While the ban remains in place there is hope for the surviving rorquals. Yet those that are alive today are hardly more than a token remnant of the legions of their kind which, together with the vanished multitudes of black rights, bowheads, greys, belugas, and smaller whales, once made the northwestern waters of the Atlantic Ocean truly deserving of the name—the Sea of Whales.
15. The Little Whales
In the spring of 1954, my father and I sailed his sturdy old ketch from Montreal downriver into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, bound for the Atlantic via the narrow Canso Strait. This was the last year the Gut, as the Strait is familiarly known, permitted free passage. A nearby mountain of granite was being demolished to form a massive causeway linking Cape Breton Island with the Nova Scotia mainland. By the time we approached it there remained a gap of only a hundred feet through which the tidal waters of the Atlantic were forced to funnel. They did so in a torrent that thundered and foamed in such fierce restraint that no vessel could have surmounted it.
We anchored to await slack water. It was a sweet morning with a soft green light suffusing the new-leafing forests on both sides of the Gut. I was looking with some awe at the roaring cataract when the curling lip of angry water began to sprout gleaming ebony eruptions. These came and went so rapidly I could not tell what they were. I stood up to see better and at that moment a dozen white-bellied, brown torpedoes, each the size of a small man, broke the surface alongside, curved four or five feet into the air, then plunged back into the water as smoothly as hot bullets passing through butter.
They were harbour porpoises, one of the smallest members of the whale kind. As I watched, fascinated, more and more of them debouched through the roaring gap and fell to circling in the calm backwater where we lay. Suddenly a group of about twenty turned abruptly east and headed back into the fury of falling water.
Even Atlantic salmon, most expert of all white-water fishes, would have been hard put to mount that monstrous cascade and I expected the little whales to be flung back from it in utter confusion. Instead they accelerated as if propelled by rockets, hit the downfall, vanished for a moment, and then were airborne, curving cleanly over the lip of the overflow and plunging into the swift but smooth waters beyond. And then—and this dumbfounded me—they turned in one sleek movement and plunged back down the chute.
I watched, enthralled, as group after group shot up the cascade, circled swiftly, and ran down again. Only as the tide began to turn, and the power of the waterfall waned, did they lose interest. The game was over. Pod by pod they began to drift westward toward the exit from the Gut.
Porpoise
More than sixty species of porpoises and dolphins (the designations are generally interchangeable) inhabit the world’s oceans together with a few freshwater lakes and rivers. The majority of those living in the northeastern approaches to America are pelagic, but some species, including the harbour porpoise, prefer inshore waters where, through unnumbered centuries, they were familiar to native tribes of the Atlantic littoral who hunted them for food.
Porpoises were very much in evidence in early historic times. Jacques Cartier commented on their abundance in the Gulf in the mid-1530s. Roberval reported “great store of porpoises” in the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence in 1542. In 1605, Champlain noted that they were “in such abundance [along the coasts of Acadia] that I can guarantee there was never a day or night during which we did not see and hear more than a thousand porpoises pass alongside our pinnace.” Nicolas Denys wrote of the poursille, as it was called in French: “It goes always in large bands and is found everywhere in the sea. They go near the land following the bait [fishes]. They are good to eat. Black puddings and chitterlings are made from their tripes; its head is better than mutton, though not so good as that of veal.”
So long as they were only killed in small numbers for food, whether by natives or Europeans, their populations remained unaffected. However, as the great whales became scarcer, it was inevitable that the little whales would catch the cold and calculating eye of commerce.
Commercial killing of porpoises for oil seems to have begun in the Cape Hatteras region as early as 1780. Thereafter increasing numbers of shoremen assaulted the porpoise schools from small boats, blazing away at them with smoothbore guns. Although the recovery rate was as low as one brought to land for every ten or a dozen fired upon, the little whales were so numerous that even with this colossal rate of wastage, hunting them was a paying proposition.
By the 1820s, hundreds of fishing communities from the Carolinas to Labrador were “fishing” porpoise, often as an adjunct to other fisheries. Some places, however, made such enterprises their main business. Net fisheries at Cape Cod and Grand Manan regularly took many thousands; and even more thousands were destroyed in drives by small boats resulting in strandings of entire herds that were then speared to death and their thin coats of blubber stripped off and sent to the trypots.
The history of the nineteenth-century porpoise fishery along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, is representative of what took place along the whole northeastern seaboard. By the 1870s, each of twelve major net fisheries in the Gulf was killing from 500 to 1,000 porpoises a year. In addition, many independent fishermen took a hand in the business. Napoleon Comeau has left us a description of how it was done in the 1880s. “Two good men in a canoe with first-rate rifles could if the weather was right get from 50 to 100 in a season. Porpoise oil was worth 75–80 cents a gallon. Only the fat was cut off and the bodies abandoned. They littered the beach for miles and the stench was indescribable.”
The slaughter was maintained until early in the twentieth century and the inshore porpoises might well have been harried to regional extinction had not the increasing cheapness and availability of petroleum eroded the value of train oil in the early decades of the new century.
The commercial hunt had all but ended by 1914, but to this day porpoises are still shot by fishermen who believe the little whales not only compete with them for fishes but destroy their gear as well.1 Furthermore, in recent years as many as 2,000 porpoises and dolphins have been killed annually as an unwanted by-catch of the Atlantic salmon driftnet and the Gulf mackerel fishery; further hundreds die in the new and deadly monofilament cod nets and traps. Additional hundreds perish from gunshot wounds inflicted by sportsmen who pursue the animals with fast motorboats in order to enjoy, in the words of one such, “good target practice at moving targets and get rid of vermin at the same time.”
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1 A new fishery opened in Passamaquoddy Bay in the Bay of Fundy during the 1970s to supply feed to mink ranchers in the region. No figures are available, but it is believed that large numbers of porpoises have perished in consequence.
Although I have too often found their bullet-punctured bodies on the beaches of the Gulf and of Nova Scotia, I have encountered living porpoises all too seldom during the past thirty years. Most memorable was a summer evening in the open roadstead of Miquelon, in the St. Pierre archipelago off southeast Newfoundland. I was sitting alone on the fishermen’s wharf keeping anchor watch on my schooner. The setting sun on my back grew warm, and I decided to strip off and have a swim. The water was frigid and I was about to turn back when a swirling of water to seaward caught my attention—and held it, riveted! Heading directly at me were two dozen scimitar-shaped dorsal fins slicing through the rose-tinted sunset sea in line ahead, at breakneck speed.
Almost paralyzed with fear, for my first thought was that I was under attack by sharks, I trod water. On they came, like great torpedoes. Then they were on me—alternately shooting past on either side, and so close I imagined I could feel the slick caress of their sleek bodies.
By then I knew what they were, having recognized their porpoise faces and the black-and-tan colours of the white-sided dolphin. Fear went from me and I waited in wonder as the school circled and returned, still moving at flank speed. This time the leader shot bodily out
of the water and curved over my head like an enormous projectile, while his or her followers repeated the alternating passage past me. Then they were gone. I swam back to the pierhead and waited on it until full dark, but they did not return. They had, as seamen would say, made their signal—and departed.
The last time I saw living porpoises was in 1976. It was spring again and this time I was crossing the Canso causeway in a car. Approaching the eastern terminus of the canal through which all marine traffic in the Gut must now pass, I saw a group of people intently watching something in the water. I got out my binoculars and swept the nearby surface of the Strait. And there they were again—the sleek, swift little whales I had first encountered near this same spot twenty-two years earlier.
There were only seven of them this time and they were not slicing through the water with the explosive vim I had once marvelled at. They circled slowly, seemingly undecided, some fifty yards from the closed lock gate. As I watched and wondered, the lock master came out of his control room and joined me. He was an old acquaintance and, after exchanging greetings, I asked what the porpoises were up to, and did he see them often?
“Nope. Not no more. When the Gut was closed off they come in from seaward next summer by the hundreds—they and big herds of potheads [pilot whales] and even a few big whales, yes, and just millions and millions of herring and mackerel. But, of course, nothing could get through. The big whales turned around and went off to sea but the porpoises stuck it out till August. They’d come and go—like they would come back every few days to see was the way clear yet. One time a bunch came right into the lock when the eastern gate was open and I had half a mind to lock them on through, except the supervisor might have raised hell if I had.
“After that they never come back for years and years. But a couple years ago a bunch about this size showed up. Could be the same crowd. I don’t know. Nor I don’t know what they got in mind; but they sure seem to be waiting for something, don’t they now?” He paused and glanced down the Gut toward the smoke-belching new industries built after the causeway was completed. “Anyhow, I hope those sons-a-bitching playboys with the speedboats leave them be this time. Last year they chased them all one weekend and I hear they shot a couple—just for the hell of it.”
Whether harbour porpoises and their several cousins will ever again swim in the Sea of Whales in anything other than token numbers remains a moot question. Although the outright kill by mankind has been much reduced, it appears that we are now attacking them indirectly and unintentionally through massive pollution of the seas. Extremely high concentrations of toxic chemicals have been found in the bodies of harbour porpoises from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick waters, and this affliction would seem to be worsening with time.
Beluga
Several other kinds of small whales once lived in great abundance in the Sea of Whales. One of the most attractive was a creamy-white creature that reached a length of about seventeen feet and weighed up to a ton. Intensely sociable, it gathered in schools composed of hundreds of individuals. It was possessed of a voice clearly audible to human beings, which led to the name sea canary being bestowed on it by early whalers. It is known to us as the white whale or, more commonly, beluga.
The beluga is categorized as an Arctic species because in our times it survives in significant numbers only in the Arctic. This was not always the case. When Cartier reached the upper estuary of the St. Lawrence in 1535, he found the waters teeming with “a species of fish which none of us had ever seen before... the body and head white as snow. There are a very large number in this river. The [Indians] call them Adhothuys and told us they are very good to eat.” In 1650, Pierre Boucher found the white whales all the way from the mouth of the Saguenay to the present site of Montreal. “One sees extraordinary numbers of them between Tadoussac and Quebec, leaping about in the River; they are very long and large and at least a barrel of oil may be reckoned on to be got from each.” Champlain also commented on the “great numbers of white porpoises in the river” and noted that their oil was excellent and fetched a goodly price.
So did their skins, from which a good grade of morocco leather was manufactured. Consequently, from as early as 1610 onwards, French colonists killed white whales in ever-increasing numbers. Beluga “fishing” sites were among the most sought-after perquisites in New France, and the early seigneurial grants along the river usually included specific and exclusive rights to fish for porpoises of all the several kinds, but especially for the white variety.
A special ordinance issued by the Intendant of New France in 1710 created a monopoly of the white porpoise fishery for six landowners at Rivière Ouelle; and an ordinance authorizing another such monopoly at Pointe aux Iroquois stated that it was “the King’s will that as many such fisheries as possible be established in this country.” The King’s will was obeyed so enthusiastically that by mid-century there were at least eight white whale companies operating between Pointe des Monts and Île aux Coudres. Between them they seem to have killed several thousand beluga every year.
Indians of the St. Lawrence had been aware since time immemorial of a faculty of the white porpoises that remained unknown to science until late in the present century. This was the ability of the little whales to “see” their way through murky waters by using a form of echo location. Prehistoric Indians had discovered that interference with this system disoriented the animals and made them easier prey. They put their knowledge to especially effective use at Isle aux Coudres, where enormous schools of beluga swam upstream on the rising tide in pursuit of the baitfishes that comprised their principal food, returning downstream again on the ebb.
Once the whales had passed to the westward of the island, the Indians paddled out to the shoal ground surrounding the place and planted long lines of thin, resilient wands spaced several feet apart. Each line was angled slightly and terminated at the shore of the island. When the tide began to ebb at full force, its powerful current made the wands vibrate, generating what amounted to a wall of high frequency sound that the eastbound whales evidently interpreted as an impenetrable or at least dangerous obstacle. In their efforts to avoid it, some would swing toward the island and into the rapidly shoaling water over the mud flats. Here they were met by men braced waist-deep in the flood who harpooned them.
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.” N
icolas 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.