Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat Read Free Book Online

strikingly patterned birds had served inbound seamen as infallible indicators that they had arrived over the Grand Banks and so were approaching a land whose dangerous coasts were often hidden by impenetrable fogs. From earliest times, rutters and pilots (books of sailing directions) used by the west-faring nations contained some variant of the following excerpt from the 1774 edition of The English Pilot.
    â€œYou may know you are on the Bank by the great quantities of fowles but none are to be minded so much as the Pengwin, for these never go without the Bank as the others do, for they are always on it.” By 1792, Sir Richard Bonnycastle was reporting to the English authorities that “this sure sea-mark on the Grand Banks has now totally disappeared, from the ruthless trade in eggs and skins.” Two years later the Colonial Secretary in London finally forbade the destruction of penguins for the feather trade because “they afford a supply of food and bait, and are useful in warning vessels that they are nearing land.”
    This prohibition not only came too late, it was virtually ignored in Newfoundland where some merchants had decided that if they could not make the Yankees desist from a good thing, then they had best join them. The consequence was that, by 1802, the last penguin rookery in North America, on that lonely rock called Funk, had been destroyed.
    Whereas it had taken our forebears a thousand and more years to extirpate the spearbill from European waters, it took modern man a mere three centuries to exterminate it in the New World. Although this was an undoubted victory in our ongoing war against the rest of animate creation, the perpetrators of it, and we their inheritors, have been reluctant to claim the credit.
    Hardly had the last North American spearbills been sent to join their European cousins in oblivion when their disappearance was being explained away with the nostrum that, because they were naturally such timid birds, they had “chosen to withdraw to” regions where men seldom went. Some apologists even maintained that the domain of the birds had always been the High Arctic. According to an American ornithologist, writing in 1824:
    â€œThe great auk or northern penguin inhabits only the highest latitudes of the globe, dwelling by choice and instinct amidst the horrors of a region covered with eternal ice. Here it is still commonly found upon the floating masses of the gelid ocean.”
    When a succession of Arctic explorers failed to report the slightest trace of a spearbill, living or dead, in the “gelid ocean,” an even more remarkable attempt to bury the memory of the bird appeared. The suggestion was made that “in all probability, the so-called great auk of history was a mythical creature invented by unlettered sailors and fisherfolk.” Evidence as to the bird’s non-existence was adduced from the discovery of a number of counterfeit eggs made of plaster and some stuffed specimens found to be patched together from the skins of several kinds of seabirds, all for sale to gullible collectors.
    This instinct to erase the spearbill from history, and so from conscience, was confounded by a late nineteenth-century discovery on Funk Island of huge quantities of recent penguin beaks, bones, and even a few carcasses partly preserved in guano. When these arrived in Europe they created a sensation in the scientific community, whose members avidly bid against one another to purchase them. As a contemporary publication put it: “The large quantity of remains obtained on Funk Island by Professor Milne have been bought by many museums and private collectors and have proved useful in filling a much felt want.”
    The “want” was the acquisitive passion that motivated so many wealthy nineteenth-century men, for whom natural history rarities were what Monets and Gaugins are to modern art collectors. Fortunes were spent scouring the world in pursuit of