A Whale for the Killing Read online

  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 1
972, 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.

  “Was that the whale?” I asked in astonishment.

  Sim’s intent face wrinkled in puzzlement.

  “Never heard no whale blow like that before. But if ’twarn’t he, what do you suppose it were?”

  We watched and listened and after a minute or two the sound came again, deep and vibrant; but this time the surface of the Cove remained unbroken. It was four or five minutes later before the whale rose and blew, with no more than his normal whooshing exhalation. Although Sim and I continued to stand there, half frozen, for the better part of an hour, we did not hear that otherworldly sound again. A year was to pass before I would hear it once more and certainly identify it as the voice of the fin whale.

  WHILE CLAIRE AND I were away in the winter of 1966–67, the whales’ friends in Burgeo awaited the annual visit of the finners with foreboding. It was common knowledge that 1966 had been a very good year for the Karlsen catchers and that no great whales had been seen “in passage” by any of our local draggers throughout the autumn months. However, during the first week in December, Uncle Art was delighted to discover they had returned.

  It was a sadly diminished band—a single family numbering five individuals.

  Throughout most of December these five spent their time, as of old, in the runs among the islands; but during Christmas week their quiet occupancy was challenged by several big British Columbia herring seiners. These great steel vacuum cleaners began sucking up the herring with a relentlessness that was terrifying to behold. Working so close to land that they several times swept away nets belonging to local fishermen, they roused the wrath of Burgeo; but the intruders did not care about the nets, the wrath, or about whales either. On one occasion Uncle Art reported seeing a seiner make what looked like a deliberate ramming run at a surfacing finner. If it was deliberate, then it was also foolhardy, since a collision between ship and whale would have been disastrous to both.

  The whales did not take to the newcomers. According to Onie and Uncle Art, they seemed uneasy in their presence. This is understandable since seiners and whale catchers are driven by diesel engines that must sound ominously alike.

  A few days after the arrival of the seiners, the fin family abandoned the island runs and shifted eastward to a little fjord called The Ha Ha, which not even the insatiable seiners dared enter because of many rocky outcrops that might have damaged their costly nets. The whales stayed close to The Ha Ha and the nearby mouth of Bay de Loup, except when the seiners were absent delivering their catches to the reduction plant at Harbour Breton. It was on one such occasion, when only a single seiner was present, that Uncle Art and I stood on Messers Head and watched the whales demonstrate the superiority of their fishing techniques.

  The whales were not alone in The Ha Ha. They shared it with several Burgeo fishermen working cod nets from open boats. When the whales moved in, these men were concerned for the safety of their nets. Two among them, the Hann brothers, Douglas and Kenneth—small, quiet, foxy-faced men from Muddy Hole—even considered moving their gear to some safer ground.

  “’Twarn’t as we t’ought they’d tear up our gear a-purpose-like,” Douglas Hann remembered, “but The Ha Ha is a right small place and not much water at the head of she. We t’ought, what with six fleets of nets scattered round, them whales was bound to run foul of some of them... couldn’t help theirselves. Well, sorr, they never did. Sometimes when we’d be hauling a net they’d pass right under the boat close enough you could have scratched their backs with a gaff. First off, when they did that, we used to bang the oars on the side of the boat and yell to make them veer away; but after a time we sees they knowed what they was about, and was going to keep clear without no help from we.

  “Still and all, ’twas scary enough betimes. One evening our engine give out. We had the big trap skiff and no thole-pins for the oars so we had to scull her along. It were coming on duckish* and we was alone in The Ha Ha and them whales begun coming up all round. They was only six fathom of water where we was to, and they was after the herring like big black bullets. We could hear the swoosh when they drove by, and foam would fair bile up where they took a big mouthful out of a herring school.

  * * *

  *Meaning dark.

  “I’d as soon have been home in me kitchen, I can tell you, but them whales is some smart navigators, for they never come nigh enough to do we any hurt. We was an hour poking our way to the pushthrough what leads into Aldridges Pond, and them whales stayed right along of we. Toward the end of it they give up fishing and just come along like they knowed we was into some kind of a kettle. Ken, he said maybe they was offering we a tow; but I suppose that’s only foolishness.”

  What the Hanns told me of their experience reminded me of a story I had heard some years earlier from a very old man at Hermitage Bay, many miles to the eastward. As a youth this man had been employed at a whale factory in Gaultois, on the north shore of Hermitage Bay. His home was five miles across the full breadth of the bay, but on weekends he would row over to spend Sunday with his family.

  One Saturday afternoon he was homeward bound when he saw a pod of finners. There were three of them, and they were behaving in a peculiar fashion. Instead of briefly surfacing and then sounding again, they were cruising on the top. Their course converged with his, and as they drew close, my friend saw that they were swimming, as he put it, “shoulder to shoulder.” The centre whale was blowing much more rapidly than the rest and its spray was pink in colour.

  “’Twarn’t hard to know what was the trouble,” the old man remembered. “Yon middle whale had been harpooned and the iron had drawed and he’d got clear of the catcher boat. The bomb must have fired, but not deep enough for to kill he.

  “I laid back on me oars, not wantin’ to get too handy to them three, but they never minded I... just steamed slow as you please right past me boat, heading down the bay and out to sea. They was close enough so I could near swear the two outside whales was holding up the middle one. I t’inks they done it with their flippers. That’s what I t’inks.

  “When they was all clear, I rowed on home. Never t’ought no more about it. About the middle of the week a schooner puts in to Gaultois and the skipper was telling how he come across three whales outside Green Island. They was right on top of the water, he says, and never sounding at all, and making a slow passage to eastward. The skipper, he held
over toward they; but when it looked like they was all going to go afoul of one another he had to alter course, for they had no mind to sound no matter what he did. When he passed alongside he saw the middle whale had a girt hole in his back.

  “I made certain ’twas the same three I come across and ’twas agreed by all hands ’twas the same whale was harpooned by one of our boats that Sunday morning and got away. They two other whales took the sick one off someplace... some said ’twas to the whales’ burying ground... but all I knows is they kept that sick one afloat somehow for five days, and close onto sixty miles.”

  ALDRIDGES POND IS a saltwater enclosure about half a mile in length, and nearly as broad, lying in the centre of the rocky isthmus which separates The Ha Ha from Short Reach. There is a narrow and very shallow “pushthrough” between it and The Ha Ha, passable only by small boats and then only at high water. However, a wider and deeper channel connects the Pond to Short Reach by way of a rather large entry cove. It was the habit of the men who fished The Ha Ha to pass back and forth through Aldridges Pond to save themselves the long and, in dirty weather, dangerous outside run around the head of the peninsula. Each morning at daybreak they would cross Short Reach, enter and cross the Pond, pole through the pushthrough, and set to work hauling their nets in The Ha Ha. In mid-afternoon, when the haul was finished, they would bring their loaded boats back into Aldridges and moor up to the shore in the Pond’s protected waters to gut their catch.

  During our years in Burgeo, Claire and I had only once visited Aldridges Pond; but before we had been home two weeks, the Pond became the centre and the setting for an event which was to change our lives.