Sea of Slaughter (31 page)

From station after station the whaleboats swarmed out to meet the oncoming armada. Braving razor-edged cat-ice, ice fogs, snow squalls, and freezing winds, the boatmen pressed their attacks with a frenzy that ignored everything except the urgency of killing. It was indeed a terrible urgency, for they had to complete the slaughter, make their oil, and depart quickly—or face a deathly winter, frozen in on Labrador's black coast.

The risk was real. In 1577, winter struck in early December and never relented thereafter until the following spring. Shore-ice made so quickly and so thickly that it trapped much of the Basque fleet in harbour. Something less than half seem to have escaped, perhaps by fleeing southwest into the Gulf, thence eastward through Cabot Strait into the Atlantic; however, for some twenty-five or thirty ships and more than 2,000 men, there was no escape. Through five interminable months they endured fearsome cold, near starvation, and, worst torment of all, the scourge of scurvy. Before spring freed their ships, 540 of them died. Although this was a singularly savage blow, it did not dull the whaling syndicates' appetite for gain; in 1578, an even larger than usual fleet returned to risk its men in the December gamble for the oil of the Grand Bay whale.
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As the slaughter of the western sarda slowed for want of victims, a new wave of destruction incarnadined the northern reaches of the Sea of Whales. Until the loss of their fleet in the Armada debacle of 1588, the Spanish Basques fished the Grand Bay whale with the ruthless singleness of purpose that lust for profit fires in men; and, when they were gone, their place was taken by the French Basques who, according to Champlain, were making 200,000 livres worth of train a year during the first decades of the seventeenth century. However, as we have already seen, by then the great days of the Basque whaling monopoly were fast fading away.

The event that triggered the beginning of the end of that monopoly took place in 1607 when that doughty explorer, Henry Hudson, sailed into the virtually unknown Arctic seas seeking a passage around Asia leading to Cathay. Hudson coasted the polar pack for hundreds of miles, discovering the isolated island he called Hudson's Touches (Jan Mayen Island) and examining parts of the Spitzbergen archipelago. Although he failed to find what he sought, he reported “great store of whales” of enormous size that seemed to swarm everywhere in the Arctic seas.

News of this discovery spread rapidly through the business capitals of northwest Europe and ignited considerable excitement—if the reports were true, it appeared that a source of train oil at least equal to that dominated by the Basques in the Western Ocean had been found much closer to home. The upshot was that first the English and then the Dutch sent ships into the frozen north to investigate. By 1612, a new oil rush was under way.

At first the English dominated the new whaling grounds in what they vaguely called the Greenland Sea, which included all that portion of the Arctic Ocean lying between east Greenland and Novaya Zemlya. Then the Dutch came whaling in force. Skirmishes and even pitched battles were fought between the rivals in the bleak fiords of Spitzbergen. But this was as nothing to the war they waged together against the leviathan they would come to call the Greenland whale.

By 1622, the Dutch alone were sending 300 ships and 15,000 to 18,000 men to “fish” Spitzbergen's frigid waters, and had built a big summer settlement on one of the barren islands, which they appropriately named
Smeerenburg
—Blubbertown. The carcasses of as many as 1,500 Greenland whales were towed into its stinking harbour each season to be flensed and their blubber rendered. Countless more whales were killed and their oil rendered in temporary shore stations all around the archipelago by English and Dutch alike.

In a few years the resultant gush of train oil into European markets washed away the former Basque monopoly. Although some French Basques continued to whale in New World waters on a much-diminished scale, most either turned to fishing cod or hired themselves out as mercenary harpooners aboard Dutch and English ships fishing the new grounds in the Greenland Sea.

Although the Grand Bay whales now enjoyed something of a reprieve on their wintering grounds, the cold polar waters where they summered were reddening with their blood. By 1640, the Greenland or Grand Bay whale was being hunted across the whole sweep of the European Arctic. Soon the old tale was being told anew. As the hunt intensified, the numbers of available whales began to shrink and competition for what was left grew fiercer. In 1721, a century after the great Arctic slaughter had begun, 445 whaling ships of half-a-dozen nationalities scoured the Greenland Sea—and succeeded in killing an average of only two whales each. By 1763, the average was down to one whale per ship, and those that
were
being killed produced only two-thirds to half as much oil as had been rendered from the monsters originally found around Spitzbergen.

Whales are long-lived animals. Unmolested, a Greenland whale might have lived sixty years or so and, growing all the time, attained a length of seventy feet. By the time the seventeenth century ended few, if any, were being permitted such longevity. By 1770, a fifty-five-footer was considered a big whale, and the kill of ever younger and smaller whales from year to year was becoming the regular pattern. Eventually more than half the kill would consist of “nursery whales”—youngsters of the year, still nursing on their dams.

Having taken the cream of the big whales from the Greenland Sea, the Dutch began searching farther afield until some of their ships rounded Cape Farewell and entered Davis Strait. Here they found a virgin population of Greenland whales and the slaughter began anew. The Dutch tried to monopolize this new ground, but English whalers avidly followed the stench of oil and money westward. Meanwhile, the young but vigorous New England whaling industry had begun sniffing northward. About 1740, its whalers discovered the wintering grounds of the whale they christened “Bowhead,” but at first they were frustrated in their attempts to exploit the find because the Gulf of St. Lawrence was still French territory and forbidden to the English. The New Englanders thereupon resorted to clandestine methods, seasonally and secretly reoccupying some of the old Basque stations and establishing new ones concealed in coves on the lower Labrador and the Petit Nord peninsula of Newfoundland.

Since French cod fishermen did not winter on these coasts, using them and their harbours only from June to October, the New Englanders had only to wait until the French fishing fleet departed for Europe before putting wintering whaling crews ashore, after which the mother ships sailed south to hunt for sperm whales in warmer waters. As early as possible the following spring the schooners headed north again, braving the south-flowing polar pack in order to pick up the wintering crews and their production of oil and baleen before the French fleet again arrived on the scene. The French authorities either did not realize what was happening or, possibly, they knew but were not overly concerned.

After the British expelled the French from the region in the 1760s the New Englanders—mostly New Bedford men—were able to whale openly. They increased the number of winter stations fishing bowheads and, not content with this, sent their whalers northward in the spring to range the edges of the Labrador pack and pick off laggards from the stream of migrants. These were mostly nursing females whose progress north was slowed by their calves. The cow bowheads were particularly vulnerable because they would not abandon their young, a fact that whalers learned early to exploit. When a cow with her accompanying calf was sighted the harpooners first attacked the calf, aiming to cripple it but not to kill it outright. They could then take their time slaughtering the mother.

When the American colonies went to war with Britain in 1775, their whalers were excluded from fishing the Sea of Whales, so many went north to compete with the English and the Dutch in Davis Strait.

They were not missed on the Labrador coast, where their behaviour had been less than civil. In 1772–73, Lieutenant Curtis of the Royal Navy was sent to the Strait of Belle Isle to investigate complaints against them and he reported that they were “lawless banditti, the cause of every quarrel between the Eskimos and the Europeans... they swarmed upon the coast like locusts and committed every kind of offence with malignant wantonness.”

Their departure may have brought relief to the people of the region but it came too late to help the bowheads. By that time the Greenland whales had been so decimated on both their summer and winter grounds that only a few pods remained. By the turn of the century they had become so rare on the Labrador coast that the Inuit, who had long depended on killing the occasional one for subsistence and for whalebone to trade for European goods, were unable to do so anymore.

In 1766, the wealthy English naturalist Joseph Banks visited Chateau Bay, which had been one of the main whaling harbours on Belle Isle Strait since at least as early as 1535. Here he was told of a remarkable find. “Last year, in digging, an extraordinary discovery was made of a quantity of Whalebone [baleen] carefully and regularly buried... and so large that I have been told by those who saw it that as much was dug as, had it been sound, would have been worth £20,000... it is supposed to be Left here by the Danes who in their return from Groenland South about, touched upon this Coast and Left several Whaling Crews, tempted no doubt by the Large quantities of Whales Which Pass Every Year through the Straights of Bellisle into the Gulph of St. Lawrence. Here we are to suppose that the fortunate Crew who had taken this immense quantity of Bone fixed their habitation... till the Ships should return as usual where upon [under threat of] an attack by the Inland Indians they Buried the Bone for greater security and most Probably were cut off to a man, so that their Treasures remained untouched till chance directed us to them in their present decayed state.”
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Banks' identification of the people responsible for this cache is surely mistaken. No Danes are known ever to have whaled the Labrador coast. Nor could the cache have been of any great age since, unlike true bone, baleen rots rather quickly after it is buried. This considerable treasure was most probably secreted by a New England wintering crew, whether against a possible native attack as Banks supposed, or, what is perhaps more likely, against discovery by French summer fishermen after the whalers' mother ship failed to return for them.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Dutch, having reaped untold millions of guilders from two centuries of butchery (between 1675 and 1721 alone they sold whale products worth 80 million guilders), abandoned what remained of the bowhead fishery to English, Scots, and Yankee whalers who were then competing fiercely in Davis Strait. However, the Americans did not long remain in those crowded waters.

In 1847 a Yankee whaler hunting down remnant black rights in the North Pacific entered the Sea of Okhotsk and “found an enormity of whales assembled there.” They were of a kind unfamiliar to the Captain, who had never hunted in northern waters before, but when a Sag Harbor whaler went through Bering Strait two years later and found enormous numbers of these same whales, he recognized them as being close kin to the bowhead. Called polar whales at first, they were in fact true bowheads, but of a separate tribe that ranged the North Pacific and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in the Arctic Ocean.

The discovery of this previously untouched lode drew almost every American whaling vessel into those distant waters, where Yankee daring, ingenuity, skill, and, above all, cupidity initiated a carnage that would have awed the Dutch of Smeerenburg. It took the Americans just fifty years to effectively exterminate the Pacific bowhead. They were merciless, killing every individual they could, regardless of age, size, or sex. Indeed, some ships' crews made a business of taking calves, which yielded as little as ten barrels of oil and little or no baleen. In 1852 one of the Yankee captains described their activities in this wise:

“The great combined fleet moved northward toward the Pole, and there the ships of all [our] whaling ports are now, lending their united efforts to the destruction of the [Bowhead] whale, capturing even the young... The whales have diminished since I was first here two years ago... how can it be otherwise? Look at the immense fleet fishing from Cape Thaddeus to the [Bering] Straits! By day and by night the whale is chased and harassed... there could not have been less than three thousand polar whales killed last season, yet the average [quantity] of oil is only about half as great as it was two years ago. The fact speaks for itself and shows that it will not long be profitable to send ships to the Arctic.”

The Captain may well have been right about the profitability of train oil, the value of which was already being undercut by petroleum; but there was still baleen. In the mid-nineteenth century, demand for it in the manufacture of such varied articles as whips, parasols, hats, suspenders, neck-stocks, canes, billiard table cushions, fishing rods, divining rods, tongue scrapers, etc., etc. seemed to be ever on the increase, and the price rocketed accordingly. By 1855, baleen was worth $2 a pound and double that ten years later. There followed an orgy of destruction during which thousands of bowheads were killed
solely
for their “bone.”

Freed of the time-consuming and exhausting business of flensing carcasses and boiling down the blubber, the whalers were able to devote almost all their time to killing. Some ships brought home as much as twenty-five tons of baleen from a single voyage. This amount represented as many as thirty or more whales, for by then it was a rare bowhead which lived long enough to produce as much as a ton of bone.