Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  In 1962, I went aboard one of their small-whale catchers in Thurso harbour in northern Scotland. The skipper, who was also the gunner of his seventy-foot killer, cheerfully explained the nature of his business.

  “We are just a meat shop, you might call us,” he said with a laugh. “We fit out from Bergen and just keep going west ’til we find whales. Minkes is best for us, bottlenose is next, but if we don’t get enough of them, there is always killers and potheads [orcas and pilot whales].

  “After the whale is struck with our nice 50-mm gun, we bring him alongside. If he is not too big we haul him on deck. If not, we put a sling around him to keep him steady, then the lads go overboard with spiked boots and cutting knives. We don’t have too much refrigerated stowage space, you understand, so we mostly just cut out the prime cuts: steaks, sirloins, roasts. The rest? Well, the sharks got to have their suppers too.”

  I asked about the market for meat and was told that minke commanded a very good price in Norway, where some people preferred it to beef, but that bottlenose was only fit for pet food. When the kill was greater than the home market could absorb, the frozen meat was shipped to the apparently insatiable Japanese.

  The second depredation visited on the Chaney John was less severe than the first only because there were far fewer whales to kill. It was, however, more thorough and has resulted in the near elimination of the species in the North Atlantic. Between 1962 and 1967, Karl Karlsen’s fleet operating out of Blandford, Nova Scotia, killed eighty-seven Chaney Johns, but met with no more during the remaining five years the station was in operation. Between 1969 and 1971, long-range whaling vessels from Norway patrolling through the seas off the Canadian Atlantic coast mainly after minkes killed about 400 bottlenose whales as an incidental catch, but by 1972 they were only able to find and kill seventeen. In later years, they could find none.

  In the opinion of one Canadian cetologist, Chaney John may be destined to become the second whale species, after the Atlantic grey whale, to become extinct at the hands of man, this despite the fact that, since 1977, the North Atlantic bottlenose has had “provisional protected status” under International Whaling Commission regulations.

  Minke

  “Small-whale quartet” is the name given, half humorously perhaps, by cetologists and fisheries management experts to the group that includes the bottlenose, orca, pilot, and minke whales. Of the four, the minke has been and still remains the most important to Norwegian whalers, the chief exploiters of the quartet.

  The thirty-foot, ten-ton minke is, it will be remembered, a rorqual—the smallest member of that family. Whale scientists, who are notoriously conservative about such matters, concede that as late as the 1950s it numbered better than a quarter of a million in southern seas and probably more than 100,000 in the North Atlantic. It had suffered only slightly from commercial whaling before World War II because it was relatively small, but after men finished with the human slaughter the minke’s turn came.

  A group of Norwegian businessmen arrived in Newfoundland in 1946 with a proposal to establish a small-whale fishery there. They were greeted with open arms and within the year had built a modern processing plant, Arctic Fisheries, near the village of South Dildo in Trinity Bay—a mighty arm of the sea that for centuries had been renowned for its plethora of whales. Supplied by two ultra-modern killer boats, the plant was designed to produce marine oil for the margarine trade and frozen meat to be sold in Europe and Japan. In later years, Arctic Fisheries operated with Japanese affiliations, killing large whales as well as small, but at first it concentrated on the small-whale quartet. Orcas and bottlenoses proved scarce but an abundance of minkes and pilots made up for that. Because minkes were individually much larger and therefore more valuable than pilots, they were the first choice of the killer boats.

  Between 1947 and 1972, the company processed slightly more than 1,000 minkes. Yet, although typical of its kind, the Dildo operation represented a mere drop in the bloody bucket of worldwide minke exploitation. Norwegian “small quartet” whalers ranging the North Atlantic landed 16,000 minkes between 1953 and 1957. Thereafter, the annual yield began to decline until by 1975 the catch was down to a mere 1,800. It continues to decline as the last remnants of the eastern North Atlantic minkes are hauled up on the greasy decks of Norwegian processing vessels.

  A numerical assessment of the total kill is difficult to arrive at, but since some of the Norwegian boats are known to have had loss rates of 80 per cent, and considering that the reported landings between 1939 and 1975 totalled nearly 75,000, the death tally for the North Atlantic minke tribes must by now be well over 100,000.

  The North Atlantic is not the only current minke killing ground of note. In 1969, Antarctic pelagic whaling fleets began taking minkes in lieu of the larger species that by then had mostly been extirpated in southern waters. During the succeeding three years Norwegian, Japanese, and Soviet Antarctic factory ships processed nearly 20,000 minkes. This was the beginning of the last hurrah for whaling in the far south. When it concludes, as it will soon if for no other reason than a lack of whales, peace will return to those cold and distant seas—but it will be the peace of the dead and the departed.

  In the Sea of Whales the commercial massacre has ended. It is now possible for dedicated whale watchers in the right places, at the right seasons, to see there some of the last survivors of the minke kind. If we can forbear from turning on them once again, the minke may yet escape the vortex of extinction.

  The Pilot

  About 1592, a cartographer named Petrus Plancius drew a map of Nova Francia and the New World. Like many maps of that era it was illustrated with vignettes of life. One such is a lively and detailed picture of whaling on the east coast of Newfoundland.

  The scene is the foot of a deep bay. The foreground is filled with rowboats, each carrying two men. This flotilla has just completed driving a school of small whales onto a gently sloping beach and, while some of the boatmen attack the stranded animals with lance-like darts, others on shore are already at work stripping off the blubber. In the distance, a tryworks sends a great coil of black smoke into the sky. The whales, not much larger than the boats, have bulbous, protruding foreheads. Considering their size and circumstances they can only be identified as pilot whales. And this picture could, with some small variations, equally well represent a scene from several thousand years ago; or from the 1950s.

  The sleek, black pilot is gregarious, living in schools or clans containing up to several hundreds of individuals of all ages and both sexes. Growing to twenty feet in length, and weighing two to three tons, they sport elegant dove-grey throat patches, long and flexible front flippers, and watermelon-sized, oil-filled bulges on their foreheads. This peculiar but not unattractive feature, which serves as part of the animal’s echo-location equipment, gives rise to the inelegant name of pothead, especially in vogue in Newfoundland.

  Its chief food is a small squid that schools in almost unimaginable numbers. These squid live in the deeps well away from shore throughout most of the year, and there the pilots pursue them, diving into darkness to depths perhaps as great as those achieved by Chaney John. However, during the summer the squid strike in to shore to mate and lay their eggs, coming right up to the landwash and sometimes even entering brackish lagoons and fresh-water streams. The pilots fearlessly venture after them and, in so doing, expose themselves to the terrible danger of stranding.

  Accidental strandings most frequently take place when the little whales chase squid into shallow, murky waters. Perhaps due to sickness, or to some physical disability, the leader sometimes seems unable to use his or her echo-sounding sense, and so, becoming aurally as well as visually blind, goes aground. A grounded whale is usually powerless to help itself and the pilot is no exception. The rest of the clan, being strongly conditioned to follow its “pilot,” as well as to assist one of its kind in trouble, tends to close in. In the chaos that ens
ues, an entire clan can strand itself. If the tide is rising, or if there is a sufficiently high sea breaking, some may escape. Otherwise, they die.

  In prehistoric times, such accidents must have been spectacularly rewarding to shoreside scavengers, including man. Eventually our ancestors realized that they had no need to wait passively for such gifts from the gods but could arrange for them to happen on a regular basis. So the whale drive was born.

  When a clan of pilots swept into a fiord or dead-end bay in northern Europe, following the squid, a rabble of skin boats or dugouts would put out from shore and attempt to bar the whales’ avenue of escape. Men beat on hollow logs, howled and shrieked, pounded the gunwales with paddles, and churned the water into foam. Later generations added trumpets, horns, and bells.

  The purpose of this din was to panic the whales into heedless flight toward shore. The noise also tended to disrupt their delicate sonar sense, thus masking the dangers posed by the shoals ahead until it was too late to turn back. Once the driven whales were wallowing helplessly in the shallows, the boats would push in amongst them; hunters stabbing ferociously with spears, lances, even swords, attempting to immobilize as many of the creatures as they could.

  Exploitation of North American pilot whales by Europeans must have begun early in the sixteenth century since, by the time of Petrius Plancius, it had become sufficiently important to warrant its advertisement on his map. By the eighteenth century it had become a traditional seasonal occupation for fishermen living in the deep bays of the northeast coast of Newfoundland and at other suitable drive sites as far south as Cape Cod. Some Newfoundlanders found a way to make extra profit from it by substituting pothead oil for the more valuable seal oil and selling it to the rapacious St. John’s merchants—a classic case of the biter being bit.

  So long as it remained localized and small in scale, this fishery posed no major threat to the continued existence of a species that evidently mustered on the order of 60,000 members in Newfoundland waters alone. Until the middle of the twentieth century the annual kill over the whole of the northeastern approaches seems seldom to have exceeded 2,000, except for a few years in the 1880s when a drive fishery on the Cape Cod beaches accounted for that many every season. Even the latter-day Norwegian small-whale fishery did no great damage initially, since it only killed pilots when nothing better was at hand.

  In the 1950s, that all changed.

  Newfoundland, it will be remembered, joined Canada in 1949. The man who claims personal credit for this confederation and who became the first Premier of Canada’s tenth province is Joseph Smallwood, a one-time labour organizer who, by 1950, had been transformed into a born-again believer in entrepreneurial capitalism. Smallwood was determined to industrialize Newfoundland and, to this end, sent emissaries to scour the Western world with offers of financial assistance, free land, tax benefits, and any manner of other inducements that might persuade new enterprises to come to Newfoundland. Perhaps the most seductive inducement was the offer of a free hand to “develop” Newfoundland’s natural resources.

  Amongst those who descended on the island with schemes ranging from building a machine-gun arsenal to a condom factory was one representing mainland mink ranchers. He explained to Smallwood that the mink industry, then largely based in the western provinces, where a combination of the right climate and access to the cheap meat of wild horses had made it immensely profitable, was facing difficulties. The wild horses had almost all been converted into mink feed and the ranchers were forced to buy beluga meat, which had to be shipped all the way from Churchill at great cost. The proposal was that the mink industry relocate in Newfoundland and thereby make that province a world centre for the production of luxury furs.

  Smallwood was much enamoured of the idea, which certainly had more glamour attached to it than did the condom plant. When he inquired what would be wanted from the province, he was told it would suffice if Newfoundland paid the costs of moving the ranchers east, provided free land, subsidized the construction of new ranches, and provided an unlimited supply of meat for mink feed. Although Smallwood was only too happy to acquiesce, he was somewhat uncertain about the meat supply. Where would that come from? Ah, said the representative, from a source that is presently doing nobody any good, not earning a penny for Canada: namely, the pilot whale.

  Splendid, said Smallwood. Bring on the mink!

  Since Newfoundland was now part of Canada and its marine resources therefore came under the jurisdiction of the federal government, Ottawa had to be consulted. The federal Department of Fisheries enthusiastically embraced the proposal. It also instructed its scientific experts to assess pilot whale “stocks” and draw up a management program for “harvesting” them.

  Everything was now going swimmingly. The only problem was how best to “harvest” the whales. Happily, the owners of the Dildo whale processing plant proved most co-operative.

  The chosen method of destruction proved to be an innovative combination of old and new. During slack intervals when the three killer boats then supplying Arctic Fisheries were not harpooning humpbacks, finners, seis, and minkes, they carried out sweeps of Trinity Bay, locating pilot clans—sometimes seven or eight of them—at distances of as much as thirty miles from Dildo. Through the skilful use of ultrasonic underwater transmitters, combined with deafening engine and propeller noises to confuse and terrorize the whales, the killer boats would herd the pilots toward the foot of Trinity Bay.

  Three killing beaches had been selected there, adjacent to the outports of New Harbour, Chapel Arm, and Old Shop. Having been alerted that a drive was starting, fishermen from these places would stand by at sea in a variegated collection of trap skiffs, power dories, long-liners, and outboard-engined “sporting” boats. Radio contact kept everyone informed of what was happening, and when the knife-edged bows of the killer boats foamed into view, boatmen and shoremen alike were ready to receive the pilot clans, which by then had disintegrated into a disoriented and exhausted mob fleeing in panic from it knew not what.

  About a mile off the chosen beach, the killers “delivered” the results of the round-up to the fishermen, whose boats now formed a curved line of “beaters” behind the whales. In the words of a journalist hired to write a publicity handout for the federal Department of Fisheries: “This is perhaps the most thrilling phase of the hunt, certainly the most noisy. Coursing back and forth behind the potheads the boatriders create a cacophonous din—beating on drums, slapping oars in the water, throwing stones, yelling and halooing—with the staccato noise of the open exhaust motors overriding all... the drive continues into the shallow water at the edge of the beach where the struggling whales stir up blinding mud and silt... the whales are killed by lancing.”

  The killing was not quite as clean and easy as described. Individual whales might be stabbed scores of times, often by boys ten years of age and upwards using knives lashed to sticks. It was no surprise to the blood-drenched butchers on the beach to discover that some of the whales they were cutting up were still alive. Almost completely immobilized by their own weight, such unfortunate victims could only flex their flukes in agony as cutting spades sliced through their flesh.

  What was even worse was the practice of holding live whales on the beach. When so many had been stranded that the flensers could not deal with them, the surplus animals were sometimes “preserved alive” by hauling them clear of high-tide mark with tractors or teams of horses and left high and dry. During cool and cloudy weather they might endure for as much as three or four days, dying by inches, before the butchers finally got around to them.

  The first season of this new fishery—the summer of 1951—was a smashing success. The fact that only two mink farms had yet been established in Newfoundland, and neither had freezing or meat storage facilities, did not detract from that success. By summer’s end, at least 3,100 pilot whales had been slaughtered on the beaches near Dildo—and mostly left to rot.
Meat was removed from less than a hundred corpses, and much of even this went bad before it could be used by the mink ranchers.

  All that was salvageable from this colossal shambles was several hundred gallons of the light and viscous oil found in the melon on the pilot’s head. This oil is very stable at a wide range of temperatures and, like that of the sperm whale, commands a premium price for use as a lubricant in fine instruments and in guided and ballistic missiles.

  The situation had improved by 1955. Construction of a freezing plant in which whale meat could be stored, together with the installation of a “corral” of buoyed netting in which the surplus animals from a drive could be held alive until “taken to the beaches for processing on an assembly line basis,” at least reduced the wastage. It did not reduce the scale of the destruction. This had increased with each passing year until, in 1956, it reached the astounding total of 10,000 pilot whales in that single season.

  The mink industry was now flourishing and had become so lucrative that the Premier himself became part-owner of a ranch. Women of fashion and wealth all over the civilized world were wearing the latest pastel shades of mutant mink from Newfoundland. Unfortunately, even though the fur farms had expanded by leaps and bounds they could not begin to use anything like the quantity of pilot whales that were now being slaughtered. Nevertheless, the overkill was considered justifiable because of the increased production of melon oil.

  It seemed that the pilot whale had found its place and purpose in the human scheme of life. Then things began to go askew. In 1957 the killers were only able to butcher 7,800 whales; and thereafter the size of the pilot herd mysteriously declined until, by 1964, only 3,000 could be landed. However, according to experts of the Department of Fisheries, the decrease was apparent rather than real. It was probably due, they explained, not to over-harvesting, but to temporary alterations in the migratory patterns of the pilot whales’ chief prey, the squid, brought about by “changed hydrographic factors.” The experts predicted that the squid would soon return and bring the whales. Meantime, it was suggested, why not feed the mink on minkes? This play on words was considered amusing enough to warrant its publication in a staid research bulletin devoted to population dynamics.