Sea of Slaughter (2 page)

W
hen I was still a child, but already enamoured of the mysteries of the natural world, a relative gave me a portfolio of reproductions of Audubon's birds, painted more than a century earlier. All the plates were fascinating, but the one that stood out then, and still does in memory, depicted a strange, penguin-like creature standing on a forbidding ledge of rock. The caption (added since Audubon's time) told me little more than the bird's name; that it was flightless—and that it was extinct.

“Extinct” meant little to me then, other than that this was a creature I would never meet. Over the years, as the dread import of the word burned into my consciousness, it came to be indissolubly linked to the austere image of Audubon's great auk.

Because the flightless auk, or spearbill as it was called by those who knew it in life, was one of the first of man's victims in the Sea of Slaughter, I tell its story first before examining what has happened to the other seabirds, with whom the spearbill shared the oceanic world.

By way of contrast, the story then moves on to a family of birds whose members bestrode the borders where oceans meet the land. One of these, the Eskimo curlew, was annihilated a century after the great auk had vanished out of time. These two stories together span the full five centuries since European man began his assault on avian life in North America. The curlew's surviving relatives are the subject of the fourth chapter. The final chapter in this section describes the varied fates inflicted on some of the many other birds that once abounded in the northeastern regions of the New World.

“The 12th day of April, having then been 27 days from Poole, we came on soundings and knew it to be the Bank of Newfoundland. We would have understood this well enough from other indications for it seemed as if all the Fowles of Air were gathered thereunto. They so bemused the eye with their perpetual comings and goings that their numbers quite defied description. There can be but few places on Earth where is to be seen such a manifestation of the fecundity of His Creation.”

This eighteenth-century commentary reflects the astonishment of early European visitors on their first encounter with the astronomical congregations of seabirds on the northeastern approaches to America. It was truly a world of wings. Elfin dovekies, swallow-like storm petrels, deep-diving murres, puffins, and auks, soaring kittiwakes, aerobatic shearwaters, fulmars, and skuas, and great-winged gannets all contributed to the multitudes. In storm and calm, by day and night, in winter and summer, the oceanic birds formed islands of life upon the surface of the sea while others of their kinds filled the air above with seemingly endless skeins and clouds of flickering pinions.

All were able fishermen, spending the greater part of their lives on, over, and under salt water, going ashore only briefly to “propagate their kind.” All were at home with Ocean; but there was one amongst them which was uniquely so, for it had entirely abandoned the world of air.

A large and elegant creature, boldly patterned in glossy black above and gleaming white below, it was totally flightless, its wings having metamorphosed into stubby, powerful, feathered fins more suitable to a fish than to a bird. In truth, it could cleave a passage through the deeps with speed and manoeuvrability surpassing that of most fishes. A sleek undersea projectile torpedoing into the dark depths to 300 feet and more, it could remain submerged a quarter of an hour. On the surface, it floated high and proud, flamboyantly visible, having no need to hide itself since it had no airborne enemies.

Paired couples lived dispersed over the endless reaches of the North Atlantic but, on occasion, thousands would congregate to form vast flotillas in especially food-rich regions. Once a year the couples came to land on some isolated rock or desolate islet to rear their single chicks. Ashore, they were impressive figures, standing so tall that their heads reached as high as a man's midriff. They walked bolt upright with shambling little steps and the rolling gait of all true sailors. Intensely social during the breeding season, they crowded into rookeries that held hundreds of thousands of rudimentary nests so closely packed that it was difficult for the adult birds to move about.

Through the long course of time this exceptional creature bore many names. The ancient Norse called it
geiifugel
—spearbird, while the even more ancient Basques knew it as
arponaz
—spearbill. Both names paid tribute to the great bird's massive, fluted mandibles. Spanish and Portuguese voyagers called it
pinguin
—the fat one—a reference to the thick layer of blubber that encased it. By the beginning of the sixteenth century most deep-water men of whatever nation had adopted some version of this later name, as
pennegouin
in French, and
pingwen
in English. Indeed, it was the first, and the true, penguin. But before the nineteenth century ended, all of its original names had been stripped from it and it passed out of time carrying a tag attached to dusty museum specimens by modern science... great auk. I shall refer to it by the names bestowed on it by those who knew it in life.

During the aeons when scattered bands of prehistoric human beings flourished along the European coasts, the spearbill flourished, too. Its likeness is found in Spanish cave paintings and carved in stone in Norway, and its bones have been excavated from neolithic kitchen middens as far to the south as the Mediterranean coast of France. Clearly the spearbill was contributing to human survival 10,000 and more years ago; yet the predation of our ancestors had no evident effect upon its range or abundance. It was not until the human hunter began his transition into industrial man that the toll began to grow exorbitant.

By AD 900, the spearbill was no longer being killed primarily for food; it was being slaughtered for its oil and for its soft, elastic feathers, both of which had become valuable trading commodities throughout much of Europe. So avidly was it hunted on the European coasts thereafter that, by the mid-1500s, only a scattering of its eastern Atlantic breeding colonies had escaped destruction. By a century later only one remained, on the bleak and forbidding island of St. Kilda in the Outer Hebrides. In 1697, St. Kilda was visited by a certain Mr. Martin who left us this succinct account.

“The gairfowl is the stateliest as well as the largest sort [of seabird], of a black colour, red about the eyes, a large spot under each eye; a long broad bill; it stands stately, its whole body erected, its wings short, flies not at all; lays its egg upon the bare rock which if taken away she lays no more for that year... it appears the first of May and goes away the middle of June.”

Sometime before 1800 it went away from St. Kilda for the last time... never to return.

Look now at a time before Europe began to cast its engulfing shadow over the New World.

A little cluster of men gather in darkness beside two bark canoes drawn up on a stony beach in what will one day be known as Newfoundland. They peer earnestly into the pre-dawn sky. Slowly the light strengthens, revealing a few tendrils of high cloud in the western dome. There is no threat of wind. The men smile their satisfaction at one another and at the tall, tawny one who leads them on this June day.

As they wade into the landwash, carefully holding their fragile craft clear of the kelp-slimed rocks, the sun explodes over the hills behind them. On the sea horizon, a string of looming shadows begins to take on the contours of a low-lying archipelago. Aimless catspaws riffle the water as the canoes drive out from land toward the distant islands, leaving the scattered tents of the People to dwindle into insignificance against a sombre wall of forest.

In the full glare of morning, the islands become haloed with a glittering haze of flashing wings as their inhabitants depart the land to begin the day's fishing. Phalanx after phalanx of arrow-swift murres and puffins fill the air with their rush and rustle. Above them, massed echelons of snowy gannets row steadily on black-tipped wings. Terns, kittiwakes, and larger gulls fly arabesques betwixt and between until the sky seems everywhere alive with flight.

The sea through which the canoes ease swiftly is living, too. Endless flotillas of the big black-and-white divers, that fly in water instead of air, stream outward from the low-lying islands. The first flock comes porpoising past the canoes. The men cease paddling and their leader touches a bone amulet hanging around his neck, upon which is carved an image of the spear-billed bird.

The morning is half-spent before the paddlers close with the island of their choice, and now the multitudes that have remained ashore to incubate their eggs or brood their young begin to take alarm. Soon they are rising in such numbers that the sky is obscured as by a blizzard. So vast is this airborne armada that the sun's light is dimmed and the surface of the sea hisses from the rain of droppings falling into it.

As the canoes approach the island, winged masses descend on them like the funnel of a tornado. The rush of air through stiffened pinions and the harsh clangour of bird cries make it hard for the men to hear each other's shouts as they leap overside and carry the canoes to safety on the sloping rocks of the foreshore.

They move with hunched shoulders, as if cringing under the weight of furious life above them... and ahead. Not twenty feet from the landing place, rank after serried rank of spearbills stand, so closely packed that they seem almost shoulder to shoulder. Here stands an army of occupation hundreds of thousands strong. It covers almost the entire surface of the mile-long island. Each individual bird is incubating a single enormous egg in a shallow depression in the stinking mass of guano that everywhere overlies the ancient rock. The birds nearest the intruders turn as one to face the threat, bodies erect and fearsome beaks thrust out.

The men move warily, each holding his long, pointed paddle before him like a lance. The leader pauses, fingers his amulet again, and, in a voice hardly audible above the shrieking hubbub, makes his apology for what he and his companions are about to do.

Abruptly the paddles become flails. At the first thud of wood on bone and flesh, the foremost ranks of spearbills begin to break and fall back, each bird stumbling clumsily into those behind. Confused by the crush, those in the rear strike angrily at neighbours who are being pushed across the invisible boundaries of each one's tiny territory. Defence of territory becomes more pressing an issue than defence against the human intruders, and chaos ripples through the massed battalions.

While some of the men continue flailing at the nearest birds until they have killed three or four dozen of them, the rest hurriedly fill sealskin shoulder bags with eggs. Not ten minutes after landing they begin their retreat, dragging the slain birds by their necks and humping the heavy bags of eggs to the beached canoes. Loading and launching are done with the urgency of thieves. Each man seizes his paddle and, half-deafened by the noise, half-choked by the almost palpable stench, they flee as if pursued by devils. None looks back at the pandemonium still sweeping the Island of the Birds.

This vignette is set at the Port au Choix Peninsula, which juts out from the west coast of Newfoundland into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here archaeologists have been sifting through the rich remains of a series of aboriginal cultures that drew heavily upon the sea for sustenance.

Reliance on the spearbill in particular is revealed by the great quantities of bones uncovered in middens, living sites, and even in graves. One grave alone yielded more than 200 spearbill mandibles while another contained the image of a spearbill incised on bone.

The Port au Choix people were by no means unique in their relationship with the spearbill. Kitchen middens all the way from Disco in northwest Greenland south as far as Florida yield spearbill bones. The big birds provided the littoral dwellers of the western Atlantic seaboard with eggs and meat in and out of season. Greenland Inuit (like seventeenth-century Scots on the Hebrides) rendered spearbill fat and stored it against winter needs in sacks made from the birds' own inflated gullets. Indians from Labrador to Cape Cod smoked or dried the meat, which would then keep for months. The Beothuks, the last native inhabitants of Newfoundland, even ground the dried contents of spearbill eggs into a kind of flour from which they made winter puddings.

Yet with all of this, the thousands of years during which the bird provided a vital source of sustenance to generations of human beings seem to have had no appreciable effect on the spearbill population. Those early peoples were never in danger of eating themselves out of house and home by levying too heavy a toll. They took no more than they needed with the result that, when Europeans arrived on the scene, they found spearbill rookeries scattered along the coasts all the way from Labrador to Cape Cod. And the great divers were so abundant on some of the offshore fishing banks that early chroniclers could only describe them as uncountable.

One April day in 1534, two Breton smacks of the sort usually employed in the cod fisheries at
Terre Neuve
put to sea from the port of Saint Malo. They were not, however, going fishing. They were under charter to a hawk-visaged, forty-two-year-old entrepreneur named Jacques Cartier for a commercial reconnaissance of the inland sea the French called
La Grande Baie,
now the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The two little sixty-tonners crossed the Western Ocean successfully to make landfall at Cape Bonavista in northeastern Newfoundland. Here they encountered a tongue of Arctic pack ice driving south with the Labrador Current and were forced to seek shelter in the fishermen's harbour at Santa Catalina. While they waited for the ice to release them, the seamen assembled and rigged two
barques,
thirty-foot fishing cutters brought across the ocean broken down in sections. Eventually, as Cartier's chronicler recorded, the wind veered offshore, blowing the ice seaward and opening a passage along the Newfoundland coast to the northward.

“On the 21st of the month of May we set forth from harbour... and sailed as far as the Isle of Birds, which island was completely surrounded and encompassed by a barrier of ice, broken and split into cakes. In spite of this our two barques were sent off to the island to procure some of the birds, whose numbers were so great as to be incredible, unless one has seen them for himself, for although the island is scarcely a league in circumference it is so exceeding full of birds that one would think they had been stowed there [as one would stow the hold of a ship].

“In the air and round about on the water are a hundred times as many as on the island itself. Some of these birds are as large as geese, being black and white with a beak like a raven. These stay always in the water, not being able to fly in the air because they have only small wings, about half the size of a man's hand, with which, however, they move as quickly through the water as the other birds fly through the air. And these birds are so fat it is a marvel to behold. We call them
Apponatz,
and in less than half an hour our two barques were laden with them as if laden with stones. Of these birds each of our ships salted four or five casks, not counting those we were able to eat fresh.”

In the spring of the following year Cartier took a second expedition into the Gulf and again stopped at the Isle of Birds where a new, but equally astonished chronicler had this to add:

“This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been removed. We took away two barque loads to add to our stores.”