Sea of Slaughter Read Free

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,