Sea of Slaughter (51 page)

The period between 1830 and 1860 is still nostalgically referred to in Newfoundland as the Great Days of Sealing. During those three decades, some
13 million
seals were landed—out of perhaps twice that number killed. Indeed, they
were
great days for those who controlled the industry, and this monumental massacre provided the substance for many Newfoundland merchant dynasties that survive into our day.

Many changes in the nature of the hunt took place, none of them advantageous to the seals. For one, the previously ignored or, it may be, virtually unknown harp and hood whelping patches in the Gulf of St. Lawrence came under sustained attack from the ever-growing Newfoundland fleet.

For another, the skins of adult seals, particularly hoods, became extremely valuable as leather, a large part of which was used in the manufacture of industrial belting. The pelts of young hoods had always fetched a good price in the luxury clothing trade, but now a way was found to market some whitecoats, too, not by inventing a fur-fast tanning process but as a result of the gruesome discovery that the fur of just-born or unborn whitecoats, called cats by the sealers, would remain fast on its own. Early in the 1850s, some Newfoundland entrepreneur shipped a consignment of cats to England. When muffs, stoles, and other female adornments were made out of them, the soft, white fur proved well-nigh irresistible to wealthy women. Such was the origin of the fashion-fur demand for whitecoats that became a multimillion-dollar business in recent times. However, until the post–World War II discovery by a Norwegian company of how to fix the fur of
all
whitecoats, the market had to be satisfied for the most part with the fur of unborn pups. This, of course, led to a huge increase in the butchery of pregnant harps.

It is axiomatic that modern economic progress depends on a never-ending elaboration of ways and means to turn a profit from available raw resources. By the 1860s so much ingenuity had gone into “product development” of seals that the demand was outstripping the supply. Furs and skins were being sold for such diverse uses as ladies' jackets and blacksmiths' bellows; while seal fat was being used for a multitude of purposes ranging from locomotive lubricants to a substitute for olive oil. The industry was coining money and, although most of it stuck to the fingers of the merchant masters, some dribbled down to ordinary fishermen, a few of whom found themselves relatively wealthy, if briefly so. Dr. Grenfell tells of one liveyere who ran a net fishery in a remote bay on the Labrador at about this time.

“At one little settlement a trapper by the name of Jones became so rich through regular large catches of seals that he actually had a carriage and horses sent from Quebec, and a road made to drive them on; while he had a private musician hired from Canada for the whole winter to perform at his continuous feastings. I was called on awhile ago to help supply clothing to cover the nakedness of this man's grandchildren.”

The destruction engulfing the ice seals was not confined to North America. Early in the 1700s, Scots and English whalers sailing west in European Arctic waters had discovered a gigantic population of whelping harps and hoods on the so-called West Ice of the Greenland Sea, in the vicinity of uninhabited Jan Mayen Island. So long as sufficient bowhead whales could be killed in these waters, the seals generally went unmolested; but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the whale population to the east of Greenland had been so decimated that it was a lucky ship that could kill enough to make her voyage pay. It was at this juncture that the whalers began turning their attention to the hordes of hoods and harps on the West Ice and in Davis Strait.

As was the case with Newfoundlanders, they learned ice-sealing the hard way, but by the spring of 1768 a dozen British whaling ships each loaded about 2,000 hood and harp seals at the West Ice. They were soon joined on that living oil field by Germans, Danes, Hollanders, and the inevitable Norwegians, and amongst them they were landing a quarter of a million sculps a year before the nineteenth century was well begun.

The massive devastation that engulfed the harp and hood nations off Newfoundland as the nineteenth century aged was matched by a similar orgy of destruction at the West Ice. In 1850, about 400,000 seals were landed from there, and in the following year the figure for Newfoundland and the West Ice combined passed the million mark.

Greed took its toll of men as well as seals at the West Ice. During the spring of 1854, the skipper of the British sealer
Orion
dispatched a rally of his men to kill what appeared to be a patch of hoods amongst a torment of upthrust ice. The patch resolved itself into the frozen corpses of seventy shipwrecked Danish sealers, keeping company with hundreds of blueback carcasses with which the doomed men had tried to construct a barricade against the killing edge of a polar gale.

As at the Newfoundland Front, mounting competition for skins and fat forced the ever-diminishing West Ice seals deeper and deeper into the protective pack until they were all but inaccessible, even to the most foolhardy skippers. Losses of ships and men soared, and the catch began going down. For a time, it looked as if the halcyon days of sealing were coming to an end.

It was the English who found a way out of this impasse. In 1857, the Hull whaler
Diana,
newly equipped with auxiliary steam power, challenged the West Ice and was able to return home “log-loaded with fat.” She also rescued eighty men from two sailing sealers that had been beset and had sunk in the ice when the wind failed them. The point was made. Crude and inefficient as it was,
Diana
's forty-horsepower engine, driving an awkward iron screw, was the technological key to mastery of the ice fields, and a flood of steam-auxiliary sailing vessels followed on her heels.

The first of the steam-auxiliaries to try their luck in Newfoundland waters were the British whaler/sealers
Camperdown
and
Polynia,
which made a trial voyage to the Front in 1862. They took only a few seals because ice conditions were so appallingly bad that some fifty sailing vessels were crushed and sunk. But the steamers were at least able to extricate themselves, and the lesson was not lost on the St. John's sealing tycoons. Another bad season in 1864, which saw twenty-six more Newfoundland sailing sealers crushed, drove it home.

Thereafter the steam-auxiliaries quickly took the lead, and as quickly proved their terrible effectiveness. During the spring of 1871, eighteen of them unloaded a quarter of a million sculps on St. John's greasy wharves, bringing Newfoundland's total landings that year to well above the half-million mark for a value of about $12 million in today's currency. Seals were by then second only to cod in the Newfoundland economy.

It was not uncommon for a steam sealer, with her superior speed and ability in ice, to make several trips to the Front during one spring season; loading whitecoats and adult harps on her first trip; bluebacks and harp and hood adults on a second; and moulting harps on a third and even fourth. The
Erik
once landed 40,000 seals from three such ventures.

Although the advent of steam enormously increased the efficiency of the massacre, it did not change its nature, as the Reverend Philip Tocque, writing in 1877, confirms: “The seal-fishery is a constant scene of bloodshed and slaughter. Here you behold a heap of seals which have only received a slight dart from the gaff, writhing, and crimsoning the ice with their blood, rolling from side to side in dying agony. There you see another lot, while the last spark of life is not yet extinguished, being stripped of their skins and fat, their startlings and heavings making the unpractised hand shrink with horror to touch them.”

While the steamers ravaged the seal sanctuaries deep within the ice tongue at the Front and on the ice plains in the Gulf, the remaining sailing vessels scoured the outer reaches of the pack. Meantime, landsmen went swatching in inshore waters and made rallies into any whelping patches they might find; and the net fisheries killed as many as 80,000 adult harps each year, mostly during the southbound migration when the females were carrying young.

The all-embracing nature of the slaughter was awesome tribute to the genius of modern man as mass destroyer. It also bore awesome testimony to the vitality of the western ice-seal nations, which between 1871 and 1881 suffered decimation in excess of a million individuals each year
yet still managed to endure.

They endured—but both nations were fast wasting away. Average landings declined by almost half between 1881 and 1891 and continued to decline until after the turn of the century, when there was an improvement, from the point of view of the sealing industry, due to the determined application of that basic principle of exploitation whereby a diminution in supply is countered by ever more ruthless effort.

After 1900, the “catch-to-effort ratio” was much improved by the introduction of really large, full-powered, steel-hulled ice-breaking steamers on the one hand, and modern repeating rifles on the other. Assisted by wireless telegraphy, which enabled the sealing fleet to co-ordinate its assault, the Newfoundland fishery maintained landings averaging nearly 250,000 a year until World War I. By then, however, sealers had been living on capital for more than half a century. It could only have been a matter of a few more years before the industry collapsed, had not the war intervened.

By the time the Armistice was signed, most of the new steel sealers had been sunk by enemy action, and those auxiliary steamers that still remained afloat were so old as to hardly dare face the ice again. Furthermore, the price of seal oil, which had risen to outrageous heights during the war, now slumped below pre-war levels and soon, with the onset of the Great Depression, became only marginally profitable. Although sealing still continued, it was at a much lower level of intensity than it had known for a century. The eruption of World War II in 1939 virtually brought it to an end.

While that war raged in Europe and the North Atlantic, the seals had five whelping seasons in which to bear and rear their young in relative security. By 1945 females born at the war's beginning were themselves bearing pups, with the result that the western harp and hood nations were showing a modest increase for the first time in a hundred years.

War's end brought no revival of interest in commercial sealing in North America. By then all but two vessels of the Newfoundland sealing fleet were gone, and the island's capitalists preferred to concentrate their resources on rebuilding the Grand Banks fishing fleet.

Although the Great Sealing Game had rewarded with enormous wealth the handful of mercantile aristocrats who ruled the island, it had returned precious little to ordinary men, thousands of whom had perished along with the tens of millions of ice seals they had slain. Now, it seemed, the time had come for the dead to bury the dead; time for the great dying of men and seals to become no more than a memory of an earlier and darker time, when human rapacity had known no bounds.

Close on a thousand years after the Nordic adventurer Karlsefni sailed his
knorr
into New World waters seeking profits from their abounding wealth, he was followed by another of his lineage impelled by the same desires. This latecomer was a man we have already met in connection with his exploits as a whaler. Karl Karlsen was to succeed in his ambitions on a scale that would have been beyond the wildest dreams of his distant predecessor.

In devastated post-war Europe a dearth of animal fats had sent the value of marine oils soaring and those most efficient of all sea-ravagers, the Norwegians, had been quick to respond to this opportunity. Shortly after the end of hostilities at sea they began dispatching whatever makeshift vessels they could find into the nearby White Sea to kill harp seals. They proved so destructive here that the Soviets eventually had to bar them. But they were also, and urgently, building new ships—multi-purpose killer boats designed (as we have seen in the story of the whales) for hunting sea mammals in any seas, no matter how far afield.

As the new ships came into service, those intended primarily for sealing were directed westward. Their first target was the West Ice off eastern Greenland where, as far back as the 1860s, Norwegian sealers had established a hegemony of slaughter. However, they had so savaged both harps and hoods in those waters prior to 1939 that even the wartime lull had not allowed the herds to make any significant recovery. What remained of them now melted fast away in the furious fire of this renewed assault.

Having quickly bloodied the remnants of two of the three tribes of the harp nation, the modern Vikings turned their vessels' heads toward the stink of oil and money in the distant west. So it was that, in 1946, a new company was born in Nova Scotia. Innocuously christened the Karlsen Shipping Company, its advent went almost unnoticed. Few knew that it was a Norwegian entity whose real interests lay, not in shipping, but in killing whales and seals in Canadian waters. And few could have known that it was the herald of a maritime scourge as terrible as any that Western man had previously inflicted in the seas of the New World.

Incorporation as a Canadian company brought Karlsen many advantages, including access to federal and provincial subsidies, but the chief value was that it enabled a foreign interest to seal and whale without restraint inside Canadian territorial waters and, especially, in the enclosed waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The Karlsen organization was soon operating a fleet of Norwegian-built, Norwegian-officered whale-cum-seal killers out of Blandford, Nova Scotia, against the ice seals of the Gulf. Simultaneously, another fleet of home-based Norwegian sealing ships appeared at the Front off Newfoundland. Since the Front whelping and moulting patches normally formed in international waters, this fleet was subject to no national restraints or supervision.

Goaded by this alien presence on their traditional sealing grounds, and with their cupidity belatedly aroused by the increasing value of seal fat, Newfoundlanders now returned to the ice. By 1947, they were again manning a small handful of sealing ships. However, theirs was a nondescript fleet consisting mostly of small motor vessels normally employed in the cod fishery or the coastal trade. These were hopelessly outclassed by fourteen brand-new Norwegian sealers, which by 1950 were ravaging the Front while the Karlsen fleet did the same in the Gulf. Amongst them, the Norwegians landed better than 200,000 sculps that year. A year later they brought back twice as many—a slaughter the like of which had not been attained since 1881. The fire had flared up anew.

Not content with killing pups and adult females on the whelping ice and adults of both sexes at the moulting patches, the Norwegian offshore fleet took to pursuing the migrating herds northward, even as far as west Greenland waters, killing all the way. The seals they killed would normally have returned south to pup the following spring. Most were not given the chance. In a single year, the new Vikings landed 60,000 sculps out of probably 300,000 adults shot in water and on ice.

This was bloodletting on such a scale as to quickly wipe out whatever gains the harp and hood nations had made since 1919. By 1961, according to Dr. David Sergeant, the western harp nation had declined to an estimated 1,750,000 individuals, or about half of what it was thought to have numbered ten years earlier.

Now, under the prodding of an alarmed Sergeant and of a few others such as Newfoundlander Harold Horwood, whose magazine article, “Tragedy on the Whelping Ice,” was one of the earliest public warnings of what was happening, the governments of Canada and Norway made their first gesture toward “protecting and conserving” the ice seals.
1
Having agreed to an opening date designed to ensure maximum production of whitecoats, they proclaimed that the hunt for adults must end by May 5. However, since this date came after the Norwegian pursuit of the northbound herd was usually abandoned anyway, it was meaningless. Moreover, adult seals were no longer the prime object of the sealers.

During the late 1950s, Norwegian chemists had finally discovered a way of treating whitecoat pelts so that the soft and silky hair would remain fast to the skin. The resultant fur delighted the fashion market in affluent Western countries. Although in 1952 a whitecoat sculp unloaded at the docks had only been worth about a dollar, and this mostly for the fat, by 1961 it was worth $5, four of which were for the fur alone. Since a single sealer loose in a whelping patch could kill and sculp as many as 100 whitecoats a day, truly enormous profits could now be made. In 1962 the price for whitecoats rose to $7.50 as a mindless passion for seal fur swept fashion salons and fired the acquisitive desires of civilized women in Europe and America. The result was a frantic rush to the ice that spring, one that turned the harp and hood nurseries of eastern Canada into bloody abattoirs as sealers sculped 330,000 hoods and harps, of which more than 200,000 were whitecoats.

In the light of what followed it is only fair to emphasize that, up to this point, Canadians had played a relatively small, and usually menial, part in the post-war history of the sealing industry. For the most part they served as low-paid butchers and draft animals, assisting a foreign nation to destroy a Canadian resource. Not that there was anything new about this. Canada has always been content to divest herself of natural resources in exchange for jobs for her citizenry as haulers of water and hewers of wood.

Canadian governments, federal and provincial, did everything in their power to assist the Norwegians. Aerial ice reconnaissance was provided to the sealing fleet. Canadian Coast Guard ice-breakers were made available to assist the sealers. Most helpful of all perhaps was the refusal of the federal government to implement conservation legislation that would have interfered with the uninhibited pursuit of profit at the ice.

In the 1960s, the so-called seal “hunt” became a veritable orgy of destruction as get-rich-quick entrepreneurs congregated like vultures over the ice floes. Nor is this simile far-fetched. In the spring of 1962 some ships began using helicopters to transport sealers to distant pans and to ferry sculps back to the vessels. The following year, with whitecoat pelts fetching $10 each, an airborne assault was launched against the Gulf seals by dozens of light planes equipped with skis or balloon tires so they could operate on ice.

These planes were mostly owned by the pilots who flew them: aerial gypsies who knew little or nothing about sealing, but who were hot on the scent of a literal quick killing. The pilot-owners hired local men from the Magdalens or Prince Edward Island, flew them out to the whelping patches at dawn, then spent the rest of the day ferrying sculps to makeshift landing strips ashore.

The rivalry that developed amongst these airborne raiders, landsmen sealers, and the sealing fleet brought anarchy to the ice. Whatever rules of sense or sensibility might previously have been observed were now abandoned. Air sealers even hijacked panned sculps left on the ice by sealing ships, and not a few aircraft arrived back at their shore bases with bullet holes in their wings and fuselages. The whelping nurseries of the harp seal nation became a grisly shambles. One of the pilots who flew at the Gulf in 1963 gave me this graphic account of what transpired.

“We had to take what we could get in the way of sealers. The competition for anybody big enough to swing a club or use a knife was wild. I had to go into Charlottetown and round up a bunch of deadbeats out of the beer parlours. They didn't know from nothing, and couldn't have cared less so long as they made a few quick bucks.

“There was so many planes buzzing around out there it was like a war movie... flopping down anywhere there was a pan big enough to hold 'em. And I guess every seal bitch was drove right off the ice, whether she'd pupped or not. Nobody give a damn. It was only the pups we wanted and there was millions of the fat little buggers.

“I put my crowd out just about eight A.M. and waited for them to kill me my first load. But, Jesus, they was dumb! They could smash a pup on the head alright, but skin? Couldn't have skinned an orange right. I wasted half the morning showing them how, and at that they spoiled as many as they saved.

“Everybody had the fever. To beat the other guys. There was guys running around as never stopped to skin a pup at all—just banged 'em on the head and run on to bang the next one they could see before some other guy could get it first. You'd have to see it to believe it.

“One trip I landed on a soft patch and damn near lost the plane. Had to gun her out of there and make a landing some ways off where a different crowd was killing. They waved me off, but I landed anyhow. I never seen nothing like it. They weren't even
trying
to kill their seals. Guys was holding them down with one foot and ripping them up the belly, then trying to peel the skin off. What a mess! With the pup wriggling like crazy, they'd slice the skin in a dozen places and ruin it for sure. Not to worry. Stick the knife into the next pup and try again.

“I seen things I won't forget.
You
ever see a
skinned
pup trying to wiggle out of the water where some guy'd kicked it? Yeah, sure, I made a pile that season, but I never went back next year. It was too rough for me.”

Most of the pilots did go back, however, and were joined by many more, since the rewards for two weeks of hard living and considerable risk-taking could exceed $10,000. In 1964, whitecoat sculps went up to $12.50 each, fuelling a carnage that was becoming wanton beyond belief. At least sixty-five light aircraft, together with several helicopters, “worked” the Gulf seals that spring, along with hundreds of landsmen and the sealing fleet. The competition was ruthless, and the sealers pitiless. Even the best of them became driven machines, wasting or abandoning many pups in their frenzied haste to forestall competitors.

Eighty-one thousand whitecoats were removed from the Gulf ice that spring. Although the actual number killed will never be known, there is agreement amongst those who were there that the year's “crop” was effectively wiped out. At the Front, where light aircraft could not operate, things were almost as grim. An estimated 85 per cent of the pups born were killed by the Norwegian fleet. The saving grace, if it could be called such, was that at the Front the butchers were at least professionals and there was comparatively little waste.

Meanwhile, seal products continued to diversify. Après-ski slippers for women and boots and sports jackets for men made of the silvery skins of adult seals led to a renewed slaughter of mature animals after the annual whitecoat and blueback massacre ended. Even the net fishery flourished anew, particularly along the south Labrador coast. Fishermen who had never previously bothered with seals began catching adults and bedlamers on huge, baited hooks. Worse still, crowds of men and youths started gunning for bedlamers and beaters from every sort of boat, using lightweight .22 calibre rifles. Only a lucky hit in the brain with a .22 was likely to kill even a beater. The accountant of a fish plant in northern Newfoundland who got seal fever and went swatching told me he estimated the ratio of hits to kills at about ten to one.

Not since the mid-nineteenth century had the ice seals endured such merciless persecution. In 1963, reported landings from the northwestern Atlantic totalled 352,000—“reported” because the Norwegians were believed to always land many more than were admitted. Assuming a most conservative loss ratio, the kill that year must have been close to 500,000. The following spring the death toll was almost as huge.

By the summer of 1964 it had become brutally obvious to everyone involved in the business that the ice seals were destined to commercial, if not actual, extinction. From as many as 10 million (the estimates vary) in its aboriginal state, the western herd of the harp nation had been reduced to little more than a million. As for those at the West Ice, not more than 200,000 survived. The Soviets had also joined in the outbreak of uncontrolled avarice by grossly over-killing whitecoats in the White Sea in order to profit from the Western world's mania for sealskin artifacts.

Those departments of the Norwegian, Canadian, and Soviet governments entrusted with the regulation and protection of fisheries were fully aware of what was happening. They had been briefed by their own scientists, most of whom, it must be said in all fairness, were predicting a devastating collapse of harp and hood populations unless the mayhem on the ice was quickly halted.

Norway and Canada ignored the warnings. However, in the autumn of 1964 the Soviet government prohibited further ship-borne sealing in the White Sea. When challenged to follow suit, a spokesman for Canada's Department of Fisheries asserted that, far from declining, harp seals were actually increasing in numbers. Furthermore, there could be no thought of interfering with the rights of free enterprise to continue making a legitimate profit from this “rational harvesting of a natural resource which was of great importance to the Canadian economy.”