Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  By the time the Armistice was signed, most of the new steel sealers had been sunk by enemy action, and those auxiliary steamers that still remained afloat were so old as to hardly dare face the ice again. Furthermore, the price of seal oil, which had risen to outrageous heights during the war, now slumped below pre-war levels and soon, with the onset of the Great Depression, became only marginally profitable. Although sealing still continued, it was at a much lower level of intensity than it had known for a century. The eruption of World War II in 1939 virtually brought it to an end.

  While that war raged in Europe and the North Atlantic, the seals had five whelping seasons in which to bear and rear their young in relative security. By 1945 females born at the war’s beginning were themselves bearing pups, with the result that the western harp and hood nations were showing a modest increase for the first time in a hundred years.

  War’s end brought no revival of interest in commercial sealing in North America. By then all but two vessels of the Newfoundland sealing fleet were gone, and the island’s capitalists preferred to concentrate their resources on rebuilding the Grand Banks fishing fleet.

  Although the Great Sealing Game had rewarded with enormous wealth the handful of mercantile aristocrats who ruled the island, it had returned precious little to ordinary men, thousands of whom had perished along with the tens of millions of ice seals they had slain. Now, it seemed, the time had come for the dead to bury the dead; time for the great dying of men and seals to become no more than a memory of an earlier and darker time, when human rapacity had known no bounds.

  19. Death on Ice (New Style)

  Close on a thousand years after the Nordic adventurer Karlsefni sailed his knorr into New World waters seeking profits from their abounding wealth, he was followed by another of his lineage impelled by the same desires. This latecomer was a man we have already met in connection with his exploits as a whaler. Karl Karlsen was to succeed in his ambitions on a scale that would have been beyond the wildest dreams of his distant predecessor.

  In devastated post-war Europe a dearth of animal fats had sent the value of marine oils soaring and those most efficient of all sea-ravagers, the Norwegians, had been quick to respond to this opportunity. Shortly after the end of hostilities at sea they began dispatching whatever makeshift vessels they could find into the nearby White Sea to kill harp seals. They proved so destructive here that the Soviets eventually had to bar them. But they were also, and urgently, building new ships—multi-purpose killer boats designed (as we have seen in the story of the whales) for hunting sea mammals in any seas, no matter how far afield.

  As the new ships came into service, those intended primarily for sealing were directed westward. Their first target was the West Ice off eastern Greenland where, as far back as the 1860s, Norwegian sealers had established a hegemony of slaughter. However, they had so savaged both harps and hoods in those waters prior to 1939 that even the wartime lull had not allowed the herds to make any significant recovery. What remained of them now melted fast away in the furious fire of this renewed assault.

  Having quickly bloodied the remnants of two of the three tribes of the harp nation, the modern Vikings turned their vessels’ heads toward the stink of oil and money in the distant west. So it was that, in 1946, a new company was born in Nova Scotia. Innocuously christened the Karlsen Shipping Company, its advent went almost unnoticed. Few knew that it was a Norwegian entity whose real interests lay, not in shipping, but in killing whales and seals in Canadian waters. And few could have known that it was the herald of a maritime scourge as terrible as any that Western man had previously inflicted in the seas of the New World.

  Incorporation as a Canadian company brought Karlsen many advantages, including access to federal and provincial subsidies, but the chief value was that it enabled a foreign interest to seal and whale without restraint inside Canadian territorial waters and, especially, in the enclosed waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

  The Karlsen organization was soon operating a fleet of Norwegian-built, Norwegian-officered whale-cum-seal killers out of Blandford, Nova Scotia, against the ice seals of the Gulf. Simultaneously, another fleet of home-based Norwegian sealing ships appeared at the Front off Newfoundland. Since the Front whelping and moulting patches normally formed in international waters, this fleet was subject to no national restraints or supervision.

  Goaded by this alien presence on their traditional sealing grounds, and with their cupidity belatedly aroused by the increasing value of seal fat, Newfoundlanders now returned to the ice. By 1947, they were again manning a small handful of sealing ships. However, theirs was a nondescript fleet consisting mostly of small motor vessels normally employed in the cod fishery or the coastal trade. These were hopelessly outclassed by fourteen brand-new Norwegian sealers, which by 1950 were ravaging the Front while the Karlsen fleet did the same in the Gulf. Amongst them, the Norwegians landed better than 200,000 sculps that year. A year later they brought back twice as many—a slaughter the like of which had not been attained since 1881. The fire had flared up anew.

  Not content with killing pups and adult females on the whelping ice and adults of both sexes at the moulting patches, the Norwegian offshore fleet took to pursuing the migrating herds northward, even as far as west Greenland waters, killing all the way. The seals they killed would normally have returned south to pup the following spring. Most were not given the chance. In a single year, the new Vikings landed 60,000 sculps out of probably 300,000 adults shot in water and on ice.

  This was bloodletting on such a scale as to quickly wipe out whatever gains the harp and hood nations had made since 1919. By 1961, according to Dr. David Sergeant, the western harp nation had declined to an estimated 1,750,000 individuals, or about half of what it was thought to have numbered ten years earlier.

  Now, under the prodding of an alarmed Sergeant and of a few others such as Newfoundlander Harold Horwood, whose magazine article, “Tragedy on the Whelping Ice,” was one of the earliest public warnings of what was happening, the governments of Canada and Norway made their first gesture toward “protecting and conserving” the ice seals.1 Having agreed to an opening date designed to ensure maximum production of whitecoats, they proclaimed that the hunt for adults must end by May 5. However, since this date came after the Norwegian pursuit of the northbound herd was usually abandoned anyway, it was meaningless. Moreover, adult seals were no longer the prime object of the sealers.

  * * *

  1 Until 1949 Newfoundland was an independent state. In that year it became a province of Canada and the federal government thereafter bore responsibility for the seal hunt at the Front, as well as in the Gulf.

  During the late 1950s, Norwegian chemists had finally discovered a way of treating whitecoat pelts so that the soft and silky hair would remain fast to the skin. The resultant fur delighted the fashion market in affluent Western countries. Although in 1952 a whitecoat sculp unloaded at the docks had only been worth about a dollar, and this mostly for the fat, by 1961 it was worth $5, four of which were for the fur alone. Since a single sealer loose in a whelping patch could kill and sculp as many as 100 whitecoats a day, truly enormous profits could now be made. In 1962 the price for whitecoats rose to $7.50 as a mindless passion for seal fur swept fashion salons and fired the acquisitive desires of civilized women in Europe and America. The result was a frantic rush to the ice that spring, one that turned the harp and hood nurseries of eastern Canada into bloody abattoirs as sealers sculped 330,000 hoods and harps, of which more than 200,000 were whitecoats.

  In the light of what followed it is only fair to emphasize that, up to this point, Canadians had played a relatively small, and usually menial, part in the post-war history of the sealing industry. For the most part they served as low-paid butchers and draft animals, assisting a foreign nation to destroy a Canadian resource. Not that there was anything new about this. Canada has always been content to divest herself of nat
ural resources in exchange for jobs for her citizenry as haulers of water and hewers of wood.

  Canadian governments, federal and provincial, did everything in their power to assist the Norwegians. Aerial ice reconnaissance was provided to the sealing fleet. Canadian Coast Guard ice-breakers were made available to assist the sealers. Most helpful of all perhaps was the refusal of the federal government to implement conservation legislation that would have interfered with the uninhibited pursuit of profit at the ice.

  In the 1960s, the so-called seal “hunt” became a veritable orgy of destruction as get-rich-quick entrepreneurs congregated like vultures over the ice floes. Nor is this simile far-fetched. In the spring of 1962 some ships began using helicopters to transport sealers to distant pans and to ferry sculps back to the vessels. The following year, with whitecoat pelts fetching $10 each, an airborne assault was launched against the Gulf seals by dozens of light planes equipped with skis or balloon tires so they could operate on ice.

  These planes were mostly owned by the pilots who flew them: aerial gypsies who knew little or nothing about sealing, but who were hot on the scent of a literal quick killing. The pilot-owners hired local men from the Magdalens or Prince Edward Island, flew them out to the whelping patches at dawn, then spent the rest of the day ferrying sculps to makeshift landing strips ashore.

  The rivalry that developed amongst these airborne raiders, landsmen sealers, and the sealing fleet brought anarchy to the ice. Whatever rules of sense or sensibility might previously have been observed were now abandoned. Air sealers even hijacked panned sculps left on the ice by sealing ships, and not a few aircraft arrived back at their shore bases with bullet holes in their wings and fuselages. The whelping nurseries of the harp seal nation became a grisly shambles. One of the pilots who flew at the Gulf in 1963 gave me this graphic account of what transpired.

  “We had to take what we could get in the way of sealers. The competition for anybody big enough to swing a club or use a knife was wild. I had to go into Charlottetown and round up a bunch of deadbeats out of the beer parlours. They didn’t know from nothing, and couldn’t have cared less so long as they made a few quick bucks.

  “There was so many planes buzzing around out there it was like a war movie... flopping down anywhere there was a pan big enough to hold ’em. And I guess every seal bitch was drove right off the ice, whether she’d pupped or not. Nobody give a damn. It was only the pups we wanted and there was millions of the fat little buggers.

  “I put my crowd out just about eight A.M. and waited for them to kill me my first load. But, Jesus, they was dumb! They could smash a pup on the head alright, but skin? Couldn’t have skinned an orange right. I wasted half the morning showing them how, and at that they spoiled as many as they saved.

  “Everybody had the fever. To beat the other guys. There was guys running around as never stopped to skin a pup at all—just banged ’em on the head and run on to bang the next one they could see before some other guy could get it first. You’d have to see it to believe it.

  “One trip I landed on a soft patch and damn near lost the plane. Had to gun her out of there and make a landing some ways off where a different crowd was killing. They waved me off, but I landed anyhow. I never seen nothing like it. They weren’t even trying to kill their seals. Guys was holding them down with one foot and ripping them up the belly, then trying to peel the skin off. What a mess! With the pup wriggling like crazy, they’d slice the skin in a dozen places and ruin it for sure. Not to worry. Stick the knife into the next pup and try again.

  “I seen things I won’t forget. You ever see a skinned pup trying to wiggle out of the water where some guy’d kicked it? Yeah, sure, I made a pile that season, but I never went back next year. It was too rough for me.”

  Most of the pilots did go back, however, and were joined by many more, since the rewards for two weeks of hard living and considerable risk-taking could exceed $10,000. In 1964, whitecoat sculps went up to $12.50 each, fuelling a carnage that was becoming wanton beyond belief. At least sixty-five light aircraft, together with several helicopters, “worked” the Gulf seals that spring, along with hundreds of landsmen and the sealing fleet. The competition was ruthless, and the sealers pitiless. Even the best of them became driven machines, wasting or abandoning many pups in their frenzied haste to forestall competitors.

  Eighty-one thousand whitecoats were removed from the Gulf ice that spring. Although the actual number killed will never be known, there is agreement amongst those who were there that the year’s “crop” was effectively wiped out. At the Front, where light aircraft could not operate, things were almost as grim. An estimated 85 per cent of the pups born were killed by the Norwegian fleet. The saving grace, if it could be called such, was that at the Front the butchers were at least professionals and there was comparatively little waste.

  Meanwhile, seal products continued to diversify. Après-ski slippers for women and boots and sports jackets for men made of the silvery skins of adult seals led to a renewed slaughter of mature animals after the annual whitecoat and blueback massacre ended. Even the net fishery flourished anew, particularly along the south Labrador coast. Fishermen who had never previously bothered with seals began catching adults and bedlamers on huge, baited hooks. Worse still, crowds of men and youths started gunning for bedlamers and beaters from every sort of boat, using lightweight .22 calibre rifles. Only a lucky hit in the brain with a .22 was likely to kill even a beater. The accountant of a fish plant in northern Newfoundland who got seal fever and went swatching told me he estimated the ratio of hits to kills at about ten to one.

  Not since the mid-nineteenth century had the ice seals endured such merciless persecution. In 1963, reported landings from the northwestern Atlantic totalled 352,000—“reported” because the Norwegians were believed to always land many more than were admitted. Assuming a most conservative loss ratio, the kill that year must have been close to 500,000. The following spring the death toll was almost as huge.

  By the summer of 1964 it had become brutally obvious to everyone involved in the business that the ice seals were destined to commercial, if not actual, extinction. From as many as 10 million (the estimates vary) in its aboriginal state, the western herd of the harp nation had been reduced to little more than a million. As for those at the West Ice, not more than 200,000 survived. The Soviets had also joined in the outbreak of uncontrolled avarice by grossly over-killing whitecoats in the White Sea in order to profit from the Western world’s mania for sealskin artifacts.

  Those departments of the Norwegian, Canadian, and Soviet governments entrusted with the regulation and protection of fisheries were fully aware of what was happening. They had been briefed by their own scientists, most of whom, it must be said in all fairness, were predicting a devastating collapse of harp and hood populations unless the mayhem on the ice was quickly halted.

  Norway and Canada ignored the warnings. However, in the autumn of 1964 the Soviet government prohibited further ship-borne sealing in the White Sea. When challenged to follow suit, a spokesman for Canada’s Department of Fisheries asserted that, far from declining, harp seals were actually increasing in numbers. Furthermore, there could be no thought of interfering with the rights of free enterprise to continue making a legitimate profit from this “rational harvesting of a natural resource which was of great importance to the Canadian economy.”

  The Norwegian response was to point out that, since the Front and West Ice seals lived in international waters, it was nobody’s business what their sealers did. Norway would accept no restraint on her freedom to “fish” on the high seas.

  Up until this time, the world at large had remained in ignorance of what was happening. This condition might well have continued until the western Atlantic harp and hood nations had been totally destroyed had it not been for a singularly ironic twist of fate. In 1964 a small, Montreal-based company called Artek won a contract from Que
bec’s tourism department to make some television films extolling the attractions of La Belle Province. Having filmed the usual subjects, it occurred to the producer that something special would add spice to the series. One of his staff, a Magdalen Islander, mentioned a seal hunt that took place there every spring, and this sounded like the very thing. So, in March of 1964, the Artek crew went to the archipelago and filmed what was intended to show an archaic but exciting struggle between man and nature on the harsh world of the ice fields—a glimpse, as it were, of Old Quebec in pioneering days.

  The resulting film was exciting enough—but excruciatingly gory. Not only did it show the stark vista of crimson slush on white ice, which is the hallmark of the seal hunt, it captured harrowing scenes of sealers with steel-hooked staves gaffing what may well be the most appealing young creature in the animal kingdom, together with stunning close-ups of one of these attractive little animals—being skinned alive.

  When the French television network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation screened this film, the audience response was so overwhelming that the corporation decided to broadcast it on the national network, with English subtitles. The subtitles were hardly needed. The images were so devastatingly revolting that words were superfluous.

  The reaction of many viewers, including a number of Americans who tune in to CBC, was a massive outpouring of revulsion and outrage. Local branches of the Humane Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals obtained copies of the film and showed them across the country in church basements, community halls, and schools. Members of Parliament and the federal Department of Fisheries were inundated by a wave of indignation as thousands of ordinary people registered their protests and demanded that the massacre of baby seals be stopped forthwith. An appalled Quebec Bureau of Tourism did its best to squelch the film. It was far too late for that.