A Whale for the Killing

by Farley Mowat

  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.

  When I went to bed, the whales were still circling leisurely. I slept late, to be awakened by the snarl of outboard engines, by excited shouting, and by the sound of feet pounding on my deck. When I thrust my head out of the hatch, I found what appeared to be about half the male population of St. Pierre, accompanied by a good many women and children, closely clustered along the waterfront.

  There was a slight fog lying over the harbour. In and out of it wove two over-powered launches, roaring along at full throttle. In the bow of one stood a young man wielding a homemade lance which he had made by lashing a hunting knife to the end of an oar. In the second boat was another young man, balancing a rifle across his knees. Both boats were in furious pursuit of the potheads, which numbered some fifteen adults and six or seven calves.

  The whales were very frightened. The moment one of them surfaced, the boats tore down upon it, while gunners on the shore poured out a fusillade of shots. The big animals had no time to properly ventilate their lungs but were forced to submerge after snatching a single breath. The calves, choking for oxygen, were often slow in diving. Time after time the harpooner got close enough to ram his hunting knife into the back of one of them so that long streamers of crimson began to appear on the filthy surface of the harbour. It was obvious that neither the gunfire—mostly from .22-calibre rifles—nor the lance were capable of killing the whales outright; but it did not appear that killing them was the object. In truth, what I was watching was a sporting event.

  I was appalled and infuriated, but there seemed to be nothing I could do to end this exhibition of wanton bloodlust. A fisherman friend of mine, Theophille Detcheverey, came aboard and I poured out my distress to him. He shrugged.

  “That one in the big speedboat, he is the son of the biggest merchant here. The other, with the spear, he is from France. He came here two years ago to start a raft voyage across the Atlantic. But he don’t get out of the bars until today, I think. They are pigs, eh? But we are not all pigs. You see, there is no fisherman helping them with their dirty work.”

  This was true enough, if of small comfort to the whales. The fishermen of St. Pierre had left for the cod grounds at dawn. When they returned in their laden dories late in the afternoon, the excitement in the harbour had reached a crescendo. All the fast pleasure craft available had joined in the game. The onlookers crowding around the harbour had become so densely packed it was hard to push one’s way through. I had chased scores of them off my decks, where they sought a better vantage point; and they had responded to my anger with derision. For ten hours, relays of boats had chased the whales. Clusters of men with rifles stood at the pierhead at the harbour entrance and every time the potheads tried to escape in that direction they were met with a barrage of bullets which now included heavy-calibre slugs. Unable to run that gauntlet, the whales were forced to give up their attempts to escape in the only direction open to them.

  Toward evening the whales, most of them now bleeding profusely, had become so exhausted they began to crowd up into the dangerously shoal water at the head of the harbour where the boats could not follow. Here they lay, gasping and rolling, until they had recovered enough strength to return to deeper water. Many times they swam directly under my boat, and they were beautiful... superb masters of the seas, now at the mercy of the bifurcated killer of the land.

  At dusk the sportsmen called it a day and went home to dinner. The audience departed. The fog rolled in thickly and silence returned. Again I sat on deck, and again the strange sibilant breathing of the whales kept me company. I could not go to my berth, knowing what must await them with the dawn. Finally I untied my little dinghy and rowed out into the darkness of the fog shroud. I had a vague hope that I might be able to drive the herd out of the harbour before daylight brought a renewal of their ordeal.

  It was an uncanny experience, and a nerve-wracking one, to row my little cockleshell silently through that dense and dripping fog, not knowing where the whales might be. The size of them—the largest must have been nearly twenty feet long—and their mysterious and unseen presence intimidated me. I felt extraordinarily vulnerable, detached from my own world, adrift on the lip of a world which was utterly alien. I thought, as a man would think, that if there was the capacity for vengeance in these beasts, surely I would experience it.

  Then, with heart-stopping suddenness, the entire pod surfaced all around me. A calf blew directly under one upraised oar and my little boat rocked lightly in its wash. It should have been a terrifying moment, but it was not. Inexplicably, I was no longer afraid. I began talking to the beasts in a quiet way, warning them that they must leave. They stayed at or near the surface, swimming very slowly—perhaps still exhausted—and I had no difficulty staying with them. Time after time they surfaced all around me, and although any one of them, even the smallest calf, could have easily overturned the dinghy, they avoided touching it. I began to experience an indescribable sense of empathy with them... and a mounting frustration. How could I help them to escape from what the morrow held?

  We slowly circled the harbour—this strange flotilla of man and whales—but they would not go near the harbour mouth, either because they knew the killer whales were still in the vicinity or because of the vicious barrage of bullets with which men had greeted their every attempt to escape during the daylight hours.

  Eventually I decided to try desperate measures. At the closest point to the harbour entrance to which they would go, I suddenly began howling at them and wildly flailing my oars against the water. Instantly they sounded, diving deep and long. I heard them blow once more at the far side of the harbour but they never came close to me again. I had done the wrong thing—the human thing—and my action had brought an end to their acceptance of me.

  The whales were still in the harbour when dawn broke. During the long evening in the bars, the ingenious sportsmen of St. Pierre had set the stage for a massacre.

  Early in the morning, just as the tide was beginning to ebb, half a dozen boats came out and formed a line abreast at the harbour mouth. Slowly, they began to sweep the harbour, driving the herd closer and closer to the shoals. When the whales sounded and doubled back, they were again met with rifle fire from the breakwater as on the day before. One of the largest beasts seemed to be leading these attempts to escape, with the rest following close in its wake. It looked like a stalemate until three small whales became momentarily separated from the pod as it came under the fusillade from the breakwater. They gave way to panic. Fleeing at full speed on the surface, and close-harried by a fast speedboat, they torpedoed across the harbour and into the shoals, where the tide was dropping fast. Within minutes they were hopelessly aground.

  Howling like the veriest banshees, men and boys armed with axes and carving knives leapt into the knee-deep shallows. Blood began to swirl thickly about them. The apparent leader of the pod, responding to what impulse I shall never know, charged toward the three stranded and mutilated whales. There was a wild melee of running, falling, yelling people; then the big whale was stranded too. The rest of the herd, following close behind, were soon ashore as well. Only one calf remained afloat. It swam aimlessly back and forth just beyond the fatal shoals, and for a few minutes was ignored as the boats crowded in upon the herd and men leapt overboard, jostling one another in their lust to have a hand in the slaughter. Blood from one impaled whale spouted high over their h
eads—a red and drenching rain. Men flung up their ensanguined faces, wiped the blood away, and laughed and shouted in the delirium of dealing death.

  Finally someone noticed the calf. Arms, red and savage, pointed urgently. A man leapt into his speedboat. The engine roared. He circled once at top speed, then bore straight at the calf, which was in such shoal water it could not sound. The boat almost ran up on its back. The calf swerved frantically, beat its flukes wildly, and was aground.

  The slashing and the hacking on that bloody foreshore continued long after all the whales had bled to death. A crowd of four or five hundred people drank in the spectacle with eager appetite. It was a great fiesta in St. Pierre. Throughout the remainder of the day there was a crowd standing and staring at the monstrous corpses. I particularly remember a small boy, who could not have been more than eight years of age, straddling a dead calf and repeatedly striking into its flesh with a pocket knife, while his father stood by and encouraged him.

  Nor were the “townies” of St. Pierre the only ones to enjoy the spectacle. Many American and Canadian tourists had witnessed the show and now were busy taking pictures of one another posing beside the dead behemoths. Something to show the folks back home.

  It was a grand exhibition... but the aftermath was not so grand. Those many tons of putrefying flesh could not be left lying where they were: So, on the following day, several big trucks appeared at the shore where lay the carcasses of twenty-three pothead whales. One by one the whales were hauled up by a mobile derrick and either loaded aboard the trucks or, if they were too big, chained behind. Then the trucks carried and dragged the bodies across the island to a cliff where, one by one, they were rolled over the steep slopes... and returned to the freedom of the seas.

  6

  A CURIOSITY ABOUT THE WHALE nation has been a part of me for as long as I can remember. When I was a very small child my grandfather used to sing me a song that began:

  In the North Sea lived a whale...

  Big of bone and large of tail...

  The song went on to describe how this particular whale was the master of his world until the day when he espied a stranger in his domain: a big, gleaming silver fish who stubbornly refused to acknowledge the whale’s mastery. The whale grew angry and slapped the interloper with his tail. That was a fatal error, because the strange fish was actually a torpedo.

  The moral of the song (all children’s songs of that era had a moral) must have been that it does not pay to be a bully. I never understood it that way. The song haunted me because my sympathy was entirely with the whale—the victim, so it seemed to me, of a very dirty trick.

  As I grew older and became more and more fascinated by non-human forms of life, the whale became a symbol of the ultimate secrets which have not yet been revealed to us by the “other” animals. Whenever anything came to hand about whales, I read it avidly; but the only thing which seemed to emerge with certainty from all my reading was that the whales appeared to be doomed by human greed to disappear and to carry their secrets with them into oblivion.

  Before coming to live in Burgeo, I had never actually seen one of the great whales. Knowing how rapidly they were being destroyed, I never really expected to see one. However, I had not been there long when I heard about the little pod of finners which had spent the previous winter among the Burgeo islands. The possibility that they might come back again was intensely exciting and contributed something to my decision to make our home in Messers Cove.

  Shortly after I first met Uncle Art, I asked him if he thought the whales would return. He assured me they would, but I hardly dared believe him until a day just before Christmas in 1962.

  It was a cold and pallid day with a hazed sky and sun dogs circling a half-veiled sun. Claire and I were in our kitchen, reading, when Onie Stickland came quietly through the door to tell us that whales were spouting just off Messers Head.

  Seizing binoculars, we followed him out along the snow-crusted promontory. Not more than a quarter of a mile off the headland, several quick, high puffs of vapour bloomed and hung briefly in the still air. We could catch only elusive glimpses of the great beasts themselves: slick black mounds, like moving rocks, awash in the jet-dark waters. It was enough. For me it was a moment of supreme excitement and supreme awareness. The secret was here—was now—was on my own doorstep.

  Four fins comprised the family that spent the rest of that winter in Burgeo waters, and it was a bad day indeed when we could not spot them from our seaward windows. Uncle Art was so delighted to have them about that, I truly believe, he set most of his herring nets, not to catch herring, but simply to justify the hours he spent on the water watching his gigantic friends. Ashore, he was equally happy to sit for hours telling me what he had learned about leviathan during his long life; and slowly, slowly, I began to steal some glimpses through the shroud of mystery.

  During the succeeding years, the whales returned to our coast early each December and remained with us until the herring departed, usually sometime in April. Each winter we looked forward with unabated eagerness to their arrival. We were not alone in our interest. In general, the fishermen of Burgeo seemed to hold the great beasts in a kind of rough and friendly regard. There was no conflict between whales and men. The whales remained scrupulous in keeping clear of the fishing gear; nor could they be looked upon as competitors for the herring since our fishermen were only interested in taking small quantities for use as trawl bait, plus a few tubs to be salted down for table use. Since the herring were present in millions, if not billions, there were far more than enough of them for whales and men together.

  The whales and the inshore fishermen developed a remarkable familiarity. Whales would often surface only yards from a dory, a skiff, or even a forty-foot longliner; blow, draw in a huge draft of air, then return unconcernedly to their fishing while the human fishermen went on as unconcernedly with theirs.

  It was Uncle Art’s conviction that the whales looked upon our fishermen with an almost benevolent tolerance, as those who are past masters of a complex trade may sometimes look upon willing but not very bright apprentices. This is how matters stood until the arrival of the “foreign” purse seiners on our coast.

  Although anatomists and other such can tell us something about the mechanisms of dead whales in terms of what they are, rather than of what they do, science remains surprisingly ignorant about the activities and behaviour of living whales and understands even less about their special capabilities in their aquatic world. A friend of mine, who is one of the foremost cetologists of our time, recently summed up the state of our knowledge in these words: “The little we biologists know about whales in life would hardly provide enough material for an essay by a high school student.”

  In view of the fact that man’s interest in the great whales, through the millenniums, has been largely restricted to bringing them to death, this is not very surprising. It has only been within the last few decades that we modern technological men have made any real effort to study them as living creatures; and by the time our scientists began to show some interest in the matter, there was only a remnant population of many species left, and that, however, so widely dispersed over such an immense realm of waters that we landsmen could count ourselves lucky to catch even occasional glimpses of them. A modern scientist attempting to plumb the secrets of whale life is in much the same predicament as the denizen of another planet would be if, suspended high above the atmosphere, he tried to comprehend the intricacies of human life through the cloudy ocean of air surrounding us. Fortunately, we do not have to rely solely upon what professional science has been able to piece together.

  Because fin whales are herring-eaters (at least in certain seasons and in certain parts of their vast oceanic range) and because the herring strike inshore every winter along the ice-free southern coast of Newfoundland, there is a period when the great mammals live almost at the portals of our world. And because of
men like Uncle Art, who are possessed of that abiding curiosity about other forms of life which is the hallmark of natural man, we actually know rather more about the great whales than my scientist friend concedes.

  It is proper for me to acknowledge my debt to such men as Uncle Art, and to warn the reader, if such a warning is needed, that in almost all that I have to tell about the fin whale, I have drawn heavily on the observations and on the intuition of such natural observers. For instance, I have been able to find nothing in writing to explain even such an apparently basic thing as how a fin whale gets his supper. It was Uncle Art who gave me the key to this minor secret. My own subsequent observations enlarged upon the picture and, when combined with some of science’s discoveries about whale sonar, enabled me to come to a broad understanding—a somewhat awestruck one—of how a finner feeds himself.

  WHEN UNCLE ART and I stood on Messers Head on the winter day in 1967 watching that marvel of technology—a modern herring seiner, competing with a family of fin whales—Uncle Art was moved to amusement. He had reason to be.

  Consider one of those new seiners: a hundred-odd feet of steel, diesel power and complex electronic gear, all designed, with the ultimate in modern man’s technical skill, to pursue and catch a little fish about a foot in length.

  The seiner begins its work by first locating a herring school, with a sophisticated echo-location system whereby a pulse of sound is transmitted through the water to be reflected back by any object it encounters. The returning echoes “read off’ on a slowly unrolling strip of sensitized paper, and a dense school of herring will show clearly on this record. Depth and distance are also indicated. The seiner follows the electric scent and closes in on the school. When the ship is in position she “shoots her seine,” a fine-mesh net which is laid in such a fashion as to encircle the school. The net is then “pursed”: its bottom edges being drawn together and its circumference diminished until the catch is concentrated, as in a huge dip net, alongside the ship. A big suction pipe is then lowered into the purse and the herring are pumped from the net and spewed into the vessel’s holds. From beginning to end it is a complex operation which may take several hours to complete.