Sea of Slaughter (34 page)

With the blue whale almost gone and the humpback close behind it, the fin whale took the brunt of the ongoing destruction. The indefatigable Millais has left us this account of how the finbacks died.

“About six o'clock in the evening we encountered the fringe of the main herd of Finbacks, which were spouting in all directions. We pursued whale after whale, but all seemed wild except one monster which refused to leave the side of the vessel, and in consequence could not be shot at. At last the mate got a shot at 7 P.M., and missed. He was much crestfallen, and retired to the galley to enjoy the healing balm of coffee and potatoes. At 7.30 it was bitterly cold when Captain Stokken again stood beside the gun, and we were in full pursuit of a large female Finback that seemed tamer than the rest. Eventually in its final ‘roll' the whale raised itself about ten yards from the gun, and the whaler tipping the muzzle downwards fired and struck the quarry under the backbone.

“At first the Finback was rather quiet, and then it began to run, the strong line rushing out at a speed of about 15 knots. When some two miles of rope had gone over the bow I turned to Captain Stokken, and said:

“ ‘How much line have you got?'

“ ‘About three mile,' was the curt reply.

“ ‘But when that three miles goes, what then?'

“ ‘Oh, well,' was the imperturbable answer, ‘then I check line, and we see which is strongest, whale or rope.'

“In the course of a minute the captain gave the order to check the line. The strain now became terrific, the two-inch rope straining and groaning as if it would burst. At the same moment the little steamer leaped forward, pulled over the seas at about twelve miles an hour. There was a feeling of intense exhilaration as we rushed northwards, the spray flying from our bows as the ship leapt from crest to crest in the heavy swell. I have enjoyed the rushes of gallant thirty and even forty-pound salmon in heavy water on the Tay, the supreme moments in an angler's life, but that was mere child's play to the intense excitement which we now experienced during the next three hours. To be in tow of a wild whale is something to experience and remember to one's dying day. You feel that you are alive, and that you are there with the sport of kings. No wonder the Norwegians are full of life, and the men, from the captain to the cook, run to their several tasks with eyes and hearts aflame. This is a trade which will stir the blood of the dullest clod, and to men who are one and all the finest seamen in the world, it is the very life and essence of the Viking nature.

“Three hours of this fierce race went on, and the gallant Finback was as fresh as ever when the captain gave the order, ‘Quarter-speed astern'. Another tremendous strain on the rope, the churning of the backward-driving screw, and our speed was at once reduced to 10 knots. It was marvellous the strength of the animal. The minutes and even the hours fled by, still the great cetacean held on its northward course without a check. Three hours went by; then came the order, ‘Half-speed astern', and we were down to 6 knots, the vessel and the whale still fighting the battle for the mastery. In another hour the whale showed visible signs of weakening, when ‘Full-speed astern' brought matters to a standstill. The machinery of man and the natural strength of the beast still worried on for another hour, and then we saw the steamer moving backwards; the whale was done, and could pull no more.

“The rope was then slackened, hoisted on to a ‘giving' pulley, and then wound on to the powerful steam winch, which, acting like the fisherman's reel, at once began to ‘take in'. Nothing was heard for another hour but the monotonous throb of the engine, and grind of the winch, until at last on the crest of a wave, about 300 yards to windward, was seen the great Finback, rolling over and over, spouting continuously, but so tired that it was unable to drag or dive.

“The captain now gave the order, ‘Lower away to lance'. There was a fairly heavy sea running, and yet I never saw anything more smartly done than the way in which those Norwegians flung their light ‘pram' into the water and jumped in from the bulwarks. Other men were ready with the oars, which they handed to the two rowers, whilst the mate seized the long 15-foot ‘killing' lance, and the small party rowed rapidly away toward the whale.

“Hans Andersen, the mate, stood up in the stern, holding his long lance, as the men rowed slowly up to the leviathan. Then the rowers turned the boat round, and backed it in towards their prey. At times they were lost in the great swell, and then they would appear apparently beside the sea-monster, whose pathetic rolling was at once changed into spasmodic life. The whale, churning the water, now righted itself, and at once turned on its attackers, who retreated at full-speed. Now on one side and now on another, the plucky mate tried to approach and bring off his death-thrust, but all to no avail. Every time the exhausted cetacean had just enough strength left to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to turn the tables on its opponents. Mist and darkness were rolling up, the sea was rising, and still the duel of attack and defence went on. At last darkness hid the combatants from view, when Stokken turned to me and said:

“ ‘This very wild whale. Must give him another shot, or Andersen will get hurt.' He reached up and blew the steam whistle three times as a signal for the boat to return. In a few minutes Andersen's cheerful face was looking up at us, the lance held high and streaming with blood.'

“ ‘Ha, so you stab him,' said Stokken.

“ ‘Ja, just as you blow the whistle,' replied the mate, with a smile. The pram and its occupants were soon aboard, and the whale rolled in and lashed alongside by the tail. The chase had lasted seven hours.”

So the great rorquals disappeared from Newfoundland waters—not fleeing to some distant sanctuary as apologists for their absence insisted—but into the trypots, pressure cookers, and fish-meal plants of the whaling industry.

The outbreak of the First World War brought a respite of sorts while men concentrated their destructive energies on each other. The big rorquals of the northwest Atlantic were by then in desperate need of respite. Since the beginning of the Norwegian onslaught in 1898, more than 1,700 blues, 6,000 finners, and 1,200 humpbacks had been “harvested” in the Sea of Whales. These numbers, be it remembered, only represent whales delivered to the factories. They take no account of those fatally injured, of calves that died of starvation after the deaths of their mothers, or of those that perished as a result of wound-induced infections.

If I stress this latter point, it is because whales appear to be singularly susceptible to terrestrial bacteria and viruses, against which they seem to have little if any natural immunity. This constitutes a mortality factor seldom mentioned in discussions of whaling practice and usually ignored in official statistics purporting to represent the damage inflicted by whalers. However, the whalers themselves have been well aware of the infection factor and have used it to their own advantage since earliest times.

As far back as the ninth century Norwegian fiords men were driving pods of minkes into the inner reaches of long fiords, then barring off escape with nets. The trapped animals were attacked, not with spears or lances, but by firing crossbow bolts into them—very special bolts that had been deliberately dipped in vats of putrid meat. The organisms introduced into the whale by this “innoculation” were so virulent that the infected minke would die within three or four days, its bloated body a seething mass of gangrene and septicaemia. Meat from such corpses was, of course, useless, but the blubber was unimpaired and was rendered to produce lamp oil, whale-oil tar, and other such products. Sei whales were still being killed in fiords near Bergen by what was essentially the same barbarous method until early in the twentieth century.
1

By 1908, having ravaged the great rorquals on both sides of the North Atlantic, packs of Norwegian killer boats were swarming across the equator into the South Atlantic. From there they soon found their ways into the Pacific, then into the Indian Ocean. Shore stations sprang up behind them and the stench of megadeath spread like a miasma. The havoc the killers wrought on the whales of the tropical and temperate oceans was of a previously unimaginable enormity. It included the virtual obliteration within a few brief years of the remaining southern black right whales, a devastating massacre of previously untouched tribes of humpbacks, and the near extinction of grey whales in the North Pacific.

It was not enough. The Norwegian whaling industry had become a modern Moloch whose appetite was insatiable—and unrelenting. And there was still one major ocean left to ravage. The killer fleet ranged even farther south until, off the tip of South America, it found whales in such multitudes as had not been seen since the first Basques sailed into the Sea of Whales 400 or more years earlier.

By 1912, sixty-two killer boats were steaming out of shore bases on the Falkland and South Orkney Islands, scouring the nearby waters with such rapacity that, in the summer of that year, they delivered more than 20,000 whale carcasses to the factories. About 80 per cent of these were humpbacks, the rest a mixture of right whales, blues, and finners.

Because the whales were so incredibly abundant, individual catchers could easily kill a dozen or more in a single day. And because they
could
—they often
did.
One catcher out of the Falklands killed thirty-seven whales between dawn and dusk. The corpses were flagged, then cast adrift to be picked up when the killer boat had finished her butchery and was ready to return to the factory. That is, they were picked up if they could still be found. All too often they were never seen again, having been lost in darkness or in fog, or carried away by wind and current. When we take into account losses from this cause alone, together with the usual mortality suffered by wounded whales and orphaned calves, the true magnitude of the slaughter begins to boggle the imagination.

Processing was as wasteful as killing. Because there was a glut of corpses, the flensers only stripped off the thicker back and belly blubber whereupon, as Ommanney tells us, “the
skrotts
, as the carcasses were called, were cast adrift in the harbour. They floated ashore to rot on the beaches and to this day [1971] Deception Harbour in the South Shetlands and many of the bays and inlets of South Georgia are edged with ramparts of bleached bones, skulls, jaws, backbones and ribs, memorials to the greed and folly of mankind.”

The stench of these harbours was legendary. But as the manager of a latter-day American whaling station defiantly proclaimed: “Who the hell gives a damn! That's the stink of money and it sure smells good to me.”

It smelled so good to the Norwegians that, just after World War I, a few of their bigger killer boats pushed yet farther south to explore the possibilities of even more profitable slaughter. When they came within sight of the permanent ice pack of the Antarctic Ocean they discovered what Herman Melville, of
Moby Dick
fame, had believed would forever remain an inviolable refuge where “The whales can at last resort to the Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.”

That last resort was one no longer. When the returned catcher captains reported having found rorquals in such numbers as to be almost astronomical, neither the Antarctic Ocean's remoteness from shore bases nor the white hostility of its climate could suffice to protect the whales from man's remorseless avarice.

Initially, distance was a problem. Shore factories could not be established on the ice of the frozen continent itself, and the island bases were a long way north. However, in 1925, a Captain Sorlle of Vestfold, Norway, displayed the genius for destruction of a Svend Foyn and invented the ultimate weapon with which to convert what remained of the world's great whales into hard cash.

He invented the pelagic factory ship—a very large vessel designed to operate in the open ocean, fitted with a gaping hole in the stern and a ramp up which whales could be winched into a combined floating abattoir and processing plant. Even the first of these ships was big enough and rugged enough to “work” whales at sea in almost any weather, and it could be stored for voyages of six months or more. Each factory ship became the nucleus of a fleet grimly comparable in composition to a naval task force. It included a pack of killers of new and even more terrible potential, buoy boats to mark the corpses, tugs to haul them to the factory, and freighter-tankers to resupply the fleet at sea, after which they would carry the accumulated whale products from the factory ships to distant markets.

Even Sorlle's rudimentary prototype was able to penetrate southward to near the edge of the Antarctic pack, and later versions ranged the whole of the Antarctic Ocean, killing and processing rorquals and such other whales as might be found on a twenty-four-hour-a-day assembly line basis. There was now no place left on earth where whales could escape the fate we had ordained for them.

The ensuing massacre (and there is no other word for it) remains without parallel in the history of man's exploitation of other living beings. It will probably never be surpassed, if only because no other such an enormous aggregation of large animals still exists upon this planet.

In 1931, only six years after the first voyage of the first factory ship, forty-one such ships serviced by 232 killer boats were savaging the Antarctic rorquals. They flew the flags of the several nations whose businessmen had rushed to gain a share of this lucrative enterprise. Among them were the U.S., Norway, Great Britain, Japan, Panama, Argentina, Germany, and Holland; but it was the Norwegians who dominated the shambles, either on their own behalf or by means of the crews and ships they provided on hire and charter.