A Whale For The Killing (7 page)

This fishery was extremely successful in its first few years of operation. In 1969 more than 120,000 tons of herring were taken by seiners in Newfoundland waters alone... and almost all of this mighty harvest of the sea was reduced to fish meal and fish oil for agricultural and industrial use. Only an insignificant part was used directly as food for man. However, by 1970, despite an even greater catching effort, the take had fallen by one third. Samples taken in 1971 by fisheries biologists showed that the new-year classes (new generations) of herring were not coming along at anything like a sufficient rate to fill the gaps in the herring ranks. It is a competent prediction that by 1980 the herring fishery in eastern Canadian waters, if not in the entire North Atlantic Ocean, will have ceased because there will be almost no herring left.

Their disappearance will bring the threat of starvation to a vast array of commercially important fishes such as cod, halibut, haddock and even salmon, all of which depend heavily upon herring and upon which, in turn, the wildly proliferating human species is itself becoming increasingly dependent for
its
survival.

This is not something which worries the owners of the efficient new herring-reduction plants which have sprung up all along the Canadian Atlantic coasts. These plants (there is now one in Burgeo and it is due to triple its capacity before 1973) are highly mechanized, low-cost, low-employment operations. Most of those built on the Sou’west Coast amortized their investment costs
in the first three years
of operation. They are now intensely profitable, and the owners expect to continue making a big profit, even after the herring have been destroyed, by switching the attack to the other primary food of those large northern food fishes which man has used to sustain himself for countless centuries. The seiners will go after the capelin: a slim, beautiful little fish which is found only in northern waters but which may be as numerous at present as the herring were in the days before the purse seine fishery began.

The Norwegians have already begun seining capelin in eastern Atlantic waters in order to feed their reduction plants. Two Newfoundland plants are already experimenting with them. One of the executives of an international fisheries corporation happily told me he expects the capelin supply will “hold up for as long as five or ten years.” What happens after that is something for which the fishing industry, apparently, has no great concern.

It will not be a happy prospect for the North Atlantic fin whales, if, indeed, any remain alive that long. It will also be a poor lookout for the remnants of the once great herds of harp seals, which are primarily capelin-eaters and which are still being savagely decimated by Norwegian sealing fleets with some assistance from Canadians.

The prospective elimination of the great base herds of capelin and herring, upon which so many other forms of marine life depend for survival, is actually being used to provide a human rationale for the continuing butchery of seals and whales. This rationale was explained to me by a man who has interests in both whaling stations and sealing ships.

“It is nonsense to try to save the seals, or the whales either. The herring and capelin, and probably squid also, are going to go into the reduction plants, so the whales and seals will end up starving anyway. We might as well kill them while they are still some good to us.”

Another rationale for continuing the slaughter to extermination was given to me by a fisheries biologist charged with helping to conserve the resources of the oceans: a task which, I suspect, he may feel is already beyond our capabilities.

“A lot of people in the business [resource management] say it’s ridiculous to get worked up about saving whales because they are probably going to disappear anyway, because of pollution. All the fish-eating species are at the top of oceanic food chains and they concentrate such pollutants as DDT, mercury and the rest of the stuff we are dumping into the sea. If those things don’t kill them outright, it will likely make them sterile, or at least shorten their lives... Of course, if we
did
stop hunting them, it would certainly ease the total pressure they are under now and, who knows, they just might make out despite the pollution problem.”

There is still another reason for exploiting the remaining whales, of all species and all sizes. This has to do with the extremely heavy capital investment required to build a modern whaling fleet and its ancillary industries. The Japanese, who are now the world’s major whalers, claim they cannot afford to stop killing whales until all their investments have been amortized and,
even then, it would be economically wasteful
not to continue to make use of their fleet and plant for whaling since most of it cannot be converted to other uses. Presumably Russia, with the second largest whaling fleet, Norway and other whaling countries, such as Canada, agree with this.

However, these are not the publicly stated reasons for continuing the massacre. Propagandists for the whaling interests insist we must continue to kill whales, and in quantity, to provide protein and fat for hungry human beings and to provide industrial and medicinal products vitally needed by modern society. These arguments are, at best, fraudulent. At worst they are downright lies. There is no single product derived from whales which cannot now be synthesized at comparable cost, and proteins and fats can be more effectively produced by farming on a sustained-yield basis than by the hunting-to-extinction methods which we still apply to oceanic life.

Nevertheless, we should not be much surprised by any of these attitudes. They are, after all, no more than expressions of the basic approach of modern man toward the world around him. Exploit... consume... excrete... at an ever-accelerating pace. Such is the mad litany of our times.

Like imbecilic children loose in a candy store, we may well come to a sticky end in a belch of indigestion, but, if we do not, then we will assuredly die of hunger when the sweets run out. They are running out very rapidly in the oceans of the world. The fond expectation that the seas will feed mankind when the ravaged earth can no longer do so is no more than an illusion.
Already the seas are being grossly over-fished.
Competent fisheries experts predict, with gloomy certainty, that within two decades food-fish populations in the oceans will have plunged to less than half their present levels, while during the same twenty years the fishing pressures upon them will have increased at least tenfold!

The appalling destruction of herring in Newfoundland waters is already seriously affecting the inshore fishery for cod and related species. Taken in conjunction with the gross overkill of all the larger species of food fishes on the offshore banks by the burgeoning fleets of trawlers and draggers belonging to a score of desperately competing nations, the loss of the bait fishes (mainly herring and capelin) will mean an early end to any significant continuing catch of large edible fishes. It will also mean an end to fisheries as a way of life for many thousands of men. However, not everyone views this as a disaster. As Premier Smallwood, a rather typical politician in the modern mould, once told me:

“That would be a good thing. Yes. A very good thing. A very, very good thing indeed! It would mean the fishermen would have to take jobs ashore as industrial workers. It would lead them into a better way of life, you see. A good thing! Yes, the best thing in the world for them.”

ALTHOUGH MY ATTEMPTS TO GAIN insight into the lives of the finners were bound to be frustratingly inadequate, because I could only encounter them at the interface between air and water, I occasionally had a stroke of luck. Lee Frankham, a friend who was the pilot of a Beaver airplane on floats and who sometimes came visiting and took us joyriding along the coast, was responsible for one such happy accident.

On a July day in 1964 we flew off with him to visit the abandoned settlement of Cape La Hune, Uncle Art’s onetime home. It was a cloudless afternoon and the cold coastal waters were particularly pellucid and transparent. As we were crossing the broad mouth of White Bear Bay, Lee suddenly banked the Beaver and put her into a shallow dive. When he levelled out at less than a hundred feet, we were flying parallel to a family of six fin whales.

They were in line abreast and only a few feet below the surface. As seamen would say, they were making a passage under forced draft. Lee estimated they were doing all of twenty knots.

He throttled back almost to stall speed and we slowly circled them. From our unique vantage point, they were as clearly visible as if they had been in air, or we in water, and we could see minute details of their bodies and of their actions. Yet if it had not been that their swift progress underwater was relative to a light wind-popple on the surface, it would have been hard to believe they were progressing at all.

Their mighty tails and flukes, which, unlike the tails of fishes, work vertically, swept lazily up and down with what appeared to be a completely effortless beat. Their great, paddle-like flippers—remnants of the forelimbs of their terrestrial ancestors—barely moved at all, for these organs serve mainly as stabilizers and as diving planes.

There was no visible turbulence in the water although the whales were moving at a rate of knots which few of man’s submarines can equal when submerged. The overall effect was of six exquisitely streamlined bodies hovering in the green sea and seeming to undulate just perceptibly, as if their bodies were composed of something more subtle and responsive than ordinary flesh and bones. There was a suggestion of sinuosity, of absolute fidelity, to some powerful but unheard aquatic rhythm.

They were supremely beautiful beings.

“It’s like watching a fantastic ballet,” was Claire’s response. “Perfect control and harmony! They aren’t
swimming
through the water... they’re
dancing
through it!”

Dancing? It seemed a wildly imaginative concept, for I knew these beasts weighed seventy or eighty tons apiece. And yet I cannot better Claire’s description.

Man, being a terrestrial beast of rather rigid perceptivity, is limited in his ability to conceive of alien beings except in terrestrial terms. In attempting to convey something of the magnitude of the great whales, men have inevitably compared them with the largest dinosaurs that ever lived (the great whales are much larger), or with the largest surviving land animal, the elephant—“a herd of twelve African elephants could be contained inside the skin of one blue whale.”

Even more misleading is the concept we have formed of the great whales from looking at them stranded on a beach or hauled up on the flensing plan at a whaling factory. Out of its own element (and stone dead in the bargain), one of the great whales becomes a monstrous lump of a thing: a shapeless and gigantic sack, loosely stuffed with meat and guts and fat, only remotely identifiable with the living, functioning entity it once was.

The living whale is something else. The all-too-brief period during which we watched the fin family crossing White Bear Bay was a revelation. We were all three of us made sharply aware that these creatures were paragons of grace who had achieved a harmonious relationship to the world of waters such as man will never know in air or on the land, in nature or in art.

About ten minutes after we first saw them, the whales rose as one, surfaced, blew and inhaled several times, then sounded while still moving at full speed and without leaving more than a few faint ripples. Since they have excellent vision in air as well as in water, they may have seen our plane. In any event, when they sounded they went deep; shimmering and diminishing in our view as if they were sliding down a long, unseen chute leading to the privacy of the abyssal depths.

SINCE THE LAST world war men have become very interested in how whales move so swiftly and smoothly in both the horizontal and vertical planes of their three-dimensional world. This interest has not been prompted by admiration or even by true scientific curiosity, but rather by the desire of human warriors to build better submarines with which more effectively to destroy one another. This curiosity, perverted though it be, has led to some fascinating discoveries about the whale as a machine; and everything science has discovered has strengthened the conclusion that whales are among the most highly perfected forms of life ever to dwell upon this planet.

One thing that sadly puzzled early investigators was the question of how a whale could achieve its great speeds with such a “rudimentary” power source as living muscle, and such a simple transmitter of power to water as a pair of flukes. Streamlining was obviously a part of the answer, but only a part. Most modern submarines are almost slavishly streamlined after the whale pattern but, even so, and even when equipped with engines and propellers of maximum mechanical efficiency, they can only achieve speeds comparable to those of whales by expending many times the amount of energy. The secret seems to lie in the fact that the submarine is a rigid object and the whale is not. Experiments in test tanks with those little whales, the dolphins, show that the illusion Claire, Lee and I thought we were experiencing—that of seeing a sort of shimmering undulation in the dancing fins—was no illusion at all.

Apparently the outer layers of a whale—skin, blubber and the immediate underlying layers of connective tissue—have the capacity to simulate fluids in motion, almost as if they were themselves a liquid substance. This strange quality produces what hydrodynamic experts refer to as laminar flow, an effect which almost eliminates the normal turbulence produced by an object moving rapidly through water. Laminar flow has the effect (if one can imagine this) of lubricating the whale’s body so there is almost no friction or drag. Although I am by no means certain the scientists fully understand what laminar flow is all about, they have certainly recognized its effectiveness. They have discovered, for example, that a dolphin of the same relative mass as a modem torpedo can attain torpedo speed with an expenditure of only one tenth the energy.

A classic case illustrating the whale’s efficiency is referred to by Ivan Sanderson in his fine book,
Follow the Whale.
An 800-horsepower catcher harpooned an eighty-foot blue whale, which then proceeded to tow the catcher, whose engine was running
full speed astern,
a distance of fifty miles at speeds up to eight knots! It was not brute power which made this feat possible. No, it was the almost unimaginable efficiency achieved by the whale’s near-total adaptation to the aquatic medium.

We do not know the highest speeds attainable by whales. Some smaller species have been accurately clocked at twenty-seven knots. The misnamed killer whale can evidently exceed thirty knots in short spurts, and fin whales have been seen to outrun killers! However, unlike men, fin whales probably do not worship speed as an end in itself. For the most part they seem content just to loaf along, conserving energy, at a modest six to seven knots.

ALTHOUGH WE ARE beginning to learn a little something about the mechanics of the whale as a living machine, we still know very little about the nature of whale society.

The toothed whales, which are more primitive than the baleen, seem to prefer extended family groupings rather like those of baboons and many monkeys. Such groups may include a hundred or more individuals. Polygamy, or at least random mating, seems to be the general rule among the toothed whales. All members of the group or tribe have mutual but generalized responsibilities toward one another. Mature males, or in some cases mature females, may assume leadership roles but all “hands” appear equally concerned with the well-being of the young. When a member of the group is injured, or endangered, all the adults within reach will rally to its assistance. There are many well-authenticated reports of toothed whales physically supporting a sick companion so that it can rise to the surface and breathe. And what is almost unique in the animal world, toothed whales of one species will sometimes come to the assistance of an individual of quite a
different
species.

Among the baleen whales, the social structure seems to be based on the closed family unit. I am convinced that each fin whale pod is actually a “nuclear” family consisting of a mated pair of adults, accompanied by the calf of the year plus one or several earlier and as yet unmated offspring. The fin is not only monogamous; it evidently mates for life, and the bonds between a mated pair are extraordinarily close and tenacious.

Although finners are strongly family-oriented, they are also social in a broader sense. There are reports, dating back to the days when whales were still plentiful, of aggregations of as many as three hundred fins gathered together in one small portion of the sea. These were gatherings of family groups, rather than of individuals. Some whalers believed these gatherings took place two or three times a year and were in the nature of festivals at which unmated whales conducted their courtships in order to establish new family units.

The largest number of finners seen at Burgeo, after the return of the species to the Newfoundland coast, gathered among the islands during the winter of 1964–65. There were five discrete pods numbering thirty or thirty-one individuals in total. Although some of the families might temporarily come together, and even remain together for a day or two, they would eventually separate again. Each family maintained its own cohesion and each had its own preferred fishing grounds.

The winter of 1964–65 saw the peak and the beginning of the decline of the reoccupation of the south Newfoundland seas by the several species of rorquals. Word of their return had spread all too rapidly until it came to the ears of the Norwegians, who, by that time, in company with the British, Japanese, Dutch and Russians, had swept the Antarctic waters almost clean.

Shortly after the end of the war, Karl Karlsen, a financially well-established Norwegian immigrant to Nova Scotia, set up a company to exploit the herds of harp seals which drop their pups—whitecoats, they are called—each spring on the pack ice of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off the northern coasts of Newfoundland. Karlsen acquired a fleet of sealing ships and built a processing plant at Blandford, near Halifax. In 1964 he expanded the plant to handle whales and, using Norwegian catching ships and Norwegian crews, began going after the rorquals which had reappeared in the seas between Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland. Soon his big sea-going catchers, like the
Thorarinn,
which is two hundred feet long, were ranging five hundred miles and more from the Blandford base, thereby exposing the uselessness of another of the International Whaling Commission’s gestures at whale conservation. The commission had forbidden the use of factory ships in the North Atlantic in order, so it was announced, to provide a sanctuary in mid-ocean for the beleaguered stocks of Atlantic whales. The fact that few of the great whales ever use the mid-ocean reaches but prefer to stay near the coastal shelves, where food is much more abundant, was not mentioned. In any event, the whole gesture was meaningless in view of the fact that modern catchers, such as the
Thorarinn,
have such great range that those operating from land bases in Norway, Iceland and eastern Canada could, between them, cover almost every area where whales were to be found.

Karlsen’s ships worked as far east as the Grand Banks and during their first year took 56 finners. The next year they killed 108. In 1966 they began to hit their stride, killing 263, and the following year they killed 318. In all, the Karlsen enterprise had killed 1,458 finners up to the end of 1971.* These were in addition to 654 sei whales, 64 sperm whales and a number of minkes and humpbacks. Most of the meat from the more than 2,000 great whales so far processed at Blandford has been sold for “animal food,” which is to say, for pet food. A good percentage of the oil rendered there has been consumed by the world cosmetics industry, although it is true that some of the meat, and some of the oil, has gone to Japan for human consumption.

* From 1964 to 1972, the three stations on the eastern Canadian coast—Williamsport, Dildo and Blandford—killed 3,598 finners out of a Western Atlantic population estimated at 7,000 in 1964. Their total kill of whales of all species in this eight-year period was 5,717.

With the coming of the Karlsen enterprises, the brief respite during which the great whales had found a sanctuary in the waters south of Newfoundland drew rapidly to a close.

During the winter of 1965–66 only two fin families returned to Burgeo. There were four individuals in one, and only three in the other, but in addition there was one lone whale whom I believe to have been the sole survivor of a family which had been destroyed by the whalers.

The “Loner,” as we called the single whale, spent part of his time in company with one or other of the two family groups, but even more time by himself. Oddly, his favourite fishing place seemed to be the restricted waters of Messers Cove. Here, apparently oblivious to houses, people and moored boats which almost surrounded him, he spent many hours contentedly eating herring which misguidedly continued to pour into this cul-de-sac. Returning homeward late on winter evenings, I would often hear him blowing in the Cove. He taught me much about his species but perhaps the most surprising discovery was that he had a voice and, moreover, one that could be heard by the human ear, in air.

Late one chilly afternoon I was chatting with Sim Spencer on Messers bridge when we both became aware of a deep thrumming sound which seemed to be as much felt as heard. We turned in surprise toward the Cove and saw a fading pillar of vapour hanging over the icy water.