Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  Two years later, on a fine spring morning at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some Acadians had gone to the beach at La Bassin in the south part of the Magdalens to dig clams for cod bait. A hundred yards off the empty echourie a massive head suddenly reared out of the heaving surf. The men straightened from their digging and stared seaward at a vache marin whose gleaming tusks seemed longer than any they had ever seen before. Holding its position rock-solid in the breakers, it seemed to return their stares with such intensity that some of the men became uneasy. Then it submerged.

  None of its kind has ever again been seen in the one-time heartland of the vanished nation.

  After 1800 no resident walrus existed anywhere south of the Strait of Belle Isle, and precious few remained alive even on the Labrador coast to the northward. An anonymous official reporting in the Sessional Papers of the Quebec government in mid-century had this to say about their disappearance.

  “They used to be found basking in the sun and breathing at their ease on the sandy beaches of the Gulf. But first the French, then the English and Americans waged as bitter a war against them that at the commencement of this century they were almost totally destroyed... they are now hardly ever to be met with except on the Labrador coast, in Hudson’s Straits and Hudson’s Bay... Their tusks are often found buried in the sand of the shores of the River and Gulf of St. Lawrence. These are the last remains of those animals whose spoils have helped to build up many fortunes. But the indifference and want of foresight of governments, and the cupidity of merchants, have caused their total disappearance.”

  There was now no respite for walrus anywhere. During the latter part of the nineteenth century even those living in far northern waters came under attack as British and American whalers, having swept the Arctic seas almost clean of merchantable whales, turned guns and harpoons against any and all other creatures whose corpses could return some profit. Of these, the walrus was first choice.

  Walrus hides had once again become of value, as raw material from which bicycle seats were made. There was even a renewed demand for tusk ivory in the manufacture of expensive toilet accessories for wealthy women. And train oil continued to rise in price. The result was that some whalers started going north especially for walrus. In 1897, having scoured the Spitzbergen archipelago clean of whales as well as walrus, the British ventured east to discover a previously untouched tribe in remote Franz Joseph Land. Within ten years, they had wiped it out. In Greenland, so Oliver Goldsmith in his Animated Nature tells us, “the whale-fishers have been known to kill 300 or 400 [walrus] at a time and... along those shores bones are seen lying in prodigious quantities, sacrificed to those who sought them only for the purposes of avarice and luxury.”

  In North America’s eastern Arctic things were as bad or worse. Between 1868 and 1873, whalers in that region landed an average of 60,000 walrus a year, with a recovery rate of about one in four when shot at sea. This massacre was paralleled in the western Arctic, particularly in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas where, between 1869 and 1874, Yankee whalers landed an estimated 150,000 sea cows out of perhaps double that number killed, for a production of 40,000 barrels of oil.

  This carnage brought starvation to native northern peoples who depended on walrus as a staple food. These unfortunates found an advocate in a New England whaler named Captain Baker who had once been wrecked on the Alaskan coast and had survived only because the Eskimos succoured him and his crew.

  “I wish to say to the ship agents and owners in New Bedford that the wholesale butchery of the walrus pursued by nearly all their ships will surely end in the extermination of the races of natives who rely upon these animals... although to abandon an enterprise that in one season alone yielded 10,000 barrels of oil, for the sake of the Esquimaux, may seem preposterous and meet with derision and contempt... But let them who deride it see the misery entailed by this unjust wrong... I feel quite sure that a business that can last not much longer anyway will be condemned by every prompting of humanity that ever actuated the heart of a Christian.”

  Captain Baker was a cockeyed optimist. Nothing could deflect the whalemen and the good burghers from the pursuit of profits. Their own records show that, by 1920, they had slaughtered between two and three million sea cows and had reduced the Pacific walrus nation to a few tens of thousands. Nobody kept any records of the consequent loss of life amongst the native peoples of the northern coasts. Their agonies were irrelevant.

  The massacre of northern walrus was not limited to commercial exploitation. From about 1890 until well into the 1920s, millionaire American and European sport hunters ranged the eastern Arctic all the way from Spitzbergen to Ellesmere Island on private “scientific expeditions,” which in reality were nothing more than highly competitive attempts to kill more northern animals than anyone else had ever done before. These gentlemen kept careful records of the destruction wrought by their expensive guns, and walrus provided one of their prime targets. One proud sportsman who visited the northwest Greenland coast was able to tally eighty-four bull walrus, twenty cows, and “a number of youngsters” in his game book during a single three-week period. As he admitted, he had probably killed a great many more, but the ethics of good sportsmanship had prevented him from claiming any whose deaths had not been indisputably confirmed.

  When the European invasion of North America began, the region that would become eastern Canada and the northeastern United States had a resident walrus population numbering no less than three-quarters of a million. At least another quarter million inhabited the adjacent seas to the northward. By 1972, the total walrus population of eastern North America may have numbered between 5,000 and 10,000, entirely restricted to Arctic and Subarctic waters. Although officially protected, their numbers are still being depleted, primarily for their tusks, which are now much in vogue again both as expensive souvenirs and as raw material for craft carving. In 1981, many tons of illegal North American walrus ivory entered international markets where it was selling for up to $150 a pound. U. S. Federal Wildlife Service agents in Alaska seized 10,000 pounds of tusks in a single day. This much ivory required the destruction of a minimum of 750 adult walrus. So many headless walrus have recently washed up on the Siberian coast opposite Alaska that the Soviet Union has filed a formal complaint with the U.S. State Department against the ongoing massacre.

  Nevertheless, the outlook for the survival of the walrus is not totally bleak. For whatever reasons, the Soviets have given effective protection to their remaining morse, and to such effect that the species is beginning to recover at least a shadow of its lost numbers both in the Barents Sea and in the East Siberian Sea. The Wrangell Island tribe, which was reduced to the verge of extinction by Russian and Yankee hunters early in the twentieth century, has now, under absolute protection, increased to nearly 70,000 individuals, a figure that Soviet biologists think may be close to the aboriginal number. And even in Alaskan waters, despite “headhunting” for ivory, there has been some recovery.

  But in non-Arctic waters it has mostly become bones.

  Old bones!

  Near the village of Old Harry, on Coffin Island in the Magdalen group, is a place still called Sea Cow Path. It is a natural gully leading inland through the shifting dunes from the magnificent East Cape beaches (which once hosted the largest echouries in the archipelago) to a bowl-shaped depression a quarter of a mile in diameter. Once dry, this basin is now shallowly flooded by the waters of an adjacent lagoon.

  One sunlit summer day I splashed my way across its length and breadth, walking—not on sand—but on a bed of bones. I dug a test pit at low tide and at a depth of three feet was still shovelling through crumbling brown bones in a stinking matrix of black muck. These were the mortal remains of thousands of sea cows for whom this place had been the end of the path that bears their name.

  Later I rested on the slope of a nearby dune. A great blue heron paced the shore of the lagoon. Distant
gulls mewed in the white spindrift on the empty ocean beach. The sweet smell of balsam from a nearby woods was a benison and a delight. Idly I sifted hot sand through my fingers... felt something... took it in my hand. It was a corroded iron musket ball, the size of a small plum. It lay heavy in my palm... and the scene before me wavered. Changed. And darkened.

  Sable plumes of greasy smoke rolled high into a pallid sky from roaring fires under blackened vats whose contents bubbled noisomely. The hot air swirled about me, filling my nostrils with a sickly stench blended from hundreds of tons of rotting flesh, old blood, and rancid oil. My ears were assailed by the strident screaming of thousands of gulls and the raucous outcries of hundreds of ravens intermingling to form a living, piebald shroud that shifted, spread, and reformed over the mountain of death filling the depression at my feet. Half-clad children, lean men, bent women, glistening with sweat and oil and grimed by the choking smoke, chopped, hacked, and sliced reeking strips of blubber from flayed corpses that still shivered and writhed with the last ebbing of life. A musket bellowed. The birds lifted momentarily, screaming and wheeling, then settled back to feed...

  Rust from the musket ball flaked in my hand. The heron launched itself into the stiff and laboured flight of its kind and bore off over the dunes toward the sea—toward the empty reaches of La Grande Echourie, where the last cut was made.

  17. Dotars and Horseheads

  In 1949, Dean Fisher, a young Fisheries researcher, made a discovery of the kind every field biologist dreams about. Employed by the federal government of Canada to study salmon in New Brunswick’s Miramichi River, Fisher was investigating relationships between salmon and harbour seals. Choosing a hot August day of the sort that tempts seals ashore to lounge on the sandbars of the river mouth, Fisher proceeded to make a count of the recumbent animals through his binoculars.

  Almost at once he noticed occasional seals of enormous size—far larger than harbour seals had any right to be. Puzzled, he worked his way closer, focused on one of the monsters, and realized with near incredulity that he was looking at an animal that had been unreported for so long that some biologists believed it to be extinct in North America.

  The creature Fisher officially rediscovered that summer day is known to science as the grey seal. Early French arrivals in the New World called it loup marin, not because of any presumed wolfish nature but because of its haunting cries, which sound eerily like the distant baying of wolves. Since it was visibly the most abundant seal, this name soon came to be used in a generic sense, applied to all seal species. Thereafter both French and English called the present species by the distinctive name of horsehead because of the characteristic equine profile of the males. It is still best known by this name, which is the one I shall generally use.

  Of the several kinds of seals frequenting the northwestern approaches when the European invasion began, four were pre-eminent: hood, harp, harbour, and horsehead by name. Although hoods and harps were the most numerous, they were of small importance to the human newcomers, being present only during winter and early spring and even then mostly staying so far offshore as to be seldom seen. Horseheads and harbour seals, on the other hand, lived year-round in astonishing profusion almost everywhere along the northeastern coasts of the continent.

  The horsehead is by far the larger of these two; an old male may be as much as eight feet in length and weigh 800 pounds. Although females average only about seven feet, they still seem enormous compared to the harbour seal, in which species neither sex exceeds five feet or weighs more than an average human being.

  Gregarious and polygamous, horseheads used to gather in January and February in enormous numbers on myriad islands and even mainland beaches from Labrador to Cape Hatteras, there to whelp and breed. Some of these colonies were so large that, as late as the mid-1600s, the lupine howling from them could be heard several miles away.

  They tended to keep together during the balance of the year as well, forming large, convivial companies of up to several hundred individuals fishing together in inshore waters and hauling out to sun themselves in somnolent mobs on bars in salt-water lagoons and at river mouths. This was a preference they shared with their gigantic relative, the walrus. They even shared the same whelping grounds, although at different seasons.

  Harbour seals, called common seals in Europe or dotars in Newfoundland (the name I prefer), now survive mostly in small family groups. Originally they seem to have been more sociable and their colonies were scattered in bays, estuaries, and inlets from the Carolinas north into Arctic regions. They also made themselves at home in fresh water. Prior to 1800 a colony actually lived in Lake Ontario, wintering below the great cataracts of the upper St. Lawrence River. What was probably the last member of this now-vanished band was killed at Cape Vincent on the south shore of the lake in 1824. Dotars undoubtedly inhabited many of the larger rivers draining into the Atlantic, too; but the European invaders soon hunted them out of these. Their current predilection for wide dispersal and their secretive and isolated breeding habits seem to be relatively recent adaptations, forced on them by the predation of modern man.

  Jacques Cartier’s anonymous scribe provides the earliest direct reference to the horsehead. While Cartier’s second expedition was coasting the northwest corner of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1535, some of his men rowed into the sandy estuary of what is now the Moisie River to investigate a certain “fish, in appearance like unto horses... we saw a great number of these fishes in this river,” which Cartier named Rivière de Chevaulx. Further west, at the mouth of the Pentecost River, the expedition found “Large numbers of sea horses” and we are told that more were seen all the way west to the Indian village at the present site of Quebec City.

  Cartier’s scribe also noted the presence of another and smaller seal, which was evidently the dotar; but it was the sea horse that most interested the St. Malo entrepreneur. He would have been quick to realize that the oil from such huge, blubber-encased creatures offered a rich opportunity for profit.

  As we have seen, one of the most valuable products from the northeastern portion of the New World during the early centuries of European exploitation was train oil. Some of those seeking it concentrated their efforts on whaling, and some on walrus hunting—enterprises that required considerable skill and large investments. Seal hunting required neither. Seals could be killed by the merest tyro, yet their oil could make a modest fortune for anyone who could scratch together a ship, a crew, and a trypot. Furthermore, seal hides were also of considerable worth.1

  * * *

  1 Even the Spaniards, with the riches of the West Indies and Mexico at their disposal, did not disdain the profits to be made from seals. Within a decade after Columbus’s first voyage they were butchering the confiding monk seal in the Caribbean to make train, and their successors continued to do so with such rapacity that today this species of monk seal is extinct.

  The little dotar was at first ignored because of its small size and relatively low yield. Even as late as 1630, Nicolas Denys noted: “there is scarce anybody but the Indians who make war on them.” Their time would come. Meanwhile, the horsehead was the seal nonpareil.

  When Sir Humphrey Gilbert was touting his colonizing venture in 1580, he issued a brochure listing horsefishes among the prime exploitable resources in the new lands. A brief account of the voyage of the English ship Marigold, in 1593, makes a point of remarking that the expedition found “great store of seals,” particularly on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, where a remnant population of horseheads still remains. The port books of Southampton tell us that, by 1610, an annual seal fishery was being conducted in Newfoundland during the summer season, when no other species except horseheads and dotars would have been available. A few years earlier, while exploring southern Nova Scotia and the Fundy and Maine coasts, Samuel de Champlain noted numerous islands “completely covered with seals” and heard of others where Indians killed seal pups in wintertime.
Both references must have been to horseheads.

  One of the earliest commercial ventures of New England colonists was sealing, and they pursued it with the efficacy that was to make their descendants legendary. They took to raiding the long string of horsehead breeding islands off their coasts during the pupping season, slaughtering all the young and as many adults as they could get. So ruthless were they that they soon eliminated the horsehead as a profitable commodity on their own coasts. They then sailed north, and by mid-seventeenth century Nicolas Denys was complaining bitterly of their incursions into his Magdalen Island fiefdom where horseheads were to be found in the great lagoons in tens of thousands. Denys intimated that he had devised a new and more effective way to fish them there; but, being a properly cautious merchant, he refrained from committing the details to print.

  The French, who were the first permanent European residents of southern Nova Scotia, were as voracious as the New Englanders, as Denys makes clear in his account of the horsehead fishery. “[The seals] come for their lying-in about the month of February... and take position on the islands, where they give birth... Monsieur d’Aunay sends men from Port Royal with longboats to make a fishery of them. The men surround the islands, armed with strong clubs; the fathers and mothers flee into the sea and the young, which are trying to follow, are stopped, being given a blow with the club on the nose of which they die... Few young ones save themselves... There are days on which there have been killed as many as six, seven and eight hundred... Three or four young ones are required to make a barrel of oil, which is as good to eat when fresh, and as good for burning as olive oil.”

  The Sieur de Diereville witnessed a similar slaughter in Acadia at the end of the seventeenth century and was moved to pen a poem about it. Apart from the archaic language, it might have been written by a seal-hunt observer of today. It ends: