 1705, the Sieur de Courtemanche could still record that on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, whales were “in such abundance that they came so close to the land they could be harpooned from the rocks.”
At first contact the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the living waters overlying the continental shelf from Cape Cod to Labrador were among the foremost of the world’s seas for their concentrations of marine mammals. Besides providing a haven for one of the planet’s largest concentrations of walrus, they harboured untold numbers of seals of several species. Yet all of these were dwarfed into relative insignificance by the whale nations, which included almost every extant species of great whale together with many of the smaller kinds. It was not for nothing that some early Europeans referred to the northeastern approaches to the new continent as the Sea of Whales.
Although porpoises and dolphins are all members of the whale family, the word “whale” had a much narrower meaning in earlier times, when it was used to designate those sea giants that could be turned to commercial account. Thus “whales” included only those slow enough to be overtaken by sail or rowed boats; vulnerable to hand-held harpoons and lances, financially rewarding as to the amounts of oil and baleen they produced, and, finally, those that would float when dead. This last was vital since early whalers had no way of retrieving a whale that sank into the deeps. Nor could they keep a “sinking” whale on the surface while they flensed it or towed it to a shore station. Thus sixteenth-century Basques who built and manned Buterus and its fellow factories limited their activities to and recognized only four kinds of “whales.” These they called the “better sort.”
The Sarda
When the first European vessel of the modern age thrust her blunt bows into New World waters, her people would have recognized the kinds that had once been the mainstay of Basque whalers—the otta sotta and the sardak baleac, or sarda.
If that first ship was not herself of Basque origin, it was at least inevitable that word of what her crew found would soon have reached the Basques. Certainly, by some time around 1500 their whaling ships were making the venturesome voyage across the wide reaches of the North Atlantic, and their harpooners were letting the blood of the western sarda nation.
The sarda, or black right whale, was a relatively easy as well as a rewarding victim despite its enormous size. Because its vast bulk had given it immunity from most natural predators it had not evolved defensive attitudes or weapons. Neither did it need nor have any great turn of speed. It fed by slowly plowing through the plankton pastures of the sea, forcing rivers of water past a fringed thicket of baleen, or whalebone, hanging from the roof of its huge maw, which filtered out a life-sustaining soup. And the baleen did this with such efficiency that the sarda was able to accumulate enormous quantities of surplus energy it stored as fat. This blubber blanket was so thick (as much as twenty inches) that it provided more than enough buoyancy to keep the body afloat even after death. It was so oil-rich that as much as 3,500 gallons of high-quality train could be rendered out of one individual. In every way, the sarda was one of the better sort, if not the best of them all.
The plankton-rich waters of the Sea of Whales were the sardas’ main summering grounds. In late autumn they drifted slowly southward, congregating to breed in suitable bays south to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. By the time they arrived in their wintering waters, they had accumulated such reserves of energy in blubber that they could comfortably afford to spend the long months until the return of spring bearing and nursing their young, courting and making love, without having to feed.
Late in March or early in April, the huge winter schools broke up into family-sized pods that began moving northward at a leisurely three or four knots. Grazing their way in the spring meadows of the offshore Banks, where the annual efflorescence of plankton was already turning the cold waters into a rich broth of life, most of the sardas eventually turned westward through either the Strait of Belle Isle or Cabot Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there to take advantage of a late-summer plankton bloom. Here, rotund and replete as summer ended, they again congregated in enormous schools that seem to have served some social need—a sort of whales’ autumnal festival, perhaps—before beginning the slow drift south again.
Although there is no certainty as to just when the Basques first appeared on the North American scene, we do know that before Cartier made his well-publicized forays into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534 and 1535, Buterus existed on French charts as Hable de la Ballaine—Whale Harbour; and the northwest tip of Newfoundland, the most significant landfall for ships inbound from Europe, already bore the name Karpont, a French corruption of the Basque Cap Arpont—Harpoon Cape. Furthermore, the municipal archives of Biarritz contain letters patent issued in 1511 authorizing French Basques to whale in the New World; and a number of references from other sources suggest a Basque presence in the Gulf as early as 1480. So we will probably not be far astray if we envisage salt-caked and sea-weary Basque caravels laboriously beating in toward the coasts of south Labrador, Newfoundland, and Cape Breton Island (which, incidentally, takes its name from the ancient Basque whaling port of Cap Breton) by the end of the fifteenth century.
They were soon to be found over the whole region. Current charts still preserve more than a score of names testifying to their widespread presence, and the mossed-over, wind-eroded, and sometimes sea-flooded remains of their shore stations are to be found as far westward as the mouth of the Saguenay River, a bare hundred miles from Quebec City.
Buterus itself seems to have been a typical Spanish Basque station. In any given summer it was home to as many as 1,000 men. Before dawn each day, scores of whaleboats under light sail, or propelled by oars if there was no breeze, dispersed in both directions along the coast, and out to seaward from it, until they formed an arc with a radius of ten or fifteen miles centred on Buterus. Then they waited for the light to quicken. All hands intently scanned the surrounding sea for the V-shaped double spout that bespoke the sarda. As soon as one was seen, hanging diaphanous in the morning air, two or three of the nearest boats converged on it. The harpooner took the head in each, and every crew rowed desperately, hoping to give its own harpooner the first throw.
The chosen victim normally reacted to the approaching boats with little more than amiable curiosity—until a harpoon flashed in the rays of the rising sun and the wickedly double-barbed iron drove through thick blubber deep into flesh below. The “struck fish” sounded, only to find itself tethered to the dragging weight of the boat above. When it surfaced to draw breath, it might be struck with a second and even a third harpoon. Panic and fear must have flooded the mind of a creature that, in all likelihood, had experienced neither before. There would have been agonizing pain as well, as the irons ripped and tore in the straining muscles.
After hours of titanic struggle, even the sarda’s mighty strength would ebb. Then the boats closed in, driving the strick-en animal under with thrusts of long, slim lances before it could fill its straining lungs. Mortally stabbed by lilliputians, the sarda at last rolled helpless on the surface. Its spout became a crimson fog. The sea about it swirled dark with blood. The mighty flukes lifted and fell in one last paroxysm, and life was gone.
With a haze of gulls already gathering over it, the glistening carcass was towed by two or three boats into Buterus harbour and moored to one of several barrel buoys a few hundred feet off the tryworks. Here it would lie in a pod of dead companions until the log slip-way on the beach was cleared of earlier corpses and it could be hauled up the greasy slope by capstan winches.1
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1 A
t stations where there was sufficient tide the carcasses were often simply grounded on the beach at high water and cut-in when the falling tide had left them high and dry.
Day long, night long, under the smoky glare of train oil torches, the butchers swarmed over the gargantuan carcasses, their cutting knives thrusting and shearing, while other men carried slabs of blubber to the tryworks threshold. Here the fat was minced into pieces small enough to fork into a row of sputtering, bubbling cauldrons heated by roaring fires, themselves fuelled with a ropy detritus of connective tissue fished out of the pots from time to time—the whale thus provided the fuel for its own immolation.
Having stripped the blubber from its body and hacked the baleen from its mouth, the whalers would trip the capstan brake allowing the naked corpse to slide back into the sea. It would still float, even though stripped of its fat, because the progress of internal decay swiftly produced such quantities of gas as to inflate the carcass into a monstrous, fetid balloon. Turned loose to the mercy of wind and tide, this enormity would join a host of similar putrescent horrors being vomited out of the score of bays where whalers worked. Most of these ghastly objects eventually drove ashore, adding their contributions to a charnel yard that stretched for hundreds of miles along the shores of the Grand Bay.
The Sieur de Courtemanche has left us a macabre glimpse of what those shores must have been like. In 1704, at the head of a small bay only a few miles from long-abandoned Buterus, he found “a quantity of bones cast up on the coast like sticks of wood, one on the other... there must have been, in our estimate, the remains of more than two or three thousand whales. In one place alone we counted ninety skulls of prodigious size.”
