Sea of Slaughter (39 page)

“I regret to say that we made several attempts to shoot them with our express-rifles; but they took no notice. Then we decided to fire a volley.

“Three bottlenoses were heading straight for us; they came up astern, and one of them stopped and lay motionless about 20 yards away from the ship. The gunners stood together on the half-deck aft. Counting up to three we all blazed away, but the whale lifted his tail high in the air, lashed the water with it, and disappeared. Some blubber which it left floating on the surface was much appreciated by the gulls.

“The whale did not worry itself much about our bullets, apparently, for we afterwards saw it swimming along quite gamely with the others. We knew it was the same one by the gulls which gathered on the water wherever it had been, no doubt finding blood and blubber there.

“The captain suggested that it might be interesting to lower a boat and see how near we could get to them. This was accordingly done and we rowed towards one or two whales which were lying quite still. We were able to approach so near that we could almost touch them with our oars. Then suddenly they lifted their tails in the air, brought them down with a whack that drenched the boat with spray, and disappeared. Presently they came up again close to us, swam round the boat and had a good look at us from every point of view, then lay just under the surface of the sea, turning on one side to watch us with their small eyes.

“Once the captain laid hold of the tail of one of them with the boat-hook. The whale heaved up its tail, brought it down with a splash, and dived. If we rowed on a bit they followed, half a dozen of them at once swimming alongside of us, now a little in front, now a little behind, but always quite close to us; they were evidently extremely inquisitive.

“I cannot deny that we wished we had possessed some sort of instrument to fasten on to these big fellows, for they would have been sporting steeds to drive, as Markussen once discovered when he ‘harnessed' one of them. He told us the story himself on board the ‘Viking'.

“ ‘I couldn't bear seeing all this blubber going a-begging year after year in the sea round my ship', he related. ‘Well, one fine day I saw a lot of bottlenoses about. So I rigged up a boat with a harpoon, and took three whale-lines to be on the safe side... Well, we soon fell in with a fine fellow who came up right ahead of the boat. When I stuck the harpoon into him, he made a hell of a splash and then sounded; the line ran out so fast that you could smell burning... The first line ran out, and the second soon followed; then he started on the third line, and it ran out every bit as fast as the other two had done.

“ ‘When he had taken the lot of it he pulled the boat under too, straight on without a stop; down it went, and left us behind kicking about in the water.

“ ‘The men yelled like the devil—they couldn't swim; but I told 'em to stow it, and gave each of 'em an oar to hang on to.

“ ‘As luck would have it the “Vega” had steam up, and could come at once and haul us out.

“ ‘But them fish are the very devil to stay under water. Though the sea was like glass and we kept a sharp look-out from the crow's nest all day in the hope of seeing our boat, neither boat nor fish did we ever see again. He certainly didn't come up anywhere between us and the horizon.

“ ‘I felt pretty sore at losing such a good boat.

“ ‘Well I wasn't going to risk another boat, but I thought I'd be even with him all the same. Next year I took some petroleum casks with me. I rigged up three of these casks, fixing them on to three new whale-lines, and laid them all ready at the bottom of the boat.

“ ‘Then we started out again. Well, I made fast to a fish, and down he went in the same way. The first line ran right out and we chucked the first cask overboard. But he pulled it on down with him full pelt as before, without stopping a moment. Then the second line ran but, and we chucked the second cask into the water, but it just went after the first and disappeared in the same non-stop fashion; while the third line went running out as fast as though we hadn't had any casks at all.

“ ‘At length we chucked the last cask overboard; but I'll be hanged if it didn't go under every bit as quick as the others. So we'd lost the whale and the lines and the casks, and we never saw them again. This whale didn't come up anywhere within sight either, so far as we could make out.

“ ‘Who'd have thought the old fish had so much go in him? Anyway, I gave him up after that.' ”

About 1877, with the bowhead almost gone, some Scots whalers working the northwestern grounds began killing Chaney Johns using bomb-lances and grenades. As Nansen had discovered, their friendliness and curiosity made them easy targets. Moreover, they were bound by extraordinarily strong family ties and would not abandon a wounded member of the pod, as Captain David Gray, the first Scot to hunt them, found:

“They are gregarious in their habits, going in herds of from four to ten, although many different herds are frequently in sight at the same time. The adult males very often go by themselves; but young bulls, cows and calves, with an old male as a leader, are sometimes seen together.

“They are very unsuspicious, coming close alongside the ship, round about and underneath the boats, until their curiosity is satisfied. The herd never leaves a wounded companion so long as it is alive; but they desert it immediately when dead; and if another can be harpooned before the previous struck one is killed, we often capture the whole herd, frequently taking ten, and on one occasion fifteen, before our hold over them was lost.”

In 1882, Gray, commanding the Dundee whaler
Eclipse,
killed 203 Chaney Johns off northern Labrador. Thereafter they became increasingly sought after, particularly by Norwegian whalers newly equipped with Svend Foyn's terrible harpoon gun. By 1891, seventy Norwegian killer boats were hunting them. Every year thereafter until early in the twentieth century, the Norwegians landed an average of 2,000 and “struck” and lost a great many more. The cumulative destruction was so enormous that by 1920 the whalers could only find and kill 200–300. At this point the “fishery” was abandoned as being insufficiently rewarding.

That the Chaney Johns had not been totally exterminated was due to the dispersal of the few survivors over such a vast waste of ocean that whalers could no longer find them in worthwhile numbers. They, however, could find each other and during the next half-century their pods began to grow again. Given sufficient time they might eventually have recovered something approaching their former abundance—but that was not to be.

As we have seen, during the 1920s and 1930s, Norwegian whalers turned their fatal attention to the titanic slaughter of great whales in southern waters. However, as that massacre reached its bloody climax and began to wane from lack of victims, more and more Norwegians returned to hunting “second-string” whales in waters nearer home. Although the minke (soon to be discussed) was chief amongst these, the awesomely efficient Norwegians discovered that some few Chaney Johns were again available in western waters and began killing them as well. World War II did not bring a halt to Norwegian whaling, which continued under the aegis of the Germans; but it did limit it to home waters with the result that, being a pelagic species, few Chaney Johns were caught. But when that war ended, Norwegian whalers began going deep-sea again.

Equipped with a new generation of extremely fast and efficient small-whale killers, they carried death and destruction first to Scottish waters, thence ever westward to the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and the northeastern approaches to America. Along the way they devastated the few remaining pods of Chaney Johns.

In 1962, I went aboard one of their small-whale catchers in Thurso harbour in northern Scotland. The skipper, who was also the gunner of his seventy-foot killer, cheerfully explained the nature of his business.

“We are just a meat shop, you might call us,” he said with a laugh. “We fit out from Bergen and just keep going west 'til we find whales. Minkes is best for us, bottlenose is next, but if we don't get enough of them, there is always killers and potheads [orcas and pilot whales].

“After the whale is struck with our nice 50-mm gun, we bring him alongside. If he is not too big we haul him on deck. If not, we put a sling around him to keep him steady, then the lads go overboard with spiked boots and cutting knives. We don't have too much refrigerated stowage space, you understand, so we mostly just cut out the prime cuts: steaks, sirloins, roasts. The rest? Well, the sharks got to have their suppers too.”

I asked about the market for meat and was told that minke commanded a very good price in Norway, where some people preferred it to beef, but that bottlenose was only fit for pet food. When the kill was greater than the home market could absorb, the frozen meat was shipped to the apparently insatiable Japanese.

The second depredation visited on the Chaney John was less severe than the first only because there were far fewer whales to kill. It was, however, more thorough and has resulted in the near elimination of the species in the North Atlantic. Between 1962 and 1967, Karl Karlsen's fleet operating out of Blandford, Nova Scotia, killed eighty-seven Chaney Johns, but met with no more during the remaining five years the station was in operation. Between 1969 and 1971, long-range whaling vessels from Norway patrolling through the seas off the Canadian Atlantic coast mainly after minkes killed about 400 bottlenose whales as an incidental catch, but by 1972 they were only able to find and kill seventeen. In later years, they could find none.

In the opinion of one Canadian cetologist, Chaney John may be destined to become the second whale species, after the Atlantic grey whale, to become extinct at the hands of man, this despite the fact that, since 1977, the North Atlantic bottlenose has had “provisional protected status” under International Whaling Commission regulations.

“Small-whale quartet” is the name given, half humorously perhaps, by cetologists and fisheries management experts to the group that includes the bottlenose, orca, pilot, and minke whales. Of the four, the minke has been and still remains the most important to Norwegian whalers, the chief exploiters of the quartet.

The thirty-foot, ten-ton minke is, it will be remembered, a rorqual—the smallest member of that family. Whale scientists, who are notoriously conservative about such matters, concede that as late as the 1950s it numbered better than a quarter of a million in southern seas and probably more than 100,000 in the North Atlantic. It had suffered only slightly from commercial whaling before World War II because it was relatively small, but after men finished with the human slaughter the minke's turn came.

A group of Norwegian businessmen arrived in Newfoundland in 1946 with a proposal to establish a small-whale fishery there. They were greeted with open arms and within the year had built a modern processing plant, Arctic Fisheries, near the village of South Dildo in Trinity Bay—a mighty arm of the sea that for centuries had been renowned for its plethora of whales. Supplied by two ultra-modern killer boats, the plant was designed to produce marine oil for the margarine trade and frozen meat to be sold in Europe and Japan. In later years, Arctic Fisheries operated with Japanese affiliations, killing large whales as well as small, but at first it concentrated on the small-whale quartet. Orcas and bottlenoses proved scarce but an abundance of minkes and pilots made up for that. Because minkes were individually much larger and therefore more valuable than pilots, they were the first choice of the killer boats.

Between 1947 and 1972, the company processed slightly more than 1,000 minkes. Yet, although typical of its kind, the Dildo operation represented a mere drop in the bloody bucket of worldwide minke exploitation. Norwegian “small quartet” whalers ranging the North Atlantic landed 16,000 minkes between 1953 and 1957. Thereafter, the annual yield began to decline until by 1975 the catch was down to a mere 1,800. It continues to decline as the last remnants of the eastern North Atlantic minkes are hauled up on the greasy decks of Norwegian processing vessels.

A numerical assessment of the total kill is difficult to arrive at, but since some of the Norwegian boats are known to have had loss rates of 80 per cent, and considering that the reported landings between 1939 and 1975 totalled nearly 75,000, the death tally for the North Atlantic minke tribes must by now be well over 100,000.

The North Atlantic is not the only current minke killing ground of note. In 1969, Antarctic pelagic whaling fleets began taking minkes in lieu of the larger species that by then had mostly been extirpated in southern waters. During the succeeding three years Norwegian, Japanese, and Soviet Antarctic factory ships processed nearly 20,000 minkes. This was the beginning of the last hurrah for whaling in the far south. When it concludes, as it will soon if for no other reason than a lack of whales, peace will return to those cold and distant seas—but it will be the peace of the dead and the departed.

In the Sea of Whales the commercial massacre has ended. It is now possible for dedicated whale watchers in the right places, at the right seasons, to see there some of the last survivors of the minke kind. If we can forbear from turning on them once again, the minke may yet escape the vortex of extinction.

About 1592, a cartographer named Petrus Plancius drew a map of
Nova Francia
and the New World. Like many maps of that era it was illustrated with vignettes of life. One such is a lively and detailed picture of whaling on the east coast of Newfoundland.

The scene is the foot of a deep bay. The foreground is filled with rowboats, each carrying two men. This flotilla has just completed driving a school of small whales onto a gently sloping beach and, while some of the boatmen attack the stranded animals with lance-like darts, others on shore are already at work stripping off the blubber. In the distance, a tryworks sends a great coil of black smoke into the sky. The whales, not much larger than the boats, have bulbous, protruding foreheads. Considering their size and circumstances they can only be identified as pilot whales. And this picture could, with some small variations, equally well represent a scene from several thousand years ago; or from the 1950s.