Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  One of my friends and neighbours when I lived in Burgeo, Newfoundland, was “Uncle” Art Baggs, who had been a fisherman on the sou’west coast since the 1890s. He remembered meeting his first whales at the age of eight, when he accompanied his father in a four-oared dory to the offshore cod fishery at the Penguin Islands.

  “ ’Twas a winter fishery them times, and hard enough. The Penguins lies twenty miles offshore... nothin’ more’n a mess of reefs and sunkers... we’d row out there on a Monday and stay till we finished up our grub...

  “They was t’ousands of the biggest kind of whales on the coast them times. Companies of ’em would be fishing herrings at the Penguins whilst we was fishing cod. Times we’d be the only boat, but they whales made it seem as we was in the middle of a girt big fleet. They never hurted we and we never hurted they. Many’s the time a right girt bull would spout so close you could have spit baccy juice down his vent. Me old Dad claimed they’d do it a-purpose; a kind of joke, you understand.”

  It was during the winter of 1913 that Arthur witnessed the disappearance of the great whales.

  “Back about 1900 they Norway fellows built a blubber factory eastward of Cape La Hune. They called it Balaena and, me son, it were some dirty place! They had two or three little steamers with harpoon guns, and they was never idle. Most days each of ’em would tow in a couple of sulphur-bottoms [blues] or finners and the shoremen would cut ’em up some quick. No trouble to smell that place ten miles away.

  “And floating whales! When they got the most of the blubber off, they turned ’em loose, the meat all black, and them all blasted up so high they nigh floated out of the water. Some days when I been jigging off shore ’twas like a whole new kit of islands had growed there overnight. Five or ten in sight at once and each one with t’ousands of gulls hangin’ over it like a cloud.

  “ ’Twas a hard winter for weather and I never got out to the Penguin Islands as much as in a good year, but when I was there I hardly see a whale. Then, come February, one morning when ’twas right frosty and nary a pick of wind, I was workin’ a trawl near the Offer Rock when I heared this girt big sound. It kind of shivered the dory.

  “I turned me head and there was the biggest finner I ever see. He looked nigh as big as the coastal steamer. He was right on top of the water and blowin’ hard, and every time he blowed, the blood went twenty feet into the air... I could see there was a hole into his back big enough to drop a puncheon into.

  “Now I got to say I was a mite feared... I was tryin’ to slip me oars twixt the t’ole pins, quiet like, when he began to come straight for I. Was nothin’ to be done but grab the oar to fend him off, but he never come that close. He hauled off and sounded and I never saw he again... no, nor any of his like, for fifty year.”

  During the mid-1950s, to the astonishment of most of the younger fishermen, who had never seen a great whale before, some fin whales reappeared along the sou’west coast. A pod of half a dozen even took to wintering amongst the Burgeo islands. Arthur was delighted to welcome them back again, and when my wife and I came to Burgeo in 1962, he showed them to us with proprietary pleasure.

  These resident finners fed on herring in the runs and channels between the islands and each winter through the next five years from December into March I could look out the seaward windows of our house almost any day and see them spouting high puffs of hoary mist into the cold air. Unmolested by human beings, they were quite fearless, allowing power dories and even big herring seiners to approach within a few yards. In the course of the years, I became almost as familiar with them as if they had been cattle-beasts in a neighbouring field, but by far the most spectacular view I ever had was on a fine July day in 1964.

  The pilot of a Beaver float plane was taking my wife and me joy-riding along the towering, rock-ribbed coast to the eastward of Burgeo. It was a cloudless afternoon and the cold waters below us were unusually transparent. As we crossed the broad mouth of one of the fiords, our pilot unexpectedly banked the plane and put her into a shallow dive. When he levelled out at less than a hundred feet we were flying parallel to a pod of six fin whales.

  There were in line abreast, swimming only a few feet below the surface and, as seamen say, making a passage under forced draft. We estimated their speed at nearly twenty knots. The pilot throttled back almost to a stall and we circled them. They were as clearly visible as if they had been in air. Their mighty flukes which, unlike the tails of fish, work vertically instead of horizontally, swept lazily up and down with what seemed to be a completely effortless beat. There was no accompanying turbulence and the overall effect was of six exquisitely streamlined bodies hovering in the green sea and seeming to undulate just perceptibly as if they were composed of something more subtle and responsive than mere flesh and bone.

  They were beautiful.

  About ten minutes after we met them, the whales surfaced as one, blew several times, then sounded while still moving at full speed. This time they went deep, shimmering and diminishing in our view as if they were sliding down some unseen chute into the abyssal depths.

  We had no way of knowing that they and their rorqual fellows were about to be plunged into much darker depths.

  The reappearance of finners on the sou’west coast was due to the fact that—unlike the northern waters of the Sea of Whales, in which they had been more or less continuously hunted for fifty years—the waters south of Newfoundland had provided something of a haven for the rorqual tribes since the closing of the Balaena factory in 1914.3

  * * *

  3 In 1945, a Norwegian/Newfoundland consortium reopened the old factory at Hawkes Harbour in Labrador, and in 1947, the Olsen Whaling and Sealing Company began operations at Williamsport in northern Newfoundland. Subject to no controls of any kind, these companies whaled with such ruthlessness that, by 1951, the waters that could be swept by their fleet of killer boats had been “cleaned out.” By then the two factories had processed 3,721 finners together with several hundred “other whales,” and had reaped an estimated return on their investments in excess of 900 per cent.

  Female rorquals of the larger species do not become sexually mature until they are several years old and can then produce only a single offspring every two to four years. Because of this, those species that had been reduced to near the vanishing point were not able to gain much from the half-century reprieve. However, because a fair number of finners had survived the pre-World War I massacre, they had been able to increase their numbers to perhaps as many as 3,000 by the early 1960s. The southern portion of the Sea of Whales also harboured some sperms and humpbacks, together with a population of seis and minkes that had never been fished commercially.

  By 1960, the heyday of whaling in the Antarctic was over. The blues were gone. The finners were fast disappearing. It was clear that switching to the much smaller seis would not satisfy the gargantuan appetite of the pelagic fleets for long. By 1963, many of the factory ships had already been laid up or converted to other work. There was, however, no peacetime role for the killer boats, except for those few sold to Third World countries to serve as naval gunboats. Nevertheless, as both the Norwegians and Japanese were aware, such small pockets of marketable whales as existed here and there in remote corners of the world’s oceans could still be turned to good account before the last killer boat had to be sold to the breakers’ yard for scrap.

  In the winter of 1963–64, an Antarctic killer named Thorarinn tossed and thrust her way across the cold wastes of the North Atlantic. Her destination was Blandford, Nova Scotia. Before her arrival, she hauled down her Norwegian flag and hoisted the Canadian ensign in token of the fact that she would henceforth be working for a nominally Canadian company.

  Thorarinn was a 200-foot, 800-ton, 2,000-horsepower diesel-electric killing machine, whose 90 mm harpoon gun mounted high on her destroyer bow had already taken the lives of thousands of great whales in southern waters. She could range 300 mi
les from base, kill and take in tow eight or nine big whales, return them to shore, and be off again within a few hours on a new sweep of destruction.

  Manned by seasoned Norwegian whalers, Thorarinn, and a sister ship that joined her a little later, belonged to the misleadingly named Karlsen Shipping Company. As we shall later see, this organization was headed by a Norwegian named Karl Karlsen, who arrived in Canada shortly after the end of World War II to establish a business based on killing harp seals and exporting their skins to Norway. The business flourished and the company constructed an extensive plant at the little village of Blandford. Sometime in the early 1960s, the company became aware of the presence of the resurgent finner population and of the untouched seis and minkes in the southern portion of the Sea of Whales. The rest is bloody history.

  Between 1964 and 1972, Karl Karlsen’s plant at Blandford legally processed 1,573 fin whales, 840 seis, 94 sperms, and even 45 of the little minkes. In addition, it processed three illegally killed blue whales together with a number of finners under the legal size. In no case was the company punished for breaking Canadian laws.

  The products of the factory included select frozen whale “beef” and “bacon” for the gourmet Japanese market; marine oil (the new name for whale oil), which was mainly used in making margarine and as a base for cosmetics; bone meal for fertilizer; and, not least, large quantities of low-grade meat and offal for pet food markets in Europe and in North America.

  The Karlsen organization was not long left to reap the benefits from this last whale bonanza all to itself. The stink of dead whales, and of money, soon reached other “harvesters of the seas.” In 1965, a Norwegian-manned “small whale” operation at Dildo, Newfoundland, which had been established to kill minke and pilot whales in co-operation with a Japanese company called Kyokuyo Hogei, went to work on the larger rorquals. It was followed in 1967 by the Japanese Taiyo Gyogyo Company, in association with Newfoundland’s largest fish processor, Fisheries Products Limited, which reopened the old whaling plant at Williamsport.

  Canada welcomed this new exploitation of her resources with open arms, proclaiming it to be the beginning of an enduring Canadian (sic) fishery that would bring great economic benefits to the maritime regions. To ensure that such would indeed be the case, the federal Department of Fisheries announced that the new industry would be closely supervised and rationally managed on such sound scientific principles as Maximum Sustainable Yield, whereby only the surplus whale population would be “harvested.”

  As was to be anticipated, there was no effective supervision and no real effort was made to regulate the hunt. The scientific basis for management that was adopted worked, not for the ongoing survival of the whales but to legitimize and even encourage their depletion to extinction. Canada, all on her own, chose to play the sleazy International Whaling Commission tune... one more time.

  From 1964 until 1967, no restraints were placed on the whalers as to the number or kinds of rorquals they could kill. In 1967 they were finally forbidden to kill blues and humpbacks, which were almost effectively extinct in any case, and were given a finback quota determined by Fisheries scientists on the basis of the estimated Maximum Sustainable Yield of a local population that had been scientifically calculated to number between 7,000 and 10,000.

  This first quota allowed the killing of 800 finners, but the best efforts of three whaling companies produced only 748 fin corpses. Perhaps, the scientists concluded, the quota might be a little high. They lowered it to 700 for 1968. This time, the whalers managed to fill it, but only just. Still a bit high perhaps? In 1969, it came down to 600 but the whalers only managed to land 576. Down it came again—to 470—yet the whalers were able to kill only 418. In 1972, the quota went down—to 360—and this time, by dint of Herculean efforts, the killer boats managed to meet it.

  Now the experts reworked their data and concluded that the original fin whale stock must actually have been on the order of 3,000, not 10,000. They thereupon proposed a 1973 quota of 143 finners, presumably on the assumption that all of the original 3,000 were still alive and busily reproducing their kind.

  The whalers could have told them otherwise. Having processed 4,000 finners, 900 seis, 123 sperms, 46 humpbacks, at least three blues, and one black right (together with hundreds of smaller whales) during the preceding eight years, and having probably killed, but failed to recover, an additional several hundred, they were running out of whales.

  The “promising new Canadian whale fishery” of a Department of Fisheries’ press release was in trouble. In the spring of 1972, in response to a query of mine about its prospects addressed to what had by then become the Fisheries Branch of a quaintly named department called Environment Canada, I received the following reply.

  “The market conditions in the future, coupled with the limited availability of whales off our Atlantic coast, could make it uneconomic for the Canadian [sic] stations to continue to operate. The current policy of the Department is to permit a limited Canadian whaling activity based on sustainable annual yields estimated from the available scientific evidence.”

  In the autumn of 1972, I had a meeting with the Minister of the Environment, the Honourable Jack Davis, in my capacity as president of the Canadian branch of Operation Jonah, one of several international organizations working toward a general moratorium on commercial whaling. Davis was not only surprisingly sympathetic, he was actively encouraging. In fact, he as good as promised that Canada would make an end to commercial whaling in her territorial waters before the year was out. I left his office feeling euphoric. My delight was slightly dampened by a conversation with one of the minister’s senior officials who, as I recall his words, had this to say.

  “You came at a good time. Karlsen is about ready to close down for lack of whales; but naturally, he’d prefer for us to close him down. That way we’d have to provide compensation and also look after his shore people. The Japanese? No way do they want out. Not until there isn’t a damn whale left alive. But yes, you’ll likely get your ban.”

  At the end of 1972 the ban was duly promulgated, but it was initially limited to “large whales” in the Atlantic region. It was vague even as to exactly which species were to be protected. The door was left open for the future killing of whales whose populations could be considered “commercially viable.” As we shall see in the next chapter, these included not only the minke, but pilot and white whales as well.

  Imposition of the ban did not sit well with many bureaucrats, nor with some scientists. The latter may have been disgruntled because the ban would deny them specimens for dissection and examination, without which they could not amass the material on which many of the “papers” so essential to scientific advancement had been based.4 Fisheries mandarins were displeased because it was, and remains, department policy that Canada’s marine resources should be exploited to the fullest extent possible. Furthermore (as we shall see in Part V), it was established policy to seek the elimination of all marine mammals that might be competitive with the commercial fishery, either directly or indirectly. A number of whales and porpoises had been so stigmatized. The bureaucrats saw even a limited ban as interference with the department’s internal dogma, and at the same time viewed the ban as a dangerous precedent for the future. They did what they could to subvert it.

  * * *

  4 Between 1969 and 1971, Fisheries issued special permits allowing east-coast whalers to “take” seventy of the by then protected Atlantic humpbacks, in the interests of scientific inquiry. Forty-one were killed before the “take” was stopped on the strong recommendation of one departmental cetologist, who vigorously disagreed with the policy.

  During the late 1970s, one departmental expert claimed to have detected a notable recovery in the numbers of fin whales and to have established that exploitable stocks of seis were still available in Canadian waters. Despite the fact that another Fisheries scientist denied these claims, “an initiative
” was taken to have the ban rescinded so that a Japanese whaling company could again begin “harvesting an otherwise under-utilized resource.” However, word of what was afoot was leaked by a whale sympathizer and the likelihood of massive public condemnation made the proposal politically inexpedient, at least for the nonce. In 1980, the department once more tested the water by orchestrating the complaints of Newfoundland fishermen to the effect that whales were causing intolerable damage to nets and cod-traps, and therefore should be “controlled.” But by then public opinion had swung so strongly to the side of the whales that a proposed whale control project, to be undertaken through a Japanese-financed commercial “harvest,” had to be shelved.

  Equally revealing of the attitude of the mandarins is the fact that, until 1982, Fisheries nominated a Canadian commissioner to the International Whaling Commission who was one of a small, intractable minority that for ten years stubbornly refused to accept a United Nations General Assembly recommendation for a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling.

  Attitudes and actions such as these inevitably give rise to scepticism about the validity and use of scientific data and the objectivity (if not the honesty) underlying government and industry policies for the “management” of marine life. Because the Canadian ban on killing rorquals has remained in place, small numbers of finners have returned to the sou’west coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf. Family pods of humpbacks once again range from Cape Cod to southern Labrador. Perhaps as many as three dozen blue whales are now to be found in northeastern seaboard waters. Minkes and seis disport themselves in the Bay of Fundy and up the St. Lawrence as far as the Saguenay.