Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  Obediah Macy, one of Thomas’s descendants, tells us in his History of Nantucket that this first whale was a scrag, and that it was the kind the island natives had long been used to hunting. In truth, it was the Indians who here, as elsewhere along the coast, taught the English how to catch these whales. Furthermore, through most of the succeeding century, native whalers were employed (dragooned might be a better term) to do most of the actual killing that fed a mushrooming proliferation of shore factories.

  By 1660, scrag whales were being killed by shoremen along much of their migration route between Nova Scotia and Florida. During the northern migration of 1669, Samuel Mavericke alone took thirteen off the east end of Long Island and noted they were so abundant that several were seen right in the harbour every day. In 1687, seven small factories along the Southampton and Easthampton beaches of Long Island tried out 2,148 barrels of oil, while 4,000 barrels were made on Long Island in 1707. A forty-six-barrel whale was considered a good catch, while thirty-six-barrel whales were the norm. A black right of average size, it should be remembered, yielded up to 160 barrels.

  By 1725, only three-quarters of a century after the diligent New Englanders had begun killing them, the last days of the powdaree had come. Although the English were not solely responsible for their destruction—French Basques whaling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the summer season undoubtedly killed their share as substitutes for the now all-but-vanished sarda—it was the New Englanders who doomed the powdaree.

  In so doing, they found themselves forced to abandon their dependence on inshore whaling and to take to “ye deepes,” as the Boston News-Letter of March 20, 1727, reported: “We hear from the Towne of the Cape [Cod] that the Whale-fishery amongst them having failed much this Winter, as it has done for several winters past, but having found a way of going to Sea upon that Business... they are now fitting out several Vessels to sail with all Expedition upon that dangerous design this Spring.” These “several Vessels” were forerunners of the enormous and horrendously predatory Yankee deep-sea whaling fleet that would eventually scour all the oceans of the world in merciless pursuit of whales of many species.

  Although the execution of the grey whale took place along much of the Atlantic seaboard of what is now the United States, by far the bloodiest destruction was committed in the Cape Cod and Long Island district, where extensive shoals lying athwart the whales’ migration route made them especially vulnerable to boat whalers. Consequently, this region is fully entitled to its claim to being the cradle of the American whaling industry. It is also entitled to renown as the place that gave the impetus to the first major extinction to be perpetrated by Western man in North America... the first of many such.

  Bowhead

  During the autumn of 1947, I was in Churchill, Manitoba, the northern terminus of the Hudson Bay Railroad on the shore of the vast inland sea of the same name. The straggling little community was dominated by an enormous concrete grain elevator that towered like a misplaced skyscraper over a primeval world of rolling tundra and icy seas. Yet impressive as it was, my most vivid memory from that visit is of a giant of another sort.

  One day when an easterly gale was blowing across the surging waters of the Bay, dusting the dim world in driven snow, I sought shelter in the bar of a hotel. I was nursing a beer when a red-faced fellow stomped into the place.

  “Down to the gov’mint pier!” he yelled. “Seen it myself! Big as a goddamn boxcar! Bigger’n two of the buggers. You gotta see it, boys!”

  Twenty minutes later the grain-loading pier jutting into the ice-rimmed harbour was crowded with most of the male residents of Churchill. I stood among them, parka hood pulled up against the freezing spindrift. Next to me, three Inuit hunched their shoulders. They were from Pond Inlet on distant Baffin Island and had been shipped south to be trained as truck drivers for an American radar base. I had met them before and found them morose and withdrawn, but now they could hardly contain their excitement. When I asked if they had seen the visitor who had drawn us to the pier, they exploded in words and gesticulations.

  “Eeee! Yiss! Arveq—the Big One! Look there!”

  The waters heaved and there it was, a glistening blue-black monster, massive as an upturned ship, looming through the storm-murk not a hundred feet from the concrete cliff on which we stood. It seemed at least as big as the sixty-foot tug moored to the pier. I heard a muffled whooooooffff as twin, steamy jets spouted twenty feet into the air and blew down upon us, bringing a touch of warmth and a rank, fishy stink. The Inuit were beside themselves.

  “Breathe well! Get strong! Go north! Take word of us!” they shouted.

  The whale spouted three times, then sounded, seeming to roll down into the depths like the segment of a gigantic wheel. The snow was thickening and soon all things were hidden in a full-fledged blizzard. I never saw it again... but he, or she, was unforgettable.

  The still-ebullient Inuit joined me for a beer and we discussed the visitation. What we had seen, they told me, was the greatest being their world knew. In the days of their fathers, Arveq had been everywhere. “All the bays, all the passages—he come so many nobody can count.” Then, they said, big ships had begun to appear off the Baffin coast and white men had begun killing the great whales. Now so few were left that the Pond Inlet people counted themselves lucky if they glimpsed one during the course of several years.

  I count myself lucky, too. Arveq, or Balaena mysticetus as it is known to science; bearded whale, Greenland whale, Grand Bay whale, Arctic right, polar whale, or bowhead, as it was called by a succession of whalers, is now one of the rarest animals on earth, perhaps even rarer than its cousin the sarda.

  A giant amongst giants, it attained lengths of over seventy feet and weights as much as ninety tons, although in later days, after we had laid our doom upon it, few survived to reach fifty feet or sixty tons. Shaped rather like a gargantuan tadpole, its body was wrapped in the heaviest blanket of fat carried by any whale, sometimes two feet thick and capable of producing as much as 7,000 gallons of oil. In addition, it carried the biggest “head” of baleen of any whale—up to two tons of the horny substance.

  Its size was such that even latter-day whalers were awed by it, as this nineteenth-century description attests: “Consider his mouth as having a 300 barrel capacity... nearly ten feet high, twice that in length, and more than fifteen feet wide. The lips are four feet thick. The lips and throat alone should yield 60 barrels of oil. When the creature feeds, his lips are spread as much as 30 feet apart and to obtain a single mouthful he strains the minuscule organisms that are his meal from a quarter of a mile of ocean. Barrels of blood more than 100 degrees warm pour through the massive pipes of his circulatory system, the largest a foot in diameter, driven by a heart as large as three barrels.”

  The prodigious quantities of whalebone and train oil obtainable from the bowhead made it by far the most valuable of whales and, in consequence, the most avidly and relentlessly pursued—once it had been discovered. But that discovery came surprisingly late in whaling history.

  In summer the Greenland whales cruised bays and inlets from Franz Joseph Land in the eastern Barents Sea, west to Spitzbergen, northeast Greenland, Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and the islands of Canada’s eastern Arctic archipelago. When October began darkening the skies in high latitudes and pack ice began to spread and thicken over Arctic seas, these giants, bursting with blubber acquired during their summer plankton feasting, moved majestically southward. Those from the seas east of Greenland shaped their courses southwestward through Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland. They did not migrate into European waters because had they gone in that direction they would have encountered warm tendrils of the Gulf Stream, and their super-insulating coats of blubber probably made them uncomfortable in water more than a few degrees above the freezing mark. After rounding Cape Farewell, I believe that many of the massed squadrons from the Greenland Sea continued southwes
t across the Labrador Sea and by late November had ridden the frigid Labrador Current to the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle, through which they poured into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there to spend the winter months. Meantime, companion multitudes that had summered in Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and amongst the Arctic islands made their ways south to Hudson Strait or Fury and Hecla Strait and through one of these into Foxe Basin and Hudson Bay, where they would calve and breed in lanes of water kept open all winter long by fierce winds and powerful tidal currents.

  Those wintering in the Gulf of St. Lawrence probably remained there until early March, by which time the females had given birth to their fifteen-foot offspring and mating had taken place. Then the passage north began, at first following the seaward edge of the vast tongue of ice that thrusts south down the Labrador coast in late winter. As summer progressed the spreading pods pushed north, east, and west, everywhere following the retreating pack or even penetrating deep within it to feed on the luxurious plankton bloom fostered by the effect of the sun’s rays on melting sea ice. So the annual cycle made its round... a round that remained completely beyond the ken of European man until well into the sixteenth century.

  The European discovery of the New World did not immediately reveal the existence of the polar whale because until about the mid-sixteenth century, most Europeans were summer visitors only. They had no taste for the North American winter, or for being storm-battered by autumnal gales in the roaring seas of the North Atlantic.

  Nevertheless, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, some ships and crews would find themselves benighted, either through shipwreck or because they had been caught in harbour by an unseasonably early freeze. That misfortunes of this nature did overtake early Basque whalers in the Strait of Belle Isle is an historic fact. Probably most of the men so marooned perished miserably, but any whaler who managed to survive the bitter cold and the terrible attrition of scurvy, and then make his way home, would have had a tale to whet the appetite of any whaling syndicate.

  He would have reported the presence of winter whales of prodigious size and numbers. We can gain some idea of the numbers involved by considering that it took the massed whaling might of Basques, English, Scots, Dutch, Germans, and Americans 350 years of intense and unremitting hunting to effectively exterminate the Greenland whale. The slaughter is reasonably well documented after about 1610, and my analysis of the records suggests that, at first contact, the North Atlantic population numbered as many as 150,000 individuals. If only a part of these spent the mid-winter months in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the December flood of Greenland whales funnelling through the narrow neck between Newfoundland and Labrador would nevertheless have provided an unparalleled spectacle.

  But did the Greenland whales really winter in the Gulf? Most authorities seem to have little or nothing to say about the matter. Typically, Dr. F. Banfield, in his recent Mammals of Canada, describes the southward migration of Balaena mysticetus as far as southeastern Baffin Island, after which those multitudes mysteriously vanish. The possibility that the Gulf might have been the goal of many of them, and that it could have given them the nursery and wintering grounds they needed, seems not to have been considered, perhaps because of a conviction gained from looking at the map that it lies too far south to be suitable for such “Arctic” animals as bowhead whales.

  In truth it would have been as suitable to them as it was to such other nominally Arctic animals as the polar bear, walrus, and beluga whale, all of which were found there in abundance in earlier times. Although it becomes partially though never wholly ice-covered as winter progresses, this would have been no disadvantage to the polar whales, which would have welcomed the familiar presence of ice. Capable of remaining submerged for up to an hour while making passages from one lead of open water to another under the immensely heavy pack of the Arctic Ocean, they would have found no hindrance to free movement here; yet the drifting pack would have provided protection against heavy weather and big seas during the crucial period when the calves were being born. It should be remembered that the Greenland or bowhead was a cold-water animal and seldom if ever sought warm water, as did many other whales. The northern waters of the Gulf were eminently suitable since they were chilled by an offshoot of the Labrador Current entering through the Strait of Belle Isle. A comparison between the Gulf and the major wintering and calving ground of the Pacific tribe of bowhead whales in the Sea of Okhotsk reveals a range of similarities that strongly recommend the Gulf as an ideal wintering ground for North Atlantic bowheads.

  Solid evidence has recently come to light as a result of excavations being undertaken in the boneyards surrounding ancient Basque whaling stations on the north shore of the Gulf. Intermingled with the remains of the sarda are quantities of bowhead bones.

  A final point. In the list of the four whales of the “better sort” recorded by the Master of the Mary Margaret, the whale that stands first in excellence is, by its description, indubitably the bowhead; yet until the voyage of the Mary Margaret, neither the Basques nor anyone else had whaled in European Arctic waters where bowheads might have been encountered. How then did the Basques know about this whale, and why did they rank it so highly? The answer has to be that they knew it and hunted it in the Sea of Whales. Confirmation of this comes from the fact that the name by which it was first known to both French and English was Grand Bay whale—Grand Bay or La Grande Baie being the name given to the northern arm of the Gulf by sailors of these nations.

  The pattern of whaling voyages to the northern Gulf exhibits significant changes during the 1560s. Whalers still sailed from Spanish ports as usual, aiming to pass through the Strait of Belle Isle early in July after the pack ice had cleared out of its narrow waters. On reaching their stations along the north shore, they began hunting sarda as they had done for close to half a century; but, whereas in former times the fleet had used to weigh anchor for home ports before the end of October (by which time the sarda had departed for the south), now the Basques lingered on. Not even white frosts at night and the onset of bitter warning winds out of the northwest could force them to depart. They waited, and they watched, even though the Sea of Whales now seemed devoid of prey.

  November came. Scum ice began to form in the harbours, and still the Basques waited. Finally, lookouts on high ground at the easternmost station of Xateau—now Chateau Bay—staring out over the grey seas spotted the approaching vanguard of Grand Bay whales rolling south on the Labrador Current, breaching and blowing until the sky seemed filmed with frozen haze.

  From station after station the whaleboats swarmed out to meet the oncoming armada. Braving razor-edged cat-ice, ice fogs, snow squalls, and freezing winds, the boatmen pressed their attacks with a frenzy that ignored everything except the urgency of killing. It was indeed a terrible urgency, for they had to complete the slaughter, make their oil, and depart quickly—or face a deathly winter, frozen in on Labrador’s black coast.

  The risk was real. In 1577, winter struck in early December and never relented thereafter until the following spring. Shore-ice made so quickly and so thickly that it trapped much of the Basque fleet in harbour. Something less than half seem to have escaped, perhaps by fleeing southwest into the Gulf, thence eastward through Cabot Strait into the Atlantic; however, for some twenty-five or thirty ships and more than 2,000 men, there was no escape. Through five interminable months they endured fearsome cold, near starvation, and, worst torment of all, the scourge of scurvy. Before spring freed their ships, 540 of them died. Although this was a singularly savage blow, it did not dull the whaling syndicates’ appetite for gain; in 1578, an even larger than usual fleet returned to risk its men in the December gamble for the oil of the Grand Bay whale.2

  * * *

  2 During 1983, excavators at the Basque station at Red Bay uncovered the skeletons of scores of men, the reasons for whose deaths could not be determined. They may well have been scurvy victims.

  As the sl
aughter of the western sarda slowed for want of victims, a new wave of destruction incarnadined the northern reaches of the Sea of Whales. Until the loss of their fleet in the Armada debacle of 1588, the Spanish Basques fished the Grand Bay whale with the ruthless singleness of purpose that lust for profit fires in men; and, when they were gone, their place was taken by the French Basques who, according to Champlain, were making 200,000 livres worth of train a year during the first decades of the seventeenth century. However, as we have already seen, by then the great days of the Basque whaling monopoly were fast fading away.

  The event that triggered the beginning of the end of that monopoly took place in 1607 when that doughty explorer, Henry Hudson, sailed into the virtually unknown Arctic seas seeking a passage around Asia leading to Cathay. Hudson coasted the polar pack for hundreds of miles, discovering the isolated island he called Hudson’s Touches (Jan Mayen Island) and examining parts of the Spitzbergen archipelago. Although he failed to find what he sought, he reported “great store of whales” of enormous size that seemed to swarm everywhere in the Arctic seas.

  News of this discovery spread rapidly through the business capitals of northwest Europe and ignited considerable excitement—if the reports were true, it appeared that a source of train oil at least equal to that dominated by the Basques in the Western Ocean had been found much closer to home. The upshot was that first the English and then the Dutch sent ships into the frozen north to investigate. By 1612, a new oil rush was under way.