Sea of Slaughter (35 page)

That year, 40,200 rorquals, mostly blues, were ripped apart in the floating knackers' yards... and the cold seas of the distant south ran dark with blood.

It was a banner year for the whaling industry and for the men who sat in board rooms in London, Tokyo, Oslo, New York, and other bastions of civilization. One factory ship, the nobly named
Sir James Clark Ross,
docked at New York after a six-month Antarctic voyage with a cargo consisting in part of 18,000 tons of whale oil worth just over $2.5 million.

A good time for whalers.

An evil time for whales.

Between 1904 and 1939 well over two million great whales died the death prescribed for them by modern business practices.

By 1915, the last Norwegian killer boat had abandoned the wasted Sea of Whales to join in the South Atlantic carnage. The surviving North Atlantic whales were not, however, safe from death-dealing men. As the U-boat menace mounted in the Atlantic, the Allies launched more and more anti-submarine vessels until several hundred lean and lethal destroyers were committed to battle against equally deadly mechanical whales. But green crews for the destroyers needed training and, man being what he is, it was decided that an effective way to hone the killer skills would be to practise these on living whales. Unofficial reports suggest that some thousands of whales were killed in consequence. Most were victims of naval gunfire, but others were imploded into shapeless masses when they were used as targets for depth-charge training. There is also at least one known case of destroyers using whales as targets for ramming practice. Probably as many or more whales died in “accidental” encounters when they were mistaken for enemy submarines; but no one kept a record of how many whales were sacrificed to the cause of Victory at Sea.

When the Armistice brought an end to the military murder of men and whales, the commercial whalers hastened back to work. Although the major assault was directed at the South Atlantic and Antarctic rorquals, the wartime discovery that train oil could be processed into a prime ingredient in margarine so escalated its value that even the remnant populations of rorquals in the North Atlantic became attractive quarry. Thus, between 1923 and 1930, three Norwegian stations again worked the coasts of northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador for a landed kill of 153 blues, 2,026 finners, 199 humpbacks, 43 seis, and 94 sperm whales.

Profits were small compared to those of the southern fishery, but by making greater use of each whale they were kept at a satisfactory level. After trying all the oil out of the blubber, the residue, including meat, bones, and guts, was dried to produce fertilizer—manure as it was called. In a paraphrase of the age-old farmer's joke, a Newfoundland partner in the Hawkes Harbour whaling plant told the
St. John's Evening Telegram:
“We put every inch of the whale to profit, except the spout.”

Nevertheless, when the Depression struck in 1929, profits fell below acceptable levels; so, from 1930 until 1935, there was another brief hiatus in whaling in the Sea of Whales. However, in 1936, two stations reopened, one in Labrador, the other in northern Newfoundland, and one or both remained active until 1949. During that period, they were able to kill and land 1,100 finners, 40 blues, and 47 humpbacks.

Figures have but small impact on the imagination, but perhaps these will have more significance if we think of the whales involved as being equivalent in biomass to some 12,000 elephants—or a mountain of flesh, fat, guts, and bone weighing considerably more than the liner
Queen Elizabeth.
Small as this local butchery may have been by comparison with what was happening in the Antarctic, it was by no means a negligible slaughter.

The cataclysmic advent of World War II afflicted the few remaining North Atlantic rorquals with even worse horrors than they had endured during World War I. Corvettes, destroyers, and frigates, eventually numbering in the thousands, prowled the dark waters of the Western Ocean and they were much more lethal than their ancestors had been twenty-five years earlier. Sonar, for the detection of underwater objects, together with a wide range of new weapons not only made them deadly hunters of submarines but, more or less incidentally, of whales, whose sonar echoes were often indistinguishable from those of submarines. As the war at sea grew fiercer, the drifting carcasses of bombed or depth-charged whales became a familiar sight to the crews of naval and merchant ships alike.

This military massacre did not cease with war's end. Beginning in the mid-1940s, U.S. naval aircraft flying out of their leased base at Argentia, Newfoundland, regularly used whales as training targets, attacking them with machine-gun and cannon fire, rockets, depth charges, and bombs. When this came to light in 1957, as a result of an investigation by Harold Horwood of the
St. John's Evening Telegram,
the naval authorities appeared baffled by and even indignant at the resulting public outcry. Having pointed out that all navies routinely practised gunnery and anti-submarine warfare on marine animals, they questioned the logic and even the motives of those who would condemn such an eminently practical procedure. Large whales, they pointed out, not only provided excellent simulacra of enemy submarines, they cost the taxpayer absolutely nothing. Surely, the naval brass concluded, the death of a few whales was a small price to pay for helping to preserve our freedom.
2

Advances in the arts of war had another and even more disastrous effect on the whales. When the Antarctic whalers went back to work in 1946, they were armed with a panoply of new weapons. These included sophisticated communications systems, sonar, radar, new navigational equipment, and electronic devices to disorient, scare, and confuse the whales. Spotter aircraft or helicopters operating from immense new floating factories (some of which displaced 30,000 tons) were combined with ex-naval corvettes and frigates converted to whale killers. The largest of these were 700-ton vessels of 3,000 horsepower, capable of making thirty knots and armed with harpoon guns of formidable efficacy. The overall combination ensured that any whale that came within the wide-ranging ken of a pelagic fleet now stood no more than a fractional chance of escaping death. What followed was annihilation.

By the end of the 1940s, some twenty to twenty-five pelagic fleets were annually killing 25,000 to 30,000 whales, mostly blues, from an Antarctic whale population that had already been reduced to less than half its initial size. By 1950, the Antarctic blues, which had originally numbered between a quarter and half a million, were all but gone and the killer fleets had shifted their attentions to the finners. By 1955, it was estimated that no more than 100,000 Antarctic finners remained from an original population in excess of three-quarters of a million; and in the following year, the whalers landed 25,289 fin whales—about a quarter of what was left.

Although even the statistics released by the whaling industry during the late 1950s made it brutally clear that the great whales everywhere on earth were entering upon their final days, no steps were taken to reduce the slaughter. Multinational corporations as well as national interests from the U.S., Great Britain, Norway, Holland, Japan, and the Soviet Union made it abundantly clear that they were not only determined to continue the carnage, but intended to increase the scale of the bloodletting. As one discouraged conservationist expressed it: “They clearly felt the whales were just too valuable to be allowed to live.”

The voice of mercy, or even of sanity, was not often heard speaking out on behalf of whales during those years. To the contrary, the world was treated to a spate of novels, non-fiction, and even feature films that not only justified but
glorified
the continuing slaughter, at the same time praising the heroic qualities of the whale killers and the financial acumen of the whaling entrepreneurs.

Equally revolting was the prostitution of science to justify the holocaust. In 1946, the countries most actively engaged in whaling formed the International Whaling Commission, which they claimed was dedicated to the protection of whale stocks and to the regulation of the industry through scientific management. A surprising number of scientists were prevailed upon to lend themselves and their reputations to creating and maintaining a most unsavoury subterfuge.

From its inception, the IWC has been little more than a smoke screen created by corporate industry with the full support of national governments and justified by subservient science, under cover of which the world's whale populations have been systematically destroyed. A detailed account of its evasions, outright lies, queasy morality, and abuse of science is beyond the scope of this book, but those who can stomach the unpalatable details are invited to read Robert McNally's
So Remorseless a Havoc.

McNally summarizes the sham of self-serving interests policing themselves in the following terms: “A clich
e
of liberal ideology has it that an entrepreneur profiting from a resource will strive to protect that resource in order to make profits over the long run. Thus, the argument continues, market forces contribute to the preservation of the environment. This may be good corporate public relations, but the whaling capitalist cares not a fig whether there will be whales in the sea in fifty or a hundred years. His sole concern is whether the whales will last long enough for him... He will keep on killing as long as some gain can be had... Market forces provide no check to extinction; they actually contribute to it. Greed preserves only itself.”

One of my friends and neighbours when I lived in Burgeo, Newfoundland, was “Uncle” Art Baggs, who had been a fisherman on the sou'west coast since the 1890s. He remembered meeting his first whales at the age of eight, when he accompanied his father in a four-oared dory to the offshore cod fishery at the Penguin Islands.

“ 'Twas a winter fishery them times, and hard enough. The Penguins lies twenty miles offshore... nothin' more'n a mess of reefs and sunkers... we'd row out there on a Monday and stay till we finished up our grub...

“They was t'ousands of the biggest kind of whales on the coast them times. Companies of 'em would be fishing herrings at the Penguins whilst we was fishing cod. Times we'd be the only boat, but they whales made it seem as we was in the middle of a girt big fleet. They never hurted we and we never hurted they. Many's the time a right girt bull would spout so close you could have spit baccy juice down his vent. Me old Dad claimed they'd do it a-purpose; a kind of joke, you understand.”

It was during the winter of 1913 that Arthur witnessed the disappearance of the great whales.

“Back about 1900 they Norway fellows built a blubber factory eastward of Cape La Hune. They called it Balaena and, me son, it were some dirty place! They had two or three little steamers with harpoon guns, and they was never idle. Most days each of 'em would tow in a couple of sulphur-bottoms [blues] or finners and the shoremen would cut 'em up some quick. No trouble to smell that place ten miles away.

“And floating whales! When they got the most of the blubber off, they turned 'em loose, the meat all black, and them all blasted up so high they nigh floated out of the water. Some days when I been jigging off shore 'twas like a whole new kit of islands had growed there overnight. Five or ten in sight at once and each one with t'ousands of gulls hangin' over it like a cloud.

“ 'Twas a hard winter for weather and I never got out to the Penguin Islands as much as in a good year, but when I was there I hardly see a whale. Then, come February, one morning when 'twas right frosty and nary a pick of wind, I was workin' a trawl near the Offer Rock when I heared this girt big sound. It kind of shivered the dory.

“I turned me head and there was the biggest finner I ever see. He looked nigh as big as the coastal steamer. He was right on top of the water and blowin' hard, and every time he blowed, the blood went twenty feet into the air... I could see there was a hole into his back big enough to drop a puncheon into.

“Now I got to say I was a mite feared... I was tryin' to slip me oars twixt the t'ole pins, quiet like, when he began to come straight for I. Was nothin' to be done but grab the oar to fend him off, but he never come that close. He hauled off and sounded and I never saw he again... no, nor any of his like, for fifty year.”

During the mid-1950s, to the astonishment of most of the younger fishermen, who had never seen a great whale before, some fin whales reappeared along the sou'west coast. A pod of half a dozen even took to wintering amongst the Burgeo islands. Arthur was delighted to welcome them back again, and when my wife and I came to Burgeo in 1962, he showed them to us with proprietary pleasure.

These resident finners fed on herring in the runs and channels between the islands and each winter through the next five years from December into March I could look out the seaward windows of our house almost any day and see them spouting high puffs of hoary mist into the cold air. Unmolested by human beings, they were quite fearless, allowing power dories and even big herring seiners to approach within a few yards. In the course of the years, I became almost as familiar with them as if they had been cattle-beasts in a neighbouring field, but by far the most spectacular view I ever had was on a fine July day in 1964.

The pilot of a Beaver float plane was taking my wife and me joy-riding along the towering, rock-ribbed coast to the eastward of Burgeo. It was a cloudless afternoon and the cold waters below us were unusually transparent. As we crossed the broad mouth of one of the fiords, our pilot unexpectedly banked the plane and put her into a shallow dive. When he levelled out at less than a hundred feet we were flying parallel to a pod of six fin whales.