by Farley Mowat
It was, of course, de rigeur in Judeo-Christian-dominated cultures to believe that all large carnivores were inherently savage and ferocious animals that should be treated as inimical and destroyed whenever possible. The white bear was no exception. From as early as the sixteenth century it bore a horrid reputation as a man-eater that much preferred crunching human skulls to seal skulls. Such canards were legion, although the stark truth is that only a handful of authentic records attest to unprovoked attacks by white bears on human beings—and some of these are suspect.
Although the bears had co-existed successfully with aboriginal mankind, they were unable to do so with the new human interlopers. Fed up (quite literally) with eating fish, whether salt or fresh, European fishermen summering on New World coasts lusted after red meat; and one of the most readily accessible sources of such was the white or water bear, as they sometimes called it. Abundant on the fishing coasts from Nova Scotia “down” the Labrador and west to the estuary of the St. Lawrence, it flaunted its presence, not just by reason of its colour but because it had so little fear of man that it would neither hide nor flee when he appeared. To the contrary, it deliberately sought out fishermen’s shore establishments, which its perceptive nose could detect from many miles away, where it felt free to help itself from flakes and drying racks, thereby infuriating the human owners. For these several reasons, together with the fact that its shaggy pelt was a valuable curiosity in Europe, it early became a target for destruction.
The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did. Nevertheless, toward the end of the seventeenth century its numbers had been so sadly reduced that it was a rarity in southern Newfoundland, where it had by then acquired a mythical reputation. Baron Lahontan wrote of it in 1680: “The White Bears are monstrous Animals... they are so fierce that they will come and attack a Sloop in the Sea with seven or eight men in it... I never saw but one of them... which had certainly tore me to pieces if I had not spy’d it at a distance and so had time to run back to shelter to Fort Louis at Placentia [on Newfoundland’s southeast coast].”
Paradoxically, the European impact that resulted in the destruction of water bears in the southern and eastern regions of the Gulf of St. Lawrence had the opposite effect along the northern coast. From Belle Isle Strait westward was white bear country par excellence, providing them with enormous and accessible herds of harp and hood seals during the winter and early spring; grey and harbour seals, together with young walrus, throughout the year; seabird eggs and young on the numberless fringing islands in late spring; swarming summer and autumn schools of salmon in the many rivers; cod and flatfish in the estuaries; and berries and other vegetation on the land. In aboriginal times it had also provided occasional gargantuan feasts in the form of stranded whale carcasses.
In the sixteenth century Basque whalers began to work the northern coast of the Gulf. Thereafter, the number of whale carcasses increased at such a rate that not all the water bears in eastern North America could have consumed this bounty. Such a glut of food became available as a result of the Basque slaughter of the great whales that the white bear population seems to have exploded. So numerous did they become that the entire region began to acquire a singularly menacing reputation.
If this reputation was not actually invented by the canny Basques as a means of keeping competitors away from their immensely lucrative whale fishery, it was certainly enhanced by them. Anticosti Island, in the centre of the Basque whaling ground, became particularly notorious for its bears. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, so Champlain tells us, not even the natives would go near the place because “they say that a number of very dangerous white bears are to be found there.” Another Frenchman, Father Sagard, sailed past the island in the 1630s and noted that “on the Island of Anticosti it is said there are white bears of enormous size, which eat men.”
However, the century-long free lunch supplied by the whalers turned out to be a mixed blessing for the bears. When the supply of whale carcasses dwindled away during the early 1600s, the swollen bear population had to hustle for a living. Furthermore, their huge numbers were now attracting the mercenary interest of the French, who had by then suborned the north-shore Indians into becoming furriers and had equipped them with guns. With firearms in their hands, the natives outmatched the bears. They also ceased to regard them with traditional reverence, once it was understood that bear pelts could be translated into trinkets and brandy at French trading posts. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the resident white bears, not only of Anticosti but of the whole north shore of the Gulf, were being hurried after their Newfoundland brethren—into oblivion.
They held out somewhat longer in and about Belle Isle Strait where, as late as 1707, the French trader Courtemanche found them still common. But by 1766, when famed English naturalist Joseph Banks visited the Belle Isle region, the only trace of white bears he could find was the report of a female with two cubs seen earlier on the Newfoundland side of the Strait.
The bears were still holding their own on the Atlantic coast of Labrador, which had not yet been infested by Europeans. In 1775, the Moravian missionary Jens Munk coasted north along that shore as far as Davis Inlet and recorded that “This land abounds with Deer, Foxes, White and Black Bears.” However, it was Captain George Cartwright, first European to establish a “plantation” (a trading post-cum-seal-fishery-cum-anything-else that could be turned to make a pound) in southeastern Labrador, who left us one of the best accounts of the life and times of the great white bear on the Atlantic seaboard of America.
Cartwright operated several salmon fisheries, one of which was in Sandwich Bay on White Bear River—so called by him because it was also fished, and heavily so, by white bears. What follows is condensed from his account of a visit to nearby Eagle River on July 22, 1778.
“About half a mile upriver, I came to a very strong shoot of water, from thence I saw several white-bears fishing in the stream above. I waited for them, and in a short time, a bitch with a small cub swam close to the other shore, and landed a little below. The bitch immediately went into the woods, but the cub sat down upon a rock, when I sent a ball through it, at the distance of a hundred and twenty yards at the least, and knocked it over; but getting up again it crawled into the woods, where I heard it crying mournfully, and concluded that it could not long survive.
“The report of my gun brought some others down, and another she bear, with a cub of eighteen months old came swimming close under me. I shot the bitch through the head and killed her dead. The cub perceiving this and getting sight of me made at me with great ferocity; but just as the creature was about to revenge the death of his dam, I saluted him with a load of large shot in his right eye, which not only knocked that out, but also made him close the other. He no sooner was able to keep his left eye open, than he made at me again, quite mad with rage and pain; but when he came to the foot of the bank, I gave him another salute with the other barrel, and blinded him most completely; his whole head, was then entirely covered with blood. He blundered into the woods; knocking his head against every rock and tree that he met with.
“I now perceived that two others had just landed about sixty yards above me, and were fiercely looking round them. The bears advanced a few yards to the edge of the woods, and the old one was looking sternly at me. The danger of firing at her I knew was great, as she was seconded by a cub of eighteen months; but I could not resist the temptation. I fortunately sent my ball through her heart, and dropped her; but getting up again, she ran some yards into the woods; where I soon found her dead, without her cub.
“The captain and Jack coming up, I was informed that Jack had shot one of those white ones which first passed me; that the beast had gone up on a small barren hill, some little distance within the woods, and there died.
“Leaving them to skin this bear, I advanced higher up the river, until I came opposite a beautiful cataract. There I sat down upon some bare roc
ks, to contemplate the scene before me, and to observe the manoeuvres of the bears; numbers of which were then in sight.
“I had not sat there long, ere my attention was diverted to an enormous, old, dog bear, which came out of some alder bushes on my right and was walking slowly towards me, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his nose not far from it. I rested my elbows, and in that position suffered him to come within five yards of me before I drew the trigger; when I placed my ball in the centre of his scull, and killed him dead: but as the shore was a flat reclining rock, he rolled round until he fell into the river.
“On casting my eyes around, I perceived another beast of equal size, raised half out of the water. He no sooner discovered me, than he made towards me as fast as he could swim. As I was not then prepared to receive him, I ran into the wood to make ready my unerring rifle. Whilst I was employed in that operation, he dived and brought up a salmon; which he repeatedly tossed up a yard or two in the air, and letting fall into the water, would dive and bring it up again. Being now ready, I advanced to the attack, and presently perceived him, standing in the water with his fore paws upon a rock, devouring the salmon. I crept through the bushes until I came opposite to him, and interrupted his repast, by sending a ball through his head; it entered a little above his left eye, went out at the root of his right ear, and knocked him over, he then appeared to be in the agonies of death for some time; but at last recovered sufficiently to land on my side of the river, and to stagger into the woods.
“Never in my life did I regret the want of ammunition so much as on this day; as I was by the failure interrupted in the finest sport that man ever had. I am certain, that I could with great ease have killed four or five brace more. They were in such plenty, that I counted thirty-two white-bears but there were certainly many more, as they generally retire into the woods to sleep after making a hearty meal.
“Having now only two balls left beside that in my rifle, I thought it was most prudent to return to the boat and wait the return of the other people. It was not long before they came down; for they were not able to skin the second bear. Although his body was afloat in the water and nothing but his head rested upon a flat rock, yet they could not lift even that up. We judged him to be as much as twelve hundred pounds weight; nor could he well be less than that, as he stood six feet high, as his carcass was as big as the largest ox I ever saw. Thus ended in disappointment, the noblest day’s sport I ever saw: for we got only one skin, although we had killed six bears.”
Cartwright encountered white bears at all seasons. In late April of 1776, one of his men “saw the tracks of near a hundred white-bears which had lately crossed Sandwich Bay.” He also recorded the species as still to be found in Newfoundland. It clearly whelped in south Labrador since he not only correctly gives the whelping time but refers to females with young cubs. In discussing the farming possibilities of Labrador, he concluded it would be too difficult and expensive “to fence against the white-bears and wolves,” which were clearly the major predators of the region. It is also of interest that in Cartwright’s time not only were a great many white bears living on the Labrador, they were co-existing with at least 600 Inuit and an even larger number of Nascopie Indians. But, as elsewhere, co-existence with Europeans proved to be a different proposition.
In the opinion of orthodox biologists, all occurrences of white bears along the Atlantic coast south of Hudson Strait refer, by definition as it were, to polar bears, which is to say to polar-dwelling bears. Conventional wisdom has it that these bears go adrift on the Arctic pack while hunting seals far from land and are then carried south, willy-nilly, until the ice melts under them and they are forced to swim to the nearest shore. Having regained solid ground, so the scenario runs, they dutifully set out to trek back to their Arctic homes, an overland journey which, in the case of those unfortunate enough to have landed in Nova Scotia, spans at least 1,000 miles, measured as the goose flies.
The peripatetic polar bear hypothesis carries some appearance of plausibility because, in our own times, the only white bears to be found along the Atlantic seaboard are almost certainly strays from Arctic or sub-Arctic regions—for the very good reason that the endemic population has long since been exterminated.
The possibility that these “ice drift” bears are in fact recapitulating an ancient pattern of involuntary colonization, just as their ancestors must have done aeons ago, and that they are failing now because they are being destroyed as fast as they arrive, is decisively rejected. Yet the orthodox explanation is even less acceptable since it would have required an enormous circulation of bears drifting aimlessly southward on the ice for many months of every year, then toiling laboriously northwards along the rock-ribbed coasts for as many months again, in order to account for the known abundance of white bears in the south in earlier times. Although appropriate to birds, an annual roundelay of such proportions would exhaust even as powerful an animal as the white bear, let alone allow him and her sufficient time and opportunity to propagate their kind.
The crux of the argument against a southern population lies, first, in the contention that the polar bear is specifically and exclusively adapted to far northern regions and therefore could not establish itself elsewhere; and second, in the belief that, because it is only found in polar regions now, this must always have been the case. But what about those special Arctic adaptations? Take colour, for example. White does have an obvious advantage for animals that spend a major part of their lives surrounded by ice and snow. And the polar bear is white during the winter; but then so are the varying hare and the ermine weasel, whose ranges extend south to Nova Scotia. In summer, hare and weasel acquire new brown coats; and in summer the hair of the white bear takes on a muddy, yellowish cast that provides good camouflage from a hunter working the landwash at the edge of the sea, whether in the north, which is also snow-free in the summer, or as far southward as one might care to go.
Another supposedly limiting adaptation is that polar bears can only exist where ice seals are abundant—the implication being that such conditions obtain only in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. The truth is that ice seals were found in near astronomical numbers off Newfoundland, south Labrador, and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from December through to April. Furthermore, white bears will happily eat any species of seal and, in aboriginal times, both grey and harbour seals existed in enormous quantities not only in all the waters just mentioned, but south to Cape Cod and beyond. What is even more to the point, the white bear is in no way limited to a seal diet. He is, in fact, one of the most opportunistic feeders in the animal kingdom.
There is also the argument that pregnant white bears must be able to find deep snowdrifts in which to den, and therefore reproduction is quite impossible except in Arctic regions. As we shall shortly see, this contention is as fallacious as the rest. The fact of the matter is that the white bear was never any more a prisoner of the Arctic than were the bowhead whale, walrus, beluga, white wolf, white fox, or any of a dozen species whose survivors in our time are now restricted to the frigid zone simply because they have been destroyed by us elsewhere.
During the spring of 1969, ornithologists from the Canadian Wildlife Service making an aerial search for goose nesting grounds about forty miles south of Churchill, Manitoba (and close to where I saw my first white bear), were startled to find “polar bears in such numbers the entire region seemed infested with them.” A follow-up investigation that winter revealed fifty earth-dug dens occupied by female white bears with their cubs.
This was just the beginning of one of the most extraordinary mammalian discoveries of recent times. Continuing surveys revealed the existence of a polar bear “zone” extending nearly 500 miles southward from Churchill almost to the bottom of James Bay, inhabited on a permanent basis by at least 1,500 white bears, including 600 breeding females. The mere existence of such a massive assemblage was astonishing enough; what made it even more so was the fact that they were livin
g as far to the south as the latitude of southern Labrador on the one hand and the prairie city of Calgary on the other.
Almost equally surprising was that a population of this size—it represented about a tenth of the known world population of white bears—could have remained undetected for so long. The explanation for that lay partly in the fact that nobody expected polar bears to be found so far south, but it was mainly due to the nature of the drowned morass known as the Hudson Bay Lowlands, where they lived. These lowlands consist of a soggy strip of coastal tundra bordering the west coast of James Bay and running north almost to Churchill. Inland lies a tangle of black spruce bog where the sole vertical relief is provided by occasional eskers, ancient raised beaches, and permafrost hummocks, in which the white bears excavate their dens. Virtually impenetrable in summer because of its saturated nature, the region is rendered most difficult of approach from seaward by a fringing barrier of mud and rock tidal flats that, in places, extends eight miles out from “shore.” In past times, even the natives treated the Lowlands much as the Bedouin treat the Empty Quarter of Arabia, and European traders and trappers bypassed it, considering it to be a worthless wasteland.
From July through December, when James Bay and Hudson Bay are ice-free, the bears remain ashore, where they lead an indolent life, sleeping, playing, denning, and feeding on berries, grass, kelp, small mammals, flightless ducks and geese, fishes, and marine life gleaned on the vast tidal flats. Although the population is densest near the coast, individuals range as much as 100 miles inland where they present helicopter-borne observers with the odd spectacle of polar bears trying to conceal their vast bulks behind clumps of scraggly spruce.
In November almost all the adults except pregnant females move to the shore and congregate while waiting for the sea ice to thicken so they can go seal hunting. In November of 1969, an aerial survey counted about 300 of them assembled near Cape Churchill, while hundreds more crowded the coastline to the south—more white bears than had ever been seen in one region of the world in human memory.