Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  This blunt recommendation, coupled with the disastrous consequences to Canada of the massive anti–harp sealing campaign of that year, seems to have had some effect. Early in 1984 the department announced that only 300 pups would be “culled” this year. However, the cessation of mass slaughter at the rookeries is only for this one year. It is no more than a tactical move that does not alter the overriding strategy of extinction that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans continues to pursue. And the bounty kill will continue as before. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that, in southern New Brunswick, it has been unofficially expanded to include dotars once again.

  A carefully orchestrated attempt is being made, nominally by “independent” fishermen’s organizations, to have the bounty increased. Other proposals, which I believe originate with Fisheries and Oceans, are now being publicly reflected back to it. They include the suggestion that Canada do as Ireland has done and sell grey seal hunting safaris to foreign sportsmen. East-coast fishing organizations are also clamouring for a “public seal hunt.” Special prizes will be awarded to the good citizens who make the largest “score” (read: kill), and a festival will be held to celebrate those who have “helped Canada get rid of this growing threat to our fisheries.”

  The shape of things intended is clearly revealed in a Canadian Press release dated May 14, 1984.

  “Seal Cull Urgent, Ottawa Told. The Nova Scotia and federal Governments have held discussions for several months on a possible cull of grey seals, according to provincial Fisheries Minister John Leefe.

  “Mr. Leefe said on Friday the seals are eating about 1.5-million tonnes of cod off the East Coast annually and spreading a parasite which reduces the value of the fish. Because of the sealworm infestation, processors have refused to buy cod caught near Sable Island, a major breeding grounds for grey seals. [Italics mine]

  “Mr. Leefe said the Nova Scotia Government wants a kill organized quickly but Ottawa is unwilling because it fears adverse publicity. Commercial seal hunts off Newfoundland and Quebec have resulted in campaigns by anti-sealing groups to have consumers in Britain and the United States boycott Canadian products.

  “ ‘Ottawa and four Atlantic provinces should take part in the cull,’ Mr. Leefe said.

  “He said Ottawa ‘would be delighted’ if the Nova Scotia Government dealt with the problem unilaterally but that the province doesn’t have the power to do so. The grey seal population, estimated at a few thousand 20 years ago, now has increased to about 100,000, Mr. Leefe said.”

  It seems brutally apparent that the continuing survival of dotars and horseheads in Canadian waters will depend, not on enlightened and honest policies applied by government departments and their patrons and lackeys, but on such independent conservation organizations such as may take up the battle on behalf of the grey seal.

  18. Death on Ice (Old Style)

  Now it is to be told that the ships of Karlsefni coasted southward with Snorri and Bjarni and their people. They journeyed a long time until they came to a river which flowed into a pond and thence into the sea. They settled above the shore of the pond and remained there all that winter.

  One morning after spring arrived, a great number of skin boats came rowing from the south. They were so numerous it looked as if charcoal had been scattered on the sea. The two parties came together and began to barter.

  Some of the Norse cattle were near and the bull ran out of the woods and began to bellow. This terrified the Skraelings and they raced to their boats and rowed away. For three weeks nothing more was seen of them, then a great multitude was discovered coming from the south. Thereupon Karlsefni and his men took red shields and displayed them. The Skraelings sprang from their boats, and they met and fought together.

  Freydis Eriksdottir came out of doors and seeing that Karlsefni and the men were fleeing she tried to join them but could not keep up since she was pregnant. Then she saw a dead man before her, naked sword beside him. Freydis snatched it up and as the Skraelings came close she let fall her shift and slapped her breasts with the naked blade. Seeing this the Skraelings were frightened and ran to their boats and rowed away.

  It now seemed clear to Karlsefni and his people that though this was an attractive country their lives there would be filled with fear and turmoil because of the Skraelings and so they decided to leave. They sailed north along the coast and surprised five Skraelings dressed in skin doublets asleep near the sea, and they put them to death.

  This paraphrased and shortened version of an old Norse saga describes an event that took place about the year 1000 when a Norse expedition from Greenland tried to establish itself on the west coast of Newfoundland. The attempt failed because of conflict with a native people whom the Norse called Skraelingar. For almost a thousand years thereafter, the identity of these people remained a mystery.

  Now we know they were not Indians, as might have been expected, but an Eskimoan people of the so-called Dorset culture who had been drawn from the High Arctic to make their homes in the relatively temperate Gulf of St. Lawrence region for the same reason that had attracted many northern animals such as the bowhead whale, beluga, walrus, and white bear—because it was a place that met their needs.

  The Skraelings were seal hunters, and what brought them to the Gulf and held them there was the unimaginable multitude of seals that inhabited the neighbouring waters—and, in particular, the species known to us as the harp seal, with which their culture was inextricably entwined.

  Skraelings lived and prospered on all the coasts of North America adjacent to the seas wherein the harp abounded. Around Baffin Bay basin, on both sides of Davis Strait, among the eastern islands of the Canadian Arctic archipelago, south along the Labrador, and into the Gulf of St. Lawrence at least as far as Cabot Strait, their places of habitation can still be found. The sites are easily identified by characteristic microlithic stone implements found in midden heaps, but especially by the composition of the middens themselves, which consist mainly of decayed organic material and bones of seals. Some middens, such as those at Englee, Port au Choix, and Cape Ray in Newfoundland, are so vast and their greasy black layers of long-decayed seal offal so thickly impregnated with seal bones that they convey the impression of titanic butchery. But that is an illusion due to the telescoping of time. These accumulations are the product of as many as eight or nine centuries of subsistence hunting by generation after generation of people for whom the harp seal was the staff of life.

  The adult harp is of moderate size as seals go, averaging about 300 pounds in weight and five and a half feet in length, roughly midway between the little dotar and the massive horsehead. It is pre-eminently an ice seal, spending much of its life on or close to the broken floes of the drifting pack. A superb swimmer, it can dive to at least 600 feet and make long passages underwater, or under ice, remaining submerged for as long as half an hour.

  The harp nation is composed of three distinct parts. One lives in the White and Barents Seas to the north of Europe, the second in the Greenland Sea east of that great island, while the third and largest inhabits the waters of the northwest Atlantic. This tribe, the one with which we are most concerned, summers as far north as Hall Basin, within 400 miles of the North Pole, but whelps off northeast Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. During the cycle of one annual migration its members must travel 5,000 miles or more.

  These western harps begin their autumnal migration a few weeks before the Arctic seas begin to congeal, streaming south in companies of thousands and tens of thousands to form an almost unbroken procession down the coast of Labrador—a procession that once was composed of several million individuals. By late November the leading companies have reached the Strait of Belle Isle, and here the river splits. The mightiest stream passes through the Strait and heads west along the north shore of the Gulf. Some conception of its magnitude can be gained from the observation of a French trader who watched the harps pass the nor
thern tip of Newfoundland in the autumn of 1760. He reported that they filled the sea from shore to horizon for ten days and nights. At one time this stream flowed as far west as Isle aux Coudres, only a few score miles short of Quebec City, though what is left of it today seldom gets beyond the Saguenay.

  From the Strait of Belle Isle, the other river seems to flow southeastward—and disappears. Some biologists believe it reaches the Grand Banks, where its members disperse and spend the winter, but there is no sure evidence for this. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that the swift-swimming seals loop around eastern Newfoundland and enter the Gulf through Cabot Strait. Thereafter, I suspect, they make their way northward up the west coast of Newfoundland where, once, they brought the gift of life to the Skraeling settlements that waited for them there.

  But this is mostly speculation. It is a salutary thought that even in these days of electronic eyes and ears, and in seas full of working fishing vessels, the whereabouts of the mighty mass of the harp herds still remain essentially unknown from January through to the latter part of February.

  During the winter months a titanic tongue of polar pack as much as 100 miles in width thrusts southward in the grip of the Labrador Current until, by mid-February, its offshoots are clogging the shores of northeastern Newfoundland and pushing through Belle Isle Strait to meet and mingle with winter ice born in the Gulf.

  To the untutored human eye this world of grinding, shifting pans and floes, lifting, splintering, and raftering in the ocean swell, swept by blizzards, gales, and fog, has the aspect of a white and desolate desert, seemingly the very anathema of life. Yet it is in this realm of frozen chaos that, as February ends and March storms in, the teeming legions of the harp seal reappear.

  Flying low over the pack on a rare sunny day in mid-February, one sees nothing but a glittering empty wasteland except, perhaps, that here and there in open leads one catches a glimpse of animation as pale sunlight gleams from the wet backs of a few porpoising seals. Several days later, a miracle seems to have taken place.

  From a light plane cruising at 1,500 feet on a late February day in 1968, I looked down upon an endless vista of ice that was clotted, clustered, and speckled with whelping seals in such quantity that the biologist flying with me could only shrug when I asked how many he thought there were.

  Even with the help of aerial photography, scientists can only roughly estimate the number of individuals in a major harp seal whelping patch. The working figure generally used is 3,000–4,000 adults per square mile, mostly female, together with nearly as many pups, depending on how far advanced the whelping is. There is no way of counting the males, which are generally in the water or under it. To make things even more difficult, the area occupied by the patch can itself be only roughly estimated. Although the heart of the one we flew over that day seemed to be about twelve miles long and at least six wide, amorphous strings and tongues of seals spread outward from it in all directions like the pseudopods of some gigantic amoeba. Our estimate, which was little better than a guess, was that this patch perhaps held half a million seals.

  Yet it was as nothing to the size of those that once existed.

  In the spring of 1844, more than 100 Newfoundland sealing ships worked a whelping patch off the southeast coast of Labrador, the main portion of which was at least fifty miles long and twenty broad. At a most conservative estimate that one patch contained more than five million seals. What is known for certain is that the sealers landed approximately 740,000 pelts, the vast majority of which were stripped from newborn pups.

  Western harp seals whelp in two well-separated regions: on the ice fields drifting off northeastern Newfoundland, which area is known as the Front, and in the Gulf. There are generally two well-defined patches at the Front and two or more in the Gulf. At each patch, the males linger in frolicking companies in open leads or rest companionably on the edge of the pans, while the females disperse across the ice plain, each claiming her own space on which to bear and nurture her single pup.

  A description of the newborn pup, or whitecoat as it is called, is probably superfluous since its image has appeared so often that there can be few people who are not now familiar with it. This big-eyed, cuddlesome creature has become the ultimate symbol for those who are convinced that man must put a check-rein on his ruinous abuse of animate creation and, as such, it is by no means badly chosen.

  It remains a whitecoat for only about two weeks. Then it is left to fend for itself when its mother, who has fed it such generous quantities of creamy milk that the pup has not only more than tripled in weight but has acquired a two-inch layer of fat, abandons it and goes off to mate with the attendant males. Now the soft, luxuriant white fur begins to shed. At this stage the pup is called a raggedy-jacket. In several days the moult is complete, leaving the youngster in a mottled coat of silvery-grey. Called a beater now, the pup makes its first venture into the water at the age of five to six weeks, soon teaches itself to swim, and begins learning how to make a living from the sea, meanwhile subsisting on its reserves of fat and protein.

  As spring progresses, the adult seals, duty done and pleasure taken, form a second series of enormous aggregations, called moulting patches. For days and even weeks, the harp multitudes remain in close company, hauling out in black-and-silver multitudes to sun themselves, shed their coats, and, we can believe, socialize. This is the annual harp seal festival, celebrated at the end of the breeding year before a new cycle begins.

  Toward the end of April, as the great ice tongue begins to dissolve under the influence of the spring sun, the festival ends and the adults begin the long journey back to Arctic seas. A month or two behind them come hordes of beaters, travelling individually and apparently with only an inner voice to guide them in their solitary passage to the ancestral summering grounds.

  Basque whalers were probably the earliest Europeans to become aware of the existence of the harp nation of the west, having seen the migrating companies come pouring through Belle Isle Strait during those winters when the whalers were forced to harbour in the New World.

  The first European sealers seem to have been the French colonists who began settling along the lower St. Lawrence River valley in the mid-seventeenth century. Initially, as we have seen, they preyed upon the horsehead, but as more settlers spread eastward down the shores of the great estuary, they began to encounter a different kind of seal, one that appeared in January in almost inconceivable numbers.

  Since these silvery animals with their distinctive black caps and dark saddle patches shaped rather like harps never entered river mouths or hauled out on shore or off-lying rocks as did dotars and horseheads, the only way to hunt them seemed to be by gunning from small boats. The combination of ineffective muskets and ice-filled waters not only made this unproductive but exceedingly dangerous. Nevertheless, some considered it worth the risk, since each of these seals was so thickly layered with fat that it could yield almost as much oil as a much larger horsehead. So they were highly prized by the colonists, who called them loup-marin brasseur in distinction to the original loup marin, or horsehead.

  The incredible abundance but relative untouchability of the loup-marin brasseur must have caused much frustration until, at last, the French found a way to slaughter them en masse. During the first half of the seventeenth century, some adventurer exploring eastward into terra incognita along the north shore of the Gulf encountered those most accomplished of all sealers, the Inuit. In those times, Inuit wintered at least as far west as Anticosti Island, subsisting primarily on seals, of which the harp was their principal quarry. Having no guns, they took it by means of nets woven of sealskin thongs set across narrow runs between coastal islands.

  The French were always quick to learn hunting skills from native peoples and, in short order, were making and setting sealing nets themselves. This net fishery soon became so financially rewarding that the authorities in Quebec and Paris were kept busy s
elling new seigneuries. By 1700 these stretched as far east as the Mingan Islands, and in every case the wording of the grants clearly indicates that a local monopoly of the seal fishery was the most valuable right embodied in them.

  Expansion farther eastward was halted, not by any shortage of seals but because the French had roused the enmity of the Inuit by associating themselves and their interests with various Indian tribes. The hostility that followed had grown so intense and bloody that neither French nor Indians dared winter on the Gulf coast east of Mingan until early in the eighteenth century.

  A way around this was found by coming at it from the other end. The region around the Strait of Belle Isle had for long been dominated by cod fishermen from France and, although there had been bloody clashes with the Inuit there as well, French wintering parties could hold their own by retreating at need into the security of wooden blockhouses defended by ships’ cannon. So, in 1689, two seigneuries, principally engaged in sealing, were established to encompass the whole of the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts bordering the Strait.

  By then the harp seal fishery had become so lucrative that the French rallied their Indian allies and began waging a successful war of extermination against the Inuit for control of the Côte du Nord. By 1720, a string of seigneuries stretched from Tadoussac all along the north shore right to Belle Isle, then north along Labrador’s Atlantic coast as far as Hamilton Inlet. Additional sealing stations also sprang up along the west coast of Newfoundland at some of the very sites once occupied by the vanished Skraelings.

  The nature of the fishery had altered and become more complex as the French grew increasingly familiar with their quarry’s annual cycle. To the eastward of Anticosti there were now two sealing seasons: one in early winter when the herds came pouring through the Strait and headed west along the Côte du Nord, and a second during the spring after the adults began making their ways northward to the moulting patches. Nets had changed, too. Instead of relying solely on mesh nets to entangle and drown the seals, pound nets were also being used. These soon grew to such size and complexity that it required up to a dozen men to operate one. By raising and lowering door panels with winches operated from shore, it was possible to trap entire companies of migrating seals, which could then be killed at leisure.