Sea of Slaughter (50 page)

“During this time hundreds of old seals were popping up their heads in the leads and holes among the ice, anxiously looking for their young. Occasionally one would hurry across a pan in search of the snow-white darling she had left, and which she could no longer recognize in the bloody and broken carcass that alone remained of it. I fired at these old ones with my rifle from the deck but without success, as unless the ball hits them in the head, it is a great chance whether it touch any vital part.

“That evening the sun set most gloriously across the bright expanse of snow, now stained with many a bloody spot and the ensanguined trail which marked the footsteps of the intruders.”

Topaz
returned from her voyage freighted to her marks with between 4,000 and 5,000 sculps. But the vessels that in 1819 first found the main patch brought back nearly 150,000 whitecoats, bringing the total landings for that “bumper year” to 280,000 harp seals, young and old! The fires that would consume the harp nation were now flaming high.

A digression must be made here to deal with a misconception that has been of great service to those responsible for the recent “management” of the seal herds: namely, that the number of seals
destroyed
has always been, and remains, essentially the same as the number of sculps
landed.
Even in the net fishery this assumption is untrue, since a very large percentage of netted seals are pregnant females, the death of each of which represents two lives lost.

As applied to the gun fishery, it is also false. Prior to the breeding season, when they are still fat but not fully buoyant, at least half the adult harp seals killed in open water will sink before they can be recovered. In addition, most of those hit are only wounded and will dive and not be seen again. Of those adults killed outright in the water
after
the breeding season, when the fat reserves of both sexes have largely been exhausted, as many as four out of five will sink and so be lost.

Beaters more than a month old are mostly hunted in open water and are seldom fat enough to float. The current recovery rate by hunters using modern rifles is probably no more than one of every six or seven hit. The rate of loss for bedlamers is lower than that for fully adult animals, because bedlamers suffer little fat depletion and so retain considerable buoyancy; nevertheless the sinking loss is heavy. It is also high in the eastern Canadian Arctic and west Greenland where, in the 1940s, native hunters annually landed as many as 20,000 harps killed in the water—but lost as many as seven out of every ten they shot. In recent years landings in these regions have ominously declined to about 7,000 a year.

The gun kill of harp seals on the ice itself is equally wasteful. Seals shot at the ice edge, which is where the males congregate during the whelping season and where both sexes gather while moulting,
must
be killed outright if they are to be recovered. Even then, muscular spasms plunge a good many into the sea where the corpses sink into the depths. But instant kills are hard to achieve. Even such a staunch proponent of sealing as Newfoundlander Captain Abraham Kean, who went to the ice sixty-seven springs and is credited with landing more than a million seal sculps (a feat for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire), admitted that his men had to kill at least three adult seals on ice for every one they recovered. Dr. Harry Lillie, who went to the Front ice in the late 1950s, reported that only one seal was recovered for every five shot by the Newfoundland sealers he accompanied. During April of 1968 I went to the Front in a Norwegian ship under charter to Canadian government scientists who were collecting specimens from the moulting patch. Their seals were shot for them by experienced Norwegian sealers, yet the recovery rate was only one of every five seals hit. There remains the loss entailed in the whitecoat slaughter; but this we shall examine in succeeding pages.

In the meantime, it should be clear enough that landings are not and never have been synonymous with killings—a fact to be born in mind as you read on.

After 1819, Newfoundland went mad for seals. Although still vigorous, the net and swatching fishery of the outport dwellers was overshadowed and almost lost to view in the frenzied efforts of merchants and ship-owners in St. John's, and a handful of major towns in Trinity and Conception Bays, to exploit the main patch. They went about it with a single-mindedness that only unadulterated greed can induce. New vessels began coming off the ways at such a rate that, by 1830, nearly 600 brigantines, barques, and schooners were together carrying nearly 14,000 Newfoundland sealers to the ice each spring—a number that probably represented most of the able-bodied men of the northern coasts.

What followed was unregenerate carnage with no quarter given. Considering that oil was the prime objective (whitecoat skins themselves were worth very little at this period), the sealers might, in their own best interests, have been expected to refrain from killing pups until these had attained their greatest weight of fat at between ten days and two weeks of age. They might also have been expected to spare the females, at least until they had borne their young and nursed them to “commercial maturity.”

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 barquentine “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.