Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  They did neither.

  Urged furiously forward by his vessel’s owner, every sealing captain sought to be first to reach the main patch. The result was that the fleet sailed earlier and earlier each year, until it was arriving in the region where the patch was expected to form as much as two weeks before the females began to give birth. With nothing else to occupy them, the sealers waged war against adult harps as these clustered in the leads or hauled up on the floe edge. The indiscriminate slaughter that ensued resulted in the loss of uncounted tens of thousands of adult females and, not only of the pups they carried in their wombs, but of all the pups they might have produced during the remainder of their lives.

  Females that did manage to whelp got no better treatment. Competition between ships’ crews was so ferocious that men would be sent out on the ice to butcher pups only a day or two old rather than risk letting them fall into someone else’s hands. To compensate for the loss of fat entailed by this barbaric (and idiotic) practice, the men would club or shoot all females they encountered, whether whelping, about to whelp, or nursing young.

  “Never leave nothin’ to the Devil” was the watchword of the individual sealer, whose own pitifully small returns were based on the lay or percentage system, and, therefore, on his ship obtaining the absolute maximum amount of fat. In consequence, each sealer did his best to ensure that the “devils” in the surrounding vessels would have to sail home “clean,” or at least with only a poor “showing of fat” in their holds.

  Yet another and equally destructive consequence of the ruthless rivalry was the system of “panning” sculps. Instead of encouraging each sealer to drag his own tow back to the ship after every “rally,” captains divided their crews into battle groups whose task was to cover as much of the ice field as swiftly as possible. Some men in each group were to do the sculping, which they did almost on the run. Others gathered the steaming pelts from each area of slaughter, stacked them into a pile on some convenient floe, marked them with a company flag atop a bamboo pole, then hurried on. Such groups might travel miles during ten or twelve hours on the ice, leaving a glaring trail of blood to mark their passage from one pile of sculps on to the next.

  Theoretically, the mother ship would push along as close as possible on the sealers’ heels, bruising a passage through the floes or being towed through by her working crew, and picking up each pan of sculps as she came abreast of it. In practice, even latter-day steam-powered sealers, built as icebreakers, often found the task impossible. In 1897 five steam sealers at the main patch abandoned some 60,000 panned sculps they could not reach; while in 1904, the steamer Erik alone abandoned eighty-six pans that together held about 19,000 sculps. In the days of sail, sealing ships frequently lost half their pans, and it was not unusual for them to fail to pick up any if the men had been working distant ice when a storm came down. Such losses were considered no great matter. There were always lots more whitecoats waiting to be killed.

  Not only pans were lost; ships were, too. Vessels were sunk when the ice set tight and crushed their hulls and, when they went down, they often took thousands of seal sculps with them. None of this was of any great consequence to the Captains of Industry who controlled and directed the seal hunt from their counting houses in Newfoundland towns and English cities. The profits being made were so enormous that such losses constituted no more than a negligible nuisance.

  From 1819 to 1829, the annual average landed catch was just under 300,000 sculps; but when the unrecorded kill is calculated we find that the slaughter must have been destroying at least 500,000 seals a year. In 1830, some 558 vessels went to the Front, returning with 559,000 sculps. The following spring saw the landings rise to at least 686,000 (one authority gives the catch that year as 743,735). The smaller of these two figures indicates a real kill in excess of a million seals. The consuming fire of human greed was roaring now.

  Harp seals have so far engrossed this chapter; but theirs was not the only seal nation in the world of floating ice. They shared that realm in evident amity with a larger species known to sealers as the hood—a name derived from an inflatable sac carried by each adult male on the front of his head.

  If harps can be thought of as urbanites of the ice, living by preference in dense concentrations, then hoods constitute a kind of rural population. Usually their breeding patches are composed of dispersed and distinct families, each consisting of a male, female, and single pup. The patches are located by preference on the chaotic surface of old polar pack, which is much thicker and rougher than the relatively flat and fragile first-year ice that is the usual choice of the harp nation.

  Hoods are monogamous in any given year, intensely territorial, and fiercely protective of their young. Neither sex will flee an enemy. If a sealer approaches too closely, one or both adult hoods may go for him. Since a male hood can be more than eight feet long, weigh 800–900 pounds, is equipped with teeth a wolf might envy, and can hump his vast bulk over the ice about as fast as a man can run, he poses no mean threat. Nevertheless, hoods are no match for modern sealers, as Dr. Wilfred Grenfell tells us.

  “[The hood] seal displays great strength, courage and affection in defending its young and I have seen a whole family die together. Four men with wooden seal bats did the killing, but not before the male had caught one club in his mouth and cleared his enemies off the pan by swinging it from side to side. This old seal was hoisted on board whole so as not to delay the steamer. He was apparently quite dead. As, however, he came over the rail the strap broke and he fell back into the sea. The cold water must have revived him, for I saw him return to the same pan of ice distinguished by the blood stains left by the recent battle. The edge of the pan was almost six feet above water, but he leapt clear up over the edge and landed almost on the spot where his family had met its tragic fate. The men immediately ran back and killed him with bullets.”

  Until well into the nineteenth century, sealers took few hoods. The animals were too big and powerful to be held by nets and generally too tough to be killed in open water with the kind of firearms then available. Because they were so seldom taken, some biologists have concluded that they must have always been rare. They were, in fact, extremely abundant. Although never approaching the harp nation in terms of absolute numbers, the hood nation may not have been far inferior in terms of biomass—until the day when it became the companion in bloody misfortune to the harp.

  Black days for the hoods began when Newfoundlanders started searching for whitecoat nurseries. Since these were usually embedded deep in the great ice-lobe that hung pendant off the southeast coast of Labrador and were protected by rugged barriers of old polar pack along the outer edges, wooden sealing vessels could only penetrate to the harp sanctuaries when wind and weather made the pack go slack. Consequently, they were often held at bay for days along the outer edge, and here they encountered the hood seal.

  Hoods offered no small reward to killers with fortitude enough to tackle them. For one thing, their pups—called bluebacks—were clothed in lustrous blue-black fur above and silver-grey below, and unlike the whitecoat, whose fur would not remain “fast” when tanned by then-existing methods, that of the blueback would. The skin of a hood pup was therefore of considerable value. Furthermore, its sculp would produce twice as much oil as that of a whitecoat. And the parent hoods, both of whom could usually be killed along with their pup, together produced as much oil as several adult harps.

  By as early as 1850, Newfoundland ship sealers were regularly and intensively hunting hoods to such effect that, during the later years of the nineteenth century, according to a study by Harold Horwood, as many as 30 per cent of all sculps landed were from this species.

  Hoods whelped on the Gulf floes, too, where easier ice conditions made them still more vulnerable to sealers. In the spring of 1862, schooner sealers from the Magdalens slaughtered 15,000–20,000 in a five-day period. A few years later the crew of a Newfoundland barq
uentine “log-loaded” their vessel with hoods during a voyage to the Gulf.

  Mass industrial slaughter was particularly disastrous to the hood nation. When sealers savaged a harp whelping patch, most males and a goodly proportion of the females escaped alive and so could at least help to make good the loss of that year’s pups. But when sealers assaulted a hood whelping patch, almost none of its occupants escaped destruction. That patch was wiped out for all time.

  Despite the fact that hood seals are referred to in the current scientific literature as being “a comparatively rare species”... “few and scattered” ... “much less numerous than harps, and have always been so,” careful analysis of the history of sealing not only demonstrates that they were once exceedingly numerous, but also shows that their current rarity was brought about entirely by our slaughterous assault upon them.

  The period between 1830 and 1860 is still nostalgically referred to in Newfoundland as the Great Days of Sealing. During those three decades, some 13 million seals were landed—out of perhaps twice that number killed. Indeed, they were great days for those who controlled the industry, and this monumental massacre provided the substance for many Newfoundland merchant dynasties that survive into our day.

  Many changes in the nature of the hunt took place, none of them advantageous to the seals. For one, the previously ignored or, it may be, virtually unknown harp and hood whelping patches in the Gulf of St. Lawrence came under sustained attack from the ever-growing Newfoundland fleet.

  For another, the skins of adult seals, particularly hoods, became extremely valuable as leather, a large part of which was used in the manufacture of industrial belting. The pelts of young hoods had always fetched a good price in the luxury clothing trade, but now a way was found to market some whitecoats, too, not by inventing a fur-fast tanning process but as a result of the gruesome discovery that the fur of just-born or unborn whitecoats, called cats by the sealers, would remain fast on its own. Early in the 1850s, some Newfoundland entrepreneur shipped a consignment of cats to England. When muffs, stoles, and other female adornments were made out of them, the soft, white fur proved well-nigh irresistible to wealthy women. Such was the origin of the fashion-fur demand for whitecoats that became a multimillion-dollar business in recent times. However, until the post–World War II discovery by a Norwegian company of how to fix the fur of all whitecoats, the market had to be satisfied for the most part with the fur of unborn pups. This, of course, led to a huge increase in the butchery of pregnant harps.

  It is axiomatic that modern economic progress depends on a never-ending elaboration of ways and means to turn a profit from available raw resources. By the 1860s so much ingenuity had gone into “product development” of seals that the demand was outstripping the supply. Furs and skins were being sold for such diverse uses as ladies’ jackets and blacksmiths’ bellows; while seal fat was being used for a multitude of purposes ranging from locomotive lubricants to a substitute for olive oil. The industry was coining money and, although most of it stuck to the fingers of the merchant masters, some dribbled down to ordinary fishermen, a few of whom found themselves relatively wealthy, if briefly so. Dr. Grenfell tells of one liveyere who ran a net fishery in a remote bay on the Labrador at about this time.

  “At one little settlement a trapper by the name of Jones became so rich through regular large catches of seals that he actually had a carriage and horses sent from Quebec, and a road made to drive them on; while he had a private musician hired from Canada for the whole winter to perform at his continuous feastings. I was called on awhile ago to help supply clothing to cover the nakedness of this man’s grandchildren.”

  The destruction engulfing the ice seals was not confined to North America. Early in the 1700s, Scots and English whalers sailing west in European Arctic waters had discovered a gigantic population of whelping harps and hoods on the so-called West Ice of the Greenland Sea, in the vicinity of uninhabited Jan Mayen Island. So long as sufficient bowhead whales could be killed in these waters, the seals generally went unmolested; but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the whale population to the east of Greenland had been so decimated that it was a lucky ship that could kill enough to make her voyage pay. It was at this juncture that the whalers began turning their attention to the hordes of hoods and harps on the West Ice and in Davis Strait.

  As was the case with Newfoundlanders, they learned ice-sealing the hard way, but by the spring of 1768 a dozen British whaling ships each loaded about 2,000 hood and harp seals at the West Ice. They were soon joined on that living oil field by Germans, Danes, Hollanders, and the inevitable Norwegians, and amongst them they were landing a quarter of a million sculps a year before the nineteenth century was well begun.

  The massive devastation that engulfed the harp and hood nations off Newfoundland as the nineteenth century aged was matched by a similar orgy of destruction at the West Ice. In 1850, about 400,000 seals were landed from there, and in the following year the figure for Newfoundland and the West Ice combined passed the million mark.

  Greed took its toll of men as well as seals at the West Ice. During the spring of 1854, the skipper of the British sealer Orion dispatched a rally of his men to kill what appeared to be a patch of hoods amongst a torment of upthrust ice. The patch resolved itself into the frozen corpses of seventy shipwrecked Danish sealers, keeping company with hundreds of blueback carcasses with which the doomed men had tried to construct a barricade against the killing edge of a polar gale.

  As at the Newfoundland Front, mounting competition for skins and fat forced the ever-diminishing West Ice seals deeper and deeper into the protective pack until they were all but inaccessible, even to the most foolhardy skippers. Losses of ships and men soared, and the catch began going down. For a time, it looked as if the halcyon days of sealing were coming to an end.

  It was the English who found a way out of this impasse. In 1857, the Hull whaler Diana, newly equipped with auxiliary steam power, challenged the West Ice and was able to return home “log-loaded with fat.” She also rescued eighty men from two sailing sealers that had been beset and had sunk in the ice when the wind failed them. The point was made. Crude and inefficient as it was, Diana’s forty-horsepower engine, driving an awkward iron screw, was the technological key to mastery of the ice fields, and a flood of steam-auxiliary sailing vessels followed on her heels.

  The first of the steam-auxiliaries to try their luck in Newfoundland waters were the British whaler/sealers Camperdown and Polynia, which made a trial voyage to the Front in 1862. They took only a few seals because ice conditions were so appallingly bad that some fifty sailing vessels were crushed and sunk. But the steamers were at least able to extricate themselves, and the lesson was not lost on the St. John’s sealing tycoons. Another bad season in 1864, which saw twenty-six more Newfoundland sailing sealers crushed, drove it home.

  Thereafter the steam-auxiliaries quickly took the lead, and as quickly proved their terrible effectiveness. During the spring of 1871, eighteen of them unloaded a quarter of a million sculps on St. John’s greasy wharves, bringing Newfoundland’s total landings that year to well above the half-million mark for a value of about $12 million in today’s currency. Seals were by then second only to cod in the Newfoundland economy.

  It was not uncommon for a steam sealer, with her superior speed and ability in ice, to make several trips to the Front during one spring season; loading whitecoats and adult harps on her first trip; bluebacks and harp and hood adults on a second; and moulting harps on a third and even fourth. The Erik once landed 40,000 seals from three such ventures.

  Although the advent of steam enormously increased the efficiency of the massacre, it did not change its nature, as the Reverend Philip Tocque, writing in 1877, confirms: “The seal-fishery is a constant scene of bloodshed and slaughter. Here you behold a heap of seals which have only received a slight dart from the gaff, writhing, and crimsoning the ice with their blood,
rolling from side to side in dying agony. There you see another lot, while the last spark of life is not yet extinguished, being stripped of their skins and fat, their startlings and heavings making the unpractised hand shrink with horror to touch them.”

  While the steamers ravaged the seal sanctuaries deep within the ice tongue at the Front and on the ice plains in the Gulf, the remaining sailing vessels scoured the outer reaches of the pack. Meantime, landsmen went swatching in inshore waters and made rallies into any whelping patches they might find; and the net fisheries killed as many as 80,000 adult harps each year, mostly during the southbound migration when the females were carrying young.

  The all-embracing nature of the slaughter was awesome tribute to the genius of modern man as mass destroyer. It also bore awesome testimony to the vitality of the western ice-seal nations, which between 1871 and 1881 suffered decimation in excess of a million individuals each year yet still managed to endure.

  They endured—but both nations were fast wasting away. Average landings declined by almost half between 1881 and 1891 and continued to decline until after the turn of the century, when there was an improvement, from the point of view of the sealing industry, due to the determined application of that basic principle of exploitation whereby a diminution in supply is countered by ever more ruthless effort.

  After 1900, the “catch-to-effort ratio” was much improved by the introduction of really large, full-powered, steel-hulled ice-breaking steamers on the one hand, and modern repeating rifles on the other. Assisted by wireless telegraphy, which enabled the sealing fleet to co-ordinate its assault, the Newfoundland fishery maintained landings averaging nearly 250,000 a year until World War I. By then, however, sealers had been living on capital for more than half a century. It could only have been a matter of a few more years before the industry collapsed, had not the war intervened.