Sea of Slaughter (3 page)

So reads the earliest surviving record of an encounter between Europeans and spearbills in North America; but it was assuredly not the first. The course Cartier's Bretons steered into the Gulf had been established before 1505, and his Isle of Birds was already a well-known sea-mark on the route. Now called Funk Island, it is a thirty-five-foot-high slab of granite, half-a-mile long by a quarter wide, lying some thirty miles off the Newfoundland coast. Its name is an archaic English word meaning an atrocious stench. Funk Island not only lay on the usual route into the Grand Bay via Belle Isle Strait, it also lay well clear of the dangerous reefs that fringe the adjacent mainland coast and inshore islands. For these reasons it was the preferred rookery at which inbound ships could call to fill their casks with salted spearbill carcasses; but it was by no means the only such rookery in the region. Forty miles to the east, in the mouth of Bonavista Bay, are two islands each of which also once bore the name Funk, but are now called Stinking Islands.
1
At about the same distance southwest lie twin Penguin Islands. There are also several bird islands in the nearby Wadham group, on one of which local fishermen found a veritable charnel house of partly burned bones they identified as the remains of “pinwins” slaughtered and boiled to make oil. Other northeastern Newfoundland sites include the North and South Penguin Islands off Musgrave Harbour and Penguin Island near Baccalieu.

Spearbill rookeries probably flourished along most of the 5,000-mile coast of Newfoundland. In 1536, an English expedition visited the south coast. What follows is an abridged account taken from Richard Hakluyt's
Principal Navigations... of the English Nation.

“One, Master Hore of London, encouraged divers gentlemen to accompany him on a voyage of discovery upon the Northeast parts of America: wherein his persuasions took such effect that many gentlemen very willingly entered into the action with him.

“From the time of their setting out they were at sea above two months until they came to [the region] about Cape Breton. Shaping their course from thence Northeastward they came to the Island of Penguin, whereon they went and found it full of great fowls, white and gray and as big as geese, and they saw infinite number of their eggs. They drove a great number of the fowls into their boats and took many of their eggs. They dressed [the birds] and eat them and found them to be very good and nourishing meat.”

Hore's island is to be identified with one lying fifteen miles off Cape La Hune in the middle of Newfoundland's south coast. The first Europeans to discover it were Portuguese who gave it the name it still bears. As was the case with Funk on the northwest coast, this Penguin Island provided a convenient place for vessels inbound from Europe to the Gulf via the southern route to fill their salt-meat casks with spearbill carcasses.

A third famous rookery existed well within the Gulf itself, and also was visited by Cartier in 1534.

“We came to... two islands... as steep as a wall so that it was impossible to climb to the tops. These islands were as completely covered with birds, which nest there, as a field is covered with grass... we landed on the lower part of the smaller island and killed more than a thousand murres and
apponatz
, of which we took away as many as we wished in our barque. One might have loaded, in an hour, thirty such barques.”

These two rocky pinnacles with flat and almost inaccessible tops jut out of the Gulf some ten miles northeast of the main Magdalen Island archipelago. In Cartier's time, they were called Isles de Margaulx because of the immense flocks of gannets nesting on the high plateaux. The smaller island was surrounded by broad ledges just above storm tide level, and it was here that spearbills nested.

As well as providing an important sea-mark, Isles de Margaulx (now the Bird Rocks) served as a convenient “sea-poultry market” where passing vessels could take on stores of meat and eggs. However, it was only one of many such rookeries in the vicinity. The then-uninhabited Magdalen group seems to have had several spearbill colonies. The density of their populations may be judged by the fact that even the one on Bird Rocks, which was physically much restricted and very exposed, managed to survive annual raids by ships' crews for more than a century. When Samuel de Champlain visited the Rocks in 1620, he found the birds “in such abundance that they may be killed with sticks”; and as late as the end of the 1600s, Charlevoix noted that the islets still harboured “a number of fowl that cannot fly.”

The problem of locating and identifying spearbill colonies in other parts of the northeastern seaboard is difficult, but is assisted by the salient fact that the big birds never came ashore and seldom approached it except for the four to six weeks in the spring and early summer when they were egg-laying, brooding, and rearing their young. Consequently, when we find an otherwise suitable island that has at one time borne the name Penguin, or some variant thereof, there is a strong presumption that it once held a spearbill breeding colony.

Additional criteria include the following.

The site must have been free of large resident predators such as wolves, bears, and men, although occasional raids by any of these (and we know that both Indians and polar bears raided Funk Island) would presumably have had little effect on colonies numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Smaller mammals such as foxes and mink would have posed a much lesser threat to birds the size of geese armed with such formidable bills.

The rookeries must, of course, have been usable by flightless birds; but this does not necessarily require a gently sloped transition between land and water. Antarctic penguins making a landing can shoot out of the sea with enough momentum to carry themselves ten feet up the sheer face of an ice-foot and land comfortably on the high lip. The site itself need only have been reasonably level and free of heavy vegetation and tree growth. Because they were flightless birds, which had to swim to wherever they were going, preferred rookeries needed to be located within a comparatively short distance of good fishing grounds so that adults could forage for their young without excessive expenditure of time and energy.

A final point is that great auks were only vulnerable to native peoples
when
they were on their rookeries; thus, the presence of their bones in any quantity in human sites can be taken as clear indication of a colony reasonably near at hand.

The Atlantic coast of Labrador was probably not favoured as a spearbill breeding ground, being too much encumbered with pack ice during the summer season. However, the northern bays of Newfoundland provided ideal conditions and may have supported as many as twenty rookeries, some of them extremely large.

Newfoundland's west coast seems to have had rookeries on Lark Island, the Stearing Islands off Cow Head, Gregory Island in Bay of Islands (where a headland and a deep bay bear the Penguin name), Green Island off Flowers Cove, and Shag Island at the entrance to Port au Port Bay, and in St. John's Bay.

The south coast of Newfoundland was evidently well-endowed with spearbill colonies, including Virgin Rock in Placentia Bay (from which seventeenth-century French fishermen and soldiers are reported to have provided themselves with spearbill meat and eggs); Green Island near St-Pierre et Miquelon, which, according to local tradition, may still have harboured a few
pengouins
until the beginning of the eighteenth century; Bird Island at the mouth of Fortune Bay; Penguin Island, which we have already discussed; and the Ramea group where, so I was told by an old man of mixed European and Indian blood from nearby Burgeo, the last
penwins
were killed on Offer Rock soon after his Micmac ancestors emigrated to Newfoundland from Cape Breton, which would have been about 1750.

The north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence was exceptionally good seabird territory, at one time harbouring scores of colonies and rookeries on its innumerable islands. There is no way of knowing now how many were occupied by spearbills, but the big, flightless birds were probably hunted from most of them by sixteenth-century Basque whalers for whom this would have been a minor act of slaughter.

There are few suitable sites for seabird rookeries in the southern Gulf, except Bonaventure Island. However, in 1593, the English vessel
Marigold
found
pengwyns
at Cape Breton Island during the breeding season, and the birds were still being reported from there in 1750 as
peringouins.
The Cape Breton Micmacs have a tradition that their ancestors took spearbills and eggs on St. Paul Island in Cabot Strait, from an unidentified island in Chedabucto Bay, and from Sea Wolf Island.

Rookeries along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia may have been comparatively few in number due to a shortage of suitable sites, but that they did exist seems evident from the fact that, as late as 1758, local Indians were bringing
pengwins
into Halifax to supply the colonists.

The southern tip of Nova Scotia and the opposite shores of New Brunswick across the mouth of the Bay of Fundy offered a number of excellent spearbill sites. When Champlain visited the Tusket Island group in the early summer of 1604, he found quantities of nesting seabirds which he called
tangeaux
and which his men killed with sticks. Some ornithologists contend that “tangeaux” means gannets, but on the very next page of his own account, Champlain describes what is undoubtedly a gannet colony on a high island now called Gannet Rock, eleven miles north of the Tuskets, and identifies the bird as
margos
(margeaux), which is the French name for gannet. Noddy Island and Devil's Limb, south of the Tuskets, may also have been home to spearbill colonies, along with Machias Seal Island and at least some of the islands in the Grand Manan assemblage.

Farther south, along the coast of the Gulf of Maine, early accounts testify to the one-time presence of spearbills in considerable numbers. Some modern authorities insist these reports must all refer to migratory birds that bred at some far northern rookery such as Funk Island. The fact that many were seen and killed during the breeding season is explained on the supposition that these were immature or non-breeding birds.

However, in 1603, Captain George Weymouth landed on a small island in the mouth of Maine's Muscongus Bay and was much impressed to find “very great egg shells, bigger than goose eggs.” It is certainly within the realm of probability that these were the shells of spearbill eggs (amongst the largest eggs laid by any North American bird), which had been collected by Indians at rookeries on Monhegan or Manana Island some ten miles offshore, in the manner of the Newfoundland Beothuks at Funk Island.

David Ingram, an English sailor who was marooned on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico in 1568 and walked north to Nova Scotia, described a bird of “the shape and bigness of a goose, but their wings are covered with small, callow feathers and cannot fly: You may drive them like sheep.” Which is a good description of spearbills and their behaviour at a rookery. Josselyn, visiting New England circa 1670, described “the
Wobble,
an ill-shaped fowl having no long Feathers in their Pinions, which is the reason they cannot fly.” The spearbill was the
only
flightless bird Josselyn could have encountered and, since “Wobble” seems an apt description of the way it must have walked on land, and spearbills never came to land except to breed, I accept this as a strong indication of colonies on the New England coast. Audubon remembered an old hunter from the Boston area who told him that great auks were still present about Nahant and other islands when he was young.

The finding of spearbill bones in Indian middens along the New England coast, and even as far south as Florida, establishes the fact that they were once found far to the south of the range currently ascribed to them by many biologists.

The importance of seabird rookeries to transatlantic seamen was enormous. These men were expected to survive and work like dogs on a diet consisting principally of salt meat and hard bread. The meat was mainly lean and stringy beef or horse, and the bread was a biscuit baked to the consistency of concrete and usually shot through with weevils. Even these almost inedible staples were frequently in short supply due to the miserliness of ship-owners who seemed to believe that “wind and water” were enough to feed a sailor. Indeed, it was usual to supply the ships with only enough salt meat for the outward voyage, leaving the hard-driven, half-starved men to forage for themselves upon arrival. Apart from fish (most kinds of which if eaten as a steady diet in cold latitudes can result in chronic malnutrition because of a low fat content), the most convenient single source of food in season was what could be had from the bird rookeries.

Initially, seabirds of a dozen or more species crowded the offshore islands and islets. Most were good fliers who could, and often did, nest on ledges and cliff faces where they were difficult to reach. Furthermore, adults tended to take wing at the approach of an intruder and so could seldom be killed in quantity except with a profligate expenditure of shot and powder. Consequently, the main weight of European predation fell on the most readily accessible species—of which the spearbill was especially attractive because of its large, fat, and well-muscled carcass. Its eggs, too, were preferred above all others, not only because of their great size (as long and broad as a human hand), but because they were so easily collected. There was no question about it: so long as it lasted, the spearbill was the best buy in the shop.

Analysis of Cartier's and other contemporary accounts gives some conception of the magnitude of the destruction visited on the spearbill colonies. Cartier's thirty-foot fishing barques were built to carry about four tons and, since the weight of an adult spearbill was twelve to fifteen pounds, a fully-loaded barque could transport up to 650 birds. Two such barque-loads might have strained the storage capacity of a sixty-ton vessel—but that is the amount, so we are told, that each vessel laded. However, some Basque ships sailing those waters displaced as much as 600 tons and could have comfortably stowed away several thousand spearbill carcasses—sufficient to last the summer season through and probably enough to feed the sailors on the homeward voyage.