Chapter 21 ~ Diminishing Herds
The driftwood fire was only glowing embers and the day was almost spent when Spyglassee, Mosesee and Pitsolak returned in the whaleboat. They had found no seals, but they had seen a sealing ship in the bay and they recognised it for what it was, but I do not think they understood the extent of the sealing industry’s operations each spring in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and on the coast of Newfoundland, nor did they seem to realise to what extent its activities affected themselves.
Newspapers are not published in Baffin Island, and at that time, the clearest radio programmes were broadcast from Russia, so information which was common currency a thousand miles or more away was not available to Eskimos, who were further handicapped by the barrier of language.
Later that Summer, I met a sailor on the beach at Cape Dorset. He said the sealing ship he had served in during spring had taken twenty thousand seals on the Front near Newfoundland. What he meant was that his whaling ship had taken twenty thousand pelts and left the seal carcasses to rot on the ice.
His sealing ship was one of a fleet of twenty or thirty, which annually hunt harp and hood seals off the East Coast of Canada as the winter ice recedes. It is the time of the year when the seals are at their most vulnerable. They climb on the ice to give birth to their pups, then they molt their coats and mate with each other.
The process takes about two months during which time, sealers from Canada, Norway, France, Russia and Denmark take an unlimited kill, for the sake of the seal skins and the subcutaneous fat. They “crop” the seals by the hundred thousand each year, taking first the pup seals which are not able to swim during the first weeks of life, and when there are no more young available the adult seals are hunted across the ice with rifle fire.
The rapid decline in Canada’s harp and hood seal population is accelerated by progressively more efficient hunting methods. Nowadays, even helicopters are used to spot the herds, and to transport the sealers across the ice. Consequently, the killing is left less to chance, and each year fewer harp and hood seals survive to make the journey northwards to the shores of Greenland, Baffin Island and Labrador, where Eskimo hunters wait and live in a civilization which utilises all parts of the seal, from pelt to offal, for food, clothing, heat and light. Scant information is given by operators of the sealing industry about the annual slaughter on the Canadian East Coast, and as one company director said, the public would not be interested in talk of a decline, nor would they understand the skinning methods used on the pup seals. Many of them are skinned alive each year.
In ten years, from 1950 to 1960, the seal population declined by more than fifty per cent, according to Arctic Unit scientists of the Canadian Fisheries Research Board, which annually conducts an aerial count of the herds. The survey of 1950 was not quite complete, so the decline may be even greater.
Paradoxically, the seals will be given a chance to survive only when there are so few left that the sealing industry will no longer find the killing of them a profitable commercial venture.
Conservation by limiting the kill or by having an effective closing date on the sealing industry’s season will be possible only through voluntary international agreement, because the greatest kill takes place beyond Canada’s territorial waters. Men like Spyglassee, or Pitsolak, or the Ungava Bay Eskimos who are markedly affected by any reduction in the game population are most unlikely to have any voice at the industry’s conference tables. They are, after all, an insignificant minority which the government feeds on relief rations or to whom the government or pays relief money when they are otherwise destitute.
I asked Spyglassee if he had heard of the sealers in other parts of Canada, and knew of the thousands of seals they killed. He sat quietly gazing into the dying fire, turning over the answer in his mind, and said: “I think that is many, many seals.”
Spyglassee wanted to get away from the island early on Saturday morning, if the weather allowed it, so we let the fire die away as the sun set behind lilac and grey clouds. A cleft in the cloud bank to the north west filtered the rays of the dying day and three shafts of light shimmered beside each other, coral, yellow and silver across the ice strewn water.
Before the last light dimmed, Rosemary and I washed in a small lake behind the cliff, picked our way back over the banks and climbed into our tents for the night, ready to make a quick departure in the morning.
On Saturday morning, we had breakfast of two cups of tea and then we packed our camp into the boat. All traces of our brief colonization were removed except for the two stone tent rings and the ash of our fire. Ballooning in all our clothing, we moved down to the boat. Moving day was quickly over, we had so few possessions amongst us and our gear was put among the caribou skins and seal carcasses in the bottom of the whaleboat.
Spyglassee wore his magnificent fur lined hat and looked like a prince from Samarkand. With his best blue parka, trousers tucked in his sealskin boots and sealskin mittens on his hands he looked ready for any weather, and poised with a boat hook at the bow, he directed Pitsolak at the helm as we cleared the ice floes still in the narrow harbour entrance, and set course for Frobisher.
We stopped from time to time for brew-ups of tea. Pitsolak obtained fresh water by chopping ice from the nearest ice floe, which, despite being frozen sea water, was always fresh enough to make tea. The salt and the water separate during the freezing processes and sea ice more than two years old is almost completely fresh.
Our journey was halted while Pitsolak cooked the tea, and we sat low in the boat, clasping our hands round the welcome, hot cups, thawing our fingers, burning our tongues as we gulped the liquid too hot to drink.
In knew I had a carton of rock-bottom iron rations in the bottom of my rucksack, I had carried it throughout our Ungava Bay journeys, and I felt that as we were headed home, on the last lap, it was safe to use them.
There was some butter in a tin and Rosemary had kept a half box of processed cheese for an emergency situation. We were certainly in no emergency, but we were hungry in an open boat and breathing a lot of ozonioc sea air which put a terrible appetite on us, so it seemed propitious to muster a breakfast of cheese and iron ration biscuits. There were seven of us in the boat, and to my delight, when I opened the carton, it contained exactly seven biscuits. The Eskimos must have been feeling hungry too, because they kept a close but surreptitious watch on us as I divided the cheese into seven fragments and Rosemary buttered the biscuits. When they were handed round, they gave us rewarding grins and a heartfelt, “Nakoame,” which is Baffin Island Eskimo for “Thank you.”
Some time later we had lunch. It was served on another deserted island and was a prime cut of seal meat stewed in sea water. Pitsolak was chef and he cut up one of the seals with a nasty, rusty knife. I was so hungry I could not have given two hoots about hygeine, but had the matter risen to mind it would have been quashed at once, for the knife was thoroughly sterilised in the stew as it cooked. We gathered round the pot, and each time Pitsolak served another lump he called out “Spyglassee.” Then he promptly gave the piece to someone else, until we were all served and poor old Spyglassee received his last.
The two children crammed themselves, but Mosesee, who was more refined and always blew his nose on a piece of cotton waste from the bowels of the diesel engine housing, instead of snorting over the windward side, ate with calm assurance, knowing there was plenty in the pot when he came for a second helping.
Pitsolak, the perfect host, plunged his rusty looking knife in the pot and speared the liver, and pressed it upon me. I wanted to say, “Just a smidgeon if you please,” but language difficulties prevented, so I took just a few bites and indicated someone else ought to have the rest as the Eskimos considered the liver of seal was a tremendous delicacy. The meal kept us warm for hours, and as we moved off, Spyglassee laid out the caribou skins and indicated we were to sit on them in the bottom of the boat as a wind was coming.
In a few minutes the rain began and it was quite like old times again, soaked to the skin. By mid-afternoon, the domes of the United States Air Force camp were distinguishable on the navy blue horizon and we entered the jumble of ice floes we had watched being blown up the bay during the hurricane. Some of the floebergs were about twenty feet high. Spyglassee stood astraddle in the bow, alternately pushing us off one obstacle or heaving on another with the boat hook, punting our way between floes and rocks.
He was a splendid, self reliant figure for all his small stature, and by raising an arm, he indicated quietly to Pitsolak which way he was to steer, or when Mosesee was to stop the engine abruptly. There were frequent occasions when we did not stop quickly enough and the boat ran on to a the ice with a shudder.
It was obvious our last lap was going to be the hardest.
Occasionally the boat would run up on a low pan, roll a little sideways and then fall back slowly into the water and the ice would swing up and down, ready swamp us. Each time it became evident we were still upright and safely afloat, and we had not holed the planking in one, we would smile at each other as though we had won a victory.
Spyglassee was about sixty years old, but he leaped on and off the floes with the agility of a youth. He poled and heaved with all his might to clear our pathway. Standing on one floe he would press his body on the handle of the boat hook and push the floe lying alongside it out of the way, then as the boat slid by, he would swing back on board with sure footed nimbleness as we wormed down the lead he had made, always gaining headway towards the shore of the mainland. When at last we got through, Rosemary and I were put ashore and told to go on to Frobisher. Spyglassee indicated we were to tell the people at the rehabilitation centre that the boat was back, with seal and polar bear meat, and as soon as the tide was high enough, he would work it in to the cove at Apex.
We scrambled up the rocks, slithering on slimy weed, and once on dry tundra we set off at a jog trot, glad of action, into to Apex, in time to allay concern about our overdue arrival and to avert an air search. Later, I learned from the captain of the supply ship the Woldringham Hill that he had been in a harbour in Hudson Strait during the hurricane and to prevent his vessel being blown on shore, he had been obliged to keep the engines going at full steam into the wind while two anchors were out. When I learned the wind had blown at more than a hundred miles an hour, my respect and affection for dear old Spyglassee rose even higher.
