by Farley Mowat
At first the English dominated the new whaling grounds in what they vaguely called the Greenland Sea, which included all that portion of the Arctic Ocean lying between east Greenland and Novaya Zemlya. Then the Dutch came whaling in force. Skirmishes and even pitched battles were fought between the rivals in the bleak fiords of Spitzbergen. But this was as nothing to the war they waged together against the leviathan they would come to call the Greenland whale.
By 1622, the Dutch alone were sending 300 ships and 15,000 to 18,000 men to “fish” Spitzbergen’s frigid waters, and had built a big summer settlement on one of the barren islands, which they appropriately named Smeerenburg—Blubbertown. The carcasses of as many as 1,500 Greenland whales were towed into its stinking harbour each season to be flensed and their blubber rendered. Countless more whales were killed and their oil rendered in temporary shore stations all around the archipelago by English and Dutch alike.
In a few years the resultant gush of train oil into European markets washed away the former Basque monopoly. Although some French Basques continued to whale in New World waters on a much-diminished scale, most either turned to fishing cod or hired themselves out as mercenary harpooners aboard Dutch and English ships fishing the new grounds in the Greenland Sea.
Although the Grand Bay whales now enjoyed something of a reprieve on their wintering grounds, the cold polar waters where they summered were reddening with their blood. By 1640, the Greenland or Grand Bay whale was being hunted across the whole sweep of the European Arctic. Soon the old tale was being told anew. As the hunt intensified, the numbers of available whales began to shrink and competition for what was left grew fiercer. In 1721, a century after the great Arctic slaughter had begun, 445 whaling ships of half-a-dozen nationalities scoured the Greenland Sea—and succeeded in killing an average of only two whales each. By 1763, the average was down to one whale per ship, and those that were being killed produced only two-thirds to half as much oil as had been rendered from the monsters originally found around Spitzbergen.
Whales are long-lived animals. Unmolested, a Greenland whale might have lived sixty years or so and, growing all the time, attained a length of seventy feet. By the time the seventeenth century ended few, if any, were being permitted such longevity. By 1770, a fifty-five-footer was considered a big whale, and the kill of ever younger and smaller whales from year to year was becoming the regular pattern. Eventually more than half the kill would consist of “nursery whales”—youngsters of the year, still nursing on their dams.
Having taken the cream of the big whales from the Greenland Sea, the Dutch began searching farther afield until some of their ships rounded Cape Farewell and entered Davis Strait. Here they found a virgin population of Greenland whales and the slaughter began anew. The Dutch tried to monopolize this new ground, but English whalers avidly followed the stench of oil and money westward. Meanwhile, the young but vigorous New England whaling industry had begun sniffing northward. About 1740, its whalers discovered the wintering grounds of the whale they christened “Bowhead,” but at first they were frustrated in their attempts to exploit the find because the Gulf of St. Lawrence was still French territory and forbidden to the English. The New Englanders thereupon resorted to clandestine methods, seasonally and secretly reoccupying some of the old Basque stations and establishing new ones concealed in coves on the lower Labrador and the Petit Nord peninsula of Newfoundland.
Since French cod fishermen did not winter on these coasts, using them and their harbours only from June to October, the New Englanders had only to wait until the French fishing fleet departed for Europe before putting wintering whaling crews ashore, after which the mother ships sailed south to hunt for sperm whales in warmer waters. As early as possible the following spring the schooners headed north again, braving the south-flowing polar pack in order to pick up the wintering crews and their production of oil and baleen before the French fleet again arrived on the scene. The French authorities either did not realize what was happening or, possibly, they knew but were not overly concerned.
After the British expelled the French from the region in the 1760s the New Englanders—mostly New Bedford men—were able to whale openly. They increased the number of winter stations fishing bowheads and, not content with this, sent their whalers northward in the spring to range the edges of the Labrador pack and pick off laggards from the stream of migrants. These were mostly nursing females whose progress north was slowed by their calves. The cow bowheads were particularly vulnerable because they would not abandon their young, a fact that whalers learned early to exploit. When a cow with her accompanying calf was sighted the harpooners first attacked the calf, aiming to cripple it but not to kill it outright. They could then take their time slaughtering the mother.
When the American colonies went to war with Britain in 1775, their whalers were excluded from fishing the Sea of Whales, so many went north to compete with the English and the Dutch in Davis Strait.
They were not missed on the Labrador coast, where their behaviour had been less than civil. In 1772–73, Lieutenant Curtis of the Royal Navy was sent to the Strait of Belle Isle to investigate complaints against them and he reported that they were “lawless banditti, the cause of every quarrel between the Eskimos and the Europeans... they swarmed upon the coast like locusts and committed every kind of offence with malignant wantonness.”
Their departure may have brought relief to the people of the region but it came too late to help the bowheads. By that time the Greenland whales had been so decimated on both their summer and winter grounds that only a few pods remained. By the turn of the century they had become so rare on the Labrador coast that the Inuit, who had long depended on killing the occasional one for subsistence and for whalebone to trade for European goods, were unable to do so anymore.
In 1766, the wealthy English naturalist Joseph Banks visited Chateau Bay, which had been one of the main whaling harbours on Belle Isle Strait since at least as early as 1535. Here he was told of a remarkable find. “Last year, in digging, an extraordinary discovery was made of a quantity of Whalebone [baleen] carefully and regularly buried... and so large that I have been told by those who saw it that as much was dug as, had it been sound, would have been worth £20,000... it is supposed to be Left here by the Danes who in their return from Groenland South about, touched upon this Coast and Left several Whaling Crews, tempted no doubt by the Large quantities of Whales Which Pass Every Year through the Straights of Bellisle into the Gulph of St. Lawrence. Here we are to suppose that the fortunate Crew who had taken this immense quantity of Bone fixed their habitation... till the Ships should return as usual where upon [under threat of] an attack by the Inland Indians they Buried the Bone for greater security and most Probably were cut off to a man, so that their Treasures remained untouched till chance directed us to them in their present decayed state.”3
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3 Another observer estimated the quantity of baleen as forty-five tons, which would represent the take from twenty to thirty bowheads of average size.
Banks’ identification of the people responsible for this cache is surely mistaken. No Danes are known ever to have whaled the Labrador coast. Nor could the cache have been of any great age since, unlike true bone, baleen rots rather quickly after it is buried. This considerable treasure was most probably secreted by a New England wintering crew, whether against a possible native attack as Banks supposed, or, what is perhaps more likely, against discovery by French summer fishermen after the whalers’ mother ship failed to return for them.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Dutch, having reaped untold millions of guilders from two centuries of butchery (between 1675 and 1721 alone they sold whale products worth 80 million guilders), abandoned what remained of the bowhead fishery to English, Scots, and Yankee whalers who were then competing fiercely in Davis Strait. However, the Americans did not long remain in those crowded waters.
In 1847 a Y
ankee whaler hunting down remnant black rights in the North Pacific entered the Sea of Okhotsk and “found an enormity of whales assembled there.” They were of a kind unfamiliar to the Captain, who had never hunted in northern waters before, but when a Sag Harbor whaler went through Bering Strait two years later and found enormous numbers of these same whales, he recognized them as being close kin to the bowhead. Called polar whales at first, they were in fact true bowheads, but of a separate tribe that ranged the North Pacific and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in the Arctic Ocean.
The discovery of this previously untouched lode drew almost every American whaling vessel into those distant waters, where Yankee daring, ingenuity, skill, and, above all, cupidity initiated a carnage that would have awed the Dutch of Smeerenburg. It took the Americans just fifty years to effectively exterminate the Pacific bowhead. They were merciless, killing every individual they could, regardless of age, size, or sex. Indeed, some ships’ crews made a business of taking calves, which yielded as little as ten barrels of oil and little or no baleen. In 1852 one of the Yankee captains described their activities in this wise:
“The great combined fleet moved northward toward the Pole, and there the ships of all [our] whaling ports are now, lending their united efforts to the destruction of the [Bowhead] whale, capturing even the young... The whales have diminished since I was first here two years ago... how can it be otherwise? Look at the immense fleet fishing from Cape Thaddeus to the [Bering] Straits! By day and by night the whale is chased and harassed... there could not have been less than three thousand polar whales killed last season, yet the average [quantity] of oil is only about half as great as it was two years ago. The fact speaks for itself and shows that it will not long be profitable to send ships to the Arctic.”
The Captain may well have been right about the profitability of train oil, the value of which was already being undercut by petroleum; but there was still baleen. In the mid-nineteenth century, demand for it in the manufacture of such varied articles as whips, parasols, hats, suspenders, neck-stocks, canes, billiard table cushions, fishing rods, divining rods, tongue scrapers, etc., etc. seemed to be ever on the increase, and the price rocketed accordingly. By 1855, baleen was worth $2 a pound and double that ten years later. There followed an orgy of destruction during which thousands of bowheads were killed solely for their “bone.”
Freed of the time-consuming and exhausting business of flensing carcasses and boiling down the blubber, the whalers were able to devote almost all their time to killing. Some ships brought home as much as twenty-five tons of baleen from a single voyage. This amount represented as many as thirty or more whales, for by then it was a rare bowhead which lived long enough to produce as much as a ton of bone.
By 1910 the Bering-Beaufort-Chukchi Sea tribe of bowheads was commercially and almost literally extinct. Its eastern relatives fared no better.
Even by as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century, whalers in the Greenland Sea, where the immolation of the bowhead had begun, were running out of victims. More and more vessels—mostly English at this period—were chasing fewer and smaller whales. Not having had time to learn caution, these adolescent animals were easily approached. In 1818, the grotesquely misnamed Hull whaler, Cherub, Captain Jackson commanding, got into several pods of these youngsters and a massacre ensued. At one point, Cherub had every corner, on deck and below, stuffed with blubber—and still had fourteen untouched corpses of young whales moored alongside. Eventually Jackson had to cut them loose and let them drift away with “very great distress at the loss occasioned therebye to the Owners.” Jackson and his crew killed forty-seven nursery whales in that single season.
No form of mammalian life could long withstand this kind of attrition and the bowhead of the Greenland Sea was no exception. By the 1830s, the species was effectively extinct although a scattered handful may have survived into mid-century. Their executioners were, however, now exercising their bloody skills in what they called the Western Grounds.
Davis Strait had been fished since the middle of the seventeenth century, but, by 1810 bowheads were becoming scarce there and so the whalers pushed their luck toward the north. They shouldered into the dangerous pack ice of southern Baffin Bay, reached Disco Island on the west Greenland coast and, to their amazement, found open water in the northern reaches of Baffin Bay. In 1815 some of them crossed it to reach the shores of the Canadian Arctic archipelago, which they named West Land. Here they broke in upon the summering grounds of the last undevastated bowhead tribe in the Atlantic region.
An observer on the English whaler Cumbrian at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island in 1823 provided this vivid glimpse of the carnage that ensued: “We turned south along the land floe [and] along the floe edge lay the dead bodies of hundreds of flenched whales, and the air for miles around was tainted with the foetor which arose from such masses of putridity. Toward evening the numbers we came across were even increasing, and the effluvia which assailed our olfactories became almost intolerable.” This, it is to be remembered, was in the refrigerated climate of the Arctic!
Cumbrian’s crew killed twenty-three bowheads on this single voyage. The forty-one ships in company with her flensed more than 350 whales amongst them—and probably fatally wounded and lost another fifty.
Again, such havoc could not be sustained. In 1850 the whole of the British whaling fleet in Baffin Bay only managed to find and kill 218 bowheads, and from then on the kill waned dramatically for want of victims.
During the 1860s steam-auxiliary whalers largely replaced the old sailing ships. Most were Scottish, but by this time some American whalers were returning from the devastation they had wrought in the North Pacific. In 1863 two American steam whalers forced their way through the spring ice into Hudson Bay where they found “legions of whales... the north part of the Bay from Marble Island to Cape Fullerton was full of whales.”
This was no new discovery. Since time immemorial these waters had provided wintering, calving, and mating grounds for the bowheads of Baffin Bay and the Arctic archipelago. As early as 1631 explorers had commented on their majestic presence there. One Hudson’s Bay trader wrote in 1751: “There are such shoals of whales [in Hudson Bay] as is nowhere to be met with in the known world.”
The Hudson’s Bay Company, never an organization to miss an opportunity for profit, tried several times to start a bowhead fishery but always failed, primarily because the attempts were made by landsmen with no whaling experience. This was put to rights by the arrival of the Yankee whaling ships. For them, this was the last great whale bonanza—and they made the most of it. Between 1863 and 1885, 146 whaling voyages were made into the Bay, and a hundred of these overwintered or left wintering crews on shore. Since a single whale could yield $3,000 worth of oil and $15,000 worth of baleen, the competition amongst the whalers was ferocious, and the hunt was merciless.
The wintering whales congregated with their calves in open leads, particularly in the northwestern part of the Bay. Although they could not be easily reached by boat, they could be approached on foot along the ice edge. So instead of harpooning them, the hunters attacked with hand-held guns firing fragmentation bombs that inflicted terrible internal wounds. Unless instantly killed, a struck whale would sound beneath the ice and if and when it surfaced again it would often be in some distant lead beyond reach of the gunners. According to Inspector Moodie of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, who witnessed the hunt during its final days, at least three-quarters of the bowheads shot with bomb guns were not recovered. It can be assumed that most perished later of their wounds.
This was destruction on such a scale that, by 1895, only a handful of whaling ships were still finding it worthwhile to “fish” in Hudson Bay. The last whaler departed those waters in 1908 with empty holds, having failed to find a single bowhead.
Ten Scots steam whalers ranged almost the whole perimeter of Baffin Bay during the summer of 1910 and mana
ged to kill only eighteen whales between them. Since this was not enough for a paying trip, they tried to “make up the voyage” by killing whatever else came to hand. This included some 400 of the small whales known as beluga, 2,000 walrus, 250 polar bears, and 5,000 seals. However, not even this additional slaughter enabled them to turn a profit. The game was finished. By the time the human world plunged into its own orgy of self-destruction in 1914, the eastern bowhead was thought to be extinct.
That it was not entirely so was certainly no fault of the whalers. A few score bowheads had managed to evade destruction, but they were not left free from persecution. Between 1919 and 1976, more than forty recorded attacks were made on bowhead whales in Canadian eastern Arctic and west Greenland waters, some by natives on their own account, but more under the direction of white residents, including government officials and employees of trading companies. About half of the whales attacked were killed and most of the rest were wounded. There is no trustworthy indication that the tiny remaining remnant of a once-enormous whale nation is recovering. It may not even be holding its own.
A somewhat larger portion of the North Pacific tribe escaped the devastation. During a 1969 visit to Magadan on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, I was told by a Soviet cetologist that as many as 400 had been located by aerial surveys during the previous winter. His estimate of the total number of surviving North Pacific bowheads was no more than 2,000. However, he did not believe they were increasing because too many were being killed by the Aleuts and Inuit of northeastern Alaska.
Like their Chukotkan peers (and like some of the Inuit of the eastern Arctic), a number of Alaskan native communities hunted whales as a major part of their subsistence through many hundreds, if not thousands of years. But in pre-European times there was an abundance of whales, and the primitive hunting gear possessed by the natives ensured that this abundance could not be depleted by human predation. That has all changed now.
