by Farley Mowat
Crude tryworks were commonplace in most fishing harbours by 1600. They were fired up whenever the fishermen had the time and opportunity to make an incidental haul of some local form of life which would make train. Thus seals, walrus, whales, porpoises... and seabirds all served their turn. Because of its great size, high fat content, and availability, the spearbill was, and remained, the prime target amongst the seabird tribes for as long as it lasted. Round about 1630, so Nicolas Denys tells us, French ships fishing for cod often loaded ten to twelve puncheons of penguin oil as well. Since thousands of spearbill carcasses were needed to produce such a quantity of train, it is apparent that this was no petty enterprise. Nor was it limited to the French. English, Spanish, and Portuguese cod fishers were butchering the birds for oil on a similar scale, and some were even making special voyages to isolated rookeries where they would set up portable tryworks during the spearbill breeding season. They were able to boil oil on even the most barren rocks by feeding the fires with skins and carcasses after the layer of fat had been removed. Some of the more profligate and ruthless of the oilers used the entire bird, as Aaron Thomas, writing about Funk Island as it was near the end of the eighteenth century, confirms.
“While you abide on this Island you are in the constant practize of horrid crueltys, for you not only Skin [the Penguins] Alive, but you burn them Alive also... You take a Kettle with you and kindle the fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made from the unfortunate Penguins themselves.”
Boiling the corpses for train did not exhaust the opportunities for Europeans to profit from the destruction of seabird populations. Although immense summer runs of small school-fish such as herring, capelin, mackerel, and squid normally provided fishermen with bait in any required quantity, there was sometimes a hiatus between the runs, or before the school-fish “struck in” to the coast. Shore-based fishermen soon found a solution to such temporary bait shortages—particularly during June and July. Raiding parties would sweep the seabird islands, massacring adults and young alike. The corpses would then be torn into fragments with which to bait the hand lines that were the principal form of cod-fishing gear.
In the days of their abundance, penguins made up a major part of the seabird bait and this destruction, added to the kill for food and oil, had its inevitable result. No single species, no matter how numerous in the beginning, could have withstood such carnage indefinitely. By the mid-1700s, only a handful of shrunken and beleaguered rookeries still existed. Then a new scourge was visited upon them.
During the latter part of that century, wide-awake entrepreneurs, mostly from New England, began exploiting a growing demand for feathers and down used in bedding and for upholstery both in America and in Europe. Each spring, droves of schooners from as far south as Chesapeake Bay appeared on the coasts of Newfoundland and the Gulf, intent on ransacking the islands where colonial seabirds nested. At first they concentrated on eider ducks, taking not only the down with which the nests were lined, but also shooting and netting countless thousands of adults. So ruthless were they that the once seemingly inexhaustible eider flocks were soon diminished to “worthless remnants.” The pillagers then turned on the seabird rookeries, including the last remaining spearbill colonies.
In 1775, Newfoundland authorities petitioned Britain to stop the massacre. “Contiguous to the North part of the Island are a great many islands where birds breed in abundance and which were of great service to the inhabitants for food in winter and for bait for catching fish during summer... [these inhabitants are] now almost deprived, as a great part of the birds have been destroyed within a few years by crews of men who kill them in their breeding season for feathers, of which they make a traffic... we pray an entire stop except for food or bait.”
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... ‘About 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 rook
ery 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 once—and not long since—been 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 Siemson—let 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 Stadur—Ketil Ketilsson, Jon Brandsson, and Sigurdur Islefsson—made 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.
2. Sea Fowle
Mass destruction of seabirds was not, 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.”