A Whale For The Killing (v5.0)

by Farley Mowat

  Such technological marvels as sonar and asdic were refined to detect and follow underwater objects with great accuracy, and could guide depth charges, bombs and other deadly devices to the unseen target. Although, to my knowledge, the matter has never been investigated or even publicly discussed, there is no doubt that tens of thousands of whales were killed by the men who hunted submarines with ships or planes.

  A commander in the Royal Canadian Navy who served four years in corvettes, frigates and destroyers in the North Atlantic told me he believed a high percentage of the depth charges fired from his ships had been directed at submerged whales rather than at submarines. The drifting carcasses of bombed or depth-charged whales were a common enough sight to lookouts aboard naval and merchant ships. Wars are deadly, not only to mankind, but to those most innocent bystanders, the other forms of life which share the planet with us.

  Here is as good a place as any to reply to a question I have sometimes been asked. Why is it that, if whales have such large and well-developed brains, they have not been able to avoid destruction at man’s hands? The answer seems obvious. The whales never dabbled in the arcane arts of technology and so had no defence against that most deadly plague. In time they might have evolved a defence, but we gave them no time. The answer raises a counter question: Why is it, if man has such a remarkable intelligence, he has been unable to avoid an almost continuous acceleration of the processes of self-destruction? Why, if he is the most advanced of beings, has he become a threat to the survival of all life on earth?

  AT THE END of the Second World War, despite the fact that the Antarctic whale population had shown no increase, the whalers went back to work with renewed energy and with even deadlier weapons. Sophisticated sonar gear, radar and spotting aircraft operating from immense new floating factories (some as big as 30,000 tons), were combined with powerful new catchers that could make twenty knots with ease. This combination ensured that any whale which came within the wide-reaching electronic ken of the killer fleet stood no more than a fractional chance of survival.

  By the early 1950s the blue whale was rapidly approaching “commercial” extinction so the hunters turned their main effort on the fins. They were so successful that, by 1956, there were no more than 100,000 finners left alive out of a population estimated to have been nearly a million at the turn of the century. And in 1956, 25,289 finners—one quarter of those remaining in the seas—were slaughtered! By 1960 there may have been 2,500 blue whales left in all the oceans of the world (of whom less than a thousand now survive), and perhaps 40,000 fins in the Antarctic. They were so few, and so widely dispersed, that it hardly paid the pelagic whaling fleets to hunt them anymore, and so they turned to the lesser rorquals. They began exterminating the seis.

  Although the official whaling returns of the late 1950s made it obvious that the great whales were entering their final hours on this earth, nobody took any effective action to halt the butchery. When a few worried biologists suggested that the whaling industry should establish meaningful quotas, which would result in the whalers being able to make a sustained harvest indefinitely while allowing the whale nation to at least partially recover its numbers, they were ignored. The owners of the whaling fleets made it patently clear that they were determined to hunt the whales to extinction, and the devil take the hindmost.

  Hardly a voice was raised in public against this calculated policy of extermination. On the contrary, there was a spate of novels, non-fiction books and motion pictures, many of which seemed to glorify the slaughter, and all of which praised the hardihood and manliness of the whale killers.

  It is true that in 1946 an organization had been formed with the publicly stated intention of giving protection to the threatened species of whales and of regulating the hunt. This was the International Whaling Commission, whose headquarters were (and remain) in Norway, which also happened to be headquarters for the world’s most efficient whale killers. But despite the employment of many good and dedicated men, the commission was run for, and by, the whalers; and in such a manner that, instead of helping to preserve and conserve the vanishing whale stocks, it served as a cynical device to divert attention from the truth. It served to mask the insatiable greed which lay behind the slaughter, by promulgating regulations which appeared wise and humane but which, in fact, were useless... and sometimes worse than that.

  One of the first actions of the commission was to institute a quota system whereby each nation was allowed to kill only so many whales. It was a totally meaningless gesture since the quotas were set, and have since been consistently maintained, at levels far higher than the whale populations could support. There were regulations against the taking of undersize whales, or of cows accompanied by their calves; and these were honoured mostly in the breach. But the most hypocritical of all were the regulations, declared with great fanfare, which ultimately prohibited the killing of blues, humpbacks and all species of right whales. These were brought into effect only after all these species had been brought so close to extinction that they were no longer of any major commercial value and were, in fact, all threatened with biological extinction. These regulations were promulgated... but they were not enforced! The Japanese, for example, evaded them by pretending to discover a new species of whale in the Antarctic. They named it the Pygmy Blue Whale and, since it was outside the quota and not included in the prohibition on killing protected species, they busily cleaned up this last viable pocket which might very well have provided a nucleus for the return of the doomed blue whale. Furthermore, almost all pelagic whaling fleets, of whatever nationality, took protected whales upon occasion, giving the excuse that these were cases of mistaken identity. Still worse, many nations allowed their whalers to kill significant numbers of protected species for “scientific research.” Nearly 500 greys (also a protected species) out of a world population of under 10,000 were killed under scientific permits between 1953 and 1969 by Russian, Canadian and United States whalers, with the Americans alone taking 316 of these. During the past three years whalers on Canada’s east coast have killed 43 rare humpbacks (the survivors of this once numerous species now number fewer than 2,000) in the name of science. While it is true that scientists examined most of these sacrificial whales, adding presumably to their anatomical knowledge of the dead beasts, it is also true that the carcasses became the property of the whaling companies, who processed them commercially, for profit.

  Because of the inestimable damage it has done by assuming the guise of champion to the beleaguered whales, and so gaining acceptance in the public eye as the authority on the subject, I must emphasize that the International Whaling Commission has served only to hasten the doom of most of the species it has pretended to protect, while concealing the magnitude of the crime against life which has been, and is being, committed by the whalers on behalf of powerful individuals, industries and governments; and, in the last and inescapable analysis, on behalf of all of us.

  5

  IT WAS DURING THE WINTER of 1911 that Uncle Art saw the disappearance of the great whales from the Sou’west Coast.

  “Back about 1903 they Norway fellows built a factory in a cove eastward of Cape La Hune. Called it Baleena and, me son, ’twas some dirty place! They had three or four steam catching boats with harpoon guns, and they was never idle. Most days each of them would tow in a couple of sulphur bottoms or finners* and the shoremen would cut ’em up some quick. No trouble to smell that place ten miles away upwind!

  * * *

  * Colloquial names for blue whales and fin whales.

  “And floating whales! When they got the blubber stripped off they turned the carcasses loose, the meat all black, and they blasted up so high they floated nigh out of the water. Some days when I been offshore I t’ought a whole new set of islands had lifted overnight. Five or ten in sight at once, and each one with t’ousands of gulls hangin’ over it like a cloud.

  “’Twas a hard winter for weather and I never got to the Penguins as much as in a good year, but whe
never I was there I hardly see a whale. Then, come February and the weather got fittin’, I made a run for the grounds. Was a good sign of fish so I stayed on the islands six or seven days. One morning ’twas right frosty but nary a pick of wind. I was workin’ a trawl near the Offer Rock when I heard this girt big sound. It kind of shivered the dory.

  “I turned me head and there was the biggest finner I ever see. My son! He looked nigh as big as the coastal boat. He was right on the top of the water and blowing hard, and every time he blowed the blood went twenty feet into the air. He stayed where he was to, a dozen dory lengths from I, and I could see there was a hole blowed into his back big enough to drop a puncheon into. One of them bomb harpoons must have took him, and then the line parted.

  “Now I got to say I was a mite feared. There’s no tellin’ what ary wounded beast will do. I was tryin’ to slip me oars through the t’ole pins, quiet like, when he began to move straight for I. Was nothin’ to be done but grab the oar to fend him off, but he never come that close. He hauled off to starboard, and then he sounded, and I never saw he again... no, nor any of his like, for fifty year.”

  Until after the Second World War there were almost no sightings of great whales off the south coast of Newfoundland. Then, in the late 1940s, U.S. naval aircraft flying out of the leased base at Argentia in southeast Newfoundland began spotting an occasional big whale. News of these sightings came to light in the mid-1950s when it was learned that whales had become a useful addition to the navy’s anti-submarine training. Aircraft crews engaged in practice patrol work had been instructed to pretend that any whales they spotted were Russian submarines. The whales became targets for cannon fire, rockets, bombs and depth charges!

  In 1957 an outcry by Harold Horwood, a crusading columnist at the St. John’s Evening Telegram, resulted in a promise from the Argentia officials that whales would no longer be used as targets. However, the number which had been attacked, wounded or killed over a ten-year period was never released. Presumably it was classified information.

  The Americans were certainly not the only military people who were sacrificing whales “in defence of freedom.” Most countries with sea coasts to guard, and aircraft and ships to exercise, were probably also abusing whales in like manner, and may very well still be doing so.

  Despite their reception by the U.S. Navy, a few great whales continued to filter into the vacuum created in south Newfoundland waters by the Norwegians half a century earlier. These may have been fugitives from the coastal waters of northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador, where, in 1945, the Norwegians returned to the attack and established shore whaling stations at Williamsport and Hawkes Harbour. The finners in this region had managed a remarkable comeback during thirty years of relative freedom from the hunters. It was short-lived. In the six years before 1951, these two stations between them killed 3,721 fin whales before they began to run out of targets and both stations became “uneconomical” and were closed.

  Wherever they came from, little pods of fins and seis, a few humpbacks and sperms, and even the odd blue whale, were seen with increasing frequency during the late 1950s in the seas south of Newfoundland and east of Nova Scotia. In December of 1961, Uncle Art and Uncle Job were hauling herring nets near Hunt’s Island in the Burgeo archipelago when two fins surfaced close by.

  “’Twas the finest sight I t’inks I ever had, to see they whales come back!” Uncle Art recalled.

  “They had no fear of we. The herring was thick as smoke that month and they whales was hungry as ary wolf. They made a sweep or two close to our nets and the herring rose right out of the water ahead of she. They drove into one net and filled it up so full we had to go ashore and get some extra hands to help us haul it up.”

  These two whales were joined by another adult fin and the little group remained in Burgeo waters until April 1961, when they and the herring disappeared together.

  Their presence at first caused some concern among the younger fishermen who knew nothing about whales except by hearsay. They were afraid for their fishing gear, particularly because of an incident which had taken place the previous summer. A twenty-foot Greenland shark had invaded the narrow waters between the islands and blundered its way westward, leaving a trail of shredded salmon nets behind, until the weight of twine and anchors it was hauling grew too much for even its mighty muscles and it drowned.

  The shark had been a huge enough and destructive enough monster but he was dwarfed by the fin whales, who had the potential to wreak much greater havoc. They did nothing of the sort. Not a net or a mooring was touched nor a fishing boat threatened. After a few weeks the fishermen came to take the whales as much for granted as the whales apparently took them. To my knowledge, there was never any suggestion made by fishermen that “something should be done” about the whales. Perhaps their acceptance of the great animals was partly due to the fact that they had no weapons which could have been effective against such giants, but I think not. Their reaction was the normal one of hunting man in a natural environment toward another form of life which he cannot make use of, does not need, and which poses no threat or inconvenience to him. Live and let live was the attitude of the Burgeo fishermen.

  Unfortunately, not all Newfoundlanders felt this way. Word of the return of the great whales soon reached the sharp ears of Premier Smallwood, who was not the man to let an opportunity for the exploitation of a natural resource pass him by.

  Smallwood had already tried to profit by the presence in Newfoundland waters of a small but abundant toothed whale called the pothead. Potheads seldom grow more than eighteen feet in length but they live in large herds sometimes numbering in the hundreds. Their favourite food is small squid, in pursuit of which they often come deep into Newfoundland’s narrow fjords. Here they are very vulnerable to attack.

  Smallwood’s plan was to establish a mink industry and to feed the mink on the meat of pothead whales. In quick order several mink ranches were constructed (one of the largest of them belonging to Premier Smallwood himself), and the slaughter of the potheads began. Dildo was the favourite killing ground. When a herd entered this fjord, some boats would bar off the entrance, while others, whose crews were armed with shotguns and other noisemakers, panicked the little whales and drove them aground in the shallows at the head of the fjord. By 1965 more than fifty thousand had been axed, clubbed and stabbed to death in Newfoundland waters for mink food, so decimating the pothead stock that three Norwegian catchers had to be hired to hunt thirty-foot minke whales, the smallest members of the baleen family, which had been ignored until then but which are now coming under heavy attack.

  Smallwood also had designs on the great whales. He invited foreign interests to again revive the slaughter off the northern coasts of Newfoundland, offering incentives which amounted to guarantees that the whalers could do almost as they pleased, plus subsidies on a grand scale. The Japanese were all too happy to accept and they reopened the factory at Williamsport while a consortium of Japanese and Norwegians expanded the Dildo operation to include the killing of the big rorquals. Soon the catchers from these two stations were ranging far at sea, into the straits of Belle Isle and up the Labrador Coast, and taking between three and four hundred finners a year. Both stations are still in operation, having killed 2,114 fin whales (together with several hundred sei whales, sperm whales and minkes) between 1965 and 1971. Under a quota system authorized by the Canadian government, these stations, plus a third in Nova Scotia, will be allowed to kill 360 finners in 1972—which is about the limit of their maximum catching effort—and this from a rapidly declining population of western North Atlantic fin whales which, according to at least one biologist, may already have plunged to below 3,000 individuals. It is likely that the three stations will simply not be able to find and kill 360 finners, but no matter. There are no quotas on how many whales of other species they may slaughter, and so there is little likelihood that they will be deprived of a good margin of profit for their year’s work. However, if they do mana
ge to fill the generous fin whale quota, they, and the Canadian government, will have made a significant contribution to the ultimate destruction of a species whose world-wide numbers are now thought to be less than sixty thousand.

  THE TRANQUIL ACCEPTANCE of the fin whales at Burgeo was in sharp contrast to an incident I witnessed at about this time at St. Pierre, the capital and only port for the French islands of St. Pierre-Miquelon, which lie a few miles off the south coast of Newfoundland. Most of the inhabitants there are fishermen too, but St. Pierre itself is full of shops, tourist establishments, ship repair facilities and people whose loyalties lie with the modern industrial society.

  On a moonless night in August 1961, my schooner lay moored to a rotting dock in St. Pierre harbour. About midnight I went on deck to smoke a pipe and enjoy the silence; but the quiet was soon broken by what sounded like a gust of heavy breathing in the waters almost alongside. Startled, I grabbed a flashlight and played its beam over the dark waters. The calm surface was mysteriously roiled in great, spreading rings. As I puzzled over the meaning of this phenomenon, there came another burst of heavy exhalations. I swung the light to port and was in time to see one, three, then a dozen broad black backs smoothly break the oily surface, blow, then slip away into the depths again.

  I was seeing a school of potheads who had made their way into the sewage-laden waters of the inner harbour. They must have had a pressing reason, for no free-swimming animal in its right mind would have entered that cesspool willingly. The skipper of a local dragger later told me he had met a small group of killer whales close to the harbour channel on the day the potheads entered. Killer whales have been given a ferocious reputation by men; one not at all deserved, but it is true that they will occasionally make a meal of a pothead calf, and the potheads in St. Pierre harbour were accompanied by several calves.