Today, when there are at most only a few thousand bowheads left alive in the world, native peoples in Alaska are hunting them more intensively than they have done for many years. They no longer do so primarily to obtain essential subsistence but more for sport and profit. They also use deadly weapons provided by modern technology. Instead of the ancestral skin-covered umiaks and hand-thrown harpoons, some native whalers now use fast powerboats, and all are armed with devastatingly destructive bomb guns and bomb-lances. Nor is it unusual for them to hire spotter planes to find and track the whales as they work their way through the leads in the pack to reach their summer feeding grounds in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
The result has been, and continues to be, devastating to the surviving bowheads. Dr. Floyd Durham has spent many years studying the Alaskan “native” bowhead hunt and he reports that the “sinking loss” resulting from modern hunting methods and weapons is 80 per cent. During one period when he observed, thirty bowheads of all ages and sexes were struck by Inuit hunters, and not one was recovered. In 1973, he witnessed the successful killing of a fifty-foot bowhead female and her nursing calf. The dead female proved too much for the Inuit to handle, so they turned her adrift after removing only about 10 per cent of the blubber. Twenty-nine bowheads were landed in Alaska in 1977—but an additional eighty-four were lost after having been harpooned and/or bomb-lanced.
Canada and Greenland have now forbidden the killing of bowheads in their territorial waters under any conditions. Since the rediscovery of the wintering pods in the Sea of Okhotsk in the 1950s, the Soviets have given bowheads full protection. The United States, on the other hand, finds it expedient to permit the destruction in Alaskan waters to continue.
Environmentalists have recently become much exercised about the probable effect on the few remaining bowheads of oil and gas exploitation in Arctic waters. Within a few years a massive traffic of gigantic tankers through much of the bowheads’ summering grounds is to be anticipated. More than a hundred wells are already pumping oil. An accident involving a wellhead blowout, or a tanker rupture, is more than a probability; it is a statistical certainty, and at least one such disaster is predicted to occur every ten years. Studies indicate that a major spill in ice-covered Arctic waters can be expected to wreak damage to the marine environment and its associated life forms greater by a factor of ten than that resulting from such southern disasters as the sinking of the Torrey Canyon or the recent gargantuan spill from a runaway well in the Gulf of Mexico.
The situation in which the surviving bowheads find themselves is tragically ironic. While modern man has given over the deliberate slaughtering of them, his industrial practices indirectly threaten their tenuous hold on life. What seems even sadder is that they are still being killed by native peoples, who have now become the bearers of Western cultural attitudes toward animate creation... and who no longer need the bowheads for their own survival.
14. Rorqual
By the latter part of the eighteenth century most of the “better sort” of whales had been extirpated from the northeastern approaches to America. Nevertheless, those waters still teemed with the several species early whalers termed “the worser sort” because they were generally too swift and agile to be caught; difficult or impossible to recover after death because they sank; or poor in oil compared to the right whales.
The worser sort included the largest animal ever to exist upon this planet—the blue whale. Exceptional blues may have reached a length of a hundred feet or more and weighed over a hundred tons. Today, there are probably few survivors over eighty feet. But then, there are few survivors.
Although a creature of almost unimaginable magnitude, the blue whale was and is a gentle giant. Its food consists of the small, shrimp-like krill it filters out of the water by means of a screen of 300–400 plates of baleen contained in its enormous mouth. Streamlined to perfection, it possesses a physical strength almost beyond belief. It drives its enormous bulk along at eight or nine knots while cruising, but can accelerate to twenty.
The blue is the most prominent member of a family known as the rorquals. The similarities between most rorquals are so striking that only recently have scientists agreed as to how the group should be divided. They include the blue, followed by the fin, fin-back, or finner, which reaches a length of about eighty feet; then come two almost identical species, sei and Bryde’s, which range up to sixty feet; and, finally, the relatively “little” minke, at about thirty-five feet.
The rorquals represent the most recent (which is to say the most highly evolved) of all baleen whales. There is reason to suspect that their brain capacity does not lag far behind that of the human species, although it is most certainly not used for the purposes that we use ours. Before we laid our doom upon them, they were also the most abundant of the large whales.
Apart from size (and the size range of each species overlaps that of those above and below it) and colour, the several rorqual species are almost indistinguishable in life to the eye of the casual beholder. In fact, the minke acquired its current name when a Norwegian whaler by the name of Meincke mistook a near-at-hand pod of these smallish whales for a distant pod of blues. It was a mistake that gave the unfortunate fellow an undesired immortality.
The behaviour and life history of all the rorquals is also essentially similar, except that the blue restricts its diet to krill while the others may also eat such small fishes as capelin, sand lance, and herring when opportunity invites. All are long-lived animals, some attaining ages in excess of eighty years. All are exceptionally swift and graceful swimmers, the sei being capable of underwater speeds close to twenty-five knots. All are essentially wide-roaming creatures of the open sea, wintering in temperate to tropical waters and (except for Bryde’s) migrating in spring to colder, even polar climes. Because of their supreme adaptation to the sea, they have no special need for protected nursery grounds and most bear their young in the open ocean. Many, however, close with the land during spring and summer to take advantage of the great abundance of food to be found on continental and inshore banks. In the days of their glory, they were notably gregarious, and highly visible in consequence. As late as the 1880s, congregations of finners numbering above 1,000 individuals were no uncommon sight. A Captain Milne, in command of a Cunard liner that sailed through such an assemblage in the North Atlantic in the 1880s, likened it to “a space of about half-a-county in dimension filled with railroad engines, all puffing steam as if their lives depended on it!”
As is the case with many close-knit families, the rorqual clan harbours an eccentric. This is the humpback, a creature not only singular in appearance but in behaviour, too. One of the most “playful” of animals, it has apparently undergone major physical modifications as a result of its predilection for complicated gyrations. The humpback is also famous for its virtuoso ability to compose and sing individual songs of considerable complexity and haunting quality.
Its somewhat dumpy body seems foreshortened in contrast to the exquisite streamlining of its fellow rorquals. Attaining a weight of some sixty tons and a length of fifty-five feet, the humpback boasts two greatly extended and very flexible front flippers used for balance and for propulsion, and as arms with which courting couples enthusiastically embrace and caress each other.
It lacks the purposeful drive and thrust of other rorquals, normally proceeding at a leisurely five or six knots, although it can reach a speed of ten or twelve. Its rotund form, slow speed, gregariousness, amiability, and liking for inshore waters, together with the fact that, unlike its relatives, it sometimes floats when killed, made it appear rather more like a right whale than a rorqual in the eyes of early whalers.
New England whalers sailing out of New Bedford seem to have been the first to conclude that the humpback could be commercially exploited. By as early as 1740 these men were sailing small schooners into Newfoundland waters chasing black rights, greys, bowheads, and sperms; but the rig
hts and greys were becoming ever rarer; the bowhead did not frequent that region at all in summer; and the sperm was only to be found in useful numbers far offshore. The New Englanders must have been frustrated, not to say infuriated, to find themselves surrounded by uncountable numbers of rorquals from which they could get no profit. We will probably never know which acquisitive skipper it was who concluded that at least one of the worser sort might prove to be an exception; but by about 1750, the entire fleet was hunting humpbacks when nothing better offered.
They hunted it despite the fact that in summer it was usually a “sinker.” Vessels of those times had no mechanical devices capable of hauling such massive corpses back up to the surface of the sea; nor did they have the wherewithal to keep them afloat while towing the carcasses to a shore station or while flensing them alongside a ship. No matter. The New Bedford men depended on the whale itself to deliver its carcass into their hands by virtue of a phenomenon they called “blasting.”
When any great whale dies its body temperature quickly begins to rise, not fall, as one might expect. This is because the heat produced by decomposition is retained inside the blubber-insulated body, which becomes a kind of pressure cooker. After two or three days the internal tissues actually do begin to cook, and putrefaction soon generates gas enough to make even a hundred-ton sunken whale grow buoyant and begin to rise through the water like a surfacing submarine. Such noisome corpses do not float indefinitely. Eventually they rupture, sometimes so explosively as to send gobbets of rotting tissue flying about like soft shrapnel. What remains then sinks again, and the second sinking is forever.
The New Englanders seldom attempted to get fast to a humpback with harpoon and rope. They preferred to lance it, using twelve- to fourteen-foot lances. Sometimes the lance thrusts were enough in themselves to mortally wound the animal. If not, subsequent infections would do the job. Having fled from its tormentors, the whale would sicken and die, sink to the bottom, putrefy, then “blast” to the surface again to drift at the vagaries of wind and tide. The whalers counted on spotting such “blasted” humpbacks, whether of their own killing or of another, in sufficient numbers to reward them for the trouble they had taken. A recovery rate of one humpback for every three they lanced was apparently considered an adequate return.
It was a hellishly wasteful business, but profitable. When English authorities assessed the potential of whaling grounds around the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle a few years after the expulsion of the French, they found the fishery booming. In 1763, according to the report of the naval officer in charge of the survey, the whale fishery on the coasts of Labrador was employing 117 New England sloops and schooners each crewed by about a dozen men, who took 104 whales within thirty leagues of the mouth of the Strait. How many more they may have killed but failed to recover will never be known. By 1767, the New England whaling fleet in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and along the shores of southern Labrador, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia amounted to 300 sloops and schooners manned by more than 4,000 whalers. While their first choice remained black right, sperm, and grey whales when they could find them, they were frequently constrained to “make up their voyages” with humpback oil.
Except for a brief hiatus during and just after the American Revolution, the Yankee slaughter in the Sea of Whales steadily increased in magnitude until shortly after the turn of the century. By then greys, rights, and St. Lawrence bowheads were all effectively extinct; the sperms of the northeastern approaches were almost destroyed, and humpbacks were so devastated that it no longer paid the Americans to continue hunting the “northern waters.” About 1820 there was a partial lull in the carnage—a lull brought about solely by the fact that the better sort of whales had been exterminated or reduced to residual remnants and, as yet, the whalers had found no way to do the same to the bulk of the rorquals that continued to roam the seas in prodigious numbers.
The lull lasted for about fifty years, during which there was only relatively small-scale whaling in the Sea of Whales, mostly for humpbacks. One such operation was conducted by a Jersey company in Hermitage Bay on the south coast of Newfoundland. Its whalers annually landed some forty to sixty humpbacks, killed by whaleboats equipped with a new horror—the Greener’s bomb-lance. This was an explosive grenade on the end of a metal shaft, fired from a smooth-bore tube. No line was attached since, in principal, the bomb-lance was intended to be used to give the coup de grâce to a whale that had already been harpooned. However, whalers used it as their prime weapon against the humpbacks, counting on killing enough whales with it so that a profitable percentage might be recovered after the blasted corpses surfaced. In fiord-like bays such as Hermitage, the recovery rate was rather better than off an open coast. Nevertheless, the Jersey whalers probably doomed two or three for every one they landed.
Although humpbacks continued to suffer, the rest of the rorquals remained beyond effective reach of human rapacity until, near the end of the nineteenth century, the most ruthless and inventive sea marauders of all time finally devised the means to doom not only the rorquals, but all surviving great whales everywhere on Earth. The new slaughter was set in motion by a genius in the arts of destruction, a Norwegian named Svend Foyn. A long-time seal and whale killer, Foyn felt so thwarted by his inability to profit from the abounding rorqual nations that he single-mindedly, not to say fanatically, devoted more than ten years of his life to discovering and perfecting a way to kill and to recover them. During the 1860s, he unveiled his tripartite answer to the rorqual problem.
The essence of it was a one-ton cannon that fired a massive harpoon deep into a whale’s vitals. A fragmentation bomb in the nose of the harpoon then exploded, riddling the victim’s guts with jagged chunks of shrapnel. The explosion also caused steel barbs concealed in the harpoon shaft to spring outward, firmly anchoring it and its attached rope in the whale’s flesh.
The effect of this demoniac device on a living whale is well described by F.D. Ommanney, a cetologist with a latter-day Antarctic whaling expedition. “Our quarry broke surface [after having been harpooned] some five hundred yards away and began his silent, terrible death struggle. If whales could utter cries which could rend the heart, their deaths would be less dreadful than this losing battle which our whale was now engaged upon in silence broken only by the far-off screaming of sea birds. We could not even hear the thrashing of crimsoned foam as he writhed and plunged, spouting a bloody spray at first, then an upgushing, followed by a bubbling upwelling amid a spreading island of blood... the struggle ceased, the red foam subsided and we could see the body lying quite still. The birds busied themselves above and around it with shrill cries.”
The second prong of Foyn’s deadly trident was a small, swift, and highly manoeuvrable steam-powered vessel with a specially strengthened bow upon which the cannon was mounted. She was also fitted with an extremely powerful steam-winch and spring-pulley system that enabled her to play a harpooned whale as a sport fisherman might play a salmon, and to raise even a 100-ton dead whale from as deep as two miles down. Originally these boats were forthrightly called whale killers, but today they are known as whale catchers in deference to public sensibilities. The first killer boats were only fast enough to run down a cruising rorqual, but that was enough in the early days because the whales had not yet learned to flee the grim destroyers. With the passing years, the killer boats became larger, swifter, and more lethal in every way, some eventually being able to range as far as 400 miles from their shore base and overtake, kill, and tow home as many as a dozen of the largest and fastest rorquals.
The third element was simply a hollow metal tube thrust into the lungs or abdominal cavity of a dead whale after it had been hauled back to the surface. Through this tube compressed air or sometimes steam was injected, thereby inflating the corpse until it was buoyant enough to be towed to the factory.
Armed with Foyn’s inventions, the Norwegians began to build what is admiringly referred to in commerc
ial circles as the modern whaling industry. “Svend Foyn commenced full-scale operations on the Finnmark coast of Norway in 1880,” one of his admirers tells us, “and his immediate success was followed by a crowd of catchers, each killing sometimes as many as five or six rorquals in a single day, rapidly depleting the northern grounds. The industry, however, was so profitable that the gallant Norwegians, having found a trade after their own hearts, set out to look for ‘fresh fields and pastures new’.”
Between 1880 and 1905, the Norwegians processed nearly 60,000 North Atlantic whales, mostly blues and finners. How many they actually killed during that quarter century can only be estimated, but considering the loss-to-landing ratios of those times a figure of 80,000 is probably conservative.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Norwegians seeking “fresh fields and pastures new” were doing so with such compulsive energy that their shore stations, each served by several of the deadly killer boats, had spread like a pox along almost every oceanic coast where whales were to be found in any numbers. One of the first regions they infested was the Sea of Whales.
In 1897, the Cabot Whaling Company was incorporated at St. John’s, Newfoundland. Typical of its kind, it was a lethal mating of the avarice of local merchants with the predacious skills of the Norwegians. A shore station with the poetic name of Balaena was built at Hermitage Bay and began operating in 1898 with a single killer boat. That first season she landed forty-seven large rorquals. The following year she landed ninety-five. In 1900 her catch was 111, and in 1901 she was joined by a second killer and the two of them delivered 472 whales to the flensers at the station. In 1903, four killers worked out of Balaena and landed 850 large rorquals, almost equally divided between blues, finners, and humpbacks.