by Farley Mowat
Their hopes seemed blighted until the local headman pointed to a magnificent walrus tusk lashed to the prow of the Islanders’ vessel—and proffered a bronze knife for it. After some hesitation, for the tusk was the vessel’s talisman, the Islanders agreed. After the trade was made, the headman gave the strangers to understand that foreigners still farther to the south had an abundance of bronze which they exchanged for rare and beautiful things . . . and what could be rarer, or more beautiful, than the ivory brought by the Islanders?
On this occasion the travellers returned home nearly empty-handed, but bringing knowledge of a world where bronze could be had in exchange for walrus tusks.
Initially, the Islanders contented themselves with scouring their home shores and dunes for the tusks of long-dead animals. These they carried south to distant shores of the Irish Sea, where the ivory was exchanged for implements and ornaments. As the people’s appetite for bronze increased, “found” ivory became scarce. Inevitably the day came when the Islanders turned upon the living bearers of their talisman—and that was the start of a killing which would see beaches throughout the northern world run red with blood for centuries to come.
No accounts survive to tell us how the Islanders conducted the slaughter, but we do know how latter-day walrus hunters prosecuted the gory business.
In 1603 an English ship belonging to the Muscovy Company chanced on tiny Bear Island in the Arctic Ocean between Spitzbergen and Norway. Jonas Poole, a member of her crew, kept an account of what ensued.
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 withall 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 attack them quite another. These men knew next to nothing about walrus and were frightened of them.
In the end we shot at them, not knowing whether they could runne swiftly and seize upon us or no.
Smooth-bore guns proved largely ineffective against the tuskers’ 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.
Ivory, and the oil rendered from the fat of these fifteen, whetted the appetite of the Muscovy Company, which sent the ship direct to Bear Island the succeeding summer. Its crew had been briefed on how the job was done elsewhere.
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, Poole’s crew killed about four hundred walrus and sailed home with eleven tuns of oil and several casks of tusks. When they returned to Bear Island the following year, they were professionals. On a typical day Jonas Poole, in charge of a gang of eleven men, would make his way along the water’s edge 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 would get into the Sea.”
The line of hunters then turned inland, stabbing every walrus within reach in the throat or belly and causing such panic that the great beasts humped frantically away from their one hope of refuge, the sea. Once they had exhausted themselves, thrusting blades and swinging axes finished them off.
Before six hours 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 eight years of Poole’s first visit to Bear Island, thirty to forty thousand walrus had been butchered, and so few remained as to be not worth hunting.
An even worse slaughter took place in New World waters, especially in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where every year more than 100,000 sea cows hauled out on the beaches of the Magdalen Islands alone. In 1765 a Royal Navy officer reported on the slaughter taking place there.
When a great number of Sea Cows are assembled on a beach they are followed by others coming out of the sea who, in order to get room, give those in front a push with their tusks. These last are pushed on by more following until the Sea Cows farthest from the water are driven so far inland that even the latest arrivals have room to rest.
The échouries, as these beaches are called, being so full that the hunters can cut off three or four hundred, ten or twelve men prepare themselves with poles about 12 feet long. The attack is made at night and the principal thing to be observed is the wind, that must always blow from the animals to prevent the hunters being discovered.
When they have approached to within three or four hundred yards of the échourie beach five men are detached with poles. These creep on hands and knees until they are close to the flank of the herd. The reason for this is that if the Sea Cows had the least apprehension they would all turn and retire into the water. In which case, so far from being able to stop them, it would be great good fortune if the men saved themselves from being pressed to death or being drowned.
Being ready to attack, the first man gives the Cow in front of him a gentle strike with his pole upon the buttocks, imitating as much as possible the push they give each other. So he proceeds with the next Cow, making it advance up the beach while one of his companions secures him from harm from the Cows to seaward of him.
So they continue to the other side of the échourie, having by this process made a passage which they call the cut. All this time they have observed the utmost silence, but now they begin to halloo and make the greatest possible noise to frighten and alarm the Sea Cows. All the men now range themselves along the cut, driving and beating the Cows to prevent them falling backward to the sea. Those Cows that turn back from farthest inland are prevented from escaping by the men belabouring the seaward Cows toward them, and the collision of the two groups forms a bank of bodies twenty feet high and upwards.
The men keep exercising their poles until the beasts are quite fatigued and give up the attempt to escape, after which they are divided into parties of thirty to forty Cows that are driven to a place generally a mile inland from the échouries, where they are killed.
Up to 25,000 walrus were killed each year on the beaches of the Magdalen Islands during the 1700s. When, in 1798, another British naval officer was sent to evaluate the sea cow fishery there, he reported to his superiors, “I am extremely sorry to acquaint you that the Sea Cow fishery on these islands is totally annihilated.”
Northern Islanders probably used similar hunting methods. Their kills may not have approached the wholesale butcheries achieved in modern times; nevertheless, every spring Orcadian, Shetland, and Hebridean beaches would have been soaked in blood, and every spring fewer tuskers reappeared to haul themselves ashore. Here, as would later be the case in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, tribes that had once numbered in the hundreds of thousands shrank to tens of thousands; to tens of hundreds; and, finally, to none at all.
So walrus numbers dwindled even as the human inhabitants of the islands were becoming ever more numerous—and more avid for imported goods, including gold and silver ornaments, gemstones, pottery, wood, iron, and amber. Demand for ivory increased inexorably. By the middle of the first millennium B.C. only a remnant population of walrus still survived in the Northern or Western Islands of Britain. Yet something more than a memory of them still remained. When, in the fourth century B.C., the Northern Islands first appear in recorded history, they bear the name Orcadies—Islands of the Or
cas—a Greek word signifying monsters of the sea. There can be little doubt but that walrus were the sea monsters for whom the remote islands were named.3
Some two hundred miles northwest of, and almost equidistant from, the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland, another archipelago thrusts itself out of the ocean depths. Once called Bird Islands, now the Faeroes, it consists of a jagged array of high-rearing mountains separated one from the other by fathomless troughs in whose narrow reaches fierce tidal currents churn.
Larger than either Orkney or Shetland, most of the Faeroe land mass is nearly vertical, offering small inducement to human settlement. However, millions of seabirds breed on the many cliffs and, in ancient times, the seas about abounded in whales, seals—and walrus.
Northern Islanders must have been aware of the existence of the Faeroes from very early on. In good weather, its three-thousand-foot peaks are visible from sixty miles to seaward, and tell-tale cumulus clouds that gather over them in summer can be seen from twice that distance. Even if no Island boatman had ever been blown far enough from home to actually see the Faeroes, people would still have known land lay that way because of the vast flocks of ducks, geese, swans, and other birds that headed north and west from Shetland each spring and returned from that direction every autumn.
The Faeroes could be reached from any of the other three archipelagos in two or three sailing days.4 We can be sure that, as walrus grew scarce in home waters, Islanders would have gone to the Faeroes in search of more.
Hunting them in the Faeroes would have been more difficult than in home waters. As a Faeroese fishing captain, who, in his youth, hunted walrus in Svalbard (Spitzbergen), explained to me:
“Ya, there was sure to have been hvalross on our islands one time. You would not much catch them on the beaches though, because not many beaches. You would hunt them like we did in Svalbard. Find a bunch of the boogers hauled out on rocks and come onto them in boat from seaward. With the sun behind so they don’t soon see you. When you get close you shoot in head, but have to be good shooter because head is small target and hard like iron. We also fished with harpoons and good, strong lines. When hvalross is tired, you haul boat up to him and bash his head with axe or maul. Sometimes he come at boat, then you got to watch out! I see tusks come through three-inch oak keel and go through pine plank like butter. I don’t want to do that kind of fishing in skin boat!”
The Islanders would not have much wanted to do it either. Although their harpoons and lances were tipped with quartz blades sharper than the sharpest steel, hunting walrus in the water would have remained a risky and relatively unproductive business.
Regardless of the difficulties involved, determined pursuit of walrus in the Faeroes led to a predictable result. The population eventually became so reduced as to be no longer worth the hunting.
It was going to be an early autumn. Already long skeins of swans and geese were sweeping out of the northwestern skies, some to spiral down to rest briefly on the Bird Islands, others to overfly them on their way south.
Two men of a crew from Fetlar stood together on the shore of Sandy Island, so called because it possessed one of the very few sand beaches in the Faeroes. They were watching and listening as seemingly endless flocks of whooper swans, greylag, and pink-footed geese swept overhead, filling the dawn with sonorous voices.
“One of these years,” mused the younger of the two, “someone will take the Swan’s Way and fare to the land those birds are coming from. So many of them! It must be a great land.”
The older man stared westward across the wastes of ocean and nodded.
“Maybe so, though who’s to say? No man has gone that far.”
“No need before now,” the younger one replied with some asperity. “Used to be tuskers in plenty at home, and even here on the Bird Islands. Now they’ve mostly gone, and where else could they be but to the west? We ought to go after them.”
The biting stench of burning seaweed drenched in seal oil assailed their nostrils. They turned and walked towards a gravelly shelf a hundred yards from the water, where their ship had been upturned upon a foundation composed of stones and sod to make a summer home. Several of their fellows were busy near it, stoking the smoky fire and preparing a morning meal.
They were in a surly mood. This season’s hunt had been the worst in memory. During past springs as many as a dozen vessels had sailed to the Bird Islands and gone home again in autumn heavy with cargoes of oil, hides, and ivory. This year only two vessels had bothered to make the voyage, one from Shetland and one from the Outer Hebrides. Their crews had found only a scattering of walrus hauled out on the few suitable beaches. And these had mostly been young or female, with small tusks. Furthermore, they had been so wary as to be almost unapproachable. Between them the two crews had killed fewer than twenty animals on the beaches. At great risk they had speared a half-dozen more in the water but, all in all, the hunt had been a failure. The Hebridean crew had already sailed home in disgust.
That evening, over a meal of boiled seal meat, the young man who had spoken of faring farther west boldly broached the subject. The rest of the crew listened intently. One of the elders ventured the opinion that the land where the geese and swans nested might be dangerously distant.
“Men can go wherever lesser creatures can!” a younger man interjected contemptuously. “There’s no more tuskers in these waters. They’ve gone somewhere, and where can it be but west? Ours is the best seaboat in the Islands! What’s stopping us?”
The discussion went on far into the twilit night. Eventually it was agreed that, if the weather at dawn promised fair, a reconnaissance would be made to the northwestward one day’s sail out of sight of the highest peak of the Bird Islands. If by then there were indications of new land ahead, they might go on. Or they could turn back.
Dawn brought clear skies and a steady sou’west breeze. After a hurried breakfast, the crew carefully levered their ship off the foundation, turned her rightside up, and half-carried, half-slid her to the beach. The cooking fire was still smoking as they launched and loaded her. With sail sheeted for a broad reach, she headed lightly into the northwest, a little curl of white foam flickering at her cutwater.
The good weather held and she bowled swiftly along, rising easily to the long swells. By the time the sun dipped below the horizon for a brief interlude before rising again, the highest peak of the Faeroes was barely visible astern.
Nothing was to be seen ahead except the emptiness of ocean. The skipper held his course, and there was no grumbling amongst the crew. No man wanted to be thought timorous.
When, three hours later, the sun rose again they had lost all sight of land. Still the weather held. If anything, it improved as the breeze swung into the south. Dawn brought flights of swans and geese streaming southeastward overhead as if to confirm that the ship was on the proper course.
Tension mounted as the day wore on. Faint wisps of high cloud appeared, warning of a change in weather. The waters were alive with whales—so many that the steersman sometimes had to alter course to avoid collisions. But there was no sign of land ahead.
The afternoon was growing old when the skipper made his decision. “Wind’s going to go westerly this evening, and rise. Soon it’ll be smack on the nose. . . . We’ll hold this course ’til sunset, then turn back.”
Two hours before sunset they encountered a pod of big bull tuskers assembled as if to block the vessel’s path. The great beasts reared their bodies partly out of the water and glared enigmatically.
Shortly thereafter the lookout let out a bellow:
“Land ahead! No, by the gods, it don’t look like land! But something’s there!”
Apprehensively, the men watched the “something” lift slowly above the horizon. Instead of a dark shape looming against a pallid sky, the massive presence gradually revealing itself was ghostly white.
There was fear in many hearts, yet no man showed his feelings. The skipper held the course with a steady hand. The breeze b
egan to freshen and veer into the southwest as the ship snored through rising seas. The sun seemed to be sinking directly into the whiteness ahead, and the glitter became so intense men could no longer look directly at it.
Suddenly the skipper put the helm hard over to spill the wind out of the vessel’s sail. As she lost way the crew crowded aft, their voices a babble of interrogation. The skipper yelled for silence, then:
“Now we decide! This wind will be a howler by morning. If we turn and run for it, we’ll maybe find shelter amongst the Bird Islands. If we hold on towards that white place, only the gods know what awaits us. It’s for all of you to say!”
It was a crucial moment. The young man who had originally suggested the westward venture swung up on the little afterdeck beside his skipper.
“You all saw the tuskers in the sea! That’s our sign! There’ll be many more ahead. . . . I say . . . let’s go on.”
So it was that in the afterglow of sunset the ship from the Northern Islands closed cautiously with a new land. When dawn came clear the crew saw they had come to a country ringed by dark mountains from whose inner reaches swelled a white dome of overwhelming size. The shores of this weird world seemed to consist of endless stretches of black sand beaches along which they coasted for half a day, sheltered by the high land from what was becoming a full gale. The beaches were alive with tuskers, and so were the seas through which they sailed.
Near midday the lookout spotted a break in the beach line. Putting in towards it, they found a channel running into a broad lagoon. Once inside they dropped anchor in perfect shelter. Then they launched the ship’s boat, and the skipper and five men rowed ashore to land upon the great mid-oceanic island of the north, which the Islanders would henceforth know as Tilli.