Sea of Slaughter (28 page)

By 1900, the sarda was still known in life only to the men of a few scattered fishing hamlets on Long Island—men who still maintained the old tradition of whaling from open boats as their ancestors had done almost three centuries earlier. Once or twice a year, but sometimes not for several years, they still saw a right whale “in passage,” and, if they were lucky, killed it.

The last such kill was made in 1918 from a steam seiner fishing for menhaden. The quarry was a female sarda and her calf northbound along the Long Island coast off Amaganset. One of the whalers, Everett Edwards, wrote an account of the incident in his biography, under the heading “A Pleasure Trip.” I have condensed it.

“The last one that will ever be caught around here came along in the summer of 1918. It gave Bert and me the most expensive two days' sport we ever had for it was right in the middle of the fishing season. Bert had been fishing in the
Ocean View;
as morning broke he spied two whales just in back of the bar. He came ashore in a boat and just at sunrise I heard his voice under my bedroom window—
‘
Ev—you want to go whalin'?'

“We rowed out and climbed aboard and caught up with the whales right opposite Egypt Beach. The whales must have heard the vessel's propellor for they started offshore. Soon one broke water square across the bow. Bert darted an exploding hand-harpoon at the big whale, which settled away deep as she could in that shoal water, then struck offshore. You could see her breaking water and spouting blood. Opposite Nepeague Life Saving Station we caught up with both whales. We had six or eight bombs. Bert, Felix and I took turns darting them from the bow of the steamer into whichever whale gave a chance, until the bombs were used up. After that we used a swordfish rig... the swordfish lance had a keg attached, so we could see it all the time.

“When the small whale seemed tired and began to quiet down I launched the dory to finish him with the handlance. When the young whale was nearly finished, the old one came alongside with her head out of water, plunging. Our old steward lanced that whale as slick as ever I saw a lance darted. But the lance-rope parted, and we lost that only lance we had in the big whale, which left the scene. Our little whale then came up dead.

“We followed the other whale which was spouting thick blood, offshore for another six miles. It was then nearly night so we returned to our little whale. It was towed to Promised Land docks. Crowds of people, many of whom had never seen a whale before in their lives came to view this unusual catch. We tried out about thirty barrels of oil, but never sold it. It had no market value any more.”

The extermination of the sarda on both sides of the North Atlantic was now effectively completed; but there were other oceans and other tribes of the far-flung species the Yankee whalers called the black right or, below the equator, southern right.

Within a century of its birth, the New England pelagic whaling fleet had girded the earth, and amongst its global targets were those tribes of the sarda nation that swam in the South Atlantic, South and North Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Their destruction was carried out with such diligence and rapacity that between the years 1804 and 1817, more than 200,000 were killed, mainly around the coasts of South America. The devastation spread with such fury that within fifty years the black right whale had been almost exterminated world-over.

Something of the scope and nature of the carnage is summed up in a letter written by an anonymous Yankee whaling captain in 1852: “In the commencement of [black] right whaling the Brazil Banks was the only place of note... then came Tristan da Cunha, East Cape, Falkland Islands and Patagonia. These encompassed the entire South Atlantic. Full cargos were sometimes obtained in an incredibly short space of time. Whales were seen in great numbers—large pods [which had] gambolled unmolested for hundreds of years. The harpoon and lance soon made awful havoc of them and scattered the remainder... a few remain, as wild as the hunted deer. Can anyone believe they will ever again exist in such numbers? Or that they multiply as fast as they are destroyed?

“After the Southern [Atlantic] Ocean whales were cut up, the ships penetrated the Indian and South Pacific Oceans... I believe it is no more than twenty years since whaling began in either of these localities—but where now are the whales, at first found in great numbers? I think most whalemen will join in deciding that the better half have been killed and cut up long ago... Then came stories of large whales in large numbers in the North Pacific... and in a few years our ships swept entirely the broad Pacific and along the Kamchatka shores. They moved round Japan and there whales were found more numerous than ever. But the leviathans were driven from the bosom of the sea, their few scattered remnants running in terror.”

By the early 1900s, the bloody saga was almost over for the great black right whales, which had been amongst the most numerous and widespread of the whale kind before becoming the object of human avarice. Almost over... but not quite. Scattered here and there on the immeasurable vastness of the oceanic world a few small pods and individuals continued to exist. They were so few and scattered it no longer paid to seek them out and hunt them down.

Yet, poised as they were on the verge of the abyss of extinction, they would receive no mercy. Wherever sardas were encountered by modern whalers, they were butchered. A typical example of the treatment meted out to them took place off the north coast of Newfoundland in 1951. A catcher with no licence to take right whales met a lone sarda and promptly killed it. When the incident was reported in the press, officials of the company explained that the catcher captain had merely made a slight mistake. The company processed the sarda and sold the products and was not even publicly reprimanded by the Canadian authorities.

Even after the International Whaling Commission finally placed the black right whale on the protected list, the killing continued. In 1962, a Japanese pelagic whaling fleet encountered the largest pod of right whales to have been seen for many decades, in the waters around the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha. Despite the fact that Japan was a member of the IWC, the entire pod was butchered and processed on the spot. No punishment was meted out to those responsible for this abomination and, in fact, the IWC has never officially admitted that it happened.

To this day, non-members of the IWC, mostly using Japanese equipment and backed by Japanese capital, continue to kill right whales when they can find them. So do pirate whalers on the high seas, most of whose illicit products also go to Japan. As of 1984 the products of a single sixty-ton black right whale delivered in Japan are worth as much as $50,000.

The activities of these particular entrepreneurs are well described by Robert McNally in his book,
So Remorseless a Havoc:
“The pirate whalers are vessels of uncertain ownership and clouded registry that whale as they wish... The most notorious pirate whaler was the
Sierra
... Ownership of the
Sierra
was held by a South African through a corporation chartered in Liechtenstein, the flag was Cypriot, the master was Norwegian, and the label on the ship's frozen whale meat read ‘Produce of Spain'.

“The
Sierra
killed with a cruelty appalling even in the brutal whaling business. To save as much meat as possible the
Sierra
used a barbed metal harpoon without an explosive grenade. Struck whales commonly took hours to die, bleeding slowly to death and disemboweling themselves in their struggles against the harpoon. When the whale died often only prime cuts were taken, meaning that a 40–50-ton animal died for the sake of 2 or 3 tons of meat. The
Sierra,
fortunately, no longer sails. An explosion [detonated by an anti-whaling organization] sent the ship to the bottom of Lisbon harbour in 1979. But there are now even more pirate whalers at sea following the
Sierra
's bloody and destructive wake.”

On August 31, 1981, cetologist and long-time friend of whales, Dr. Peter Beamish, saw an unfamiliar one surface in Newfoundland's Bonavista Bay. Beamish gives this account of what ensued:

“From the shore we saw an unidentified but very large whale just sounding. Quickly we launched our Zodiac and were afloat. We moved slowly out onto the Bay. Ten minutes had passed since the whale had dived. We stopped the engine. There was silence.

“Then, like a giant rock rising in the tide the animal slowly surfaced and blew, not ten feet from us. We were being directly looked at by it, and at the same time covered with spray from the ‘blow'. Amazed and almost unbelieving we realized that here, swimming leisurely and freely beside us, was a solitary black right whale, one of the rarest animals on earth!

“Although the overwhelming feeling of delight and joy that filled me had to give way to the professional needs to photograph and record the details of the observation, the feeling of exhilaration I experienced will stay with me forever... We followed the whale slowly westward along the rocky coast and its behaviour was fearless toward us, and even appeared purposefully friendly. As darkness fell and we lost contact with it I felt a real sense of loss.”

Through the succeeding two days, a fleet of boats and two aircraft tried, with the best of intentions, to find the whale again. They failed. Beamish thinks the lone sarda may have been seeking a dimly remembered ancestral summering ground and, having found it empty of its kind, pursued its lonely search elsewhere.

More and better news has followed upon Beamish's sighting. During 1982 and 1983 an aerial search revealed as many as seventy right whales summering in the Bay of Fundy region. And in May, 1984, it was announced that a further search had uncovered the whereabouts of a calving ground. Mindful of the pirate whalers, the researchers did not pinpoint the location, saying only that it was “somewhere” along the coasts of Georgia and Florida. Fifteen adult sardas were sighted, accompanied by four newborn calves.

It is uncertain whether these sightings indicate a resurgence in an almost extinct population or are simply the belated discovery of a remnant group. But it would appear that as many as a hundred sarda may still survive in the North Atlantic, together with another group of about equal size in the South Atlantic. A third group, the last in the North Pacific, is now thought to be extinct.

The northeastern seaboard is not yet quite devoid of the great creatures called
sardak baleac,
and that is a mercy to be thankful for. Yet their continuing existence remains at imminent risk unless we can give them meaningful protection. Apart from pirate whalers, they are endangered by modern shipping. One juvenile was killed near the New Jersey coast in 1983 when its tail was chopped off by the propeller of a vessel suspected to have been a high-speed warship. There is also concern that a combination of pollution and increased boat and vessel traffic may deny the whales the use of their last calving grounds. Nevertheless, some black right whales still live, and that is grounds for hope.

The grey whale of the Pacific coast of North America is today one of the best known of all whales. Its annual migration between the lagoons of Baja California and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas takes it some 9,000 miles, for the most part within sight of land. Whale aficionados gather in their thousands on headlands and cliffs to watch with awe and admiration as the stately procession of great sea mammals makes its leisurely way past.

It was not always so.

When the Pacific tribe of the grey whale nation was discovered by American whalers in 1846, it had not previously suffered at the hands of modern man and its numbers were still legion. The whalers soon rectified that. During the next few decades, they slaughtered grey whales by the thousands, mostly in the lagoons along the Mexican coast where the females gathered in enormous schools to calve.

Because the lagoons were shallow and almost totally enclosed, the whalers had little need for harpoons and lances. Instead they relied mainly on cannons that fire explosive shells into the whales either from shore or from anchored whaling ships. There was no need to immediately secure the carcasses, as had to be done at sea, because almost every animal hit by a shell was doomed to die sooner or later either from loss of blood, damage to its internal organs, or massive infections—and, once dead, the body would remain available. Whaleboats had only to tour the lagoons at intervals, collecting the floating or stranded corpses and towing them to the tryworks. Here it was found that the victims were mostly female and either pregnant or else lactating, having recently given birth. The whalers did not bother the orphaned calves, which had no commercial value. They were left to die of starvation.

The massacre of grey whales in the lagoons was so thorough that, by 1895, the species was commercially extinct along the Pacific seaboard of North America. The plight of a sister tribe inhabiting Asiatic waters was little better. It was savaged by Korean whalers who had been quick to turn the technology developed by Western whalemen to their own advantage.

Nevertheless, some grey whales remained alive and, during the respite provided by the First World War, the species made a modest recovery. This did not escape the notice of whalers of the post-war period, now mostly using deep-sea whale catchers and factory ships. The slaughter began anew. By 1938, Norwegian, Japanese, and Korean catchers in the western Pacific had destroyed all but a handful of grey whales there. Norwegian and American catchers operating from U.S. and Canadian stations had not been quite so efficient, and as many as 2,000 whales may still have been alive at the beginning of World War II. After that war, grey whales had less value and the commercial attack on them in eastern Pacific waters began to wane. But science took up the slack. Between 1953 and 1969 Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union licensed the killing of over 500 greys for scientific purposes. Three hundred sixteen were slaughtered to provide data for two scientists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service so that they could produce a study grotesquely titled:
The Life History and Ecology of the Gray Whale.