Sea of Slaughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the “gunning” of adult birds in passage to, from, and at the rookeries grew with the passing centuries. As late as 1900, punt-gunners on the north shore of the Gulf were shooting, in a single day, “half-a-boat load, which would be about four or five hundred eiders, scoters, puffins, murres, gulls etc.”
    As if the destruction of adults and partly grown young was not horrendous enough, the seabirds had also to endure a mounting wastage of their eggs. Egging began in a relatively small way with casual raids on rookeries by ships’ crews and fishermen seeking food for themselves. As John Mason, writing about life in Newfoundland around 1620, put it: “The sea fowles are Gulls white and gray, Penguins, Sea Pigeons, Ice Birds, Bottlenoses and other sorts... [and] all are bountiful to us with their eggs, as good as our Turkie or Hens, with which the Islands are well replenished.”
    This began to change after the beginning of the eighteenth century, by which time the rapid growth of population along the Atlantic seaboard was creating a commercial market for many “products” of land and sea... amongst them seabird eggs. Egging now became a profitable business and professional eggers began to scout the coasts, denuding every rookery they could find. By about 1780, American eggers had so savaged the bird islands along the eastern coasts of the United States that they could no longer supply the burgeoning demand from cities such as Boston and New York. Consequently, the export of seabird eggs became a profitable business for the British colonies to the north.
    As was to be expected, the spearbill was a foremost victim in early times when it was still abundant. Aaron Thomas wrote this succinct description of penguin egging in Newfoundland.
    â€œIf you go to the Funks for eggs, to be certain of getting them fresh you pursue the following rule:—you drive, knock and Shove the poor Penguins in heaps. You then scrape all their Eggs in Tumps in the same manner you would a heap of Apples in an Orchard... these Eggs, from being dropped some time, are stale and useless, but you having cleared a space of ground... retire for a day or two... at the end of which time you will find plenty of Eggs—fresh for certain!”
    If, as the St. Kildans claimed, the spearbill laid only a single egg, and did not lay again that year once the egg was destroyed, the result of such wholesale destruction can easily be foreseen.
    A British naval captain investigating commercial egging in Newfoundland reported: “Parties repair [to the Funk Islands] to collect eggs and feathers. At one time a very considerable profit could be gained but lately, owing to the war of extermination, it has greatly diminished. One vessel nevertheless is said to have cleared 200 Pounds currency in a single trip.”
    William Palmer, who visited Funk in 1887, added this postscript: “What must have been the multitudes of birds in former years on this lonely island. Great auks, murres, razorbills, puffins, Arctic terns, gannets undoubtedly swarmed, and were never molested except by an occasional visit from the now-extinct Newfoundland red man; but now since the white fisherman began to plunder it, how changed. Today but for the Arctic terns and the puffins the island may be said to be deserted. [Although] sixteen barrels of murres and razorbill eggs have been known to be gathered at a time and taken to St. John’s, we did not see a dozen eggs.”
    It is to John James Audubon that we owe the most graphic account of what the egging business was like. In June of 1833, Audubon visited Nova Scotia where he met a party of eggers who, having taken some 40,000 seabird eggs, were selling them to an exporter in Halifax for twenty-five cents a dozen. A few days later, while visiting a bird island, he encountered two eggers “who had collected 800 dozen murres’ eggs and expected to get 2000 dozen... the number of broken