Evidence of the scale of the slaughter remains into our times. An engineer engaged in building a highway up the west coast of Newfoundland in the 1960s told me that wherever his earth movers dug into beach gravel, they uncovered such masses of whale bones that portions of the roadbed were “constructed more of bones than stones.” Skulls, he told me, “were a dime a dozen—some of them as big as a D-8 dozer.” I examined some of these barrow pits soon after the road was completed and satisfied myself that the majority of the gargantuan remains were from the relatively recent past and were not the slow accumulation of the ages.
Sardas were so numerous in the Gulf during the first half of the sixteenth century that whaling was simply a matter of selecting and killing as many as could be dealt with, from what must have seemed an inexhaustible supply. The process was roughly analogous to taking cattle for slaughter from an immense holding pen. The limiting factor was not the number of whales available, but the ability of the factories to process them.
Buterus, which seems to have supported as many as three separate tryworks, was only one of perhaps twenty stations ranged westward from the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle along the north shore of the Gulf and into the St. Lawrence River as far as the Saguenay. Chaleur Bay and the Gaspé coast supported several more, as did the Magdalen Islands, Northumberland Strait, and the southern and eastern shores of Cape Breton. As many as a dozen factories blackened the skies over the south shore of Newfoundland. In all, there seem to have been forty to fifty in operation in and around the Sea of Whales at the peak of the Basque “fishery.” Those to the north and east were worked mainly by Spanish Basques, those to the south and west by French Basques. Together they wrought havoc on the right whale nation.
It is possible to estimate the magnitude of the slaughter. We know that the crude tryworks of the sixteenth century yielded about 3,000 gallons, or twelve tuns, of train on average from each adult sarda and, at least initially, the harpooners disdained everything except adults, and large ones to boot. We also know the cargo capacity of Basque ships. These were of two sorts: caravels that brought men, boats, and gear out to the factories each spring and could carry home from 250 to 500 tuns of oil; and carracks, or sack ships, which sailed west in mid-summer for the sole purpose of transporting oil back to Europe. These early “tankers” were immense vessels for those times, some being capable of carrying nearly 1,000 tuns.
Sixteenth-century records indicate that the combined Basque whaling fleet ranged between forty and 120 vessels in any given year. Taking eighty as the median, and allotting to each an average lading of 350 tuns, we arrive at an annual toll of some 2,300 whales. But this by no means represented the total annual mortality. We must add at least 20 per cent to cover the loss of calves that starved to death when their mothers were killed and adults mortally wounded but not landed. An estimate of 2,500 whales a year during the peak period of the sarda slaughter (c. 1515–60) is probably conservative.
During the mid-portion of the sixteenth century, most of the train that fuelled the lamps of western Europe and provided raw materials for lubricants and soap-making, leather- and jute-processing, and even cooking oil, came from the sarda of the Sea of Whales. In addition, the western sarda provided most of the baleen, whose myriad uses included plumes for military helmets, clothing supports, stuffing for upholstery and mattresses, bristles for brushes, screening and sieve material, knife handles, horn spoons, and even springs to power mechanical toys and scientific instruments.
It was an immensely lucrative industry. In one good season at the Sea of Whales a Basque ship-owner could amortize his investment in ship and whaling gear, crew wages, supplies, and all other expenses, and show a healthy profit. It was not only good business, it was very big business. By 1570, the Basques had established their own independent consulates in many European countries solely to deal with the whaling trade. By then, their interwoven syndicates and companies had become the Exxon of their time.
Such was the magnitude of the slaughter that, by about 1570, the western sarda had been wasted to relic numbers. Time was running out for the sarda; but it was running out for the Spanish Basque whalers, too. In 1588, the Spanish Armada made its attempt on England and was largely destroyed in consequence. Amongst the scores of ships sent to the bottom by English cannon and fierce storms was the bulk of the Spanish Basque whaling fleet, conscripted to the service of King Philip and sacrificed to his ambition. The disaster was so overwhelming that the Spanish Basques never again returned to the Sea of Whales in strength.
The Armada debacle was followed by another and even more serious setback to Basque whaling in New World waters when, during the first decade of the seventeenth century, a fabulous new whaling ground was found in the icy seas around Spitzbergen. This discovery provided the genesis for a new whaling industry that soon eclipsed the fishery in the Sea of Whales and forever ended the age-old Basque monopoly.
As the main focus of the slaughter shifted eastward, the persecution of the western sarda nation eased. But it did not end. French Basques continued killing sardas, and so did increasing numbers of Norman and Breton fishermen who were turning the Gulf of St. Lawrence into a French lake. Furthermore, the migrating sardas were now coming under assault from New Englanders, who were developing a “Bay whaling” industry.
Although originally relying mainly on otta sotta, as we will shortly see, these English shoremen also killed the bigger and fatter sardas whenever they got the chance. As more and more of them turned to whaling, the sardas were denied sanctuary anywhere along the continental coast. Perhaps the survivors sought winter refuge around uninhabited islets and reefs in the West Indies and took to making their north and south passages farther and farther off the deadly North American shore. If so, it was of small avail because the New England bay whalers were extending their reach. By 1720, they were sailing out of sight of land in half-decked little sloops that could stay at sea three or four days. Although the crews of these swift little vessels killed sardas whenever they encountered them, by then both the otta sotta and the sarda had become so scarce that the New Englanders were switching the main thrust of their hunt to yet another kind of whale.
The Basques called this one trumpa and ranked it third of the four whales of the better sort. It became known to generations of Yankee whalers as the sperm. The sperm is an open-ocean mammal feeding at great depths on squid, and it seldom comes near land. Relatively easy to approach, it carries a blubber layer thick enough to keep it afloat after death and moderately good for making train. Because it is a toothed whale it has no baleen, but this deficiency was compensated for, in the whaler’s view, by a unique substance, partly light oil and partly wax, carried in its head, which some early ignoramus thought was actually its sperm—hence the name, spermaceti. By any name, it was and remains extremely valuable as an ultra-fine lubricating oil. The sperm also produced another valuable substance, described by an early seventeenth-century writer in somewhat unprepossessing terms: “In this sort of whale is likewise found the Amber grease lying in the entrails and guts of the same, being of shape and colour like unto cowes dung.” Despite its appearance, ambergris was such a precious medicinal and chemical substance, especially as a base for perfume, that as late as the nineteenth century it was literally worth its weight in gold.
The discovery of great numbers of sperms offshore drew the New England whalers seaward in such earnest that by 1730 they were sailing fully decked sloops and schooners south to Bermuda and north to the Grand Banks in pursuit of them. Since their vessels were initially too small to carry ship-borne tryworks, they at first killed sperms almost entirely for the few hundred gallons of spermaceti that could be baled out of the heads. One result of this horrendous wastage was that sometimes so many bloated sperm whale corpses floated abandoned on the fog-draped Grand Banks that they posed a hazard to transatlantic shipping. Another was that the trumpa tribe of the northeastern approaches was so severely reduced tha
t for a time it all but disappeared.
In the process of destroying the trumpa, the New Englanders became true offshore whalers. By 1765, as many as 120 New England whaling vessels, now mostly equipped with tryworks, were “fishing” the Strait of Belle Isle, the Grand Banks, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. By this time, most of the whales they were killing were humpbacks (which we will come to later); some were sperms, and a number were black right whales, which were always the preferred quarry when they could be found. During the same period, other New Englanders were sailing into southern waters searching for sperm whales, but killing every black right whale they encountered.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, no more than a few thousand sardas remained alive in the entire length and breadth of the North Atlantic. For a few years, a group of perhaps 100 managed to conceal themselves in summertime in the wild fiords of southern Newfoundland. Here they were discovered by Newfoundland and American whalers in the 1820s; by 1850, only one lone individual—a cow—could be found and killed. None was reported subsequently in Gulf, Newfoundland, and Labrador waters for 100 years, although it appears that a few score, presumably made especially wary by the fate of the rest of their kind, still survived.
In 1889, a Norwegian steam whaler armed with the new and deadly explosive harpoon gun was ranging south of Iceland when she came upon a pod of the now almost legendary sarda. The catcher killed one of seven seen before bad weather saved the rest. The next year the rusty catcher came coursing back, found the remaining six members of the pod, and killed them all.
By 1900, the sarda was still known in life only to the men of a few scattered fishing hamlets on Long Island—men who still maintained the old tradition of whaling from open boats as their ancestors had done almost three centuries earlier. Once or twice a year, but sometimes not for several years, they still saw a right whale “in passage,” and, if they were lucky, killed it.
The last such kill was made in 1918 from a steam seiner fishing for menhaden. The quarry was a female sarda and her calf northbound along the Long Island coast off Amaganset. One of the whalers, Everett Edwards, wrote an account of the incident in his biography, under the heading “A Pleasure Trip.” I have condensed it.
“The last one that will ever be caught around here came along in the summer of 1918. It gave Bert and me the most expensive two days’ sport we ever had for it was right in the middle of the fishing season. Bert had been fishing in the Ocean View; as morning broke he spied two whales just in back of the bar. He came ashore in a boat and just at sunrise I heard his voice under my bedroom window—‘Ev—you want to go whalin’?’
“We rowed out and climbed aboard and caught up with the whales right opposite Egypt Beach. The whales must have heard the vessel’s propellor for they started offshore. Soon one broke water square across the bow. Bert darted an exploding hand-harpoon at the big whale, which settled away deep as she could in that shoal water, then struck offshore. You could see her breaking water and spouting blood. Opposite Nepeague Life Saving Station we caught up with both whales. We had six or eight bombs. Bert, Felix and I took turns darting them from the bow of the steamer into whichever whale gave a chance, until the bombs were used up. After that we used a swordfish rig... the swordfish lance had a keg attached, so we could see it all the time.
“When the small whale seemed tired and began to quiet down I launched the dory to finish him with the handlance. When the young whale was nearly finished, the old one came alongside with her head out of water, plunging. Our old steward lanced that whale as slick as ever I saw a lance darted. But the lance-rope parted, and we lost that only lance we had in the big whale, which left the scene. Our little whale then came up dead.
“We followed the other whale which was spouting thick blood, offshore for another six miles. It was then nearly night so we returned to our little whale. It was towed to Promised Land docks. Crowds of people, many of whom had never seen a whale before in their lives came to view this unusual catch. We tried out about thirty barrels of oil, but never sold it. It had no market value any more.”
The extermination of the sarda on both sides of the North Atlantic was now effectively completed; but there were other oceans and other tribes of the far-flung species the Yankee whalers called the black right or, below the equator, southern right.
Within a century of its birth, the New England pelagic whaling fleet had girded the earth, and amongst its global targets were those tribes of the sarda nation that swam in the South Atlantic, South and North Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Their destruction was carried out with such diligence and rapacity that between the years 1804 and 1817, more than 200,000 were killed, mainly around the coasts of South America. The devastation spread with such fury that within fifty years the black right whale had been almost exterminated world-over.
Something of the scope and nature of the carnage is summed up in a letter written by an anonymous Yankee whaling captain in 1852: “In the commencement of [black] right whaling the Brazil Banks was the only place of note... then came Tristan da Cunha, East Cape, Falkland Islands and Patagonia. These encompassed the entire South Atlantic. Full cargos were sometimes obtained in an incredibly short space of time. Whales were seen in great numbers—large pods [which had] gambolled unmolested for hundreds of years. The harpoon and lance soon made awful havoc of them and scattered the remainder... a few remain, as wild as the hunted deer. Can anyone believe they will ever again exist in such numbers? Or that they multiply as fast as they are destroyed?
“After the Southern [Atlantic] Ocean whales were cut up, the ships penetrated the Indian and South Pacific Oceans... I believe it is no more than twenty years since whaling began in either of these localities—but where now are the whales, at first found in great numbers? I think most whalemen will join in deciding that the better half have been killed and cut up long ago... Then came stories of large whales in large numbers in the North Pacific... and in a few years our ships swept entirely the broad Pacific and along the Kamchatka shores. They moved round Japan and there whales were found more numerous than ever. But the leviathans were driven from the bosom of the sea, their few scattered remnants running in terror.”
By the early 1900s, the bloody saga was almost over for the great black right whales, which had been amongst the most numerous and widespread of the whale kind before becoming the object of human avarice. Almost over... but not quite. Scattered here and there on the immeasurable vastness of the oceanic world a few small pods and individuals continued to exist. They were so few and scattered it no longer paid to seek them out and hunt them down.
Yet, poised as they were on the verge of the abyss of extinction, they would receive no mercy. Wherever sardas were encountered by modern whalers, they were butchered. A typical example of the treatment meted out to them took place off the north coast of Newfoundland in 1951. A catcher with no licence to take right whales met a lone sarda and promptly killed it. When the incident was reported in the press, officials of the company explained that the catcher captain had merely made a slight mistake. The company processed the sarda and sold the products and was not even publicly reprimanded by the Canadian authorities.
Even after the International Whaling Commission finally placed the black right whale on the protected list, the killing continued. In 1962, a Japanese pelagic whaling fleet encountered the largest pod of right whales to have been seen for many decades, in the waters around the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha. Despite the fact that Japan was a member of the IWC, the entire pod was butchered and processed on the spot. No punishment was meted out to those responsible for this abomination and, in fact, the IWC has never officially admitted that it happened.
To this day, non-members of the IWC, mostly using Japanese equipment and backed by Japanese capital, continue to kill right whales when they can find them. So do pirate whalers on the high seas, most of whose illicit products also go to Japan. As of 1984 t
he products of a single sixty-ton black right whale delivered in Japan are worth as much as $50,000.
The activities of these particular entrepreneurs are well described by Robert McNally in his book, So Remorseless a Havoc: “The pirate whalers are vessels of uncertain ownership and clouded registry that whale as they wish... The most notorious pirate whaler was the Sierra... Ownership of the Sierra was held by a South African through a corporation chartered in Liechtenstein, the flag was Cypriot, the master was Norwegian, and the label on the ship’s frozen whale meat read ‘Produce of Spain’.
“The Sierra killed with a cruelty appalling even in the brutal whaling business. To save as much meat as possible the Sierra used a barbed metal harpoon without an explosive grenade. Struck whales commonly took hours to die, bleeding slowly to death and disemboweling themselves in their struggles against the harpoon. When the whale died often only prime cuts were taken, meaning that a 40–50-ton animal died for the sake of 2 or 3 tons of meat. The Sierra, fortunately, no longer sails. An explosion [detonated by an anti-whaling organization] sent the ship to the bottom of Lisbon harbour in 1979. But there are now even more pirate whalers at sea following the Sierra’s bloody and destructive wake.”
On August 31, 1981, cetologist and long-time friend of whales, Dr. Peter Beamish, saw an unfamiliar one surface in Newfoundland’s Bonavista Bay. Beamish gives this account of what ensued:
“From the shore we saw an unidentified but very large whale just sounding. Quickly we launched our Zodiac and were afloat. We moved slowly out onto the Bay. Ten minutes had passed since the whale had dived. We stopped the engine. There was silence.
“Then, like a giant rock rising in the tide the animal slowly surfaced and blew, not ten feet from us. We were being directly looked at by it, and at the same time covered with spray from the ‘blow’. Amazed and almost unbelieving we realized that here, swimming leisurely and freely beside us, was a solitary black right whale, one of the rarest animals on earth!