Sea of Slaughter Read Free Page B

guano that everywhere overlies the ancient rock. The birds nearest the intruders turn as one to face the threat, bodies erect and fearsome beaks thrust out.
    The men move warily, each holding his long, pointed paddle before him like a lance. The leader pauses, fingers his amulet again, and, in a voice hardly audible above the shrieking hubbub, makes his apology for what he and his companions are about to do.
    Abruptly the paddles become flails. At the first thud of wood on bone and flesh, the foremost ranks of spearbills begin to break and fall back, each bird stumbling clumsily into those behind. Confused by the crush, those in the rear strike angrily at neighbours who are being pushed across the invisible boundaries of each one’s tiny territory. Defence of territory becomes more pressing an issue than defence against the human intruders, and chaos ripples through the massed battalions.
    While some of the men continue flailing at the nearest birds until they have killed three or four dozen of them, the rest hurriedly fill sealskin shoulder bags with eggs. Not ten minutes after landing they begin their retreat, dragging the slain birds by their necks and humping the heavy bags of eggs to the beached canoes. Loading and launching are done with the urgency of thieves. Each man seizes his paddle and, half-deafened by the noise, half-choked by the almost palpable stench, they flee as if pursued by devils. None looks back at the pandemonium still sweeping the Island of the Birds.
    This vignette is set at the Port au Choix Peninsula, which juts out from the west coast of Newfoundland into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here archaeologists have been sifting through the rich remains of a series of aboriginal cultures that drew heavily upon the sea for sustenance.
    Reliance on the spearbill in particular is revealed by the great quantities of bones uncovered in middens, living sites, and even in graves. One grave alone yielded more than 200 spearbill mandibles while another contained the image of a spearbill incised on bone.
    The Port au Choix people were by no means unique in their relationship with the spearbill. Kitchen middens all the way from Disco in northwest Greenland south as far as Florida yield spearbill bones. The big birds provided the littoral dwellers of the western Atlantic seaboard with eggs and meat in and out of season. Greenland Inuit (like seventeenth-century Scots on the Hebrides) rendered spearbill fat and stored it against winter needs in sacks made from the birds’ own inflated gullets. Indians from Labrador to Cape Cod smoked or dried the meat, which would then keep for months. The Beothuks, the last native inhabitants of Newfoundland, even ground the dried contents of spearbill eggs into a kind of flour from which they made winter puddings.
    Yet with all of this, the thousands of years during which the bird provided a vital source of sustenance to generations of human beings seem to have had no appreciable effect on the spearbill population. Those early peoples were never in danger of eating themselves out of house and home by levying too heavy a toll. They took no more than they needed with the result that, when Europeans arrived on the scene, they found spearbill rookeries scattered along the coasts all the way from Labrador to Cape Cod. And the great divers were so abundant on some of the offshore fishing banks that early chroniclers could only describe them as uncountable.
    One April day in 1534, two Breton smacks of the sort usually employed in the cod fisheries at Terre Neuve put to sea from the port of Saint Malo. They were not, however, going fishing. They were under charter to a hawk-visaged, forty-two-year-old entrepreneur named Jacques Cartier for a commercial reconnaissance of the inland sea the French called La Grande Baie, now the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
    The two little sixty-tonners crossed the Western Ocean successfully to make landfall at Cape Bonavista in northeastern Newfoundland. Here