Sea of Slaughter (5 page)
A decade later, colonist and diarist George Cartwright made this prophetic journal entry: “A boat came in from Funk Island laden with birds, chiefly penguins... Innumerable flocks of sea fowl breed [there] every summer, which are of great service to the poor inhabitants who make voyages there to load with birds and eggs... but it has been customary in late years for several crews of men to live all summer on that island for the sole purpose of killing the birds for the sake of their feathers; the destruction they have made is incredible. If a stop is not soon put to that practise, the whole breed will be diminished to nothing, particularly the penguins,
for this is now the only island they have left to breed upon;
all other lying so near the shores of Newfoundland, they are continually robbed.” (Italics mine.)
The indignation of the merchant aristocracy of Newfoundland was not exactly selfless, as these comments by the Reverend Philip Tocque reveal. Before 1800, Tocque wrote, the penguin “was plentiful on Funk Island [where] incredible numbers were killed... Heaps of them were burnt as fuel... there being no fuel on the island. [Before the destruction wrought by the feather trade] the merchants of Bonavista used to sell these birds to the poor people by the hundred-weight, instead of salt pork.”
The most grimly graphic description of what was taking place comes from Aaron Thomas.
“At some Leagues distant from the Northern Shore are the islands of Fogo, Stinking Island and Funk Island. They are generally called the Funks from the stinking Smell which salutes your Nose on landing on them. I shall be particular on Funk Island. My observations on that place will apply to other Islands.
“Funk Island is a barren spot inhabited only by Penguins and other Birds. The astonishing quantity which resort to this Island is beyond... beliefe. As soon as you put your foot on shore you meet with such Thousands of them that you cannot find a place for your feet and they are so lazy that they will not attempt to move out of your way.
“If you come for their Feather you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck off the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his Skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure. This is not a very humane method, but it is the common Practize.
“I had the following information from a person in St. John's...
âAbout twenty years ago when this kind of Traffick was Lawfull, I made two Trips to the Funks. In these Trips I gathered, with one person with me, half a Ton of Feathers and as many Eggs as sold in St. John's for Thirty Pounds!'
“This skinning and taking the Eggs from the Funks is now prohibited and they are allowed to take the Birds only for Bait to catch Fish with. [But] about three years ago some fellows were detected in this kind of Plunder. They were brought to St. John's and flogged at a Cart's Tail. But I am told there is a quantity of Feathers [still] purloined from these Islands every year.”
Complaints about the destruction of the penguins were now being heard from another quarter as well. Through almost three centuries the strikingly patterned birds had served inbound seamen as infallible indicators that they had arrived over the Grand Banks and so were approaching a land whose dangerous coasts were often hidden by impenetrable fogs. From earliest times, rutters and pilots (books of sailing directions) used by the west-faring nations contained some variant of the following excerpt from the 1774 edition of
The English Pilot.
“You may know you are on the Bank by the great quantities of fowles but none are to be minded so much as the Pengwin, for these never go without the Bank as the others do, for they are always on it.” By 1792, Sir Richard Bonnycastle was reporting to the English authorities that “this sure sea-mark on the Grand Banks has now totally disappeared, from the ruthless trade in eggs and skins.” Two years later the Colonial Secretary in London finally forbade the destruction of penguins for the feather trade because “they afford a supply of food and bait, and are useful in warning vessels that they are nearing land.”
This prohibition not only came too late, it was virtually ignored in Newfoundland where some merchants had decided that if they could not make the Yankees desist from a good thing, then they had best join them. The consequence was that, by 1802, the last penguin rookery in North America, on that lonely rock called Funk, had been destroyed.
Whereas it had taken our forebears a thousand and more years to extirpate the spearbill from European waters, it took modern man a mere three centuries to exterminate it in the New World. Although this was an undoubted victory in our ongoing war against the rest of animate creation, the perpetrators of it, and we their inheritors, have been reluctant to claim the credit.
Hardly had the last North American spearbills been sent to join their European cousins in oblivion when their disappearance was being explained away with the nostrum that, because they were naturally such timid birds, they had “chosen to withdraw to” regions where men seldom went. Some apologists even maintained that the domain of the birds had always been the High Arctic. According to an American ornithologist, writing in 1824:
“The great auk or northern penguin inhabits only the highest latitudes of the globe, dwelling by choice and instinct amidst the horrors of a region covered with eternal ice. Here it is still commonly found upon the floating masses of the gelid ocean.”
When a succession of Arctic explorers failed to report the slightest trace of a spearbill, living or dead, in the “gelid ocean,” an even more remarkable attempt to bury the memory of the bird appeared. The suggestion was made that “in all probability, the so-called great auk of history was a mythical creature invented by unlettered sailors and fisherfolk.” Evidence as to the bird's non-existence was adduced from the discovery of a number of counterfeit eggs made of plaster and some stuffed specimens found to be patched together from the skins of several kinds of seabirds, all for sale to gullible collectors.
This instinct to erase the spearbill from history, and so from conscience, was confounded by a late nineteenth-century discovery on Funk Island of huge quantities of recent penguin beaks, bones, and even a few carcasses partly preserved in guano. When these arrived in Europe they created a sensation in the scientific community, whose members avidly bid against one another to purchase them. As a contemporary publication put it: “The large quantity of remains obtained on Funk Island by Professor Milne have been bought by many museums and private collectors and have proved useful in filling a much felt want.”
The “want” was the acquisitive passion that motivated so many wealthy nineteenth-century men, for whom natural history rarities were what Monets and Gaugins are to modern art collectors. Fortunes were spent scouring the world in pursuit of scarce specimens. It was a fiercely competitive business, conducted in the name of science and enlightenment; and it was the ultimate cause of extinction for scores or hundreds of species already in jeopardy. It is still being conducted by unscrupulous zoos and natural history museums, with similar results.
Indisputable recognition that the great auk was no myth, but had onceâand not long sinceâbeen a creature of flesh and blood, reopened the question of how and why it had disappeared. Most authorities still insisted that man could not possibly have been to blame, but there were a few dissenters. One was a distinguished Danish scientist, Professor J. Steenstrup who, in 1855, gave it as his opinion that: “The Geirfugl's disappearance must not be regarded as a migration, much less a natural dying out, but as an extirpation [that] has its chief cause in the devastations wrought by men.”
This was a refreshingly forthright statement of the truth, even though the good professor tried to ease his own species off the hook by adding: “Yet the bird, while disappearing, has helped to the attainment of a higher object; as it has been for a long space of time one of the means that have essentially facilitated the prosecution of fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland.” Than which, there could hardly have been a more worthwhile cause! Certainly this sentiment still commands the support of those who believe that the death of any animal, or species, which contributes thereby to the satisfaction of human desires is not only justifiable but somehow tinged with a kind of nobility.
Although by shortly after 1800 the spearbill had apparently vanished from human ken,
it was not yet extinct.
Unknown to the world at large, one rookery remained. One remnant colony, probably numbering no more than a hundred individuals, had managed to avoid contributing to a “higher object.” It owed its survival, first, to its isolation, clinging precariously to a sea-girt, storm-and-tide-battered rock called Eldey, which lay outermost in a chain of volcanic islets stretching southwest into the Atlantic from Cape Reykjaness in Iceland and, second, to the fact it harboured so few geirfugel that even the local people no longer considered it worth raiding.
But no place in the world is safe from the truly dedicated collector, and somehow word of this lost, last colony reached avid ears in Europe. About 1830, some Reykjavik export merchants began receiving letters inquiring about geirfugels and their eggs and offering princely prices for any that could be found. At least one merchant was quick to grasp the golden opportunity. His name was Siemsonâlet it be long remembered.
Siemson made an arrangement with the fishermen of the villages of Stadur and Hafnir at the tip of the Reykjaness Peninsula and each spring thereafter, weather permitting, the local men raided Eldey. By 1843, between fifty and seventy-five geirfugels and an unknown number of their eggs had passed through Siemson's hands, to end up as jealously guarded treasures in collectors' cabinets throughout western Europe. There most remained sequestered until changing times brought about the sale of a number of these private collections of natural curiosa. On March 4, 1971, the director of Iceland's Natural History Museum attended an auction at Sotheby's famous rooms and bid and paid $33,000 for one stuffed geirfugel, which presumably had been killed on Eldey. The money had been raised by public subscription and, as the director said, he could have raised twice that sum, so eager were Icelanders to restore this dusty fragment of a lost heritage to the island republic.
Others, whose nations had also contributed to the destruction of the spearbill, were less interested in refurbishing its memory. During the 1960s, Newfoundland biologist Dr. Leslie Tuck, a world authority on the Alcidae (the family to which science has assigned the spearbill), produced a new explanation for its descent into extinction... and a new exculpation for mankind. According to Dr. Tuck, the great auk was already a relic species when Europeans discovered it off the shores of North America. Having run its evolutionary course it had reached, literally, a dead end. Its degeneration had proceeded so far, Tuck claimed, that as long ago as 3000 BC the only rookery still in existence in the New World was the one on Funk Island... and it was already in the final stages of natural decline when modern man arrived upon the scene. If nothing else, this is a truly elegant alibi, with the onus so effortlessly shifted from the culprits to the victims.
Another Canadian point of view was expressed by a functionary in the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It throws light upon the current attitudes of that department toward the remaining seabirds in Canadian waters. “No matter how many there may have been, the Great Auk had to go. They must have consumed thousands of tons of marine life that commercial fish stocks depend on. There wasn't room for them in any properly managed fishery. Personally, I think we ought to be grateful to the old timers for handling that problem for us.”
This adherence to an outmoded theory justifying the destruction of “worthless” species for the presumed good of others, which we value commercially, was an attitude I encountered time and time again.
The 3rd of June, 1844, dawned clear and windless, and the heavy swell that had been thundering against the coast for days had died away. Three fishermen of StadurâKetil Ketilsson, Jon Brandsson, and Sigurdur Islefssonâmade their way down to the shore where their open boat lay beached, looked searchingly at sky and sea, exchanged a few laconic comments, and concluded that this might be a fit day to try for Eldey.
The lack of wind was a mixed blessing for it meant they would have to row the heavy boat some fifteen miles offshore, but its absence offered some assurance that they would be able to land on Eldey's steep cone when they eventually arrived. The calm weather held and, shortly before midday, they scrambled ashore on Eldey's sea-worn lava cliffs under a haze of screaming murres and gulls. An account of what ensued was obtained from the fishermen by a fellow Icelander some years later.
“As they clambered up they saw two Geirfugel sitting among numberless other sea-birds, and at once gave chase. The Geirfugel showed not the slightest disposition to repel the invaders, but immediately ran along the high cliff, their heads erect, their little wings extended. They uttered no cry of alarm and moved, with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk. Jon, with outstretched arms, drove one into a corner, where he soon had it fast. Sigurdur and Ketil pursued the second and seized it close to the edge of the rock. Ketil then returned to the sloping shelf whence the birds had started and saw an egg lying on the lava slab, which he knew to be a Geirfugel's. He took it up, but finding it was broken, dropped it again. All this took place in much less time than it took to tell.”
A broken egg upon a barren rock. The period that marked the end.
Mass destruction of seabirds was
n
ot, of course, limited to the spearbill. That unfortunate was simply a terminal example. Many other species suffered as severely, yet escaped annihilation because of their astronomical original numbers, widespread distribution, or their ability to breed in remote or otherwise inaccessible places. This chapter briefly recounts the histories of these oceanic birds under assault by modern man upon the northeastern approaches to North America.
The use of seabirds for bait seems to have begun almost as soon as European fishermen began exploiting New World waters. By the late 1500s, according to Whitbourne:
“The sea fowles do not only feed those who trade [to Newfoundland] but also they are a great furthering of divers ships voyages, because the abundance of them is such that the fishermen do bait their hooks with the quarters of Seafowle on them: and therewith some ships do yearly take a great part of their fishing voyages, with such bait.”
It was easy enough to do.
Nicolas Denys, making a raid on the rookeries at Sambro Island near Halifax, found “so great an abundance of all kinds [of sea-birds] that all my crew and myself, having cut clubs for ourselves, killed so great a number... that we were unable to carry them away. And aside from these the number of those which were spared and which rose into the air, made a cloud so thick that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate it.”
Pressure on the bird colonies to furnish bait mounted inexorably. In 1580, more than 300 European ships were already fishing the northeastern approaches, and that number quadrupled before 1700. In 1784, there were 540 deep-sea vessels alone, most of them using birds for bait during at least part of the fishing season. By 1830, an additional fleet of several hundred New England schooners was fishing the Labrador coast and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, making extensive use of birds.
Apart from the shipborne fishery, growing numbers of planters and by-boat (transient) shoremen fished from innumerable coves and harbours, and all of these regularly used seabirds for bait. Some continued to do so, particularly in Newfoundland and Labrador, well into modern times.
Dr. Arthur Bent visited the Magdalen Island Bird Rocks in 1904 and found that they were being regularly raided by bait-seeking fishermen who would scale the cliffs with ladders and ropes and slaughter as many as 500 gannets in an hour. Bent noted that forty vessels were supplying themselves from the Bird Rocks, the gannets “being roughly skinned and the flesh cut off in chunks.” Another method, still in use in the twentieth century at Cape St. Mary's, where the sheer cliffs guarding a gannet colony cannot be scaled, was to set water-logged planks or logs adrift nearby, with a herring tied to each. The gannets, diving in their spectacular way from great heights, would not detect the fraud in time and so would break their necks in scores and hundreds. Gannets, murres, razorbills, and other deep divers were taken in quantity with small-mesh nets into which the birds swam, and drowned.
Even cormorants were used for bait. Although initially their colonies were to be found everywhere along the coasts at least as far south as Georgia, by 1922 they had been so reduced that the great cormorant was for a time thought to have been “extirpated as a breeding bird in North America.”
Until late in the nineteenth century, American and Canadian bankers used to make an early voyage that depended for bait on adult oceanic birds. Called the “shack fishery,” it mainly used the flesh of the graceful shearwaters and fulmars. The birds were killed by dorymen using five- or six-fathom lines to each of which a multitude of small mackerel hooks baited with cod livers was affixed. The procedure they followed is described in an 1884 report to the United States Fish Commission.
“The fishermen derive much gratification from the sport, not only from the excitement it affords but on account of the prospective profits in obtaining a good supply of birds for bait. When a victim has been hooked it struggles most energetically to rise in the air, or by spreading its feet it holds itself back as it is dragged through the water. At times a bird may disengage the hook but usually the barbed point is well fastened and the bird is landed in the boat. The fisherman crushes its skull with his teeth or strikes it with his âgob stick'. This may continue until perhaps two hundred birds are captured.”
Sometimes shearwaters were taken to the ship alive.
“Perhaps a dozen or so of them are put in a hogshead on the deck of the vessel then the fishermen bring about an internecine war by stirring them up with a stick. The birds evidently imagine their comrades are avowed enemies and, pitching into their neighbours, a general fight and terrible commotion ensues while the feathers fly in all directions, much to the amusement of the men. The fishermen also sometimes tie two together by the legs which enables the birds to swim, but keeps them in unpleasant contact, the consequence being that they fight until one or both succumb.”
Shearwaters and fulmars were still being slaughtered for bait by Newfoundland fishermen as late as 1949.
Not even the small, robin-sized petrels (also called Mother Carey's chickens) were immune. “The most common and effective way of killing them was with a whip which was made by tying several parts of codline to a staff five or six feet in length. The petrels were tolled by throwing out a large piece of codfish liver and when they had gathered in a dense mass, swish went the thongs of the whip cutting their way through the crowded flock and killing or maiming a score or more at a single sweep. The cruel work went on until maybe 400 or 500 were killed.”
Although adult seabirds were preferred because their flesh held together better on the hook, the available supply seldom came close to meeting the demand. So the young were butchered too. On some rookeries, in some seasons, hardly a young bird reached maturity. A fisherman from Bonavista Bay in Newfoundland once described to me a bait raid in which he took part.
“ 'Twas late in June-month and the young turrs [murres] was well growed. We was seven men and a half-a-dozen youngsters in two trap boats, and we had gob sticks with iron heads onto them. We come up to the rock just after sunrise and went right off to work. Everywhere you walked the young turrs was thick as hair on a dog. Ticklasses [kittiwakes] and old turrs was overhead in thousands and thousands and the stink when the sun come up was like to choke a shark. Well, we set to, and it was whack-whack-whack until me arms got that tired I could hardly swing me stick. I was nigh covered-up with blood and gurry and the slime they hove up when they was hit. Fast as we knocked 'em over, the young lads hauled them off to the boats in brin bags. She was only a little bit of an island, so it didn't take we all day to clean her up. And I don't say as how what we left behind was enough to make a good scoff for a fox. Them boats was built to carry fifty quintal [about two-and-a-half tons] and they was well loaded. Enough bait so as every boat in the cove could fish free and easy for a fortnight afterwards.”
Here now is a look at the status of some of the major threatened seabird species of the northeastern seaboard of America.
Often called Mother Carey's chicks, or sea swallows, the little storm petrels are the disembodied wraiths of the ocean, riding the vortex of wind and water far at sea except for the brief interval when they come ashore to reproduce. They breed in shallow burrows they excavate in sod or soil and in crevices amongst the rocks, flying to and from their rookeries only in darkness. So secretive are they that one can walk across a turf-clad clifftop honeycombed with their burrows and be unaware that hundreds and thousands of them lie quiet underneath one's feet. Leach's storm petrel once bred in enormous numbers on islands and headlands south at least to Cape Cod, but the encroachments of modern man and his associated animals have deprived them of most of their one-time rookeries, except in Newfoundland. According to Dr. David Nettleship of the Canadian Wildlife Service, the population status is uncertain in Newfoundland and Labrador but still declining elsewhere in eastern Canada and New England.
The magnificent northern gannet, with its white plumage and black-tipped wings spanning nearly six feet, was once one of the most spectacular seabirds of the eastern seaboard. In 1833, even after the species had already endured more than three centuries of unrelenting slaughter, Audubon could still write of a summer visit to the Bird Rocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in this wise: “At length we discovered at a distance a white speck which the pilot assured us was the celebrated rock of our wishes. We thought it was still covered with snow several feet deep. As we approached I imagined that the atmosphere around us was filled with [snow] flakes but... I was assured there was nothing in sight but the gannets and their island home. I rubbed my eyes, took out my glasses, and saw the strange dimness in the air was caused by the innumerable birds... When we advanced the magnificent veil of floating gannets was easily seen, now shooting upward as if intent on reaching the sky, then descending as if to join the feathered masses below, and again diverging to either side and sweeping over the surface of the ocean.”
In Audubon's time, the gannet colony on Bird Rocks is believed to have numbered over 100,000 individuals. When Europeans first appeared on this continent there were scores of such rookeries, many harbouring at least this many breeding birds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, only nine rookeries still survived in all of North America. By 1973, the six remaining colonies mustered a grand total of 32,700 pairs of adult gannetsâa decrease of about 20 per cent since as recently as 1966. By 1983, there had been a further decrease in the Gulf population of as much as 10 per cent, the result chiefly of toxic chemical poisoning in the fish that sustained the Bonaventure Island colony.
The small size and restricted distribution of the remaining North American gannet populations make the bird highly vulnerable to further, and perhaps fatal, decline due to toxic pollution, increased human fishing efforts, and accidental spills that must inevitably occur with the development of an offshore oil industry.
Two species of cormorant, the great and the double-crested, formerly bred not only along sea coasts from mid-Labrador southward but beside freshwater lakes and rivers, too. They were exceedingly abundant and remained so into the seventeenth century, probably because Europeans considered their rank and oily flesh unfit for food. However, once birds became staple bait for the cod fisheries, both species began to suffer colossal wastage. Crowded together in great colonies on bare rocks or in dense stands of trees, their young could be easily killed in enormous quantities and, because of their stringy musculature, the meat “hung together” well on the cod hooks.
When bird bait ceased to be of much importance, there was no slackening in the devastation of the cormorants. By the beginning of the twentieth century many fish stocks had visibly declined, and fishermen concluded that cormorants were among the principal villains. This led to a deliberate attempt to wipe them out, chiefly by raids on their rookeries during which all eggs and chicks would be ground under foot and as many adults as possible shot down. A latter-day refinement is to spray the eggs with kerosene as they lie in the nests. This seals the microscopic pores in the shells and results in the asphyxiation of the embryos within. Since the adults are not aware that the eggs will never hatch, they often continue to brood them until too late in the season to attempt a second laying.
The campaign against the cormorants has been so successful that, by 1940, fewer than 3,000 great cormorants existed in Canadian waters. Having been granted a modicum of protection after World War II, the species might have been expected to recover, but such has not been the case, mainly because malevolent persecution by commercial and sport fishermen continues. In 1972, I investigated a raid on a major breeding colony of double-crested cormorants on the Magdalen Islands. Five men armed with .22 rifles had spent a morning shooting adults off their nests in a spruce grove, leaving the ground littered with parental corpses. What seemed far worse was the multitude of dead and dying young, both in the nests and on the groundâvictims of starvation consequent upon the deaths of their parents.
As fish stocks continue to diminish, the vendetta against cormorants, and other fish-eating animals, can be expected to intensify, with the connivance of some game and fisheries officials who still cling to the discredited belief that cormorants are indeed a menace to the fisheries.
Four species of the marvellously accomplished, black-capped fliers called terns once bred in uncounted colonies on islands, beaches, and sandbars in both fresh and salt water throughout the Atlantic seaboard. They do not seem to have been deliberately attacked by man until the middle of the nineteenth century, when their colonies were devastated by feather hunters supplying the millinery trade. Tern wings, tails, and sometimes the entire skins were used to embellish women's hats, and such was the intensity of the ensuing carnage that all terns became comparatively rare. A large share of the blame for their ongoing diminishment must, however, be laid to the loss of nesting sites through human occupation, degradation of the beaches where the birds once bred, and toxic chemical poisoning. All four species are in trouble, with the roseate and Caspian terns reduced to vestigial remnants and the once superlatively abundant Arctic and common terns suffering the most serious current rate of decline.
With one exception, the gulls seem to have benefited from recent human activities. The small, black-headed laughing gull, once common on the Atlantic seaboard from the Gulf of St. Lawrence south, is now a rarity. However, herring, ring-billed, and black-backed gulls and kittiwakes have staged a quite remarkable comeback from a centuries-long decline during which they and their eggs were taken in enormous quantities for human food. Paradoxically, their success is largely due to the massive and wasteful destruction of sea life by modern fisheries, and to the consequent surfeit of offal and carrion available to them. They have also benefited hugely from the enormous outpouring of gull-edible garbage excreted by our society.