The Empire of Necessity (19 page)

For a brief few years on his first sealing expedition, from November 1799 to November 1802, Amasa Delano was able to reverse the humiliation of his last long voyage. He was making money, and taking hundreds of thousands of sealskins to Canton. Delano was being treated as an equal by men he respected and he enjoyed the authority he felt his character and talents deserved, helping to bring law and order to these distant islands—a far cry from the piratical leveling he witnessed in Île de France. By this point, the British had mostly left sealing in the eastern part of the South Pacific to the Americans, so there were no Scots to play practical jokes on him. But the prestige couldn’t last, as the promise of fast and unprecedented profit set off a rage to slaughter that would fast sweep away this archipelago republic of seal killers.

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As the Delano brothers were making preparations to sail, they kept hearing reports of one place above all so full of seals that “if many of them were killed in a night, they would not be missed in the morning.” And that’s where they headed.
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Sitting five hundred miles dead west of Santiago, Chile, the island of Más Afuera, round, mountainous, and shrouded in mist, looks like a movie-set ideal of a misty deserted island. Rock walls rise quickly to a height of 6,000 feet, forming a plateau cut by cascades and deep chasms that seal hunters called “gulches” and circled by a craggy, cave- and cove-dotted shoreline. A “gold mine,” sealers said. And as if to make the island’s striving promise of wealth that much more perfect, its name, Más Afuera, means “even further” in English.

Más Afuera’s lack of a safe harbor or easy landing beach completed its allure as an object of desire. Enormous rookeries of fur seals remained out of easy reach. Seal ships anchored far from shore had to dispatch their launches through dangerous waves and boulders to land men and supplies. “Whale boat upset on the bar and 3 men drowned & 4 saved with great difficulty,” reported one ship’s log from the time.
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“In every bay there are such Multitudes of great Sea-Lions, and Seals of several Sorts,” Captain Edward Cooke said in 1712 of the archipelago of which Más Afuera is a part, “all with excellent Furs, that we could scarce walk along the shore as they lay about in Flocks, like Sheep, the young ones bleating like lambs.” They were so “thick on the shore” that Cooke’s men were “forced to drive them away” before they could land. Especially in November, when they “come ashore to whelp and ingender … the Shore is so full of them for a stone’s throw, that ’tis impossible to pass thro them.… When we came in, they kept a continual noise day and night, some bleating like Lambs, some howling like Dogs or Wolves, others making hideous noises of various sorts; so that we heard ’em about, tho a mile from Shore.”
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When the Delano brothers arrived at Más Afuera in March 1800 there were fourteen ships anchored at different points around the island’s circumference.

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Away teams left ashore on Más Afuera and elsewhere to acquire sealskins also hunted sea elephants, found on the same islands where seals birthed and nursed their young. These mammals were enormous, sometimes twenty feet tall and twelve feet around, the largest in the world that live both in the sea and on land. They were big, like whales, and like whales they were taken for their oil. A single bull yielded as much as two hundred gallons. Unlike whales, they were easy to kill.

The difficulty and danger involved in the high-sea hunt of a whale created respect among the men for the leviathan. The slaughter of sea elephants, in contrast, was easy sport, a game that bred cruelty and contempt. As the sea elephants opened their mouths to bellow, their hunters would take turns tossing in rocks. “There was no difficulty in killing them, since they were incapable of either resisting or escaping.”

At times, rousing them from their slumber took more effort than dispatching them. When bulls did lift themselves up to protect their cows, their blubber-rich skin undulated in great waves up and down their bodies, a trance-inducing index of their market value, and a signal to begin the kill. The animals “being soft and fat” and the lances “being sharp and long,” the men would perforate their prey in “a dozen places.” The sea elephant’s heart pushes an enormous amount of warm blood through its circulatory system, as much as twenty gallons. When the animal is underwater, its circulation slows down. But on land, blood courses through its body in a high-pressure flow. Pierced in multiple places like Saint Sebastian, the creature begins to gush “fountains of blood, spouting to a considerable distance.” At other times, the hunters would give just one quick thrust to the heart, “the blood flowing in torrents, and covering the men.”
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Sea elephants rarely fought back. There is one account, though, of a sailor “foolish and cruel enough” to slay a young one in the “presence of his mother.” She came up on her child’s executioner from behind and took his “head in her mouth,” scoring “his skull in notches with her teeth.” The sailor soon died.
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When the killing was finished, the men skinned the carcasses and cut the hides into two-by-two-foot squares, each as thick as eight inches with blubber. About fifteen to twenty of these “horse pieces” were then strung on poles and carried to the tryworks, which were usually set up by a stream or a river where the sand and blood could be washed off the blubber. The pieces were then ripped into two-inch strips, scored, and tossed into the pots, which were fired during the first round with wood. But as in the rendering of beef tallow and whale blubber, the animals assisted in their own consumption: once the initial batch was boiled into oil and ladled into casks, the crisp, nearly fried pieces of sea elephants, still unctuous enough to combust, kept the heat going. On the South Georgia Islands and elsewhere, penguin carcasses were also heaped on the flames, their feathers used as a “wick for the fat.”
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It hardly took more skill to kill seals. Here’s Delano’s description:

The method practiced to take them was, to get between them and the water, and make a lane of men, two abreast, forming three or four couples, and then drive the seal through this lane; each man furnished with a club, between five and six feet long; and as they passed, he knocked down such of them as he chose, which are commonly the half-grown, or what are called young seals. This is easily done, as a very small blow on the nose effects it. When stunned, knives are taken to cut and rip them down on the breast, from the under jaw to the tail, giving a stab in the breast that will kill them.
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Most of the farmers who made up these gangs were used to slaughtering and butchering livestock. But not on this scale.

The attack on a rookery was like a military operation. The men set out early in the morning, before daybreak, and, divided into two groups, flanked the target at either end of the beach, lying low behind outcroppings of rocks, “so as to be hid from the seals.” When a signal was given, both groups would start their rush to the seals, beginning the “dire work of slaying as fast as possible.”

The men might hide in place for hours waiting. Normally, it was the “old whigs”—that is, the mature males—that were first to appear, so named because of a tuft of curly hair on their heads. Then came the mature females, called clapmatches (either because there was a spark in their quick movements, like that of a match, or because their hooded-looking heads resembled a cap with earflaps, which in Dutch is called a
klapmut
). They’d be followed by their pups. Green hands would be anxious to start, while veterans urged patience until the rookery was filled, sometimes, in the early years of the trade, with as many as twenty thousand seals.

Usually the signal was given at around eleven in the morning. The sealer George Little described an assault he participated in: “We rushed with impetuosity down the rocks on the beach, between the seals and the water, and with our unsparing hand began the work of death. A slight blow with the club on the head was sufficient for the ‘young’ pups, but it was not so easy a task with the old ‘whigs’ and ‘clap-matches.’” Whigs might try to protect their harems, yet soon there would be a dash to the sea. Most seals in any given attack would escape, but sealers would force a large number upland, where they would be trapped and killed. If a man happened to fall in the scramble, wrote Little, “he would be torn to pieces by these huge animals, for their mouths are as large as that of a lion.”

Fur seals growl and snort, occasionally letting loose rhythmic barks. One alone can sound like a cross between a dog and a cow. When they are crowded together in the hundreds or thousands on the beach, their noise, punctuated by snapping teeth, is thunderous, competing with the howl of the Pacific wind. “This battle caused me considerable terror,” Little confessed. “What with the roaring of the old seals, maddened to desperation, and the yelping of the young pups, together with the shouts of the crew, formed, to my mind, a kind of pandemonium scene, from which I should have been exceedingly glad to have escaped.” For coats and capes, furriers preferred the larger pelts of mature seals, so they could avoid cross seams. But the dense fur that kept the “very small pups” warm was the plushest. “Too tiny” for most garments, it made fine wallets and mittens.
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The slaughter went on until dark. Since only skins were valuable, carcasses were left on the ground, “strewing in such numbers,” according to one account, “as to render it difficult to avoid treading on them in walking around.” The “smell infected the atmosphere.” By the end of the day, the men would be drenched in saltwater, blood, “squalor and filth.”
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Sea elephants were monstrous, their blubber and lumber almost perverse. Seals, though, were the size of humans, and their hunters talked about them as if they were: “They are gregarious, very intelligent, sociable, and affectionate”; they are “curious”; “when churchbells ring, they swim to the shore”; they “kiss each other, and die with grief at the loss of their young.” “I have myself,” said one traveler, “seen a young female shed tears abundantly, whilst one of our wicked and cruel sailors amused himself at the sight, knocking out her teeth with an oar, whenever she opened her mouth. The poor animal might have softened a heart of stone; its mouth streaming with blood, its eyes with tears.” Occasionally, if a fiddle, fife, or flute was available, sealers would play music to lure the animals to shore.
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Some glimpsed beauty amidst the frenzy. “They have the finest eyes imaginable, and there is no fierceness in their countenance,” said a visitor to the Malvinas, or Falklands, in 1797 who watched one being clubbed. Just before expiring, the seal’s “eyes changed colour, and their crystalline lens became of an admirable green.”
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What came next, after the “work of death,” as Little put it, was over, did require talent. Skinning had to be done fast, before rigor mortis set in. If a shore gang had enough men, the work would be broken up into tasks. One group to club, another to stab, and yet another to “rip and flip,” that is, to cut an incision along the neck, bellies, and flippers. Then a final gang of men would follow to separate the skin from the blubber. Dividing the work like this ensured that their skinning knives, made of the highest quality steel, remained razor sharp. Had the knives been used for other tasks, such as cutting through sandy hair and fur, they would have quickly lost their edge. An experienced man would work with grace and speed, taking about a minute per seal to remove a skin intact.

The skins were then soaked in water, so that the flesh and fat (which could be used to keep cooking fires or tryworks burning) could be scraped off more easily. Then they would be either salted or stretched and pegged on the ground to dry. Drawn-out skins would cover vast expanses of beach, their hair shimmering black-blue in the sea wind. There was one stretch of land nearly two miles long on the coast of Patagonia used by Connecticut captains to dry skins. They called it the “New Haven Green.”
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Amasa Delano compared the drying and stacking of sealskins to that of salt cod, yet more care had to be taken to ensure that the fine underfur of the pelts wasn’t ruined. On land, waiting for months for a ship to return, stacked skins had to be protected from rats and rain. Once on a ship, sealskins, like Buenos Aires hides, could be piled from the floor of a hold to its rafters. They needed to be absolutely dry before being stacked and the hold made waterproof. If they got wet on the voyage, the fur would come out in clumps and the skin would fester, selling, with luck, only for fertilizer.

Whaling knowledge grew slowly over centuries, expanding alongside the gradual extension of the hunting radius, from the waters around Nantucket to all of the Atlantic and then the Pacific. In contrast, the sealing industry boomed in a remarkably short period of time, starting in the early 1790s. And the drive to kill, dry, and ship skins to Canton fast outpaced technique. There was confusion among the officers, and even more among the men, about what constituted best practices.

In 1792, Edmund Fanning’s expedition caught sight of its first rookery, on the Malvina Islands. Fanning had been told that the best way to kill seals was to get between them and the water, yell loud, and drive them inland. But that method worked best with fur seals. What Fanning had come upon were hair seals, a larger species with different instincts.

One of Fanning’s hands had a doubt: “Do you think these overgrown monsters are seals?”

“Surely they are,” Fanning answered.

When the men advanced on the beach from the water, letting out a collective yell and raising their clubs, the hair seals “sent forth a roar that appeared to shake the very rocks on which we stood, and in turn, advancing upon us in double quick time, without any regard to our persons, knocked every man of us down with as much ease as if we had been pipe stems, and passing over our fallen bodies, marched with the utmost contempt to the water.”
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