by Farley Mowat
By the mid-eighteenth century, hundreds of men from the settlements of New France were engaged in harp sealing and the colony was exporting as much as 500 tons of seal oil every year, a quantity requiring an annual kill of some 20,000 adult seals. There was so much pressure to expand this money-minting enterprise as rapidly as possible that one contemporary visitor to New France felt compelled to register a warning.
“It is questionable whether it would be in the interests of the Colony to multiply the seal fisheries... on the contrary it is logical to conclude that too great a number of the same would lead in a shorter space of time to the destruction of this species of animal. They only produce one cub a year; the fishing takes place in springtime which is the season of breeding, or in the autumn at which time the females are pregnant and, in consequence a large number could not be caught without destroying the species and risking the exhaustion of this fishery.”
Predictably, this opinion was ignored. In fact, the urge to kill as many seals as possible was being inflamed by the emergence of competition. Early in the eighteenth century, English settlers from eastern Newfoundland, who had been used to sailing their small craft to the north coast to engage in a summer fishery for cod and salmon, discovered what the French were up to on the Petit Nord (the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland) and themselves began harp sealing. Soon they were establishing permanent settlements around Fogo and in Notre Dame Bay, from which they could seal in winter and fish cod and salmon in summer.
The English even added a new twist to the business. Having discovered that hordes of beaters and sub-adults, which they called bedlamers (a corruption of bêtes de la mer), haunted the northern bays in spring for some weeks after the adults had departed, they took to swatching (gunning from small rowing craft) for them amongst the thinning floes.
Such was the success attending both swatching and netting that, as early as 1738, the few scattered inhabitants of Fogo Island alone were shipping oil and skins valued at £1,200, the produce from more than 7,000 seals killed each year. Now the die was truly cast. Having become aware of the money to be made from the harp fishery, the English hastened to make it uniquely, and bloodily, their own.
At this stage, French and English sealers alike had no conception of the true size of the harp nation and knew little enough about the creature itself. For a long time they did not even realize that bedlamers and beaters were of the harp species. And they knew nothing about what the seals did when out of sight of land. The drifting world of the ice fields seemed so hostile that they avoided exploration of it. As long as this heartland of the ice seals remained sacrosanct, human predation, massive as it seemed to those engaged in it, could occur only on the periphery where it had small effect upon the nation as a whole. But this was a situation that, given accidents of fate coupled with the nature of the human beast, could not endure for long.
Very early one spring near the middle of the eighteenth century (it may have been in 1743), a prolonged period of unseasonably warm weather accompanied by heavy rains prematurely weakened the great ice tongue that thrusts down the Labrador coast to provide the floating fields whereon the largest part of the harp nation bears its young. By the time the million or more gravid females reached the fields, the floes had become so shrunken, dispersed, and rotten that the seals could find no proper place to whelp. Yet their time was on them and so, in desperation, they hauled out on any ice that would bear their weight; and there they pupped, not in the usual gigantic patches but scattered like chaff across thousands of miles of disintegrating floes.
A day or two after the mass whelping had taken place, a nor’easter came howling over the region. Seas quickly built to mountainous size in the open ocean outside the pack and, rolling in under the floes, began heaving them into wild and vertiginous motion until they were crashing into and crushing each other. Numbers of new-born whitecoats, and not a few of their mothers, were crushed, and many of the remainder of the pups, unable to swim as yet, were swept away and drowned. Those that remained alive found themselves on isolated fragments of swiftly disintegrating floes, inexorably driven south by wind and current. In mid-March, this ice began piling up along the western coast of Bonavista Bay, freighted with tens of thousands of pups.
A handful of English fishermen had already established a permanent foothold on that rocky and reef-strewn shore in order to be on hand to hunt for adult harps in winter and beaters in the spring. They were dismayed when the bay filled up with ice until it stretched so far from shore they could no longer see open water. Unless and until it blew out to sea again, there could be no boat hunting. It must have been at this juncture that some daring fellow ventured out onto the grinding chaos, perhaps because he thought he saw some sign of life, and found a scattering of small white seals.
Within hours every able-bodied person was scrambling across the dangerously uncertain pack. Before the wind hauled southerly and the ice slackened and drove offshore, they had dragged the bloody sculps (skins with the fat attached) of thousands of young seals back to land where the thick layers of blubber were peeled away and consigned to the trypots, there to produce many barrels of high-grade train oil.
It is recorded that the Bonavista people did not even realize what manner of beast it was they were slaughtering until someone noticed a whitecoat being suckled by a mother harp and drew the obvious conclusion.
There have been a number of such “Whitecoat Springs,” each of which became a milestone in the history of Newfoundland. In 1773, the whelping ice piled into Notre Dame Bay allowing fishermen there to slay 50,000 pups. In 1843, the pack jammed into Trinity and Conception Bays, enabling the landsmen to slaughter an estimated 80,000. But the most sanguine massacre of all took place in 1861, when 60,000 embayed whitecoats were killed in Hamilton Inlet together with 150,000 more in Bonavista Bay. In 1872, even the townees of St. John’s were able to swarm out on the ice beyond the harbour mouth and butcher nearly 100,000 pups.
The trouble with windfalls such as these was that they only happened at intervals of roughly twenty years. It was inevitable that, with the gleam of this white gold to light the way, Newfoundlanders should have gone looking for the mother lode.
At the time the search began, the fishermen knew only that the seals pupped somewhere on the illimitable waste of ice to the northward. Although they had no idea how distant the nurseries might be, as early as the 1770s some began probing the southern fringes of the vast ice fields in the open boats they normally used for the cod fishery. When these proved too awkward and too fragile to be forced in amongst floes or hauled across intervening pans, they developed light, clinker-built punts, which could be hauled over the ice by a two-man crew. These ice-skiffs were designed primarily for swatching beaters but, as time went by, the sealers took them farther and farther into the pack, thereby acquiring skill in the precarious business of ice navigation.
Finally, in 1789, a group of these ice hunters encountered a small whelping patch, which had drifted well to the south of where it should normally have been. During the next few days, the men of a fleet of ice-skiffs sculped 25,000 whitecoats and the drive to find what was already being referred to as the “main patch” received fresh impetus.
With the growth of experience, these tough and implacable seafarers had come to realize that the main patch could probably not be reached except with vessels strong enough to brave the pack and big enough to shelter crews from bitter temperatures and killing blizzards. So they developed the reinforced shallop, or bully-boat: a bluff-bowed, extremely strong little vessel of about forty tons, decked fore and aft, yawl-rigged, and capable of crowding a crew of a dozen sealers.
The bullies could stay out for a week or two, which was about as long as even these weather-hardened men could endure. However, although the bullies could be worked thirty or forty leagues into the loose ice fringing the central pack and could scavenge stray pockets of whitecoats that had been whelped outside the ma
in patch, they could not reach Eldorado.
Bigger boats were built to look for it. By 1802, fifty-foot, fully-decked schooners, double-planked against the ice, were sailing north. Although the main patch continued to elude them, they made fortunes anyway. In the spring of 1804, 149 bullies and schooners sailed from the northern bays and, though they got few whitecoats, they swatched 73,000 beaters and old harps. The net fishery that year yielded an additional 40,000.
From its beginnings, the search for the main patch had been expensive in terms of lives and vessels lost. But in 1817 a ferocious storm of the kind that sometimes devastated the whelping patches brought desolation to many a northern outport. The sealers landed only 50,000 sculps that year and paid a fearful price. At least twenty-five vessels were crushed and lost in the pack, taking nearly 200 men to icy deaths.
Those who survived were not intimidated. Bigger and stronger vessels pressed ever deeper into the great ice tongue until, in 1819, they finally found what they were looking for. The ice that year was singularly open, and prevailing northeast winds had drifted the main patch to within 100 miles of the Newfoundland coast. Here it was discovered by sealers in a new kind of vessel: 100-ton ice-strengthened brigantines each carrying fifty to sixty men. This opening act in a drama of ongoing slaughter seems to have gone unrecorded. Thus the eyewitness report of a Professor J.B. Jukes, who in 1840 went to the main patch in the brigantine Topaz, will have to serve. I have abbreviated it somewhat.
“We passed through some loose ice on which the young seals were scattered, and nearly all hands went overboard, slaying, skinning and hauling. We then got into a lake of open water and sent out five punts. [The men of] these joined those already on the ice, the crews dragging either the whole seals or their sculps to the punts which brought them on board. In this way, when it became too dark to do any more, we found we had got 300 seals on board and the deck was one great shambles.
“When piled in a heap together, the young seals looked like so many lambs and when from out of the bloody and dirty mass of carcasses one poor wretch, still alive, would lift up its face and begin to flounder about, I could stand it no longer and, arming myself with a handspike, I proceeded to knock on the head and put out of their misery all in whom I saw signs of life... One of the men hooked up a young seal with his gaff. Its cries were precisely like those of a young child in the extremity of agony and distress, something between shrieks and convulsive sobbings... I saw one poor wretch skinned while yet alive, and the body writhing in blood after being stripped of its pelt... the vision of [another] writhing its snow-white woolly body with its head bathed in blood, through which it was vainly endeavouring to see and breathe, really haunted my dreams.
“The next day, as soon as it was light, all hands went overboard on the ice and were employed in slaughtering young seals in all directions. The young seals lie dispersed, basking in the sun. Six or eight may sometimes be seen within a space of twenty yards square. The men, armed with a gaff and a hauling rope slung over their shoulders, whenever they find a seal, strike it a blow on the head. Having killed, or at least stunned all they see, they sculp them. Fastening the gaff in a bundle of sculps, they then haul it away over the ice to the vessel. Six pelts is reckoned a very heavy load to drag over the rough and broken ice, leaping from pan to pan, and they generally contrive to keep two or three together to assist at bad places or to pull those out who fall in the water.
“I stayed on board to help the captain and cook hoist in the pelts as they were brought alongside. By twelve o’clock, we stood more than knee deep in warm seal-skins, all blood and fat. By night the decks were covered in many places the full height of the rail.
“As the men came aboard they snatched a hasty moment to drink a bowl of tea or eat a piece of biscuit and butter; and as the sweat was dripping from their faces, and the hands and bodies were reeking with blood and fat, and they spread the butter with their thumbs and wiped their faces with their hands, they took both the liquids and solids mingled with blood. Still, there was a bustle and excitement that did not permit the fancy to dwell on the disagreeables, and after this hearty refreshment the men would hurry off in search of new victims: besides every pelt was worth a dollar!
“During this time hundreds of old seals were popping up their heads in the leads and holes among the ice, anxiously looking for their young. Occasionally one would hurry across a pan in search of the snow-white darling she had left, and which she could no longer recognize in the bloody and broken carcass that alone remained of it. I fired at these old ones with my rifle from the deck but without success, as unless the ball hits them in the head, it is a great chance whether it touch any vital part.
“That evening the sun set most gloriously across the bright expanse of snow, now stained with many a bloody spot and the ensanguined trail which marked the footsteps of the intruders.”
Topaz returned from her voyage freighted to her marks with between 4,000 and 5,000 sculps. But the vessels that in 1819 first found the main patch brought back nearly 150,000 whitecoats, bringing the total landings for that “bumper year” to 280,000 harp seals, young and old! The fires that would consume the harp nation were now flaming high.
A digression must be made here to deal with a misconception that has been of great service to those responsible for the recent “management” of the seal herds: namely, that the number of seals destroyed has always been, and remains, essentially the same as the number of sculps landed. Even in the net fishery this assumption is untrue, since a very large percentage of netted seals are pregnant females, the death of each of which represents two lives lost.
As applied to the gun fishery, it is also false. Prior to the breeding season, when they are still fat but not fully buoyant, at least half the adult harp seals killed in open water will sink before they can be recovered. In addition, most of those hit are only wounded and will dive and not be seen again. Of those adults killed outright in the water after the breeding season, when the fat reserves of both sexes have largely been exhausted, as many as four out of five will sink and so be lost.
Beaters more than a month old are mostly hunted in open water and are seldom fat enough to float. The current recovery rate by hunters using modern rifles is probably no more than one of every six or seven hit. The rate of loss for bedlamers is lower than that for fully adult animals, because bedlamers suffer little fat depletion and so retain considerable buoyancy; nevertheless the sinking loss is heavy. It is also high in the eastern Canadian Arctic and west Greenland where, in the 1940s, native hunters annually landed as many as 20,000 harps killed in the water—but lost as many as seven out of every ten they shot. In recent years landings in these regions have ominously declined to about 7,000 a year.
The gun kill of harp seals on the ice itself is equally wasteful. Seals shot at the ice edge, which is where the males congregate during the whelping season and where both sexes gather while moulting, must be killed outright if they are to be recovered. Even then, muscular spasms plunge a good many into the sea where the corpses sink into the depths. But instant kills are hard to achieve. Even such a staunch proponent of sealing as Newfoundlander Captain Abraham Kean, who went to the ice sixty-seven springs and is credited with landing more than a million seal sculps (a feat for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire), admitted that his men had to kill at least three adult seals on ice for every one they recovered. Dr. Harry Lillie, who went to the Front ice in the late 1950s, reported that only one seal was recovered for every five shot by the Newfoundland sealers he accompanied. During April of 1968 I went to the Front in a Norwegian ship under charter to Canadian government scientists who were collecting specimens from the moulting patch. Their seals were shot for them by experienced Norwegian sealers, yet the recovery rate was only one of every five seals hit. There remains the loss entailed in the whitecoat slaughter; but this we shall examine in succeeding pages.
In the meantime, it should
be clear enough that landings are not and never have been synonymous with killings—a fact to be born in mind as you read on.
After 1819, Newfoundland went mad for seals. Although still vigorous, the net and swatching fishery of the outport dwellers was overshadowed and almost lost to view in the frenzied efforts of merchants and ship-owners in St. John’s, and a handful of major towns in Trinity and Conception Bays, to exploit the main patch. They went about it with a single-mindedness that only unadulterated greed can induce. New vessels began coming off the ways at such a rate that, by 1830, nearly 600 brigantines, barques, and schooners were together carrying nearly 14,000 Newfoundland sealers to the ice each spring—a number that probably represented most of the able-bodied men of the northern coasts.
What followed was unregenerate carnage with no quarter given. Considering that oil was the prime objective (whitecoat skins themselves were worth very little at this period), the sealers might, in their own best interests, have been expected to refrain from killing pups until these had attained their greatest weight of fat at between ten days and two weeks of age. They might also have been expected to spare the females, at least until they had borne their young and nursed them to “commercial maturity.”