Sea of Slaughter Read Online Free PDF

reach. Furthermore, adults tended to take wing at the approach of an intruder and so could seldom be killed in quantity except with a profligate expenditure of shot and powder. Consequently, the main weight of European predation fell on the most readily accessible species—of which the spearbill was especially attractive because of its large, fat, and well-muscled carcass. Its eggs, too, were preferred above all others, not only because of their great size (as long and broad as a human hand), but because they were so easily collected. There was no question about it: so long as it lasted, the spearbill was the best buy in the shop.
    Analysis of Cartier’s and other contemporary accounts gives some conception of the magnitude of the destruction visited on the spearbill colonies. Cartier’s thirty-foot fishing barques were built to carry about four tons and, since the weight of an adult spearbill was twelve to fifteen pounds, a fully-loaded barque could transport up to 650 birds. Two such barque-loads might have strained the storage capacity of a sixty-ton vessel—but that is the amount, so we are told, that each vessel laded. However, some Basque ships sailing those waters displaced as much as 600 tons and could have comfortably stowed away several thousand spearbill carcasses—sufficient to last the summer season through and probably enough to feed the sailors on the homeward voyage.
    In the 1570s, Captain Anthony Parkhurst wrote: “at an Island named Pengwin we may drive them on a plank into our ship, as many as will lade her... There is more meat on one of them than on a goose. The Frenchmen that fish near the grand bay do bring but small store of meat with them, but victual themselves always with these birds.”
    A few years later, Edward Hayes, master of one of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ships, described “an island named Penguin [because] of a fowle there breeding in incredible abundance, which cannot fly... which the Frenchmen take without difficulty... to barrel up with salt.”
    Around 1600, Richard Whitbourne noted: “These Penguins are as big as geese and... they multiply so infinitely upon a certain flat island that men drive them from hence upon a board, into their boats by the hundreds at a time, as if God had made the innocency of so poor a creature to become such an admirable instrument for the sustenation of man.”
    The idea that God created all living creatures to serve man’s needs was not, of course, unique with Whitbourne. It is deeply ingrained in Judeo-Christian philosophy and continues to provide one of the major rationalizations with which we justify the wholesale destruction of other animals.
    Justifiable or not, the mass destruction of seabird rookeries in the New World proceeded apace. The birds were a staple of fishermen and settlers alike. Writing of the French presence in the region around 1615, Lescarbot tells us that “The greatest abundance [the people have] comes from certain islands where are such quantity of ducks, gannets, puffins, seagulls, cormorants and others that it is a wonderful thing to see [and] will seem to some almost incredible... we passed some of those islands [near Canso] where in a quarter of an hour we loaded our longboat with them. We had only to strike them down with staves until we were weary of striking.” Courtemanche, writing in 1705 about the north shore of the Gulf, describes the rookeries there and adds: “for a whole month they slaughter them with iron-tipped clubs in such quantity that it is an incredible thing.”
    As guns and powder became cheaper and more available in the early eighteenth century, the seabird slaughter took on a new dimension, as this note from Cape Breton, circa 1750, attests. “The birds fly by in swarms to go to their laying in spring on the bird islands... At this time there is such prodigious carnage that we shot up to 1000 gunshots every day.”
    The carnage resulting