Sea of Slaughter (44 page)

Once removed from the carcass, the blubber tended to “waste” or liquefy, allowing the precious oil to sink into the ground, so individual walrus were killed only as there was room for their fat in the trypots. But even with two pots boiling twenty-four hours a day, it took many days to render all the blubber from a single cut. During this time, the sun that had tempted the sea cows onto the beaches in the first place became their implacable tormentor. It burned down relentlessly until even their thick hides cooked and split, letting rivulets of blood and oil run down their heaving flanks. No drink was available and so, as their life fluids trickled away, thirst became an ultimate agony.

Eventually someone would give them their quietus. In Haldiman's time, this was done by firing a one-inch diameter iron ball from a muzzleloader into the cow's head. Frequently this only stunned the animal. No matter. The hide was stripped off even if the beast still lived. Then the blubber layer, which in autumn would be at least six inches thick, was sliced clear and forked into the bubbling vats. The naked carcass was left to lie where it was until eventually it, together with hundreds of attendant corpses, rotted down into the fouled and greasy sand, leaving behind only a colossal stench and acres of stained bones.

In earlier times the tusks had been carefully hacked out of the skulls, but by 1760 they were being largely ignored. A massive influx of elephant ivory into Europe from Africa and India had finally rendered walrus ivory relatively valueless. In the 1800s, a Magdalen Island merchant offered one cent apiece for every sizable walrus tusk that could still be found on the islands. Before that summer ended, the
Madelinots
had collected more than
two tons
of ivory from the old killing grounds. However, the merchant was then unable to find a market for this one-time treasure and was reduced to shipping it out as ballast in one of his schooners.

By 1760, changing European markets had also made walrus hides hardly worth the trouble of preparing them. Oil was now entirely the thing. In 1767, the oil derived from an average spring walrus fetched the equivalent of $20 (1984 value) while that from a fat, fall bull could go as high as $60. But before the next decade ended, the price had doubled! The noose imposed by human avarice was tightening in time-honoured style.

As the value of their oil rose, so were the walrus even more pitilessly butchered; and as the slaughter burgeoned, so did their numbers fall. But the value of their oil increased with their increasing rarity. The spiral tightened with every turn; and extinction lay at its centre.

The
coup de grâce
was delivered in 1762 when the British government gave two Bostonians, a Mr. Thompson and a Colonel Gridley, the monopoly of the walrus fishery at the Magdalens and in neighbouring waters. Gridley first visited the islands during the final years of the war with France, possibly accompanying Vice Admiral Molineux Shuldan, who took a British squadron there and was astounded to behold “seven or eight thousand walrus on each of the Island's echouries.” What the astute Gridley saw was thousands of pounds sterling to fill the pockets of himself and his friends; and by 1765 he had every reason to know for a fact that what Lieutenant Haldiman had written in his report of that year was marvellously true: “The Magdalens seem to be superior to any place in North America for the taking of the Sea Cow. Their numbers are incredible, amounting, upon as true a computation as can be made, to 100,000 or upwards.”

During its first year on the islands, Gridley's crew was only large enough to work three of the eleven traditional Magdalen echouries; nevertheless they killed some 25,000 walrus and made over 1,000 barrels of oil. The following year he imported twenty Acadian French families who had formerly been walrus hunters on Prince Edward Island and in Northumberland Strait.

Between 1767 and 1774 his firm exported walrus oil to Europe through St. John's, Newfoundland, to a declared value of nearly £11,000, or about a quarter of a million 1984 dollars. No records exist of how much was shipped via New England ports.

Gridley and Thompson had their Eldorado, but they were not left in sole possession of it. Following on the conquest of New France, predatory fleets of New England schooners had begun swarming into the Gulf to see what they could find. And they soon found the sea cows. Being rugged upholders of the principles of free enterprise, they were not intimidated by Gridley's monopoly, and so they not only harried the walrus in the waters around the Magdalens but raided the echouries, too.

“New England vessels approach close to shore and frequently shoot at the walrus near the Echouries, sometimes through ignorance and sometimes through mischievous design,” wrote Haldiman. “The Master of one sloop, observing the coast of Brion Island to be well stocked with Sea Cows, made use of every method he could think of to capture them, but without success, till at length he hit on the unfortunate resolution of shooting at them from the banks behind the Echouries. In consequence, he made 18–20 barrels of oil to share among as many men, and the Cows abandoned that Echourie and have never resorted there since.”

By 1774, as many as 100 New England vessels were fishing the Magdalen waters, mainly for herring and cod but taking walrus whenever they got the chance; and doing so, as the aggrieved owners of the island reported, “in a reckless and barbarous way... driving them away and preventing them from breeding.” The schooner hunt
was
singularly wasteful. Of every dozen animals shot while in the water, only one or two would be recovered, most of the rest surviving as cripples if they were lucky, or dying later, according to the severity of their wounds.

Faced with the competition of the schooner men, Gridley redoubled his own efforts to get what remained to be got, hiring or dragooning more labour until he had fifty Acadian families as well as a lawless crew of New England “wharf rats” working for him. What followed was bloody massacre. In 1780 four cuts on one beach alone yielded 2,400 walrus.

In 1798, Captain Crofton of the Royal Navy was sent to the Magdalens by the governor of Newfoundland to investigate rumours that the sea cows were being perilously depleted. Crofton's report was brief, and final: “I am extremely sorry to acquaint you that the Sea Cow fishery on these islands is totally annihilated.”

Two years later, on a fine spring morning at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some Acadians had gone to the beach at La Bassin in the south part of the Magdalens to dig clams for cod bait. A hundred yards off the empty echourie a massive head suddenly reared out of the heaving surf. The men straightened from their digging and stared seaward at a
vache marin
whose gleaming tusks seemed longer than any they had ever seen before. Holding its position rock-solid in the breakers, it seemed to return their stares with such intensity that some of the men became uneasy. Then it submerged.

None of its kind has ever again been seen in the one-time heartland of the vanished nation.

After 1800 no resident walrus existed anywhere south of the Strait of Belle Isle, and precious few remained alive even on the Labrador coast to the northward. An anonymous official reporting in the Sessional Papers of the Quebec government in mid-century had this to say about their disappearance.

“They used to be found basking in the sun and breathing at their ease on the sandy beaches of the Gulf. But first the French, then the English and Americans waged as bitter a war against them that at the commencement of this century they were almost totally destroyed... they are now hardly ever to be met with except on the Labrador coast, in Hudson's Straits and Hudson's Bay... Their tusks are often found buried in the sand of the shores of the River and Gulf of St. Lawrence. These are the last remains of those animals whose spoils have helped to build up many fortunes. But the indifference and want of foresight of governments, and the cupidity of merchants, have caused their total disappearance.”

There was now no respite for walrus anywhere. During the latter part of the nineteenth century even those living in far northern waters came under attack as British and American whalers, having swept the Arctic seas almost clean of merchantable whales, turned guns and harpoons against any and all other creatures whose corpses could return some profit. Of these, the walrus was first choice.

Walrus hides had once again become of value, as raw material from which bicycle seats were made. There was even a renewed demand for tusk ivory in the manufacture of expensive toilet accessories for wealthy women. And train oil continued to rise in price. The result was that some whalers started going north especially for walrus. In 1897, having scoured the Spitzbergen archipelago clean of whales as well as walrus, the British ventured east to discover a previously untouched tribe in remote Franz Joseph Land. Within ten years, they had wiped it out. In Greenland, so Oliver Goldsmith in his
Animated Nature
tells us, “the whale-fishers have been known to kill 300 or 400 [walrus] at a time and... along those shores bones are seen lying in prodigious quantities, sacrificed to those who sought them only for the purposes of avarice and luxury.”

In North America's eastern Arctic things were as bad or worse. Between 1868 and 1873, whalers in that region landed an average of 60,000 walrus a year, with a recovery rate of about one in four when shot at sea. This massacre was paralleled in the western Arctic, particularly in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas where, between 1869 and 1874, Yankee whalers landed an estimated 150,000 sea cows out of perhaps double that number killed, for a production of 40,000 barrels of oil.

This carnage brought starvation to native northern peoples who depended on walrus as a staple food. These unfortunates found an advocate in a New England whaler named Captain Baker who had once been wrecked on the Alaskan coast and had survived only because the Eskimos succoured him and his crew.

“I wish to say to the ship agents and owners in New Bedford that the wholesale butchery of the walrus pursued by nearly all their ships will surely end in the extermination of the races of natives who rely upon these animals... although to abandon an enterprise that in one season alone yielded 10,000 barrels of oil, for the sake of the Esquimaux, may seem preposterous and meet with derision and contempt... But let them who deride it see the misery entailed by this unjust wrong... I feel quite sure that a business that can last not much longer anyway will be condemned by every prompting of humanity that ever actuated the heart of a Christian.”

Captain Baker was a cockeyed optimist. Nothing could deflect the whalemen and the good burghers from the pursuit of profits. Their own records show that, by 1920, they had slaughtered between two and three
million
sea cows and had reduced the Pacific walrus nation to a few tens of thousands. Nobody kept any records of the consequent loss of life amongst the native peoples of the northern coasts. Their agonies were irrelevant.

The massacre of northern walrus was not limited to commercial exploitation. From about 1890 until well into the 1920s, millionaire American and European sport hunters ranged the eastern Arctic all the way from Spitzbergen to Ellesmere Island on private “scientific expeditions,” which in reality were nothing more than highly competitive attempts to kill more northern animals than anyone else had ever done before. These gentlemen kept careful records of the destruction wrought by their expensive guns, and walrus provided one of their prime targets. One proud sportsman who visited the northwest Greenland coast was able to tally eighty-four bull walrus, twenty cows, and “a number of youngsters” in his game book during a single three-week period. As he admitted, he had probably killed a great many more, but the ethics of good sportsmanship had prevented him from claiming any whose deaths had not been indisputably confirmed.

When the European invasion of North America began, the region that would become eastern Canada and the northeastern United States had a resident walrus population numbering no less than three-quarters of a million. At least another quarter million inhabited the adjacent seas to the northward. By 1972, the total walrus population of eastern North America may have numbered between 5,000 and 10,000, entirely restricted to Arctic and Subarctic waters. Although officially protected, their numbers are still being depleted, primarily for their tusks, which are now much in vogue again both as expensive souvenirs and as raw material for craft carving. In 1981, many tons of illegal North American walrus ivory entered international markets where it was selling for up to $150 a pound. U. S. Federal Wildlife Service agents in Alaska seized
10,000 pounds
of tusks in a single day. This much ivory required the destruction of a minimum of 750 adult walrus. So many headless walrus have recently washed up on the Siberian coast opposite Alaska that the Soviet Union has filed a formal complaint with the U.S. State Department against the ongoing massacre.

Nevertheless, the outlook for the survival of the walrus is not totally bleak. For whatever reasons, the Soviets have given effective protection to their remaining morse, and to such effect that the species is beginning to recover at least a shadow of its lost numbers both in the Barents Sea and in the East Siberian Sea. The Wrangell Island tribe, which was reduced to the verge of extinction by Russian and Yankee hunters early in the twentieth century, has now, under absolute protection, increased to nearly 70,000 individuals, a figure that Soviet biologists think may be close to the aboriginal number. And even in Alaskan waters, despite “headhunting” for ivory, there has been some recovery.

But in non-Arctic waters it has mostly become bones.

Old bones!

Near the village of Old Harry, on Coffin Island in the Magdalen group, is a place still called Sea Cow Path. It is a natural gully leading inland through the shifting dunes from the magnificent East Cape beaches (which once hosted the largest echouries in the archipelago) to a bowl-shaped depression a quarter of a mile in diameter. Once dry, this basin is now shallowly flooded by the waters of an adjacent lagoon.