Sea of Slaughter (38 page)

This ingenious system had supplied the Indians with the meat and oil they needed through untold generations; but it was not productive enough to satisfy the French. They wanted a means to slaughter the animals
en masse.
The one they devised for porpoises in general, but especially for the white porpoise, is described by Charlevoix in the 1720s.

“When the tide is out they plant, pretty near each other in the mud or sand, stout poles to which they tie nets in the form of a pouch... in such a manner that, when the fish has once passed through it, he cannot find his way out again... When the flood comes, these fishes, which give chase to herrings which always make toward the shore [and] which they are extremely fond of, are entangled in the nets where they are kept prisoners. In proportion as the tide ebbs you have the pleasure of seeing their confusion and fruitless struggles to escape. In a word they are left high and dry, and in such numbers that they are sometimes heaped upon one another... it is affirmed that some have been found to weigh three thousand pounds.”

As I have noted, most cetologists are emphatic that the beluga is an Arctic species and that those found in the Gulf represent no more than a “small disjunct population that is probably a relic of a past colder period.” In fact, the beluga of the Gulf originally comprised one of the largest single populations of their species extant. Nor were they narrowly limited to the St. Lawrence estuary. In 1670, Josselyn recorded the presence in New England of “the Sea-hare, as big as a Grampus [the orca, or killer whale] and as white as a sheet. There hath been of them in Blackpoint-Harbour, and some way up the river, though we could never take any of them, several have shot slugs at them but lost their labour.” Nicolas Denys reported them amongst the porpoises of Cape Breton Island and Chaleur Bay. “Those which come near the land are of two kinds. The larger are all white, almost the size of a Cow... they yield plenty of oil.” In the 1720s, Charlevoix recorded seeing “many of them on the coasts of Acadia in the Bay of Fundy.” Even as late as 1876, the English traveller John Rowan wrote: “White porpoises visit the Bay [Chaleur] in considerable numbers... I am told one of these fish will yield oil to the value of $100.” Rowan also reported them from the coasts of Cape Breton Island. The Micmacs fished them, along with other porpoises, from ancient times until the nineteenth century in the Bay of Fundy; and Dr. A.W.F. Banfield believed that a tiny remnant population might still have been in existence there as late as the 1970s, although this seems dubious. In short, the white whale was evidently at home almost everywhere in and around the Sea of Whales.

The large scale commercial fishery on the northwest shore of the Gulf estuary, and upstream at least as far as Île aux Coudres, continued without serious interruption until almost the middle of the twentieth century. It ended for the usual sorry reason. Not enough white whales remained to turn a profit.

That it had been well worthwhile in its time is clear. As late as the 1870s, 500 beluga were net-trapped during a single tide at Rivière Ouelle, and through the rest of the century that single station, which had been in continuous operation since as early as 1700, killed an average of 1,500 every year. However, by 1900 the kill had so far outrun the supply that only the factory at Rivière Ouelle and another on Île aux Coudres remained. The Île aux Coudres plant was closed in 1927, but the one at Rivière Ouelle continued in operation until 1944, by which time it was only able to kill a few score whales even in a good season.

What is singularly disgusting about those final years is that the fishery would probably have collapsed at least a decade earlier than it did, with the likelihood that enough beluga might have survived to maintain a viable population—had not the government of Quebec intervened. In 1932, Quebec began paying a bounty of $45 (a very large sum in the Depression years) for every white whale killed in provincial waters. The public excuse for this bloody largesse was the canard that beluga were destroying the salmon fishery. The real, but hidden reason for the bounty was to provide a subsidy to the Rivière Ouelle whaling company so that it could continue to function for a few more years.

Because salmon were indeed becoming scarce where they had once abounded, the official stigmatization of the white whale as the chief culprit turned every man's hand against it. Even after the termination of bounty payments, commercial fishermen, sportsmen, and sporting guides alike continued to make it their business to shoot every white whale they could. A questionnaire circulated amongst fishermen on the north shore in 1955 indicated that as many as 2,000 white whales may have been killed during the previous decade under the pretext that they were salmon-poaching vermin. In 1974, Jean Laurin, a graduate biology student studying what was left of the Gulf belugas (he estimated that no more than 1,000 then remained alive), encountered gunners on the cliffs overlooking coves frequented by the little whales, taking pot shots at them whenever they surfaced. When Laurin tried to put an end to this senseless persecution, he was rebuffed both by federal and provincial authorities, each of which claimed that the
other
had jurisdiction over the matter and so refused to take any action to protect the whales.

Not all governments have treated the white whales so shabbily. Odd as it may seem to those unfamiliar with its geography, Manitoba harbours a white whale population. The pods are strung out along the west coast of Hudson Bay where, through more than 200 years, they were commercially hunted by the Hudson's Bay Company. That fishery went into decline early in the twentieth century as a result of the falling value of marine oils but was revived after World War II by a new breed of entrepreneurs. These developed a lucrative business killing belugas in the estuary of the Churchill River, a major calving and nursery ground, and shipping the meat a thousand and more miles south by rail to the Prairies where it was sold for mink feed. Between 1949 and 1960, more than 5,000 beluga were processed at Churchill for this trade. Nearly as many more seem to have been killed but either not recovered or abandoned when the small packing plant was unable to handle them.

I witnessed that sanguinary slaughter on three separate occasions during the 1950s. Big freight canoes driven by outboard engines and manned by hunters, mostly armed with old .303 military rifles firing hard-nosed bullets, criss-crossed the shoal waters of the estuary which were alive with hundreds of white whales. According to the season, the targets included pregnant females, nursing females, and calves. If a volley proved quickly fatal to a beluga, it was gaffed and towed ashore; however, if it was only wounded it would usually escape. With so many other targets available, the gunners seldom wasted time and energy pursuing cripples.

On one occasion I watched three gunners in two canoes fire at least sixty rounds into a dense school of perhaps thirty whales that had been driven into such shoal water that they could not fully submerge. Although this fusillade was delivered at point-blank range, only two corpses were recovered.

The market for mink food collapsed during the early 1960s for reasons that will become apparent later in this chapter. Nothing daunted, the Churchill whalers then began canning
muktuk
—the whale's thick, inner skin—as an exotic snack to be sold to the kind of people who serve chocolate-covered bees at cocktail parties. This abomination ended in 1970 when it was discovered that Hudson Bay belugas were so contaminated with mercury—a pollution by-product of mining and pulp mill operations on the rivers leading into the Bay—that they were unfit for human consumption. Not to be discouraged, the operators of the Churchill fishery sought other ways to profit from whale killing. One of these involved using the
outer
skin of white whales as a material from which leather for the high-fashion trade could be manufactured. But by far the most appalling stroke of entrepreneurial ingenuity was an attempt to make the white whales central to a form of northern tourism—not as creatures to be seen and admired in life, but as targets for sport hunters.

In 1973, I received a glossy, illustrated flier extolling the pleasures to be had from shooting belugas—
Adventure and Excitement in a Thrilling Chase to Catch a Two-Ton Monster of the Sea.
This sent me posthaste to Manitoba and the office of the provincial Premier, Edward Schreyer. I put the case for the whales to him and he promised an immediate investigation. Shortly thereafter his New Democratic government banned the further killing of belugas in Manitoba waters for commerce or for sport. This was a unilateral decision taken despite the fact that the federal government of Canada, which claims jurisdiction over all sea mammals, refused to recognize such a ban; and despite the fact that it was denounced within the province as unwarranted interference with free enterprise.

Schreyer's enlightened action has benefited both the beluga and the people of Churchill. The white whale population in Churchill's vicinity has increased since 1973 and hundreds of nature-watchers journey there each summer to see the sea canaries in life. More local people and businesses draw more profit from this new approach than ever they did during the years when Churchill harbour ran red with the blood of butchered whales.

The story of the white whales in the Gulf has no such happy ending. In the summer of 1973, two remarkable women, Leone Pippard and Heather Malcolm, volunteered to help Project Jonah in its attempts to save what was left of the whale tribes in Canadian waters. Pippard and Malcolm undertook to study the belugas of the Gulf to obtain data from which a campaign for their preservation could be developed. To that end they spent several summers living in a camper truck near the mouth of the Saguenay River, devoting their waking hours to observing the whales. Their efforts were derided by some doctrinaire scientists, one of whom, Pippard remembers, “laughed in our faces when we told him we were going to learn something about white whales. He said we'd learn as much by going home and having six kids each.”

Although there was much evidence of previous abundance—one old man told Pippard that in his youth the whales had been “as many as the whitecaps on the St. Lawrence River”—by 1975 the subjects of the study seemed very hard to find. When the women undertook a census, they found to their dismay that fewer than 350 belugas remained and that their numbers were evidently still shrinking year by year. Pippard produced a report for the federally sponsored Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, and, in June of 1983, had the satisfaction of seeing it accepted. In the meantime the survivors of the St. Lawrence belugas had been granted nominal protection from hunting as of 1979, but the efficacy of that protection was then, and still remains, in some doubt.

When I attempted to find out why this last pathetic remnant of a ravaged species had for so long been refused our help, the official answer I got was chillingly revealing. “An extinct population that was of no real value anyhow is one that will give us no future problems and cause no pain. Furthermore, the niche vacated by such a species can usually be filled by another that
will
contribute to human welfare and prosperity.”

Certainly the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans does not seem overly optimistic about the Gulf belugas' ultimate survival. It currently predicts that “at the present rate of decline the [white] whales could disappear from the St. Lawrence in as little as two years.” One wonders which species the department would prefer to fill that vacant niche.

A close companion of the beluga in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters, is the narwhal, noted for the male's immensely long single tusk, which gave it the name sea unicorn. Although as late as the 1860s it was regularly seen by Inuit, and sometimes killed by them as far south as mid-Labrador, it has since vanished from those waters. Its story is as grim as that of the other threatened species of small whales. Totally extirpated from European Arctic regions, where it once seems to have been common, it is now found only in west Greenland waters and in the eastern Canadian Arctic. Here it suffers such heavy predation from native hunters (mainly for its tusk, which is worth up to $50 a pound to curio collectors and to apothecaries in Oriental countries) that its remaining population, thought to be less than 20,000, is steadily shrinking toward the point of no return.

One of the most remarkable of the small whales is also one of the least understood. A deep-water species, its western clans winter off the coasts of Nova Scotia and New England, migrate across the Grand Banks, and summer as far north as the ice edge. For the most part, they live their lives unseen by man, and until less than a century ago unmolested by him. For some now-forgotten reason, nineteenth-century British whalers, who were their first human enemies, named them Chaney Johns. Today, we know them by the unlovely name of bottlenose whale.

Chaney John is a toothed whale, of the same family as porpoises and dolphins, but can grow to thirty-five feet in length and weigh as much as eight tons. Its food consists mainly of squid taken at great depths. Extremely strong and energetic, it may be the champion mammalian diver of the world. There is a record of a harpooned individual taking out three-quarters of a mile of line in what appeared to be a vertical dive and surfacing two hours later in almost the same spot, still full of life.

Although abundant in northern waters during the summer, Chaney John was of little potential value to whalers, prior to the 1870s and the advent of the harpoon gun, because, as well as being hard to kill, it was a “sinker.” Nevertheless, it was of at least peripheral interest, as witness this account by Fridtjof Nansen cruising off the east Greenland coast.

“We saw numbers of bottlenose whales, often lying quite still in front of the bow or in our wake. Herd after herd bore right down upon the ship, then went round her and inspected us from every point of view.