“Although the overwhelming feeling of delight and joy that filled me had to give way to the professional needs to photograph and record the details of the observation, the feeling of exhilaration I experienced will stay with me forever... We followed the whale slowly westward along the rocky coast and its behaviour was fearless toward us, and even appeared purposefully friendly. As darkness fell and we lost contact with it I felt a real sense of loss.”
Through the succeeding two days, a fleet of boats and two aircraft tried, with the best of intentions, to find the whale again. They failed. Beamish thinks the lone sarda may have been seeking a dimly remembered ancestral summering ground and, having found it empty of its kind, pursued its lonely search elsewhere.
More and better news has followed upon Beamish’s sighting. During 1982 and 1983 an aerial search revealed as many as seventy right whales summering in the Bay of Fundy region. And in May, 1984, it was announced that a further search had uncovered the whereabouts of a calving ground. Mindful of the pirate whalers, the researchers did not pinpoint the location, saying only that it was “somewhere” along the coasts of Georgia and Florida. Fifteen adult sardas were sighted, accompanied by four newborn calves.
It is uncertain whether these sightings indicate a resurgence in an almost extinct population or are simply the belated discovery of a remnant group. But it would appear that as many as a hundred sarda may still survive in the North Atlantic, together with another group of about equal size in the South Atlantic. A third group, the last in the North Pacific, is now thought to be extinct.
The northeastern seaboard is not yet quite devoid of the great creatures called sardak baleac, and that is a mercy to be thankful for. Yet their continuing existence remains at imminent risk unless we can give them meaningful protection. Apart from pirate whalers, they are endangered by modern shipping. One juvenile was killed near the New Jersey coast in 1983 when its tail was chopped off by the propeller of a vessel suspected to have been a high-speed warship. There is also concern that a combination of pollution and increased boat and vessel traffic may deny the whales the use of their last calving grounds. Nevertheless, some black right whales still live, and that is grounds for hope.
The Whale That Never Was
The grey whale of the Pacific coast of North America is today one of the best known of all whales. Its annual migration between the lagoons of Baja California and the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas takes it some 9,000 miles, for the most part within sight of land. Whale aficionados gather in their thousands on headlands and cliffs to watch with awe and admiration as the stately procession of great sea mammals makes its leisurely way past.
It was not always so.
When the Pacific tribe of the grey whale nation was discovered by American whalers in 1846, it had not previously suffered at the hands of modern man and its numbers were still legion. The whalers soon rectified that. During the next few decades, they slaughtered grey whales by the thousands, mostly in the lagoons along the Mexican coast where the females gathered in enormous schools to calve.
Because the lagoons were shallow and almost totally enclosed, the whalers had little need for harpoons and lances. Instead they relied mainly on cannons that fire explosive shells into the whales either from shore or from anchored whaling ships. There was no need to immediately secure the carcasses, as had to be done at sea, because almost every animal hit by a shell was doomed to die sooner or later either from loss of blood, damage to its internal organs, or massive infections—and, once dead, the body would remain available. Whaleboats had only to tour the lagoons at intervals, collecting the floating or stranded corpses and towing them to the tryworks. Here it was found that the victims were mostly female and either pregnant or else lactating, having recently given birth. The whalers did not bother the orphaned calves, which had no commercial value. They were left to die of starvation.
The massacre of grey whales in the lagoons was so thorough that, by 1895, the species was commercially extinct along the Pacific seaboard of North America. The plight of a sister tribe inhabiting Asiatic waters was little better. It was savaged by Korean whalers who had been quick to turn the technology developed by Western whalemen to their own advantage.
Nevertheless, some grey whales remained alive and, during the respite provided by the First World War, the species made a modest recovery. This did not escape the notice of whalers of the post-war period, now mostly using deep-sea whale catchers and factory ships. The slaughter began anew. By 1938, Norwegian, Japanese, and Korean catchers in the western Pacific had destroyed all but a handful of grey whales there. Norwegian and American catchers operating from U.S. and Canadian stations had not been quite so efficient, and as many as 2,000 whales may still have been alive at the beginning of World War II. After that war, grey whales had less value and the commercial attack on them in eastern Pacific waters began to wane. But science took up the slack. Between 1953 and 1969 Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union licensed the killing of over 500 greys for scientific purposes. Three hundred sixteen were slaughtered to provide data for two scientists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service so that they could produce a study grotesquely titled: The Life History and Ecology of the Gray Whale.
In the early 1970s the remnant Pacific grey whales were, belatedly as usual, granted protection by the International Whaling Commission. It was a short-lived respite. In 1978, under pressure from the Americans, Japanese, and Soviets, the surviving grey whales were stripped of their protected status.
Largely because of massive pressure exerted by great numbers of people who had seen a grey whale in life, this protection has since been returned to them, at least in eastern Pacific waters. If we have truly found enough compassion in us to spare the grey whale of North America’s Pacific coast from extinction it will be some small measure of atonement for what we did to the sister tribe that once inhabited the waters off America’s Atlantic coast.
Until quite recently, the existence of grey whales in the Atlantic in historic times was denied by many zoologists and some even now are reluctant to accept the evidence, not only that it was once an abundant species on both sides of that ocean, but that it flourished along North America’s eastern coast until as late as the end of the seventeenth century. For these authorities, it remains the whale that never was.
In the mid-1800s some very large bones were found on the shores of a Swedish inlet. They were identified as being those of a whale, although of what species no one could tell because the grey whale was then totally unknown to science. Some considerable time later, when the Pacific grey came to the attention of naturalists, the correct correlation was made with the Swedish bones. Similar relics had meanwhile turned up in drained areas of the Zuider Zee, and it was established that grey whales must at one time have lived in European waters.
But how long ago? The experts concluded that, since nobody seemed to have any documentary evidence to show that such a whale had lived in European waters in historic times, it could only have been present in some remote prehistoric period. Consequently the bones were labelled “subfossils,” implying an antiquity of several thousand years. Thus was the otta sotta, the favourite prey of Basque whalers until they exterminated it, relegated to historical oblivion. The same treatment has been meted out to the grey whale of the New World, despite the fact that there is more than enough evidence testifying to its presence and abundance in historic times.
To begin with, let us go back to 1611 when the Muscovy Company dispatched a vessel named Mary Margaret on a pioneering whaling voyage into the icy seas to the north of Europe. Because the English were tyros in the business, Mary Margaret shipped six skilled Basque harpoonists from St. Jean de Luz. In the Master’s account of the voyage, we are told that part of their task was to instruct the English “how to tell the better sorts of whales from the worser, wherebye in their striking they may choose the good and leave the bad.”
The various sort
s are listed under their Basque names, and the fourth in order of “goodness” is called otta sotta. It is described as being “of the same colour as the Trumpa [sperm] having finnes [baleen] in its mouth all white, but not above halfe a yard long; being thicker than the Trumpa but not so long. He yeeldes the best oyle but not above 30 hogs heads.”
This description fits the grey whale and no other known species. Moreover, since all the other chief kinds of large whales are accurately described and specifically named, there can be no doubt as to this identification. Yet by this date the Atlantic grey whale had long been extinct in European waters. How then to account for the Basque description of it as a species still of importance to whalers of the time? St. Jean de Luz, from which the harpooners hailed, was the major French Basque whaling port of that period, and we know that its whalers had been “fishing” almost exclusively on the northeastern seaboard of the New World for the better part of a century. It follows that one of the “better sort” they hunted there must have been the otta sotta.
In later times, when New Englanders first learned to go a-whaling, they called the earliest “fish” they took the scrag whale. The Honourable Paul Dudley, a naturalist and Chief Justice of Massachusetts in the 1740s, has left us the sole surviving description of this whale. “It is near a-kin to the Fin-back, but, instead of a Fin upon his Back, the ridge of the Afterpart of his back is scragged with half a Dozen Knobs or Kuckles; he is near the Right Whale in figure [shape]... his bone [baleen] is white but won’t split.” Once again the description fits the otta sotta, and only the otta sotta.
That the scrag was widespread and well known along the eastern seaboard in early historic times is confirmed in my view by the presence on old charts of a number of features bearing the name. I have found forty-seven Scrag Islands, Scrag Rocks, Scrag Ledges, and Scrag Bays along the shores of Nova Scotia, the Gulf of Maine, and the American coastal states as far south as Georgia. Sag Harbor, once a famous whaling port and now a fashionable resort, was originally Scrag Harbor. The bestowing and the survival of so many examples of the name of a specific kind of whale is unique. It resulted from the fact that the grey whale was, and is, a shore-hugging animal and so would have been the whale most frequently observed, encountered, and, as we shall see, killed by early European settlers; and, before their arrival, by aboriginals.
The Algonkian people who lived there for uncounted generations called it Nanticut—the distant place, a name this sea-girt island outflung into the Atlantic near Cape Cod well deserved. Low-lying, windswept, and composed mostly of sand covered with a scanty soil upon which beach grasses and scrubby oaks and cedars grew, it seems an unprepossessing choice of a place to live. However, those who made it their home in ancient times did so not because of what the land had to offer but for the sustenance that came from the sea around it.
As the November Hunter’s Moon began to wane, the people waited. Young men topped the high dunes on the northern shore to stare fixedly seaward into the scud of autumnal gales or into the brilliant glitter of occasional sunny days. In the village of bark-covered houses, men, women, and children took part in ceremonial dances and incantations intended to encourage and welcome the gift of life that they awaited.
One day, the watchers on the dunes beheld first one or two, then half-a-dozen, then a score of misty fountains rising from a sullen sea. These blew away like smoke, only to be renewed again and again until, by day’s end, the whole seaward horizon was fretted with them. The southbound columns of the sea creature the Indians called powdaree had reached Nanticut at last.
For weeks to come, the long procession would stream by within sight of the island people. The marine mammoths surfaced, blew, rolled in the surging breakers on the shoals, and came close enough to the beaches so the watchers could see the sea-lice and barnacles mottling the dark, gleaming skin. But always, and inexorably, they kept their stately way toward the south.
They did not pass entirely unscathed. On the first fair-weather day following their appearance, clusters of canoes put off from the island beaches. Captain George Weymouth, explorer of the Maine coast in 1605, was an eye-witness of what then ensued.
“One special thing is their manner of killing the whale which they call powdare; and [they] will describe his form; and how he bloweth up the water; and that he is twelve fathoms long; that they go in company of their king with a multitude of their boats; and strike him with a bone made in a fashion of a harping iron, fastened to a rope; which they make great and strong of bark of trees; then all their boats come about him as he riseth above water, with their arrows they shoot him to death; when they have killed him and dragged him to shore they call all their chief lords together and sing a song of joy; and those chief lords, whom they call sagamores, divide the spoil and give to every man his share, which pieces are distributed, [and] they hang them up about their houses [to dry] for provisions.”
The natives of Nantucket Island, as it is now called, were not the only ones who took a major part of their winter food from the powdaree. Many coastal tribes along the 7,000–8,000-mile migration route of the whales evidently did likewise. But considering the fearful risks involved in tackling forty-ton whales from bark canoes, there is little likelihood that any settlement killed more than one or two animals each season. One would have provided meat and fat enough, preserved by smoking and rendering, to feed two or three score people all winter through.
Leaving Nanticut behind, the river of grey whales, for such I believe the powdaree to be, forged slowly southward, moving perhaps thirty or forty miles a day and always staying close to the coast. By the end of December the head of the column might have been in the vicinity of the Florida Keys, but where it went from there is anybody’s guess.
We do know that the by-then very pregnant cows would have been seeking shallow, warm waters spacious enough to allow free movement, but protected from storm seas. Such salt-water enclosures are to be found on the east Florida coast, but are especially abundant along the east, north, and western rim of the Gulf of Mexico, offering the whales an environment as hospitable as the Baja California lagoons. I conclude that this is where most of the powdaree calved and nursed their young.
In early February, the pods began to head northward toward the lush summer plankton grazing grounds. By mid-April, they would have been passing Nanticut again. Early May probably saw the head of the ponderous procession approaching the south coast of Newfoundland, then splitting into two streams, the one entering the Gulf of St. Lawrence through Cabot Strait and the Strait of Canso, the other veering eastward and then northward over the Grand Banks.
Where the northeast-bound powdaree went thereafter is also a mystery. If they followed a pattern similar to that of their Pacific cousins, they would have continued down the coast of Labrador, seeking shallow northern seas where the small, bottom-loving crustaceans that comprised their chief food multiplied in their billions. Their chosen pastures may have included the shoal regions of Hudson Bay (Foxe Basin in particular), as well as the banks off southern Iceland. While there is no concrete evidence attesting to their use of Hudson Bay, there are seventeenth-century reports of otta sotta in Icelandic waters.
Initially Basque whalers in the Gulf probably took small toll of the otta sotta. Although its blubber produced train of premium value, it yielded only about a third as much as could be rendered from a sarda and, as we shall see, even before the sarda had been devastated, the Basques had found an even more rewarding quarry in the bowhead whale. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the powdaree did vanish into limbo. Who sent it there?
The answer is to be found in a re-examination of the early history of Europeans in the eastern United States and in the elimination of errors that have become part of that history. All current accounts of what took place in New England during the early centuries correctly emphasize the importance of the whaling industry. However, they also state that the shore-based whaling that was the genesis of
the industry was based on the black right whale—and this is simply wrong.
By the time the New Englanders began whaling in earnest in the mid-1600s the western sarda nation had already been so reduced that its survivors could not have sufficed to build an industry the size of the one that did emerge. It is also clear that the New England settlers were drawn into whaling by the abundance and availability of a whale that came so close inshore it could be attacked with success by people of limited seagoing pretensions and abilities. There is no doubt that these people learned whaling as the ancestors of the Basques had done, upon a “fish” that came to them, rather than vice versa.
The first recorded attempt at shore whaling on the eastern coasts of what is now the United States was made by a Hollander named de Vries who, in 1632, brought two vessels and crews to the New Netherlands—the Dutch settlement on Long Island Sound. Whales were abundant in the Sound and within a few days of their arrival, de Vries’ men had killed seven in the enclosed waters of South Bay. What kind of whales were they? All seven together yielded only about 150 hogsheads of oil, whereas a single sarda of only average size would have yielded at least eighty hogsheads. De Vries’ whales could hardly have been sarda. The yield from them is, however, compatible with what would be expected from the grey whale. Their productivity was a disappointment to de Vries, who complained that “The whale fishery is very expensive when only such meagre fish are caught.” The upshot was that he gave up the American experiment and the Dutch made no further attempts to exploit the New World whale fishery, preferring to concentrate their efforts on the rapidly unfolding and immensely lucrative Arctic bowhead fishery instead.
If the local whales were but small fry to the Dutch, they nevertheless sufficed to fire the cupidity of the English settlers. In 1658, twenty English families led by Thomas Macy “purchased” Nantucket Island from its Indian owners, optimistically hoping to farm its scanty soil. Either that same year or in the following spring, the settlers discovered a whale swimming about in their shallow harbour. They promptly set upon it, but with such blundering incompetence that it took them three days to kill it. Nevertheless, having crudely rendered its oil, they realized that they were onto a good thing.