Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  The Hunters, armed with heavy clubs,

  Advance upon the Isle, and by the noise

  They make, affright the Creatures, which

  By flight into the Sea, seek an escape

  From those upon their slaughter bent...

  It matters not which course they take,

  All are struck down upon the way;

  Fathers and Mothers, little Ones...

  Upon them all, blows fall like hail;

  If well directed, one upon the nose

  Suffices and the deed is done. But

  The beast still lives, for by the blow

  It is but shorn of consciousness;

  And sometimes so, within an hour’s space,

  Five or six hundred are laid low.

  Abundant as they must have been along the Atlantic coast, horseheads were even more so in the Gulf of St. Lawrence where they provided a year-round fishery for French settlers who sequestered ancient Indian sealing places for their own use. The memory of one such is still preserved in the Micmac name Ashnotogun, The Place We Bar the Passage (in order to catch seals).

  Charlevoix provides a description of this fishery. “It is the custom of this animal to enter the rivers with the rising tide. When the fishermen have found out such rivers, to which great numbers of seals resort, they enclose them with stakes and nets leaving only a small opening for the seals to enter. As soon as it is high tide they shut this opening so that when the tide goes out the fishes remain a-dry, and are easily dispatched... I have been told of a sailor who having one day surprised a vast herd of them... with his comrades killed to the number of nine hundred of them.”

  By the mid-seventeenth century, settlers in New France had improved on the Indian methods and were building seal weirs in the mighty St. Lawrence River itself, siting them at strategic points where horseheads passed close to shore. The returns from this fishery were so great that possession of a site was almost as good as being able to coin one’s own currency.

  However, by the turn of the century unbridled slaughter on the river had so depleted the horseheads there that sealers were forced to seek new killing grounds. Some pressed eastward along the north shore of the Gulf. A memoir of a reconnaissance of this Côte du Nord, conducted in 1705 by the Sieur de Courtemanche from Anticosti Island almost to Belle Isle Strait, describes what was still a virgin coast insofar as non-native sealers were concerned. As such, the memoir provides us with some rare glimpses of the horsehead nation in its original state: “[Washikuti Bay], equally rich as other places in seals. [Caribou River], needless to repeat seals... are very abundant at this place. [Etamamu River], the seals are in greater abundance than at any other place previously referred to. [Netagamu River], there is such an abundance of seals that herds of them may be seen on the points of the islands as well as on the rocks. [From there to Grand Mescatina], all the islands abound with seals. [At Ha Ha Bay], I killed 200 seals with muskets in two days.”

  The fact that this journey was made in summer, taken together with the habits of the animals described, makes it certain that these were not harp or hood seal, but horseheads with, no doubt, an admixture of dotars. In 1705, they must have swarmed upon the north shore of the Gulf in tens of thousands.

  Together with the walrus, horseheads had a number of special rallying places where enormous aggregations gathered during the summer months. These included some of the beaches near Cape Cod together with Sable, Miquelon, Miscou, Prince Edward, and the Magdalen Islands, all of which possessed shoal lagoons, sandy beaches, and rich, adjacent fishing grounds. Early Europeans viewed such massive concentrations as God-given reservoirs of oil wealth and treated them accordingly. At first the walrus bore the brunt of the assault but as they were exterminated at rookery after rookery in the southerly portion of their range, horseheads replaced them in the trypots until, by 1750, most of the summer gatherings of the big seals had been so savagely depleted as to leave only vestiges of their former selves.

  There were some exceptions. Sable Island’s scimitar of sand was too distant and dangerous to be easily reached in the small craft used by most sealers, and so its great central lagoon (which was then still open to the sea) was described as still containing a “multitude” of seals in the 1750s. Miscou Island, where as many as a hundred Micmac families had gathered every autumn since antiquity to obtain their winter supply of seal meat and fat, still supported a respectable horsehead population. However, the largest remaining aggregation was probably on the Magdalens.

  An English naval officer sent there in 1765 to evaluate the walrus fishery found other things to note as well: “Although no regular method of taking seals has yet been attempted here, it is probable that it might turn out to advantage, particularly in the lagoon betwixt Haywood and Jupiter Harbours, a situation very commodious for laying nets and where there is frequently seen two or three thousand at one time, embayed and playing or sleeping upon the shoals.”

  Throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, the demand for train oil kept growing and the consequent destruction of walrus and whales increased the burden on the seals of providing oil. By the 1780s, horseheads were being so sought after that a Nova Scotian named Jesse Lawrence built a permanent factory on Sable Island so he and his men could seal during the pupping season, when foul weather frequently prevented ships from landing there. Lawrence was not long left to enjoy this profitable enterprise in peace. The long-nosed merchants of Massachusetts got wind of it and dispatched schooners to Sable as soon as spring weather would permit. The Yankee crews not only killed all the seals they could find, they looted Lawrence’s station, pirated the store of oil and hides he had accumulated during the winter, and eventually drove him off the island.

  Law and order of a sort arrived on Sable in the 1820s when the colonial government of Nova Scotia built two lighthouses there together with a life-saving station. This humanitarian act brought no relief to the seals. By 1829, according to Thomas Haliburton, lightkeepers and lifesavers had all become keen sealers, and the island had ceased to be a summer rendezvous for horseheads, “although the seals still resort to the island... for the purpose of whelping.” Haliburton graphically describes how the keepers killed adults on the whelping ground. “Each person is armed with a club 5 or 6 feet in length... the butt being transfixed with a piece of steel, one end of which is shaped like a spike, and the other formed into a blade... the party rushes in between the seals and the water and commences the attack... each man selects one and strikes it on the head several blows with the steel spike. He then applies the blade in the same manner and repeats the blows until the animal is brought to the ground... When driven off [the nursery beaches]... they disappear until the ensuing year.”

  The treatment of horseheads on the Magdalens followed much the same pattern; except that those islands had long since been settled by fishing folk who, having been brought there to hunt walrus, turned easily to slaughtering seals. By 1790, each of the several communities had its own tryworks and the seal hunt had become the islanders’ most lucrative occupation. They also killed the migratory harp and hood seals when they could get them, and dotars, too; however, through many decades, the Magdalen seal fishery was mainly based on horseheads, which could be killed in quantity year-round in the lagoons and on the beaches. There was an additional winter slaughter at the rookeries, where pups and females were butchered so ruthlessly that soon only the off-lying and frequently unapproachable Bird Rocks and Deadman Island remained of the many former whelping grounds.

  By early in the 1800s, oil from a large horsehead was worth $7 or $8—a good week’s pay for those times—and, in consequence, the hunt for them was becoming ever more intense. In the single year of 1848, 21,000 gallons of seal oil, almost all of it made from horseheads, was shipped out of the Magdalens alone.

  By the 1860s, the species had been extirpated from much of its former range. The feroci
ous law of supply and demand was having its baleful effect—the rarer the animals became, the more hotly they were harried, and the more their oil was worth. Oil from an average-sized horsehead on the Côte du Nord in 1886 was worth $11 to $12, and the skin an additional $1.50.

  There is little doubt that the horsehead would have followed the walrus into extinction on the northeastern seaboard had it not been supplanted by the unfortunate harp seal as the prime prey of the oilers. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the slaughter of the latter species had come to engross the efforts of all except a scattering of individual sealers. Horseheads were still killed when opportunity offered, but the few survivors had by then become so wary and were so dispersed that active pursuit of them was hardly worthwhile. So, as the twentieth century began, they faded into fortunate obscurity.

  The question of how many horseheads existed at first European contact cannot be answered with any degree of certainty. Nevertheless, a searching examination of all the sources—maps, charts, written accounts, and the memories of old maritimers—convinces me that something over 200 whelping rookeries originally existed between Cape Hatteras in the south and Hamilton Inlet on the Labrador coast and that the total horsehead population probably totalled between 750,000 and 1,000,000. Some of these rookeries were still producing 2,000 pups a year as late as the 1850s, and it was largely due to their systematic despoliation that the horsehead so nearly perished, a fact that has not been lost on the new breed of “natural resource managers” who now hold the ultimate fate of the horsehead in their hands.

  During the early centuries of the European invasion, the little dotar was luckier than its large relative. Because of its small size, low oil yield, and more scattered distribution, it escaped major commercial exploitation. But it did not go unscathed. As more and more Europeans came to fish and live along the Atlantic coast, the dotar was increasingly hunted to provide food, household oil, and skins for boots and clothing. Furthermore, it suffered the eventual loss of many of the coves and inlets where it had once lived and bred in relative security. Finally, when train soared to golden values, fishermen and small-scale sealers began hunting it for cash. In 1895, for example, a certain Captain Farquhar took a crew to Sable Island where, during a summer-long massacre, he so decimated the dotars there that the species virtually disappeared from Sable for a decade.

  Dotars still occupied, if sparsely, most of their original range when the twentieth century began. By then, fossil oil gushing from wells on land had begun replacing train for most industrial purposes and an ensuing drop in the value of seal oil promised a new lease on life, not only to the dotars, but to the few horsehead survivors as well.

  It was not to be. Now that these two species were no longer seen as a source of profits, human perception of them changed and they began to be perceived as a threat to profits. By early in the twentieth century, the once-astronomical profusion of Atlantic salmon was diminishing so rapidly under the pressure of the enormous carnage visited upon it that fishing interests belatedly began to be alarmed. Soon they were bringing powerful pressure to bear on provincial and federal politicians to take measures to halt the decline—so long, of course, as there was no interference with the God-given rights of the fishing industry and of wealthy and influential sport fishermen to continue killing all the salmon they themselves desired.

  The politicians did as they so often do: they ordered their minions to find an appropriate villain to blame for the salmon crisis—preferably one that could be savaged with impunity, while absolving the real culprits of any responsibility for the consequences of their greed.

  The dotar came conveniently to hand. Seals were already stigmatized as competitors to fishermen, and the public had no need to know what government experts knew full well: that dotars seldom eat free-swimming salmon, if only because it is difficult to catch such swift and agile prey.

  In 1927, the federal government of Canada officially condemned the dotars as pernicious and destructive vermin; charged them with wreaking havoc on the salmon; and placed a bounty on their heads. The initial $5 bounty was, for its time, very generous, being more than a dotar had ever been worth commercially. In order to collect it a hunter had only to bring the “muzzle” of a seal to a Fisheries warden or other local official. Most of these gentlemen were quite unable to ascertain whether the bloody lump of fur and gristle submitted to them was the nose of a dotar or that of some other species. In consequence, the bounty hunters were soon killing any and all seals, including whatever remnants of the horsehead nation they could find.

  The war on dotars turned most able-bodied male coastal dwellers into bounty hunters, either as a rewarding pastime or as a serious means of increasing their incomes. The onset of the Great Depression, and the economic misery it inflicted on east-coast fishermen, gave even greater impetus to what soon became a general anti-seal crusade. The results were devastating for the seals. By 1939 extensive stretches of the Canadian and adjacent U.S. coastline had been so denuded that some fishermen were actually complaining they could no longer find a seal to kill for the table.

  Nevertheless, a scattering of both species did manage to survive in the more remote and isolated regions until the onset of World War II gave them a breathing and a breeding space. They made the most of the interlude, and by 1945 there may have been as many as 2,000–3,000 horseheads in existence together with some tens of thousands of dotars, and both species were attempting to recolonize their ancestral ranges.

  This was not to be allowed. If there had ever been any thought given to ending the unholy war against the seals, it came to nothing in view of the political fact that east-coast fishermen had come to regard the seal bounty as a kind of permanent subsidy. To take it from them would have been to risk losing votes. So, not only was it retained, it was doubled. However, the $10 payment was made dependent on presentation of a dotar lower jaw—a change deemed necessary by the discovery that some enterprising bounty hunters had for years been manufacturing seal muzzles from other seal parts. An unanticipated result followed from this change. Because the jaw of an adult horsehead was recognizably larger than that of a dotar, adult horseheads ceased to be of interest to bounty hunters and the horsehead population continued slowly to increase.

  Dean Fisher’s 1949 rediscovery of the horsehead was not greeted with delight by the mandarins of the Department of Fisheries in Ottawa. And the further discovery during the succeeding two decades that horseheads were actually becoming more numerous brought consternation. As an employee of the department remembers: “It was a bit of a shocker. We’d written the grey seal off and figured the harbour seal was on the way out, which was what the industry was after. The grey comeback posed a problem. It took a while before we found the solution.”

  It is a fine, crisp February day in the here and now. A big helicopter hovers above a rocky islet set in a glittering expanse of fragmented sea ice a few miles off the Nova Scotia coast. Scattered across the dark rock, more than a hundred ivory-white seal pups stare in dumb amazement at the thundering apparition hanging over them. From their places beside the pups and from steaming leads between the offshore floes, the gleaming heads of scores of parent horseheads rear back in apprehension.

  The helicopter slides down its shaft of air and lands. Doors are flung open. Bulking huge in military-style parkas, several men leap to the frozen ground, led by two uniformed officers of Environment Canada’s proud Conservation and Protection Branch. All six are armed either with heavy-calibre rifles or “regulation” sealing clubs.

  They spread out rapidly, running to get between the seals and the ice-rimmed shore. Mother seals hump nervously toward the frozen sea, turn back toward their mewing pups, then mill in indecision until the staccato roar of rifle fire sends them into sudden panic. A barrage of soft-nosed bullets slams into passive flesh. Some wounded females break through to the shore, lurch convulsively into the leads, and vanish into the dark depths. Others die upon the isle
t—some still suckling their young.

  The pups have little enough time to react to the crimsoning of their small world. A new sound intrudes itself between the now-scattered rifle shots—a sodden thuck... thuck... thuck... a sickening mallet-into-melon kind of sound, as club-wielding officers and hired sealers methodically smash the skulls of every pup they can find.

  The operation is conducted with precision and dispatch by men well-practised at their trade. Hidden from the public eye, they have been conducting such search-and-destroy missions against horsehead rookeries since 1967. Every year since then, just two months before the internationally infamous slaughter of harp seals in Canadian waters begins, these employees of the federal government of Canada have been busy waging a secret war of extermination against the horsehead seal. They do the job on behalf of what is now the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They are part of the “solution” to the problem posed by the return of the grey seal from the brink of extinction.

  Only five significant horsehead breeding rookeries survive in all of North America, and all come under Canadian jurisdiction. They are on Amet, Camp, and Hut Islands along the coasts of Nova Scotia; on offshore Sable Island; and on the pack ice that gathers in Northumberland Strait. This latter site seems to be a new development, the result of desperate efforts by seals that once bred on islands off the west Cape Breton coast to find a whelping place that will not be turned into a charnel yard by the Conservation and Protection Branch. A recent rookery on Deadman Island in the Magdalen archipelago has now been virtually exterminated. There is a relic breeding population of grey seals in the Muskeget Island area near Cape Cod, but only eleven pups have been recorded since 1964.

  In 1981, I visited Hut Island, off the south coast of Cape Breton, and found its barren surface carpeted with seal bones and decaying carcasses. Most were the remains of horse-head pups, but many were those of adults, presumably nursing females. All had died at the practised hands or under the direction of Conservation and Protection officers who have visited Hut Island every winter for the past seventeen years and have destroyed virtually every pup born there during that time. With one exception, the same scene of mayhem has been repeated annually at all the other rookeries up to and including 1983, although the one on the shifting ice of Northumberland Strait has occasionally escaped detection by spotting planes and helicopters.