Sea of Slaughter (13 page)

Another supposedly limiting adaptation is that polar bears can only exist where ice seals are abundant—the implication being that such conditions obtain only in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. The truth is that ice seals were found in near astronomical numbers off Newfoundland, south Labrador, and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from December through to April. Furthermore, white bears will happily eat any species of seal and, in aboriginal times, both grey and harbour seals existed in enormous quantities not only in all the waters just mentioned, but south to Cape Cod and beyond. What is even more to the point, the white bear is in no way limited to a seal diet. He is, in fact, one of the most opportunistic feeders in the animal kingdom.

There is also the argument that pregnant white bears must be able to find deep snowdrifts in which to den, and therefore reproduction is quite impossible except in Arctic regions. As we shall shortly see, this contention is as fallacious as the rest. The fact of the matter is that the white bear was never any more a prisoner of the Arctic than were the bowhead whale, walrus, beluga, white wolf, white fox, or any of a dozen species whose survivors in our time are now restricted to the frigid zone simply because they have been destroyed by us elsewhere.

During the spring of 1969, ornithologists from the Canadian Wildlife Service making an aerial search for goose nesting grounds about forty miles south of Churchill, Manitoba (and close to where I saw my first white bear), were startled to find “polar bears in such numbers the entire region seemed infested with them.” A follow-up investigation that winter revealed fifty
earth-dug
dens occupied by female white bears with their cubs.

This was just the beginning of one of the most extraordinary mammalian discoveries of recent times. Continuing surveys revealed the existence of a polar bear “zone” extending nearly 500 miles southward from Churchill almost to the bottom of James Bay, inhabited on a permanent basis by at least 1,500 white bears, including 600 breeding females. The mere existence of such a massive assemblage was astonishing enough; what made it even more so was the fact that they were living as far to the south as the latitude of southern Labrador on the one hand and the prairie city of Calgary on the other.

Almost equally surprising was that a population of this size—it represented about a tenth of the known world population of white bears—could have remained undetected for so long. The explanation for that lay partly in the fact that nobody expected
polar
bears to be found so far south, but it was mainly due to the nature of the drowned morass known as the Hudson Bay Lowlands, where they lived. These lowlands consist of a soggy strip of coastal tundra bordering the west coast of James Bay and running north almost to Churchill. Inland lies a tangle of black spruce bog where the sole vertical relief is provided by occasional eskers, ancient raised beaches, and permafrost hummocks, in which the white bears excavate their dens. Virtually impenetrable in summer because of its saturated nature, the region is rendered most difficult of approach from seaward by a fringing barrier of mud and rock tidal flats that, in places, extends eight miles out from “shore.” In past times, even the natives treated the Lowlands much as the Bedouin treat the Empty Quarter of Arabia, and European traders and trappers bypassed it, considering it to be a worthless wasteland.

From July through December, when James Bay and Hudson Bay are ice-free, the bears remain ashore, where they lead an indolent life, sleeping, playing, denning, and feeding on berries, grass, kelp, small mammals, flightless ducks and geese, fishes, and marine life gleaned on the vast tidal flats. Although the population is densest near the coast, individuals range as much as 100 miles inland where they present helicopter-borne observers with the odd spectacle of polar bears trying to conceal their vast bulks behind clumps of scraggly spruce.

In November almost all the adults except pregnant females move to the shore and congregate while waiting for the sea ice to thicken so they can go seal hunting. In November of 1969, an aerial survey counted about 300 of them assembled near Cape Churchill, while hundreds more crowded the coastline to the south—more white bears than had ever been seen in one region of the world in human memory.

Pregnant females begin the winter in the security of maternity dens, some of which have been in use for centuries. These earth-dug homes often boast several rooms, with ventilation shafts. Here, during late December or early January, the young—usually twins—are born as naked, unformed little things about the size of guinea pigs, which are not mature enough to leave the dens until late March.

The winter seal hunt, mostly for bearded and ring seals, is the nomadic time; but studies using radio collars have shown that these bears are nomadic only in a very limited sense. Their winter range seems to be generally restricted to the ice of southern Hudson Bay, and the tagged animals seldom wander more than a few hundred miles from home. In other words, they go no farther afield than is necessary to find food. Since food is evidently in good supply, these southern bears are generally healthier, larger, and live in much greater density than their cousins in polar regions.

Some mammalogists who have participated in studies of the lowland bears now privately concede that the white bear may also have once flourished as a permanent resident in the Sea of Okhotsk in the western Pacific (it is known to have bred on the Kurils, Sakhalin, and Kamchatka), the Aleutian Islands, and southeast Alaska... and even along the northeastern Atlantic seaboard, including the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In view of the accumulated evidence, such a conclusion is difficult to avoid.

During the first decade of the seventeenth century, Europeans began pushing northward from their own continent in an avid search for train oil—the black gold of their times. The Spitzbergen archipelago was soon discovered and, by mid-century, scores of whaling ships were working its waters. These were the precursors of a burgeoning fleet that bloodied the northern oceans during succeeding centuries with an unparalleled massacre of marine mammals, something we will be looking at in ensuing chapters.

Chief amongst the victims were whales, walrus, and seals, but whalers and sealers early learned that as much as twelve gallons of good train could be rendered from the carcass of a big water bear. Moreover, the vast, shaggy pelts commanded high prices from aristocratic Europeans who coveted them as rugs for their chilly, stone-floored mansions and castles. Thus, from the start of northern voyaging, white bears were killed whenever opportunity offered; but until near the end of the eighteenth century they had not been systematically hunted, partly because firearms were not yet effective enough to inspire confidence to face the great white bear. But, by the early 1800s, the availability of new and much deadlier guns helped give the white bear prime-target status.

As the other marine mammals were hunted to scarcity, bears became increasingly sought after. Some skippers visited places especially favoured by them, systematically slaughtering all that could be found. An effective ploy was to place well-armed men in ambush near the carcass of a whale. On one occasion the crew of a Norwegian sealer in the East Greenland ice killed thirty ice bears, as they called them, using a dead whale as bait.

The magnitude of the slaughter mounted with the passing years. New England whalers working the Labrador coast during the 1790s killed every white bear they could find and traded for bear pelts with the Labrador Inuit, whom they provided with guns and turned into year-round bear hunters. By the early 1800s this had had a dual effect: the Inuit were reduced to about half their former numbers through disease acquired from the whalers; and
Nanuk
, as the Inuit called the white bear, became a vanishing species along the whole of the Labrador coast where, only half a century earlier, Cartwright had found it in abundance.

The Inuit were not alone to blame. Increasing numbers of fishermen, fur trappers, traders, and even missionaries were now invading the Labrador and most of them killed white bears on sight. By 1850, few were to be seen, and those few were usually sighted along the barrel of a rifle. There is one reference to a pair of young cubs captured alive at Square Island in south Labrador, which suggests that a handful may still have been breeding there as late as 1850. But soon thereafter, there were none.

The once vigorous and abundant white bear population that had occupied the coasts of the northeastern approaches to America had been annihilated. By then, mass destruction was being visited on the white bear almost everywhere it lived. With the virtual extinction of the bowhead whale, Arctic oilers turned upon the bear with terrible effect. In 1906, the crew of a Norwegian vessel in Greenland waters killed 296 ice bears during a single summer. During the 1909 and 1910 “fishing seasons” British whalers in Canada's eastern Arctic waters butchered 476 and rendered their fat into train oil. Meanwhile, Yankee whalers in the North Pacific were wreaking equal havoc on white bears there.

The end of Arctic whaling brought no great relief to the remaining bears. Norwegian, Scottish, and Newfoundland sealers working the harp and hood seal herds off Newfoundland, Labrador, and Greenland killed every ice bear they encountered. Nor were they the only scourge. As early as 1820, a mania for Arctic exploration gripped Europe and America as expedition after expedition went north: some to seek the legendary Northwest and Northeast Passages; some to try to reach the Pole; some in the name of science; and some for sport. All took it for granted that any living creatures they might encounter were theirs to do with as they saw fit.

In 1909 Ernest Thompson Seton had this to say about their treatment of the white bear: “It has been the custom of Arctic travellers to kill all the Polar Bears they could. It did not matter whether the travellers needed the carcasses or not. In recent years this senseless slaughter increased, since more travellers went north and deadlier weapons were carried. One Arctic explorer told me that he personally had killed 200 Polar Bears and had secured but few of them.”

The behaviour of Robert Peary, one of the two American claimants to the discovery of the North Pole, is typical. He used such larger animals as caribou, walrus, musk ox, and bear as the principal source of food, fuel, and clothing for an exploration machine that, in its final stages, included platoons of Inuit dragooned into his service, together with hundreds of sled dogs. Furthermore, he compelled both his own men and the Inuit to trap or shoot any and all furbearers whose pelts were salable in the United States, including especially white bears.

The destruction brought about by Arctic expeditions of the never-abundant mammalian life of northwestern Greenland and Ellesmere Island was on such a grand scale that entire regions were denuded of large animals; in consequence, some bands of Inuit starved to death. The treatment meted out to the bears by Peary's expeditions alone resulted in the destruction of at least 2,000 of them. Indeed, racking up a big score of polar bear kills became an attainment in itself for many self-styled explorers. In private yachts and chartered vessels, rich gunmen from Europe and the United States found their ways to most of the known retreats of the white bear, shooting all that they could find.

Some of them wrote heroic accounts of derring-do against the “ferocious white killer of the North.” This helped father a new fashion. As the twentieth century unfolded, polar bear rugs, complete with the stuffed heads gaping in long-toothed snarls, became status symbols for people of pretension and kindled a new kind of commercial hunt. It still continues and may even be gaining in intensity because of its extreme profitability. In 1964, a good polar bear pelt, untanned, fetched $1,000. Today, such a pelt commands a good deal more. By 1964 the combined commercial and trophy hunt employing ski-equipped aircraft and snowmobiles had become so destructive that even some of the dullard minds in government bureaucracies began to feel faint stirrings of alarm about the future of the bear that had, by then, become a polar bear in fact as well as name. With the exception of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the polar region was the only area where it still endured.

The following year, the First International Scientific Meeting on the Polar Bear was convened by those nations with white bear populations—Canada, the U.S., the Soviet Union, Denmark (for Greenland), and Norway (for Spitzbergen)—to see if there really were grounds for concern. Among the weighty conclusions reached by the experts was that “Intensive polar bear hunting by whalers and sealers since the 17th century has probably resulted in a reduced population.” There was no agreement as to how great that reduction might have been and, more to the point, none on how many white bears might remain alive. American scientists offered a figure of 19,000; the Soviets countered with an estimate of 8,000.

Statistics on the annual kill were even less precise. Canada's delegates thought it might “approach 600” within their territory. The figure for the U.S. kill, which was mostly made from aircraft by sportsmen and commercial hide hunters on the ice packs off Alaska, was thought to be about 1,000. Norwegian experts professed to have no idea how many were killed by their nationals.

With a single exception, none of the polar bear countries thought the creature's survival was threatened. The exception was the Soviet Union, which a decade earlier had become convinced the bear was endangered and, as of 1957, had placed it under full protection.

The decade following the congress saw the slaughter continue unabated in Alaska, Greenland, Canada, and Spitzbergen as well as, and particularly, on the ice in international waters. By 1968, it had reached an admitted total of 1,500 white bears a year with a real kill probably well in excess of 2,000. Such depletion of a species whose females only give birth every third year, and whose total world population was no more than 20,000, threatened eventual extinction. Nevertheless, most of the polar bear nations remained unconcerned.