Sea of Slaughter (45 page)

One sunlit summer day I splashed my way across its length and breadth, walking—not on sand—but on a bed of bones. I dug a test pit at low tide and at a depth of three feet was still shovelling through crumbling brown bones in a stinking matrix of black muck. These were the mortal remains of thousands of sea cows for whom this place had been the end of the path that bears their name.

Later I rested on the slope of a nearby dune. A great blue heron paced the shore of the lagoon. Distant gulls mewed in the white spindrift on the empty ocean beach. The sweet smell of balsam from a nearby woods was a benison and a delight. Idly I sifted hot sand through my fingers... felt something... took it in my hand. It was a corroded iron musket ball, the size of a small plum. It lay heavy in my palm... and the scene before me wavered. Changed. And darkened.

Sable plumes of greasy smoke rolled high into a pallid sky from roaring fires under blackened vats whose contents bubbled noisomely. The hot air swirled about me, filling my nostrils with a sickly stench blended from hundreds of tons of rotting flesh, old blood, and rancid oil. My ears were assailed by the strident screaming of thousands of gulls and the raucous outcries of hundreds of ravens intermingling to form a living, piebald shroud that shifted, spread, and reformed over the mountain of death filling the depression at my feet. Half-clad children, lean men, bent women, glistening with sweat and oil and grimed by the choking smoke, chopped, hacked, and sliced reeking strips of blubber from flayed corpses that still shivered and writhed with the last ebbing of life. A musket bellowed. The birds lifted momentarily, screaming and wheeling, then settled back to feed...

Rust from the musket ball flaked in my hand. The heron launched itself into the stiff and laboured flight of its kind and bore off over the dunes toward the sea—toward the empty reaches of La Grande Echourie, where the last cut was made.

In 1949, Dean Fisher,
a
yo
ung Fisheries researcher, made a discovery of the kind every field biologist dreams about. Employed by the federal government of Canada to study salmon in New Brunswick's Miramichi River, Fisher was investigating relationships between salmon and harbour seals. Choosing a hot August day of the sort that tempts seals ashore to lounge on the sandbars of the river mouth, Fisher proceeded to make a count of the recumbent animals through his binoculars.

Almost at once he noticed occasional seals of enormous size—far larger than harbour seals had any right to be. Puzzled, he worked his way closer, focused on one of the monsters, and realized with near incredulity that he was looking at an animal that had been unreported for so long that some biologists believed it to be extinct in North America.

The creature Fisher officially rediscovered that summer day is known to science as the grey seal. Early French arrivals in the New World called it
loup marin,
not because of any presumed wolfish nature but because of its haunting cries, which sound eerily like the distant baying of wolves. Since it was visibly the most abundant seal, this name soon came to be used in a generic sense, applied to all seal species. Thereafter both French and English called the present species by the distinctive name of horsehead because of the characteristic equine profile of the males. It is still best known by this name, which is the one I shall generally use.

Of the several kinds of seals frequenting the northwestern approaches when the European invasion began, four were pre-eminent: hood, harp, harbour, and horsehead by name. Although hoods and harps were the most numerous, they were of small importance to the human newcomers, being present only during winter and early spring and even then mostly staying so far offshore as to be seldom seen. Horseheads and harbour seals, on the other hand, lived year-round in astonishing profusion almost everywhere along the northeastern coasts of the continent.

The horsehead is by far the larger of these two; an old male may be as much as eight feet in length and weigh 800 pounds. Although females average only about seven feet, they still seem enormous compared to the harbour seal, in which species neither sex exceeds five feet or weighs more than an average human being.

Gregarious and polygamous, horseheads used to gather in January and February in enormous numbers on myriad islands and even mainland beaches from Labrador to Cape Hatteras, there to whelp and breed. Some of these colonies were so large that, as late as the mid-1600s, the lupine howling from them could be heard several miles away.

They tended to keep together during the balance of the year as well, forming large, convivial companies of up to several hundred individuals fishing together in inshore waters and hauling out to sun themselves in somnolent mobs on bars in salt-water lagoons and at river mouths. This was a preference they shared with their gigantic relative, the walrus. They even shared the same whelping grounds, although at different seasons.

Harbour seals, called common seals in Europe or dotars in Newfoundland (the name I prefer), now survive mostly in small family groups. Originally they seem to have been more sociable and their colonies were scattered in bays, estuaries, and inlets from the Carolinas north into Arctic regions. They also made themselves at home in fresh water. Prior to 1800 a colony actually lived in Lake Ontario, wintering below the great cataracts of the upper St. Lawrence River. What was probably the last member of this now-vanished band was killed at Cape Vincent on the south shore of the lake in 1824. Dotars undoubtedly inhabited many of the larger rivers draining into the Atlantic, too; but the European invaders soon hunted them out of these. Their current predilection for wide dispersal and their secretive and isolated breeding habits seem to be relatively recent adaptations, forced on them by the predation of modern man.

Jacques Cartier's anonymous scribe provides the earliest direct reference to the horsehead. While Cartier's second expedition was coasting the northwest corner of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1535, some of his men rowed into the sandy estuary of what is now the Moisie River to investigate a certain “fish, in appearance like unto horses... we saw a great number of these fishes in this river,” which Cartier named Rivière de Chevaulx. Further west, at the mouth of the Pentecost River, the expedition found “Large numbers of sea horses” and we are told that more were seen all the way west to the Indian village at the present site of Quebec City.

Cartier's scribe also noted the presence of another and smaller seal, which was evidently the dotar; but it was the sea horse that most interested the St. Malo entrepreneur. He would have been quick to realize that the oil from such huge, blubber-encased creatures offered a rich opportunity for profit.

As we have seen, one of the most valuable products from the northeastern portion of the New World during the early centuries of European exploitation was train oil. Some of those seeking it concentrated their efforts on whaling, and some on walrus hunting—enterprises that required considerable skill and large investments. Seal hunting required neither. Seals could be killed by the merest tyro, yet their oil could make a modest fortune for anyone who could scratch together a ship, a crew, and a trypot. Furthermore, seal hides were also of considerable worth.
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The little dotar was at first ignored because of its small size and relatively low yield. Even as late as 1630, Nicolas Denys noted: “there is scarce anybody but the Indians who make war on them.” Their time would come. Meanwhile, the horsehead was the seal nonpareil.

When Sir Humphrey Gilbert was touting his colonizing venture in 1580, he issued a brochure listing
horsefishes
among the prime exploitable resources in the new lands. A brief account of the voyage of the English ship
Marigold,
in 1593, makes a point of remarking that the expedition found “great store of seals,” particularly on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, where a remnant population of horseheads still remains. The port books of Southampton tell us that, by 1610, an annual seal fishery was being conducted in Newfoundland during the summer season, when no other species except horseheads and dotars would have been available. A few years earlier, while exploring southern Nova Scotia and the Fundy and Maine coasts, Samuel de Champlain noted numerous islands “completely covered with seals” and heard of others where Indians killed seal pups in wintertime. Both references must have been to horseheads.

One of the earliest commercial ventures of New England colonists was sealing, and they pursued it with the efficacy that was to make their descendants legendary. They took to raiding the long string of horsehead breeding islands off their coasts during the pupping season, slaughtering all the young and as many adults as they could get. So ruthless were they that they soon eliminated the horsehead as a profitable commodity on their own coasts. They then sailed north, and by mid-seventeenth century Nicolas Denys was complaining bitterly of their incursions into his Magdalen Island fiefdom where horseheads were to be found in the great lagoons in tens of thousands. Denys intimated that he had devised a new and more effective way to fish them there; but, being a properly cautious merchant, he refrained from committing the details to print.

The French, who were the first permanent European residents of southern Nova Scotia, were as voracious as the New Englanders, as Denys makes clear in his account of the horsehead fishery. “[The seals] come for their lying-in about the month of February... and take position on the islands, where they give birth... Monsieur d'Aunay sends men from Port Royal with longboats to make a fishery of them. The men surround the islands, armed with strong clubs; the fathers and mothers flee into the sea and the young, which are trying to follow, are stopped, being given a blow with the club on the nose of which they die... Few young ones save themselves... There are days on which there have been killed as many as six, seven and eight hundred... Three or four young ones are required to make a barrel of oil, which is as good to eat when fresh, and as good for burning as olive oil.”

The Sieur de Diereville witnessed a similar slaughter in Acadia at the end of the seventeenth century and was moved to pen a poem about it. Apart from the archaic language, it might have been written by a seal-hunt observer of today. It ends:

The Hunters, armed with heavy clubs,

Advance upon the Isle, and by the noise

They make, affright the Creatures, which

By flight into the Sea, seek an escape

From those upon their slaughter bent...

It matters not which course they take,

All are struck down upon the way;

Fathers and Mothers, little Ones...

Upon them all, blows fall like hail;

If well directed, one upon the nose

Suffices and the deed is done. But

The beast still lives, for by the blow

It is but shorn of consciousness;

And sometimes so, within an hour's space,

Five or six hundred are laid low.

Abundant as they must have been along the Atlantic coast, horseheads were even more so in the Gulf of St. Lawrence where they provided a year-round fishery for French settlers who sequestered ancient Indian sealing places for their own use. The memory of one such is still preserved in the Micmac name Ashnotogun, The Place We Bar the Passage (in order to catch seals).

Charlevoix provides a description of this fishery. “It is the custom of this animal to enter the rivers with the rising tide. When the fishermen have found out such rivers, to which great numbers of seals resort, they enclose them with stakes and nets leaving only a small opening for the seals to enter. As soon as it is high tide they shut this opening so that when the tide goes out the fishes remain a-dry, and are easily dispatched... I have been told of a sailor who having one day surprised a vast herd of them... with his comrades killed to the number of nine hundred of them.”

By the mid-seventeenth century, settlers in New France had improved on the Indian methods and were building seal weirs in the mighty St. Lawrence River itself, siting them at strategic points where horseheads passed close to shore. The returns from this fishery were so great that possession of a site was almost as good as being able to coin one's own currency.

However, by the turn of the century unbridled slaughter on the river had so depleted the horseheads there that sealers were forced to seek new killing grounds. Some pressed eastward along the north shore of the Gulf. A memoir of a reconnaissance of this Côte du Nord, conducted in 1705 by the Sieur de Courtemanche from Anticosti Island almost to Belle Isle Strait, describes what was still a virgin coast insofar as non-native sealers were concerned. As such, the memoir provides us with some rare glimpses of the horsehead nation in its original state: “[Washikuti Bay], equally rich as other places in seals. [Caribou River], needless to repeat seals... are very abundant at this place. [Etamamu River], the seals are in greater abundance than at any other place previously referred to. [Netagamu River], there is such an abundance of seals that herds of them may be seen on the points of the islands as well as on the rocks. [From there to Grand Mescatina], all the islands abound with seals. [At Ha Ha Bay], I killed 200 seals with muskets in two days.”

The fact that this journey was made in summer, taken together with the habits of the animals described, makes it certain that these were not harp or hood seal, but horseheads with, no doubt, an admixture of dotars. In 1705, they must have swarmed upon the north shore of the Gulf in tens of thousands.

Together with the walrus, horseheads had a number of special rallying places where enormous aggregations gathered during the summer months. These included some of the beaches near Cape Cod together with Sable, Miquelon, Miscou, Prince Edward, and the Magdalen Islands, all of which possessed shoal lagoons, sandy beaches, and rich, adjacent fishing grounds. Early Europeans viewed such massive concentrations as God-given reservoirs of oil wealth and treated them accordingly. At first the walrus bore the brunt of the assault but as they were exterminated at rookery after rookery in the southerly portion of their range, horseheads replaced them in the trypots until, by 1750, most of the summer gatherings of the big seals had been so savagely depleted as to leave only vestiges of their former selves.

There were some exceptions. Sable Island's scimitar of sand was too distant and dangerous to be easily reached in the small craft used by most sealers, and so its great central lagoon (which was then still open to the sea) was described as still containing a “multitude” of seals in the 1750s. Miscou Island, where as many as a hundred Micmac families had gathered every autumn since antiquity to obtain their winter supply of seal meat and fat, still supported a respectable horsehead population. However, the largest remaining aggregation was probably on the Magdalens.

An English naval officer sent there in 1765 to evaluate the walrus fishery found other things to note as well: “Although no regular method of taking seals has yet been attempted here, it is probable that it might turn out to advantage, particularly in the lagoon betwixt Haywood and Jupiter Harbours, a situation very commodious for laying nets and where there is frequently seen two or three thousand at one time, embayed and playing or sleeping upon the shoals.”