Sea of Slaughter (4 page)

In the 1570s, Captain Anthony Parkhurst wrote: “at an Island named Pengwin we may drive them on a plank into our ship, as many as will lade her... There is more meat on one of them than on a goose. The Frenchmen that fish near the grand bay do bring but small store of meat with them, but victual themselves always with these birds.”

A few years later, Edward Hayes, master of one of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's ships, described “an island named Penguin [because] of a fowle there breeding in incredible abundance, which cannot fly... which the Frenchmen take without difficulty... to barrel up with salt.”

Around 1600, Richard Whitbourne noted: “These Penguins are as big as geese and... they multiply so infinitely upon a certain flat island that men drive them from hence upon a board, into their boats by the hundreds at a time, as if God had made the innocency of so poor a creature to become such an admirable instrument for the sustenation of man.”

The idea that God created all living creatures to serve man's needs was not, of course, unique with Whitbourne. It is deeply ingrained in Judeo-Christian philosophy and continues to provide one of the major rationalizations with which we justify the wholesale destruction of other animals.

Justifiable or not, the mass destruction of seabird rookeries in the New World proceeded apace. The birds were a staple of fishermen and settlers alike. Writing of the French presence in the region around 1615, Lescarbot tells us that “The greatest abundance [the people have] comes from certain islands where are such quantity of ducks, gannets, puffins, seagulls, cormorants and others that it is a wonderful thing to see [and] will seem to some almost incredible... we passed some of those islands [near Canso] where in a quarter of an hour we loaded our longboat with them. We had only to strike them down with staves until we were weary of striking.” Courtemanche, writing in 1705 about the north shore of the Gulf, describes the rookeries there and adds: “for a whole month they slaughter them with iron-tipped clubs in such quantity that it is an incredible thing.”

As guns and powder became cheaper and more available in the early eighteenth century, the seabird slaughter took on a new dimension, as this note from Cape Breton, circa 1750, attests. “The birds fly by in swarms to go to their laying in spring on the bird islands... At this time there is such prodigious carnage that we shot up to 1000 gunshots every day.”

The carnage resulting from the “gunning” of adult birds in passage to, from, and at the rookeries grew with the passing centuries. As late as 1900, punt-gunners on the north shore of the Gulf were shooting, in a single day, “half-a-boat load, which would be about four or five hundred eiders, scoters, puffins, murres, gulls etc.”

As if the destruction of adults and partly grown young was not horrendous enough, the seabirds had also to endure a mounting wastage of their eggs. Egging began in a relatively small way with casual raids on rookeries by ships' crews and fishermen seeking food for themselves. As John Mason, writing about life in Newfoundland around 1620, put it: “The sea fowles are Gulls white and gray, Penguins, Sea Pigeons, Ice Birds, Bottlenoses and other sorts... [and] all are bountiful to us with their eggs, as good as our Turkie or Hens, with which the Islands are well replenished.”

This began to change after the beginning of the eighteenth century, by which time the rapid growth of population along the Atlantic seaboard was creating a commercial market for many “products” of land and sea... amongst them seabird eggs. Egging now became a profitable business and professional eggers began to scout the coasts, denuding every rookery they could find. By about 1780, American eggers had so savaged the bird islands along the eastern coasts of the United States that they could no longer supply the burgeoning demand from cities such as Boston and New York. Consequently, the export of seabird eggs became a profitable business for the British colonies to the north.

As was to be expected, the spearbill was a foremost victim in early times when it was still abundant. Aaron Thomas wrote this succinct description of penguin egging in Newfoundland.

“If you go to the Funks for eggs, to be certain of getting them fresh you pursue the following rule:—you drive, knock and Shove the poor Penguins in heaps. You then scrape all their Eggs in Tumps in the same manner you would a heap of Apples in an Orchard... these Eggs, from being dropped some time, are stale and useless, but you having cleared a space of ground... retire for a day or two... at the end of which time you will find plenty of Eggs—fresh for certain!”

If, as the St. Kildans claimed, the spearbill laid only a single egg, and did not lay again that year once the egg was destroyed, the result of such wholesale destruction can easily be foreseen.

A British naval captain investigating commercial egging in Newfoundland reported: “Parties repair [to the Funk Islands] to collect eggs and feathers. At one time a very considerable profit could be gained but lately, owing to the war of extermination, it has greatly diminished. One vessel nevertheless is said to have cleared 200 Pounds currency in a single trip.”

William Palmer, who visited Funk in 1887, added this postscript: “What must have been the multitudes of birds in former years on this lonely island. Great auks, murres, razorbills, puffins, Arctic terns, gannets undoubtedly swarmed, and were never molested except by an occasional visit from the now-extinct Newfoundland red man; but now since the white fisherman began to plunder it, how changed. Today but for the Arctic terns and the puffins the island may be said to be deserted. [Although] sixteen barrels of murres and razorbill eggs have been known to be gathered at a time and taken to St. John's, we did not see a dozen eggs.”

It is to John James Audubon that we owe the most graphic account of what the egging business was like. In June of 1833, Audubon visited Nova Scotia where he met a party of eggers who, having taken some 40,000 seabird eggs, were selling them to an exporter in Halifax for twenty-five cents a dozen. A few days later, while visiting a bird island, he encountered two eggers “who had collected 800 dozen murres' eggs and expected to get 2000 dozen... the number of broken eggs on the island created a fetid smell scarcely to be borne.” However, it was not until 1840, when he spent some weeks on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that Audubon experienced the full horror of the ugly business. What follows is a condensed version of his account.

“The Eggers great object is to plunder every nest, no matter where, and at whatever risk. They are the pest of the feathered tribes, and their brutal propensity to destroy the poor creatures after they have robbed them is abundantly gratified. But I could not entirely credit all their cruelties until I had actually witnessed their proceedings.

“Their vessel is a shabby thing. Her hold sends forth an odour pestilential as a charnel house. Her crew, eight in number, throw their boat overboard and seat themselves, each with a rusty gun. One of them sculls the skiff toward an island for centuries past the breeding place of myriads. At the approach of the vile thieves, clouds of birds rise from the rock and fill the air around, wheeling and screaming over their enemies.

“The reports of several muskets loaded with heavy shot are now heard, while dead and wounded birds fall heavily on the rock or into the water. The remaining birds hover in dismay over their assailants who land and walk forward exultingly. Look at them! See how they crush the chick within its shell, how they trample on every egg in their way. Onward they go, and when they leave the isle not an egg that they can find is left entire.

“They regain their filthy shallop and sail to another island a few miles distant. Arrived there they re-act the same scene, crushing every egg they can find. For a week they travel until they have reached the last breeding place on the coast. Then they return, touching at every isle in succession, and collect the fresh eggs which have been laid since their previous visit.

“With their bark half filled with fresh eggs they proceed to the principal rock where they first landed. But what is their surprise to find others there helping themselves. In boiling rage they run up to these other Eggers. The first question is a discharge of muskets, the answer is another. One man is carried to his boat with a fractured skull, another limps with a shot in his leg, and a third feels how many teeth have been driven through the hole in his cheek. At last, however, the quarrel is settled—the booty is to be divided.

“These people also gather all the eider down they can find; yet so inconsiderate are they that they kill every bird that comes in their way. The eggs of Gulls, Guillemots and Ducks are searched for with care; and they massacre the Puffins and some other birds in vast numbers for their feathers. So constant and persevering are their depredations that these species have [largely] abandoned their ancient breeding places. This war of extermination cannot last many years more.”

The wholesale destruction continued unabated until there were few if any accessible seabird rookeries from Labrador to Florida still worth robbing. In 1919, Dr. Arthur Bent summed up the results of this ruthless despoliation of the seabirds in his monumental
Life Histories
of North American birds.

“Their worst enemies are, of course, human beings, who have for generations killed them in enormous numbers and robbed them of their eggs unmercifully, until they have been practically extirpated.”

Not content to slaughter adult spearbills at a fearsome rate and to destroy uncounted numbers of their eggs for “the sustenation of man,” European invaders of the New World were quick to find more ways to exploit the birds.

By the latter part of the sixteenth century, the demand for oil had become insatiable and train oil was fetching premium prices.
2
Unfortunately for the spearbills, the blanket of fat that served to insulate them from the frigid North Atlantic could be rendered into an excellent grade of oil. The Basques were probably the first to exploit this opportunity as an adjunct to their massive whaling enterprises in New World waters; but it soon became a profitable sideline to the fisheries pursued by other nations.

Crude tryworks were commonplace in most fishing harbours by 1600. They were fired up whenever the fishermen had the time and opportunity to make an incidental haul of some local form of life which would make train. Thus seals, walrus, whales, porpoises... and seabirds all served their turn. Because of its great size, high fat content, and availability, the spearbill was, and remained, the prime target amongst the seabird tribes for as long as it lasted. Round about 1630, so Nicolas Denys tells us, French ships fishing for cod often loaded ten to twelve puncheons of penguin oil as well. Since thousands of spearbill carcasses were needed to produce such a quantity of train, it is apparent that this was no petty enterprise. Nor was it limited to the French. English, Spanish, and Portuguese cod fishers were butchering the birds for oil on a similar scale, and some were even making special voyages to isolated rookeries where they would set up portable tryworks during the spearbill breeding season. They were able to boil oil on even the most barren rocks by feeding the fires with skins and carcasses after the layer of fat had been removed. Some of the more profligate and ruthless of the oilers used the entire bird, as Aaron Thomas, writing about Funk Island as it was near the end of the eighteenth century, confirms.

“While you abide on this Island you are in the constant practize of horrid crueltys, for you not only Skin [the Penguins]
Alive,
but you burn them
Alive
also... You take a Kettle with you and kindle the fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made from the unfortunate Penguins themselves.”

Boiling the corpses for train did not exhaust the opportunities for Europeans to profit from the destruction of seabird populations. Although immense summer runs of small school-fish such as herring, capelin, mackerel, and squid normally provided fishermen with bait in any required quantity, there was sometimes a hiatus between the runs, or before the school-fish “struck in” to the coast. Shore-based fishermen soon found a solution to such temporary bait shortages—particularly during June and July. Raiding parties would sweep the seabird islands, massacring adults and young alike. The corpses would then be torn into fragments with which to bait the hand lines that were the principal form of cod-fishing gear.

In the days of their abundance, penguins made up a major part of the seabird bait and this destruction, added to the kill for food and oil, had its inevitable result. No single species, no matter how numerous in the beginning, could have withstood such carnage indefinitely. By the mid-1700s, only a handful of shrunken and beleaguered rookeries still existed. Then a new scourge was visited upon them.

During the latter part of that century, wide-awake entrepreneurs, mostly from New England, began exploiting a growing demand for feathers and down used in bedding and for upholstery both in America and in Europe. Each spring, droves of schooners from as far south as Chesapeake Bay appeared on the coasts of Newfoundland and the Gulf, intent on ransacking the islands where colonial seabirds nested. At first they concentrated on eider ducks, taking not only the down with which the nests were lined, but also shooting and netting countless thousands of adults. So ruthless were they that the once seemingly inexhaustible eider flocks were soon diminished to “worthless remnants.” The pillagers then turned on the seabird rookeries, including the last remaining spearbill colonies.

In 1775, Newfoundland authorities petitioned Britain to stop the massacre. “Contiguous to the North part of the Island are a great many islands where birds breed in abundance and which were of great service to the inhabitants for food in winter and for bait for catching fish during summer... [these inhabitants are] now almost deprived, as a great part of the birds have been destroyed within a few years by crews of men who kill them in their breeding season for feathers, of which they make a traffic... we pray an entire stop except for food or bait.”