Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  Iron-headed mauls and axes, double-handed stabbing spears, flensing knives, clay bricks, copper cauldrons, bundles of oaken staves, and willow withes were the major items amongst the gear perilously ferried ashore. The cauldrons were set up over firepits dug in the sand and lined with bricks. Coopers assembled staves and withes into train oil casks. Shack tents of sailcloth and driftwood sprouted in the sparse shelter of the dunes.

  All was hurriedly made ready and then the fishing masters led their gangs down to the beaches—to those long, sun-gleaming beaches densely packed as far as the eye could see with serried ranks of walrus.

  No first-hand description of how the slaughter was conducted during the long-ago years on Sable now exists, but we have an account from Bear Island, 300 miles north of Norway, where in 1603 a previously unknown tribe of European walrus was discovered by a far-roaming ship of the English Muscovy Company. The author of this account of what followed was a crewman named Jonas Poole.

  “We saw a sandie Bay in which we came to anchor. We had not furled our Sayles but we saw many Morses swimming by our ship and heard with all so huge a noyse of roaring as if there had been a hundred Lions. It seemed very strange to see such a multitude of Monsters of the Sea lye like Hogges in heapes [upon the beach].”

  To see them was one thing. To kill them, quite another. These men knew next to nothing about the morse and were frankly frightened of it.

  “In the end we shot at them, not knowing whether they could runne swiftly and seize upon us or no.”

  However, the guns of those times proved largely ineffective against the massive skulls and armoured hides.

  “Some, when they were wounded in the flesh, would but looke up and lye down again. And some would goe into the Sea with five or sixe shots in them, they are of such incredible strength. When all our ball shot was spent we would blow their eyes out with bird shot, and then come on the blind side of them and, with our Carpenter’s axe, cleave their heads. But for all that we could doe we killed but fifteen.”

  The ivory and oil from those fifteen walrus proved quite enough to whet the appetite of the Muscovy Company, and the crews that were sent out to make a killing the following year had seemingly been briefed on how the job was done in the New World.

  “The year before we slew with shot, not thinking that a Javelin could pierce their skinnes, which we now found contrary, if it be well handled; otherwise a man may thrust with all his force and not enter; or if he does he shall spoyle his Lance upon their bones; or they will strike with their forefeet and bend a Lance and break it.”

  Getting the feel of the job now, Poole’s crew killed about 400 walrus and sailed home with eleven tuns of oil (about 2,300 gallons) and several casks of tusks. By the next year they had become professionals. One day Jonas Poole, in charge of a gang of eleven men, made his way along the shore of a walrus beach, dropping off a man every twenty yards or so until he met the leader of a similar group coming the other way, and so “enclosed the Morses that none of them should get into the Sea.”

  The line of hunters then turned inland, stabbing every walrus within reach in the throat or belly; killing some but wounding more, and causing such a panic that the great beasts humped frantically away from their one hope of refuge, in the sea, until overtaken by thrusting blades and swinging axes.

  “Before six hours were ended we had slayne about six or eight hundred Beasts... For ten days we plied our business very hard and took in two and twenty tuns of the Oyle of the Morses and three hogsheads of their Teeth.”

  Within the space of eight seasons after Poole’s first visit the estimated 10,000–20,000 walrus of Bear Island had been so reduced that the few survivors were no longer worth the hunting. By contrast, the Sable Island herd was initially so vast that it was able to sustain a lucrative annual fishery through almost two centuries.

  A few decades after the first visits of the Portuguese, Sable temporarily slipped from their control to become the source of unspecified “rich merchandise” for one Jean Ango, a powerful sea lord of Le Havre who sent several expeditions to it between 1510 and 1515. Thereafter, João Alvares Fagundes, a Portuguese merchant-adventurer, reclaimed the island and held it until the late 1580s, when the French once more seized it.

  Sable’s new French “owner” was a Breton entrepreneur grandiloquently called Troilus de La Roche, Marquis de la Roche-Mesgouez. His chief associate was a sea captain named Chefd’ostel, and their mutual enterprise affords a revealing glimpse of the kind of men who were engaged in the “discovery” of the New World, and of how they operated.

  In exchange for his sworn promise to discover, occupy, and settle the whole northeastern coast of the new continent on behalf of the King of France and to lead its heathen savages to God, La Roche received letters patent from Henry of Navarre appointing him Viceroy and Lieutenant General over the territories of Canada, Newfoundland, Labrador, Norumbega, and, especially and significantly, Isle de Sable.

  Mere promises of great deeds to be done would hardly have sufficed to procure such a munificent grant. The evidence indicates that it was acquired by massive bribery. By the time La Roche got his patent, he was almost broke. Undaunted, he used his new powers as Viceroy to assume custody of a number of convicts from Breton and Norman jails, ostensibly to make colonists in the New World of them. In fact, he proceeded to sell them their freedom in France for hard cash. The scheme worked so well that he did it again, this time obtaining 250 prisoners. Of these he retained forty who were described as “the sweepings of the gutter” and gave “the better sort” their liberty... in exchange for enough gold to equip his expedition.

  The fleet intended for his grand accomplishment consisted of two small fishing smacks. Into the black, stinking hold of one went forty shackled “colonists,” kept in order by the muskets of ten mercenaries. Oddly enough, the Viceroy did not direct his course to the vast mainland of his new possessions. Instead he sailed to Sable Island where, as soon as the weather permitted, he set ashore his “colonists,” their guards and overseers, and meagre stores. La Roche and Chefd’ostel then sailed to the mainland coast, where they probably made a summer fishing voyage for cod, returning in the autumn direct to France. There the Viceroy brazenly announced that he had been prevented from planting a settlement anywhere other than on Sable because the weather had been unsuitable! In truth, the whole thing had been a most successful scam, by virtue of which La Roche obtained his object—exclusive title to Sable Island and its riches in train oil and ivory.

  The worth of his little Eldorado can be judged from the fact that the French government was then paying a subsidy of one écu on every barrel of train unloaded in a French port, and, by the time of his death in 1606, La Roche had earned some 24,000 écus on this subsidy alone. Since the fat of from two to four walrus (depending on size and season) was required to make a barrel of oil, La Roche’s slaves presumably must have killed something on the order of 50,000 walrus, plus an unknown number of seals, during the eight years he held the monopoly of Sable Island.

  Chefd’ostel normally visited the “colony” every year to pick up cargo and leave supplies. He failed to do so in 1602. During the ensuing winter the convicts revolted, killing their guards and overseers. When Chefd’ostel returned in 1603, he is said to have found only eleven convicts still alive, though it seems as likely that he and his tough Breton crew hunted down and slaughtered the bulk of the slaves in revenge.

  That the mutineers had indeed been brutally treated is evident from the sequel. When, filthy dirty, manacled, and still clad in homemade sealskin clothing, the eleven were brought before King Henry for punishment, he was so moved by the account they gave of their suffering that he not only freed them, he awarded each man fifty écus in compensation. The reaction of La Roche and Chefd’ostel to this act of benevolence is not recorded.

  La Roche’s successors maintained the French monopoly until about 1630, after which
they were forced to share Sable’s wealth with English fishermen-colonists from Massachusetts Bay. These made no attempt to establish shore factories, contenting themselves with raiding the beaches and the French stations. One such raid in 1641 yielded 400 pairs of tusks, which sold in Boston for the modern equivalent of $10,000. Walrus ivory was still white gold, and the New Englanders were out to get their share. Apart from raids on Sable, they scoured their own walrus beaches (which seem to have stretched south as far as Cape Cod) to such effect that by about 1700 the species seems to have been exterminated south of Nova Scotia. The last walrus recorded as being killed in Massachusetts Bay, in 1754, was probably a straggler from farther north.

  Not even the immense herds that had originally frequented Sable Island Bank could forever survive such unbridled rapacity. Sometime between 1680 and 1710, there came a spring when the curving sweep of Sable’s beaches held no more of the great creatures that had once drawn themselves up on the warm sands in their countless thousands. Nor would their living presence ever be known there again.

  For a century thereafter, Sable lay shrouded in half-legendary obscurity, dreaded and avoided by mariners until, early in the nineteenth century, lighthouses and a lifesaving crew were established on it. Thereafter, lonely riders patrolling the empty beaches on half-wild ponies sometimes came across walrus skeletons newly exposed by the ever-shifting sands. But the massive bones seemed so antediluvian that they were thought to belong to an era long before Europeans first crossed the Western Ocean.

  Buried in Sable’s sands, the teeming legions of the past were also buried out of memory. Recent histories make little or no mention of the nation of tusked creatures that once lived there, or of how and why it perished. Nevertheless Sable is once again looming large in our view. Gigantic drilling rigs, both on and off the island, are plunging their steel proboscises deep into the ocean floor, seeking what the Portuguese first found there almost 500 years ago... the wealth derived from oil.

  Sable’s walrus tribe was immense but still only an outlying colony of a nation whose real heartland lay in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The southern portion of that inland sea is dominated by a roughly circular basin some 200 miles in diameter, bounded on the east by Cape Breton Island, on the south by Prince Edward Island and Northumberland Strait, and on the west by the Gaspé Peninsula. The Magdalen Island archipelago rises almost from its centre.

  The basin’s shallow waters contain a rich mix of oceanic currents, combined with the great outflow of nutrient-laden fresh water from the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes system. In its aboriginal state it possessed some of the world’s most productive shellfish pastures, populated by stellar multitudes of oysters, soft-shelled clams, bar clams, quahogs, razor clams, scallops, moon snails, cockles, and other succulent molluscs that together offered an almost inexhaustible supply of prime walrus food. Furthermore, the surrounding shores held hundreds upon hundreds of miles of sandy beaches with space enough for uncountable multitudes of sea tuskers to mate, calve, or simply snooze under the summer sun.

  But was it possible that an animal we now know only as an inhabitant of frigid polar seas could once have dwelt in these waters more than 1,300 miles south of the Arctic Circle, and less than 400 miles north of the city of New York? It was possible, and it was so; for this was the heartland of the western Atlantic walrus nation.

  Spanish Basques seem to have been the first Europeans to have struck at that heartland, as early as the first decade of the sixteenth century; but men of other nations quickly followed. Around 1519, the same João Fagundes who fished for walrus on Sable Island made an exploratory voyage into the Gulf. What follows is my reconstruction of that region as he might have seen it then.

  Having entered the Gulf through either Cabot Strait or Canso Strait, his high-pooped caravel makes her way slowly westward through Northumberland Strait with the solidly forested coasts of Nova Scotia, then New Brunswick, slipping away to port. To starboard lie the beaches and red-ochre mudbanks of Prince Edward Island. And everywhere—on land, in air, and in the waters—life abounds.

  The strait surges with billions of herring and mackerel schooling so tightly as to form almost solid masses of living flesh. Seabirds wheel and dive into this stew in dense formations. Feeding cod rise from the bottom in such mighty phalanxes that their assaults upon the baitfish make the surface roil as if from an underwater eruption. Grey seals in their thousands watch, dark-eyed, as the ship slips past. Pods of whales, both great and small, cruise in such numbers that the caravel has sometimes to give way before them.

  Yet what is of most interest to Fagundes are the legions of walrus clustered on the beaches, sandspits, and muddy shoals or surging up around the slow-moving vessel until their staring heads seem as ubiquitous as stumps in a clear-cut forest.

  As the caravel passes out of the strait and opens the southern lip of Chaleur Bay, the walrus clans grow even more numerous. They are hauled out so thickly on the low-lying islands of Shippegan and Miscou that their somnolent bodies blacken acres of yellow sand and green grass.

  Now the pilot steers south of east into the open waters of the great basin. After a day’s sail, the lookout picks up a number of low, hazed humps on the horizon. As the ship draws closer these resolve themselves into a string of wooded islands faced with red sandstone cliffs and linked to one another by seemingly endless miles of glittering white beaches. This is the Magdalen Island archipelago, and here Fagundes would have looked upon the central core of the western walrus nation.

  The Magdalens include nine major islands, seven of which are linked by broad beaches that enclose extensive salt-water lagoons. The interlocked group is forty miles long, and its seaward-facing beaches, together with those ringing the lagoons, total more than 120 miles in length. Separated from the nearest mainland by sixty miles of open water, the Magdalens, like Sable, seem not to have been occupied by pre-European men. This fact, together with the combination of sheltered lagoons, grassy meadows, wooded hills, and endless beaches set in the midst of a life-filled sea, made it a paradise for waterfowl and sea mammals such as can hardly have been matched elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

  The walrus clearly found it so. A conservative estimate indicates that the Central Gulf herd numbered at least a quarter of a million individuals when Europeans first came upon it. Or, to put it in terms that would have been particularly meaningful to the invaders, something more than 300,000 tons of living flesh... and fat.

  Although the Magdalens seem to have been firmly in Basque hands at the time of Fagundes’ visit, lucrative opportunities remained to be claimed by him elsewhere. In 1521, he formed a company of merchants in his home town of Vianna, under a charter from King Manuel that licensed the syndicate to exploit eight specific localities in the New World. All were islands or island groups, and the five that can still be identified with reasonable certainty all harboured major walrus rookeries. These were the Île Madame complex in Cape Breton’s Chedabucto Bay, St-Pierre et Miquelon and the Ramea/Burgeo archipelago on the south coast of Newfoundland, Sable Island, and Prince Edward Island. Although no mention is made in the charter of the actual resources to be exploited (as was usual, for reasons of commercial secrecy), it is stated that one of the enterprises envisaged was a soap factory. We also know that at about this time the supremacy of olive oil in soap-making was being challenged by train oil—in particular by walrus oil. There can be but little doubt that walrus were intended to provide the major profits to the syndicate.

  Fagundes established a year-round lodgement on Prince Edward Island, the first-known European attempt at settlement in North America since Norse days. French sources blame Indians for its destruction a decade or so later, but the indications are that the natives were being saddled with the blame for bloody deeds perpetrated by Europeans. Suspicion points strongly to the French themselves, as they began aggressively encroaching on Portuguese and Spanish Basque “white gold mines” in the
Gulf.

  I believe that French interest in the Beast of the Great Teeth, as early Breton mariners called the walrus, was a major motivation for Jacques Cartier’s famous voyages to the Gulf in 1534 and 1535. It is at any rate a fact that he reconnoitred many of the major walrus rookeries and, shortly thereafter, his fellow Bretons were forcibly dispossessing the Portuguese of them. Well before 1570, the French had engrossed the rookeries on Northumberland Strait, at St-Pierre et Miquelon, on Prince Edward Island, and in Bay Chaleur, and had firmly established themselves on the Magdalens as well. By 1580, that rich archipelago had become the fiefdom of two of Cartier’s nephews. In 1591, they licensed it to another St. Malo entrepreneur, La Court de Pré-Ravillon, for the stated purpose of fishing what had by then come to be known as vaches marins.

  It was in this year that the English belatedly became aware of the riches that could be obtained from sea cows in the New World. Early in September, the Bristol privateer Pleasure was cruising off the Scilly Isles when her lookout spotted the topsails of two vessels making for the English Channel. Pleasure bore down, overhauled the smaller one, captured her, and took her into Plymouth.

  She turned out to be the Bonaventure, belonging to La Court de Pré-Ravillon, homeward-bound from some place in the Western Ocean unknown to her captors but which her Master called les Isles de Rames. These were the Magdalens, and English interest took instant fire when it was discovered that Bonaventure was laden with “40 tunnes of trayne oyell” together with great quantities of “hydes and teeth,” the produce from 1,500 sea cows killed by her crew that summer. The cargo was valued at £1,500, a considerable fortune in those times.

  Under interrogation her Master revealed that “The Island... is about 20 leagues about, and some part is flat and shoal: and the fish cometh on the shores to do their kind in April, May and June by numbers thousands; which fish is very big and hath two great teeth; and the skinne of them is like Buffe leather; and they will not go away from their yonge ones. The yonge ones are as good meat as Veal. And with the bellies of five of the said fishes they make a hogshead of Traine; which Traine is very sweet, which if it will make sope, the king of Spayne may burn some of his olive trees.”