by Farley Mowat
What is singularly disgusting about those final years is that the fishery would probably have collapsed at least a decade earlier than it did, with the likelihood that enough beluga might have survived to maintain a viable population—had not the government of Quebec intervened. In 1932, Quebec began paying a bounty of $45 (a very large sum in the Depression years) for every white whale killed in provincial waters. The public excuse for this bloody largesse was the canard that beluga were destroying the salmon fishery. The real, but hidden reason for the bounty was to provide a subsidy to the Rivière Ouelle whaling company so that it could continue to function for a few more years.
Because salmon were indeed becoming scarce where they had once abounded, the official stigmatization of the white whale as the chief culprit turned every man’s hand against it. Even after the termination of bounty payments, commercial fishermen, sportsmen, and sporting guides alike continued to make it their business to shoot every white whale they could. A questionnaire circulated amongst fishermen on the north shore in 1955 indicated that as many as 2,000 white whales may have been killed during the previous decade under the pretext that they were salmon-poaching vermin. In 1974, Jean Laurin, a graduate biology student studying what was left of the Gulf belugas (he estimated that no more than 1,000 then remained alive), encountered gunners on the cliffs overlooking coves frequented by the little whales, taking pot shots at them whenever they surfaced. When Laurin tried to put an end to this senseless persecution, he was rebuffed both by federal and provincial authorities, each of which claimed that the other had jurisdiction over the matter and so refused to take any action to protect the whales.
Not all governments have treated the white whales so shabbily. Odd as it may seem to those unfamiliar with its geography, Manitoba harbours a white whale population. The pods are strung out along the west coast of Hudson Bay where, through more than 200 years, they were commercially hunted by the Hudson’s Bay Company. That fishery went into decline early in the twentieth century as a result of the falling value of marine oils but was revived after World War II by a new breed of entrepreneurs. These developed a lucrative business killing belugas in the estuary of the Churchill River, a major calving and nursery ground, and shipping the meat a thousand and more miles south by rail to the Prairies where it was sold for mink feed. Between 1949 and 1960, more than 5,000 beluga were processed at Churchill for this trade. Nearly as many more seem to have been killed but either not recovered or abandoned when the small packing plant was unable to handle them.
I witnessed that sanguinary slaughter on three separate occasions during the 1950s. Big freight canoes driven by outboard engines and manned by hunters, mostly armed with old .303 military rifles firing hard-nosed bullets, criss-crossed the shoal waters of the estuary which were alive with hundreds of white whales. According to the season, the targets included pregnant females, nursing females, and calves. If a volley proved quickly fatal to a beluga, it was gaffed and towed ashore; however, if it was only wounded it would usually escape. With so many other targets available, the gunners seldom wasted time and energy pursuing cripples.
On one occasion I watched three gunners in two canoes fire at least sixty rounds into a dense school of perhaps thirty whales that had been driven into such shoal water that they could not fully submerge. Although this fusillade was delivered at point-blank range, only two corpses were recovered.
The market for mink food collapsed during the early 1960s for reasons that will become apparent later in this chapter. Nothing daunted, the Churchill whalers then began canning muktuk—the whale’s thick, inner skin—as an exotic snack to be sold to the kind of people who serve chocolate-covered bees at cocktail parties. This abomination ended in 1970 when it was discovered that Hudson Bay belugas were so contaminated with mercury—a pollution by-product of mining and pulp mill operations on the rivers leading into the Bay—that they were unfit for human consumption. Not to be discouraged, the operators of the Churchill fishery sought other ways to profit from whale killing. One of these involved using the outer skin of white whales as a material from which leather for the high-fashion trade could be manufactured. But by far the most appalling stroke of entrepreneurial ingenuity was an attempt to make the white whales central to a form of northern tourism—not as creatures to be seen and admired in life, but as targets for sport hunters.
In 1973, I received a glossy, illustrated flier extolling the pleasures to be had from shooting belugas—Adventure and Excitement in a Thrilling Chase to Catch a Two-Ton Monster of the Sea. This sent me posthaste to Manitoba and the office of the provincial Premier, Edward Schreyer. I put the case for the whales to him and he promised an immediate investigation. Shortly thereafter his New Democratic government banned the further killing of belugas in Manitoba waters for commerce or for sport. This was a unilateral decision taken despite the fact that the federal government of Canada, which claims jurisdiction over all sea mammals, refused to recognize such a ban; and despite the fact that it was denounced within the province as unwarranted interference with free enterprise.
Schreyer’s enlightened action has benefited both the beluga and the people of Churchill. The white whale population in Churchill’s vicinity has increased since 1973 and hundreds of nature-watchers journey there each summer to see the sea canaries in life. More local people and businesses draw more profit from this new approach than ever they did during the years when Churchill harbour ran red with the blood of butchered whales.
The story of the white whales in the Gulf has no such happy ending. In the summer of 1973, two remarkable women, Leone Pippard and Heather Malcolm, volunteered to help Project Jonah in its attempts to save what was left of the whale tribes in Canadian waters. Pippard and Malcolm undertook to study the belugas of the Gulf to obtain data from which a campaign for their preservation could be developed. To that end they spent several summers living in a camper truck near the mouth of the Saguenay River, devoting their waking hours to observing the whales. Their efforts were derided by some doctrinaire scientists, one of whom, Pippard remembers, “laughed in our faces when we told him we were going to learn something about white whales. He said we’d learn as much by going home and having six kids each.”
Although there was much evidence of previous abundance—one old man told Pippard that in his youth the whales had been “as many as the whitecaps on the St. Lawrence River”—by 1975 the subjects of the study seemed very hard to find. When the women undertook a census, they found to their dismay that fewer than 350 belugas remained and that their numbers were evidently still shrinking year by year. Pippard produced a report for the federally sponsored Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, and, in June of 1983, had the satisfaction of seeing it accepted. In the meantime the survivors of the St. Lawrence belugas had been granted nominal protection from hunting as of 1979, but the efficacy of that protection was then, and still remains, in some doubt.
When I attempted to find out why this last pathetic remnant of a ravaged species had for so long been refused our help, the official answer I got was chillingly revealing. “An extinct population that was of no real value anyhow is one that will give us no future problems and cause no pain. Furthermore, the niche vacated by such a species can usually be filled by another that will contribute to human welfare and prosperity.”
Certainly the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans does not seem overly optimistic about the Gulf belugas’ ultimate survival. It currently predicts that “at the present rate of decline the [white] whales could disappear from the St. Lawrence in as little as two years.” One wonders which species the department would prefer to fill that vacant niche.
Narwhal
A close companion of the beluga in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters, is the narwhal, noted for the male’s immensely long single tusk, which gave it the name sea unicorn. Although as late as the 1860s it was regularly seen by Inuit, and sometimes killed by them as far south as mi
d-Labrador, it has since vanished from those waters. Its story is as grim as that of the other threatened species of small whales. Totally extirpated from European Arctic regions, where it once seems to have been common, it is now found only in west Greenland waters and in the eastern Canadian Arctic. Here it suffers such heavy predation from native hunters (mainly for its tusk, which is worth up to $50 a pound to curio collectors and to apothecaries in Oriental countries) that its remaining population, thought to be less than 20,000, is steadily shrinking toward the point of no return.
Chaney John
One of the most remarkable of the small whales is also one of the least understood. A deep-water species, its western clans winter off the coasts of Nova Scotia and New England, migrate across the Grand Banks, and summer as far north as the ice edge. For the most part, they live their lives unseen by man, and until less than a century ago unmolested by him. For some now-forgotten reason, nineteenth-century British whalers, who were their first human enemies, named them Chaney Johns. Today, we know them by the unlovely name of bottlenose whale.
Chaney John is a toothed whale, of the same family as porpoises and dolphins, but can grow to thirty-five feet in length and weigh as much as eight tons. Its food consists mainly of squid taken at great depths. Extremely strong and energetic, it may be the champion mammalian diver of the world. There is a record of a harpooned individual taking out three-quarters of a mile of line in what appeared to be a vertical dive and surfacing two hours later in almost the same spot, still full of life.
Although abundant in northern waters during the summer, Chaney John was of little potential value to whalers, prior to the 1870s and the advent of the harpoon gun, because, as well as being hard to kill, it was a “sinker.” Nevertheless, it was of at least peripheral interest, as witness this account by Fridtjof Nansen cruising off the east Greenland coast.
“We saw numbers of bottlenose whales, often lying quite still in front of the bow or in our wake. Herd after herd bore right down upon the ship, then went round her and inspected us from every point of view.
“I regret to say that we made several attempts to shoot them with our express-rifles; but they took no notice. Then we decided to fire a volley.
“Three bottlenoses were heading straight for us; they came up astern, and one of them stopped and lay motionless about 20 yards away from the ship. The gunners stood together on the half-deck aft. Counting up to three we all blazed away, but the whale lifted his tail high in the air, lashed the water with it, and disappeared. Some blubber which it left floating on the surface was much appreciated by the gulls.
“The whale did not worry itself much about our bullets, apparently, for we afterwards saw it swimming along quite gamely with the others. We knew it was the same one by the gulls which gathered on the water wherever it had been, no doubt finding blood and blubber there.
“The captain suggested that it might be interesting to lower a boat and see how near we could get to them. This was accordingly done and we rowed towards one or two whales which were lying quite still. We were able to approach so near that we could almost touch them with our oars. Then suddenly they lifted their tails in the air, brought them down with a whack that drenched the boat with spray, and disappeared. Presently they came up again close to us, swam round the boat and had a good look at us from every point of view, then lay just under the surface of the sea, turning on one side to watch us with their small eyes.
“Once the captain laid hold of the tail of one of them with the boat-hook. The whale heaved up its tail, brought it down with a splash, and dived. If we rowed on a bit they followed, half a dozen of them at once swimming alongside of us, now a little in front, now a little behind, but always quite close to us; they were evidently extremely inquisitive.
“I cannot deny that we wished we had possessed some sort of instrument to fasten on to these big fellows, for they would have been sporting steeds to drive, as Markussen once discovered when he ‘harnessed’ one of them. He told us the story himself on board the ‘Viking’.
“ ‘I couldn’t bear seeing all this blubber going a-begging year after year in the sea round my ship’, he related. ‘Well, one fine day I saw a lot of bottlenoses about. So I rigged up a boat with a harpoon, and took three whale-lines to be on the safe side... Well, we soon fell in with a fine fellow who came up right ahead of the boat. When I stuck the harpoon into him, he made a hell of a splash and then sounded; the line ran out so fast that you could smell burning... The first line ran out, and the second soon followed; then he started on the third line, and it ran out every bit as fast as the other two had done.
“ ‘When he had taken the lot of it he pulled the boat under too, straight on without a stop; down it went, and left us behind kicking about in the water.
“ ‘The men yelled like the devil—they couldn’t swim; but I told ’em to stow it, and gave each of ’em an oar to hang on to.
“ ‘As luck would have it the “Vega” had steam up, and could come at once and haul us out.
“ ‘But them fish are the very devil to stay under water. Though the sea was like glass and we kept a sharp look-out from the crow’s nest all day in the hope of seeing our boat, neither boat nor fish did we ever see again. He certainly didn’t come up anywhere between us and the horizon.
“ ‘I felt pretty sore at losing such a good boat.
“ ‘Well I wasn’t going to risk another boat, but I thought I’d be even with him all the same. Next year I took some petroleum casks with me. I rigged up three of these casks, fixing them on to three new whale-lines, and laid them all ready at the bottom of the boat.
“ ‘Then we started out again. Well, I made fast to a fish, and down he went in the same way. The first line ran right out and we chucked the first cask overboard. But he pulled it on down with him full pelt as before, without stopping a moment. Then the second line ran but, and we chucked the second cask into the water, but it just went after the first and disappeared in the same non-stop fashion; while the third line went running out as fast as though we hadn’t had any casks at all.
“ ‘At length we chucked the last cask overboard; but I’ll be hanged if it didn’t go under every bit as quick as the others. So we’d lost the whale and the lines and the casks, and we never saw them again. This whale didn’t come up anywhere within sight either, so far as we could make out.
“ ‘Who’d have thought the old fish had so much go in him? Anyway, I gave him up after that.’ ”
About 1877, with the bowhead almost gone, some Scots whalers working the northwestern grounds began killing Chaney Johns using bomb-lances and grenades. As Nansen had discovered, their friendliness and curiosity made them easy targets. Moreover, they were bound by extraordinarily strong family ties and would not abandon a wounded member of the pod, as Captain David Gray, the first Scot to hunt them, found:
“They are gregarious in their habits, going in herds of from four to ten, although many different herds are frequently in sight at the same time. The adult males very often go by themselves; but young bulls, cows and calves, with an old male as a leader, are sometimes seen together.
“They are very unsuspicious, coming close alongside the ship, round about and underneath the boats, until their curiosity is satisfied. The herd never leaves a wounded companion so long as it is alive; but they desert it immediately when dead; and if another can be harpooned before the previous struck one is killed, we often capture the whole herd, frequently taking ten, and on one occasion fifteen, before our hold over them was lost.”
In 1882, Gray, commanding the Dundee whaler Eclipse, killed 203 Chaney Johns off northern Labrador. Thereafter they became increasingly sought after, particularly by Norwegian whalers newly equipped with Svend Foyn’s terrible harpoon gun. By 1891, seventy Norwegian killer boats were hunting them. Every year thereafter until early in the twentieth century, the Norwegians landed an average of 2,000 and �
�struck” and lost a great many more. The cumulative destruction was so enormous that by 1920 the whalers could only find and kill 200–300. At this point the “fishery” was abandoned as being insufficiently rewarding.
That the Chaney Johns had not been totally exterminated was due to the dispersal of the few survivors over such a vast waste of ocean that whalers could no longer find them in worthwhile numbers. They, however, could find each other and during the next half-century their pods began to grow again. Given sufficient time they might eventually have recovered something approaching their former abundance—but that was not to be.
As we have seen, during the 1920s and 1930s, Norwegian whalers turned their fatal attention to the titanic slaughter of great whales in southern waters. However, as that massacre reached its bloody climax and began to wane from lack of victims, more and more Norwegians returned to hunting “second-string” whales in waters nearer home. Although the minke (soon to be discussed) was chief amongst these, the awesomely efficient Norwegians discovered that some few Chaney Johns were again available in western waters and began killing them as well. World War II did not bring a halt to Norwegian whaling, which continued under the aegis of the Germans; but it did limit it to home waters with the result that, being a pelagic species, few Chaney Johns were caught. But when that war ended, Norwegian whalers began going deep-sea again.
Equipped with a new generation of extremely fast and efficient small-whale killers, they carried death and destruction first to Scottish waters, thence ever westward to the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and the northeastern approaches to America. Along the way they devastated the few remaining pods of Chaney Johns.