Sea of Slaughter (32 page)

By 1910 the Bering-Beaufort-Chukchi Sea tribe of bowheads was commercially and almost literally extinct. Its eastern relatives fared no better.

Even by as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century, whalers in the Greenland Sea, where the immolation of the bowhead had begun, were running out of victims. More and more vessels—mostly English at this period—were chasing fewer and smaller whales. Not having had time to learn caution, these adolescent animals were easily approached. In 1818, the grotesquely misnamed Hull whaler,
Cherub,
Captain Jackson commanding, got into several pods of these youngsters and a massacre ensued. At one point,
Cherub
had every corner, on deck and below, stuffed with blubber—and still had fourteen untouched corpses of young whales moored alongside. Eventually Jackson had to cut them loose and let them drift away with “very great distress at the loss occasioned therebye to the Owners.” Jackson and his crew killed forty-seven nursery whales in that single season.

No form of mammalian life could long withstand this kind of attrition and the bowhead of the Greenland Sea was no exception. By the 1830s, the species was effectively extinct although a scattered handful may have survived into mid-century. Their executioners were, however, now exercising their bloody skills in what they called the Western Grounds.

Davis Strait had been fished since the middle of the seventeenth century, but, by 1810 bowheads were becoming scarce there and so the whalers pushed their luck toward the north. They shouldered into the dangerous pack ice of southern Baffin Bay, reached Disco Island on the west Greenland coast and, to their amazement, found open water in the northern reaches of Baffin Bay. In 1815 some of them crossed it to reach the shores of the Canadian Arctic archipelago, which they named West Land. Here they broke in upon the summering grounds of the last undevastated bowhead tribe in the Atlantic region.

An observer on the English whaler
Cumbrian
at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island in 1823 provided this vivid glimpse of the carnage that ensued: “We turned south along the land floe [and] along the floe edge lay the dead bodies of hundreds of flenched whales, and the air for miles around was tainted with the foetor which arose from such masses of putridity. Toward evening the numbers we came across were even increasing, and the effluvia which assailed our olfactories became almost intolerable.” This, it is to be remembered, was in the refrigerated climate of the Arctic!

Cumbrian
's crew killed twenty-three bowheads on this single voyage. The forty-one ships in company with her flensed more than 350 whales amongst them—and probably fatally wounded and lost another fifty.

Again, such havoc could not be sustained. In 1850 the whole of the British whaling fleet in Baffin Bay only managed to find and kill 218 bowheads, and from then on the kill waned dramatically for want of victims.

During the 1860s steam-auxiliary whalers largely replaced the old sailing ships. Most were Scottish, but by this time some American whalers were returning from the devastation they had wrought in the North Pacific. In 1863 two American steam whalers forced their way through the spring ice into Hudson Bay where they found “legions of whales... the north part of the Bay from Marble Island to Cape Fullerton was full of whales.”

This was no new discovery. Since time immemorial these waters had provided wintering, calving, and mating grounds for the bowheads of Baffin Bay and the Arctic archipelago. As early as 1631 explorers had commented on their majestic presence there. One Hudson's Bay trader wrote in 1751: “There are such shoals of whales [in Hudson Bay] as is nowhere to be met with in the known world.”

The Hudson's Bay Company, never an organization to miss an opportunity for profit, tried several times to start a bowhead fishery but always failed, primarily because the attempts were made by landsmen with no whaling experience. This was put to rights by the arrival of the Yankee whaling ships. For them, this was the last great whale bonanza—and they made the most of it. Between 1863 and 1885, 146 whaling voyages were made into the Bay, and a hundred of these overwintered or left wintering crews on shore. Since a single whale could yield $3,000 worth of oil and $15,000 worth of baleen, the competition amongst the whalers was ferocious, and the hunt was merciless.

The wintering whales congregated with their calves in open leads, particularly in the northwestern part of the Bay. Although they could not be easily reached by boat, they could be approached on foot along the ice edge. So instead of harpooning them, the hunters attacked with hand-held guns firing fragmentation bombs that inflicted terrible internal wounds. Unless instantly killed, a struck whale would sound beneath the ice and if and when it surfaced again it would often be in some distant lead beyond reach of the gunners. According to Inspector Moodie of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, who witnessed the hunt during its final days, at least three-quarters of the bowheads shot with bomb guns were not recovered. It can be assumed that most perished later of their wounds.

This was destruction on such a scale that, by 1895, only a handful of whaling ships were still finding it worthwhile to “fish” in Hudson Bay. The last whaler departed those waters in 1908 with empty holds, having failed to find a single bowhead.

Ten Scots steam whalers ranged almost the whole perimeter of Baffin Bay during the summer of 1910 and managed to kill only eighteen whales between them. Since this was not enough for a paying trip, they tried to “make up the voyage” by killing whatever else came to hand. This included some 400 of the small whales known as beluga, 2,000 walrus, 250 polar bears, and 5,000 seals. However, not even this additional slaughter enabled them to turn a profit. The game was finished. By the time the human world plunged into its own orgy of self-destruction in 1914, the eastern bowhead was thought to be extinct.

That it was not entirely so was certainly no fault of the whalers. A few score bowheads had managed to evade destruction, but they were not left free from persecution. Between 1919 and 1976, more than forty recorded attacks were made on bowhead whales in Canadian eastern Arctic and west Greenland waters, some by natives on their own account, but more under the direction of white residents, including government officials and employees of trading companies. About half of the whales attacked were killed and most of the rest were wounded. There is no trustworthy indication that the tiny remaining remnant of a once-enormous whale nation is recovering. It may not even be holding its own.

A somewhat larger portion of the North Pacific tribe escaped the devastation. During a 1969 visit to Magadan on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, I was told by a Soviet cetologist that as many as 400 had been located by aerial surveys during the previous winter. His estimate of the total number of surviving North Pacific bowheads was no more than 2,000. However, he did not believe they were increasing because too many were being killed by the Aleuts and Inuit of northeastern Alaska.

Like their Chukotkan peers (and like some of the Inuit of the eastern Arctic), a number of Alaskan native communities hunted whales as a major part of their subsistence through many hundreds, if not thousands of years. But in pre-European times there was an abundance of whales, and the primitive hunting gear possessed by the natives ensured that this abundance could not be depleted by human predation. That has all changed now.

Today, when there are at most only a few thousand bowheads left alive in the world, native peoples in Alaska are hunting them more intensively than they have done for many years. They no longer do so primarily to obtain essential subsistence but more for sport and profit. They also use deadly weapons provided by modern technology. Instead of the ancestral skin-covered
umiaks
and hand-thrown harpoons, some native whalers now use fast powerboats, and all are armed with devastatingly destructive bomb guns and bomb-lances. Nor is it unusual for them to hire spotter planes to find and track the whales as they work their way through the leads in the pack to reach their summer feeding grounds in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

The result has been, and continues to be, devastating to the surviving bowheads. Dr. Floyd Durham has spent many years studying the Alaskan “native” bowhead hunt and he reports that the “sinking loss” resulting from modern hunting methods and weapons is 80 per cent. During one period when he observed, thirty bowheads of all ages and sexes were struck by Inuit hunters,
and not one was recovered.
In 1973, he witnessed the successful killing of a fifty-foot bowhead female and her nursing calf. The dead female proved too much for the Inuit to handle, so they turned her adrift after removing only about 10 per cent of the blubber. Twenty-nine bowheads were landed in Alaska in 1977—but an additional eighty-four were lost after having been harpooned and/or bomb-lanced.

Canada and Greenland have now forbidden the killing of bowheads in their territorial waters under any conditions. Since the rediscovery of the wintering pods in the Sea of Okhotsk in the 1950s, the Soviets have given bowheads full protection. The United States, on the other hand, finds it expedient to permit the destruction in Alaskan waters to continue.

Environmentalists have recently become much exercised about the probable effect on the few remaining bowheads of oil and gas exploitation in Arctic waters. Within a few years a massive traffic of gigantic tankers through much of the bowheads' summering grounds is to be anticipated. More than a hundred wells are already pumping oil. An accident involving a wellhead blowout, or a tanker rupture, is more than a probability; it is a statistical certainty, and at least one such disaster is predicted to occur every ten years. Studies indicate that a major spill in ice-covered Arctic waters can be expected to wreak damage to the marine environment and its associated life forms greater by a factor of ten than that resulting from such southern disasters as the sinking of the
Torrey Canyon
or the recent gargantuan spill from a runaway well in the Gulf of Mexico.

The situation in which the surviving bowheads find themselves is tragically ironic. While modern man has given over the deliberate slaughtering of them, his industrial practices indirectly threaten their tenuous hold on life. What seems even sadder is that they are still being killed by native peoples, who have now become the bearers of Western cultural attitudes toward animate creation... and who no longer need the bowheads for their own survival.

By the latter part
of
the eighteenth century most of the “better sort” of whales had been extirpated from the northeastern approaches to America. Nevertheless, those waters still teemed with the several species early whalers termed “the worser sort” because they were generally too swift and agile to be caught; difficult or impossible to recover after death because they sank; or poor in oil compared to the right whales.

The worser sort included the largest animal ever to exist upon this planet—the blue whale. Exceptional blues may have reached a length of a hundred feet or more and weighed over a hundred tons. Today, there are probably few survivors over eighty feet. But then, there are few survivors.

Although a creature of almost unimaginable magnitude, the blue whale was and is a gentle giant. Its food consists of the small, shrimp-like krill it filters out of the water by means of a screen of 300–400 plates of baleen contained in its enormous mouth. Streamlined to perfection, it possesses a physical strength almost beyond belief. It drives its enormous bulk along at eight or nine knots while cruising, but can accelerate to twenty.

The blue is the most prominent member of a family known as the rorquals. The similarities between most rorquals are so striking that only recently have scientists agreed as to how the group should be divided. They include the blue, followed by the fin, fin-back, or finner, which reaches a length of about eighty feet; then come two almost identical species, sei and Bryde's, which range up to sixty feet; and, finally, the relatively “little” minke, at about thirty-five feet.

The rorquals represent the most recent (which is to say the most highly evolved) of all baleen whales. There is reason to suspect that their brain capacity does not lag far behind that of the human species, although it is most certainly not used for the purposes that we use ours. Before we laid our doom upon them, they were also the most abundant of the large whales.

Apart from size (and the size range of each species overlaps that of those above and below it) and colour, the several rorqual species are almost indistinguishable in life to the eye of the casual beholder. In fact, the minke acquired its current name when a Norwegian whaler by the name of Meincke mistook a near-at-hand pod of these smallish whales for a distant pod of blues. It was a mistake that gave the unfortunate fellow an undesired immortality.

The behaviour and life history of all the rorquals is also essentially similar, except that the blue restricts its diet to krill while the others may also eat such small fishes as capelin, sand lance, and herring when opportunity invites. All are long-lived animals, some attaining ages in excess of eighty years. All are exceptionally swift and graceful swimmers, the sei being capable of underwater speeds close to twenty-five knots. All are essentially wide-roaming creatures of the open sea, wintering in temperate to tropical waters and (except for Bryde's) migrating in spring to colder, even polar climes. Because of their supreme adaptation to the sea, they have no special need for protected nursery grounds and most bear their young in the open ocean. Many, however, close with the land during spring and summer to take advantage of the great abundance of food to be found on continental and inshore banks. In the days of their glory, they were notably gregarious, and highly visible in consequence. As late as the 1880s, congregations of finners numbering above 1,000 individuals were no uncommon sight. A Captain Milne, in command of a Cunard liner that sailed through such an assemblage in the North Atlantic in the 1880s, likened it to “a space of about half-a-county in dimension filled with railroad engines, all puffing steam as if their lives depended on it!”

As is the case with many close-knit families, the rorqual clan harbours an eccentric. This is the humpback, a creature not only singular in appearance but in behaviour, too. One of the most “playful” of animals, it has apparently undergone major physical modifications as a result of its predilection for complicated gyrations. The humpback is also famous for its virtuoso ability to compose and sing individual songs of considerable complexity and haunting quality.

Its somewhat dumpy body seems foreshortened in contrast to the exquisite streamlining of its fellow rorquals. Attaining a weight of some sixty tons and a length of fifty-five feet, the humpback boasts two greatly extended and very flexible front flippers used for balance and for propulsion, and as arms with which courting couples enthusiastically embrace and caress each other.

It lacks the purposeful drive and thrust of other rorquals, normally proceeding at a leisurely five or six knots, although it can reach a speed of ten or twelve. Its rotund form, slow speed, gregariousness, amiability, and liking for inshore waters, together with the fact that, unlike its relatives, it sometimes floats when killed, made it appear rather more like a right whale than a rorqual in the eyes of early whalers.

New England whalers sailing out of New Bedford seem to have been the first to conclude that the humpback could be commercially exploited. By as early as 1740 these men were sailing small schooners into Newfoundland waters chasing black rights, greys, bowheads, and sperms; but the rights and greys were becoming ever rarer; the bowhead did not frequent that region at all in summer; and the sperm was only to be found in useful numbers far offshore. The New Englanders must have been frustrated, not to say infuriated, to find themselves surrounded by uncountable numbers of rorquals from which they could get no profit. We will probably never know which acquisitive skipper it was who concluded that at least one of the worser sort might prove to be an exception; but by about 1750, the entire fleet was hunting humpbacks when nothing better offered.

They hunted it despite the fact that in summer it was usually a “sinker.” Vessels of those times had no mechanical devices capable of hauling such massive corpses back up to the surface of the sea; nor did they have the wherewithal to keep them afloat while towing the carcasses to a shore station or while flensing them alongside a ship. No matter. The New Bedford men depended on the whale itself to deliver its carcass into their hands by virtue of a phenomenon they called “blasting.”

When any great whale dies its body temperature quickly begins to rise, not fall, as one might expect. This is because the heat produced by decomposition is retained inside the blubber-insulated body, which becomes a kind of pressure cooker. After two or three days the internal tissues actually do begin to cook, and putrefaction soon generates gas enough to make even a hundred-ton sunken whale grow buoyant and begin to rise through the water like a surfacing submarine. Such noisome corpses do not float indefinitely. Eventually they rupture, sometimes so explosively as to send gobbets of rotting tissue flying about like soft shrapnel. What remains then sinks again, and the second sinking is forever.

The New Englanders seldom attempted to get fast to a humpback with harpoon and rope. They preferred to lance it, using twelve- to fourteen-foot lances. Sometimes the lance thrusts were enough in themselves to mortally wound the animal. If not, subsequent infections would do the job. Having fled from its tormentors, the whale would sicken and die, sink to the bottom, putrefy, then “blast” to the surface again to drift at the vagaries of wind and tide. The whalers counted on spotting such “blasted” humpbacks, whether of their own killing or of another, in sufficient numbers to reward them for the trouble they had taken. A recovery rate of one humpback for every three they lanced was apparently considered an adequate return.

It was a hellishly wasteful business, but profitable. When English authorities assessed the potential of whaling grounds around the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle a few years after the expulsion of the French, they found the fishery booming. In 1763, according to the report of the naval officer in charge of the survey, the whale fishery on the coasts of Labrador was employing 117 New England sloops and schooners each crewed by about a dozen men, who took 104 whales within thirty leagues of the mouth of the Strait. How many more they may have killed but failed to recover will never be known. By 1767, the New England whaling fleet in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and along the shores of southern Labrador, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia amounted to 300 sloops and schooners manned by more than 4,000 whalers. While their first choice remained black right, sperm, and grey whales when they could find them, they were frequently constrained to “make up their voyages” with humpback oil.

Except for a brief hiatus during and just after the American Revolution, the Yankee slaughter in the Sea of Whales steadily increased in magnitude until shortly after the turn of the century. By then greys, rights, and St. Lawrence bowheads were all effectively extinct; the sperms of the northeastern approaches were almost destroyed, and humpbacks were so devastated that it no longer paid the Americans to continue hunting the “northern waters.” About 1820 there was a partial lull in the carnage—a lull brought about solely by the fact that the better sort of whales had been exterminated or reduced to residual remnants and, as yet, the whalers had found no way to do the same to the bulk of the rorquals that continued to roam the seas in prodigious numbers.

The lull lasted for about fifty years, during which there was only relatively small-scale whaling in the Sea of Whales, mostly for humpbacks. One such operation was conducted by a Jersey company in Hermitage Bay on the south coast of Newfoundland. Its whalers annually landed some forty to sixty humpbacks, killed by whaleboats equipped with a new horror—the Greener's bomb-lance. This was an explosive grenade on the end of a metal shaft, fired from a smooth-bore tube. No line was attached since, in principal, the bomb-lance was intended to be used to give the
coup de grâce
to a whale that had already been harpooned. However, whalers used it as their prime weapon against the humpbacks, counting on killing enough whales with it so that a profitable percentage might be recovered after the blasted corpses surfaced. In fiord-like bays such as Hermitage, the recovery rate was rather better than off an open coast. Nevertheless, the Jersey whalers probably doomed two or three for every one they landed.

Although humpbacks continued to suffer, the rest of the rorquals remained beyond effective reach of human rapacity until, near the end of the nineteenth century, the most ruthless and inventive sea marauders of all time finally devised the means to doom not only the rorquals, but all surviving great whales everywhere on Earth. The new slaughter was set in motion by a genius in the arts of destruction, a Norwegian named Svend Foyn. A long-time seal and whale killer, Foyn felt so thwarted by his inability to profit from the abounding rorqual nations that he single-mindedly, not to say fanatically, devoted more than ten years of his life to discovering and perfecting a way to kill and to recover them. During the 1860s, he unveiled his tripartite answer to the rorqual problem.

The essence of it was a one-ton cannon that fired a massive harpoon deep into a whale's vitals. A fragmentation bomb in the nose of the harpoon then exploded, riddling the victim's guts with jagged chunks of shrapnel. The explosion also caused steel barbs concealed in the harpoon shaft to spring outward, firmly anchoring it and its attached rope in the whale's flesh.

The effect of this demoniac device on a living whale is well described by F.D. Ommanney, a cetologist with a latter-day Antarctic whaling expedition. “Our quarry broke surface [after having been harpooned] some five hundred yards away and began his silent, terrible death struggle. If whales could utter cries which could rend the heart, their deaths would be less dreadful than this losing battle which our whale was now engaged upon in silence broken only by the far-off screaming of sea birds. We could not even hear the thrashing of crimsoned foam as he writhed and plunged, spouting a bloody spray at first, then an upgushing, followed by a bubbling upwelling amid a spreading island of blood... the struggle ceased, the red foam subsided and we could see the body lying quite still. The birds busied themselves above and around it with shrill cries.”

The second prong of Foyn's deadly trident was a small, swift, and highly manoeuvrable steam-powered vessel with a specially strengthened bow upon which the cannon was mounted. She was also fitted with an extremely powerful steam-winch and spring-pulley system that enabled her to play a harpooned whale as a sport fisherman might play a salmon, and to raise even a 100-ton dead whale from as deep as two miles down. Originally these boats were forthrightly called whale killers, but today they are known as whale
catchers
in deference to public sensibilities. The first killer boats were only fast enough to run down a cruising rorqual, but that was enough in the early days because the whales had not yet learned to flee the grim destroyers. With the passing years, the killer boats became larger, swifter, and more lethal in every way, some eventually being able to range as far as 400 miles from their shore base and overtake, kill, and tow home as many as a dozen of the largest and fastest rorquals.

The third element was simply a hollow metal tube thrust into the lungs or abdominal cavity of a dead whale after it had been hauled back to the surface. Through this tube compressed air or sometimes steam was injected, thereby inflating the corpse until it was buoyant enough to be towed to the factory.

Armed with Foyn's inventions, the Norwegians began to build what is admiringly referred to in commercial circles as the modern whaling industry. “Svend Foyn commenced full-scale operations on the Finnmark coast of Norway in 1880,” one of his admirers tells us, “and his immediate success was followed by a crowd of catchers, each killing sometimes as many as five or six rorquals in a single day, rapidly depleting the northern grounds. The industry, however, was so profitable that the gallant Norwegians, having found a trade after their own hearts, set out to look for ‘fresh fields and pastures new'.”

Between 1880 and 1905, the Norwegians processed nearly 60,000 North Atlantic whales, mostly blues and finners. How many they actually
killed
during that quarter century can only be estimated, but considering the loss-to-landing ratios of those times a figure of 80,000 is probably conservative.