Sea of Slaughter (27 page)

They were soon to be found over the whole region. Current charts still preserve more than a score of names testifying to their widespread presence, and the mossed-over, wind-eroded, and sometimes sea-flooded remains of their shore stations are to be found as far westward as the mouth of the Saguenay River, a bare hundred miles from Quebec City.

Buterus itself seems to have been a typical Spanish Basque station. In any given summer it was home to as many as 1,000 men. Before dawn each day, scores of whaleboats under light sail, or propelled by oars if there was no breeze, dispersed in both directions along the coast, and out to seaward from it, until they formed an arc with a radius of ten or fifteen miles centred on Buterus. Then they waited for the light to quicken. All hands intently scanned the surrounding sea for the V-shaped double spout that bespoke the sarda. As soon as one was seen, hanging diaphanous in the morning air, two or three of the nearest boats converged on it. The harpooner took the head in each, and every crew rowed desperately, hoping to give its own harpooner the first throw.

The chosen victim normally reacted to the approaching boats with little more than amiable curiosity—until a harpoon flashed in the rays of the rising sun and the wickedly double-barbed iron drove through thick blubber deep into flesh below. The “struck fish” sounded, only to find itself tethered to the dragging weight of the boat above. When it surfaced to draw breath, it might be struck with a second and even a third harpoon. Panic and fear must have flooded the mind of a creature that, in all likelihood, had experienced neither before. There would have been agonizing pain as well, as the irons ripped and tore in the straining muscles.

After hours of titanic struggle, even the sarda's mighty strength would ebb. Then the boats closed in, driving the strick-en animal under with thrusts of long, slim lances before it could fill its straining lungs. Mortally stabbed by lilliputians, the sarda at last rolled helpless on the surface. Its spout became a crimson fog. The sea about it swirled dark with blood. The mighty flukes lifted and fell in one last paroxysm, and life was gone.

With a haze of gulls already gathering over it, the glistening carcass was towed by two or three boats into Buterus harbour and moored to one of several barrel buoys a few hundred feet off the tryworks. Here it would lie in a pod of dead companions until the log slip-way on the beach was cleared of earlier corpses and it could be hauled up the greasy slope by capstan winches.
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Day long, night long, under the smoky glare of train oil torches, the butchers swarmed over the gargantuan carcasses, their cutting knives thrusting and shearing, while other men carried slabs of blubber to the tryworks threshold. Here the fat was minced into pieces small enough to fork into a row of sputtering, bubbling cauldrons heated by roaring fires, themselves fuelled with a ropy detritus of connective tissue fished out of the pots from time to time—the whale thus provided the fuel for its own immolation.

Having stripped the blubber from its body and hacked the baleen from its mouth, the whalers would trip the capstan brake allowing the naked corpse to slide back into the sea. It would still float, even though stripped of its fat, because the progress of internal decay swiftly produced such quantities of gas as to inflate the carcass into a monstrous, fetid balloon. Turned loose to the mercy of wind and tide, this enormity would join a host of similar putrescent horrors being vomited out of the score of bays where whalers worked. Most of these ghastly objects eventually drove ashore, adding their contributions to a charnel yard that stretched for hundreds of miles along the shores of the Grand Bay.

The Sieur de Courtemanche has left us a macabre glimpse of what those shores must have been like. In 1704, at the head of a small bay only a few miles from long-abandoned Buterus, he found “a quantity of bones cast up on the coast like sticks of wood, one on the other... there must have been, in our estimate, the remains of more than two or three thousand whales. In one place alone we counted ninety skulls of prodigious size.”

Evidence of the scale of the slaughter remains into our times. An engineer engaged in building a highway up the west coast of Newfoundland in the 1960s told me that wherever his earth movers dug into beach gravel, they uncovered such masses of whale bones that portions of the roadbed were “constructed more of bones than stones.” Skulls, he told me, “were a dime a dozen—some of them as big as a D-8 dozer.” I examined some of these barrow pits soon after the road was completed and satisfied myself that the majority of the gargantuan remains were from the relatively recent past and were not the slow accumulation of the ages.

Sardas were so numerous in the Gulf during the first half of the sixteenth century that whaling was simply a matter of selecting and killing as many as could be dealt with, from what must have seemed an inexhaustible supply. The process was roughly analogous to taking cattle for slaughter from an immense holding pen. The limiting factor was not the number of whales available, but the ability of the factories to process them.

Buterus, which seems to have supported as many as three separate tryworks, was only one of perhaps twenty stations ranged westward from the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle along the north shore of the Gulf and into the St. Lawrence River as far as the Saguenay. Chaleur Bay and the Gaspé coast supported several more, as did the Magdalen Islands, Northumberland Strait, and the southern and eastern shores of Cape Breton. As many as a dozen factories blackened the skies over the south shore of Newfoundland. In all, there seem to have been forty to fifty in operation in and around the Sea of Whales at the peak of the Basque “fishery.” Those to the north and east were worked mainly by Spanish Basques, those to the south and west by French Basques. Together they wrought havoc on the right whale nation.

It is possible to estimate the magnitude of the slaughter. We know that the crude tryworks of the sixteenth century yielded about 3,000 gallons, or twelve tuns, of train on average from each adult sarda and, at least initially, the harpooners disdained everything except adults, and large ones to boot. We also know the cargo capacity of Basque ships. These were of two sorts: caravels that brought men, boats, and gear out to the factories each spring and could carry home from 250 to 500 tuns of oil; and carracks, or sack ships, which sailed west in mid-summer for the sole purpose of transporting oil back to Europe. These early “tankers” were immense vessels for those times, some being capable of carrying nearly 1,000 tuns.

Sixteenth-century records indicate that the combined Basque whaling fleet ranged between forty and 120 vessels in any given year. Taking eighty as the median, and allotting to each an average lading of 350 tuns, we arrive at an annual toll of some 2,300 whales. But this by no means represented the total annual
mortality.
We must add at least 20 per cent to cover the loss of calves that starved to death when their mothers were killed and adults mortally wounded but not landed. An estimate of 2,500 whales a year during the peak period of the sarda slaughter (c. 1515–60) is probably conservative.

During the mid-portion of the sixteenth century, most of the train that fuelled the lamps of western Europe and provided raw materials for lubricants and soap-making, leather- and jute-processing, and even cooking oil, came from the sarda of the Sea of Whales. In addition, the western sarda provided most of the baleen, whose myriad uses included plumes for military helmets, clothing supports, stuffing for upholstery and mattresses, bristles for brushes, screening and sieve material, knife handles, horn spoons, and even springs to power mechanical toys and scientific instruments.

It was an immensely lucrative industry. In one good season at the Sea of Whales a Basque ship-owner could amortize his investment in ship and whaling gear, crew wages, supplies, and all other expenses, and show a healthy profit. It was not only good business, it was very big business. By 1570, the Basques had established their own independent consulates in many European countries solely to deal with the whaling trade. By then, their interwoven syndicates and companies had become the Exxon of their time.

Such was the magnitude of the slaughter that, by about 1570, the western sarda had been wasted to relic numbers. Time was running out for the sarda; but it was running out for the Spanish Basque whalers, too. In 1588, the Spanish Armada made its attempt on England and was largely destroyed in consequence. Amongst the scores of ships sent to the bottom by English cannon and fierce storms was the bulk of the Spanish Basque whaling fleet, conscripted to the service of King Philip and sacrificed to his ambition. The disaster was so overwhelming that the Spanish Basques never again returned to the Sea of Whales in strength.

The Armada debacle was followed by another and even more serious setback to Basque whaling in New World waters when, during the first decade of the seventeenth century, a fabulous new whaling ground was found in the icy seas around Spitzbergen. This discovery provided the genesis for a new whaling industry that soon eclipsed the fishery in the Sea of Whales and forever ended the age-old Basque monopoly.

As the main focus of the slaughter shifted eastward, the persecution of the western sarda nation eased. But it did not end. French Basques continued killing sardas, and so did increasing numbers of Norman and Breton fishermen who were turning the Gulf of St. Lawrence into a French lake. Furthermore, the migrating sardas were now coming under assault from New Englanders, who were developing a “Bay whaling” industry.

Although originally relying mainly on otta sotta, as we will shortly see, these English shoremen also killed the bigger and fatter sardas whenever they got the chance. As more and more of them turned to whaling, the sardas were denied sanctuary anywhere along the continental coast. Perhaps the survivors sought winter refuge around uninhabited islets and reefs in the West Indies and took to making their north and south passages farther and farther off the deadly North American shore. If so, it was of small avail because the New England bay whalers were extending their reach. By 1720, they were sailing out of sight of land in half-decked little sloops that could stay at sea three or four days. Although the crews of these swift little vessels killed sardas whenever they encountered them, by then both the otta sotta and the sarda had become so scarce that the New Englanders were switching the main thrust of their hunt to yet another kind of whale.

The Basques called this one
trumpa
and ranked it third of the four whales of the better sort. It became known to generations of Yankee whalers as the sperm. The sperm is an open-ocean mammal feeding at great depths on squid, and it seldom comes near land. Relatively easy to approach, it carries a blubber layer thick enough to keep it afloat after death and moderately good for making train. Because it is a toothed whale it has no baleen, but this deficiency was compensated for, in the whaler's view, by a unique substance, partly light oil and partly wax, carried in its head, which some early ignoramus thought was actually its sperm—hence the name, spermaceti. By any name, it was and remains extremely valuable as an ultra-fine lubricating oil. The sperm also produced another valuable substance, described by an early seventeenth-century writer in somewhat unprepossessing terms: “In this sort of whale is likewise found the Amber grease lying in the entrails and guts of the same, being of shape and colour like unto cowes dung.” Despite its appearance, ambergris was such a precious medicinal and chemical substance, especially as a base for perfume, that as late as the nineteenth century it was literally worth its weight in gold.

The discovery of great numbers of sperms offshore drew the New England whalers seaward in such earnest that by 1730 they were sailing fully decked sloops and schooners south to Bermuda and north to the Grand Banks in pursuit of them. Since their vessels were initially too small to carry ship-borne tryworks, they at first killed sperms almost entirely for the few hundred gallons of spermaceti that could be baled out of the heads. One result of this horrendous wastage was that sometimes so many bloated sperm whale corpses floated abandoned on the fog-draped Grand Banks that they posed a hazard to transatlantic shipping. Another was that the trumpa tribe of the northeastern approaches was so severely reduced that for a time it all but disappeared.

In the process of destroying the trumpa, the New Englanders became true offshore whalers. By 1765, as many as 120 New England whaling vessels, now mostly equipped with tryworks, were “fishing” the Strait of Belle Isle, the Grand Banks, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. By this time, most of the whales they were killing were humpbacks (which we will come to later); some were sperms, and a number were black right whales, which were always the preferred quarry when they could be found. During the same period, other New Englanders were sailing into southern waters searching for sperm whales, but killing every black right whale they encountered.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, no more than a few thousand sardas remained alive in the entire length and breadth of the North Atlantic. For a few years, a group of perhaps 100 managed to conceal themselves in summertime in the wild fiords of southern Newfoundland. Here they were discovered by Newfoundland and American whalers in the 1820s; by 1850, only one lone individual—a cow—could be found and killed. None was reported subsequently in Gulf, Newfoundland, and Labrador waters for 100 years, although it appears that a few score, presumably made especially wary by the fate of the rest of their kind, still survived.

In 1889, a Norwegian steam whaler armed with the new and deadly explosive harpoon gun was ranging south of Iceland when she came upon a pod of the now almost legendary sarda. The catcher killed one of seven seen before bad weather saved the rest. The next year the rusty catcher came coursing back, found the remaining six members of the pod, and killed them all.