Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat Read Free Book Online Page A

scarce specimens. It was a fiercely competitive business, conducted in the name of science and enlightenment; and it was the ultimate cause of extinction for scores or hundreds of species already in jeopardy. It is still being conducted by unscrupulous zoos and natural history museums, with similar results.
    Indisputable recognition that the great auk was no myth, but had once—and not long since—been a creature of flesh and blood, reopened the question of how and why it had disappeared. Most authorities still insisted that man could not possibly have been to blame, but there were a few dissenters. One was a distinguished Danish scientist, Professor J. Steenstrup who, in 1855, gave it as his opinion that: “The Geirfugl’s disappearance must not be regarded as a migration, much less a natural dying out, but as an extirpation [that] has its chief cause in the devastations wrought by men.”
    This was a refreshingly forthright statement of the truth, even though the good professor tried to ease his own species off the hook by adding: “Yet the bird, while disappearing, has helped to the attainment of a higher object; as it has been for a long space of time one of the means that have essentially facilitated the prosecution of fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland.” Than which, there could hardly have been a more worthwhile cause! Certainly this sentiment still commands the support of those who believe that the death of any animal, or species, which contributes thereby to the satisfaction of human desires is not only justifiable but somehow tinged with a kind of nobility.
    Although by shortly after 1800 the spearbill had apparently vanished from human ken, it was not yet extinct. Unknown to the world at large, one rookery remained. One remnant colony, probably numbering no more than a hundred individuals, had managed to avoid contributing to a “higher object.” It owed its survival, first, to its isolation, clinging precariously to a sea-girt, storm-and-tide-battered rock called Eldey, which lay outermost in a chain of volcanic islets stretching southwest into the Atlantic from Cape Reykjaness in Iceland and, second, to the fact it harboured so few geirfugel that even the local people no longer considered it worth raiding.
    But no place in the world is safe from the truly dedicated collector, and somehow word of this lost, last colony reached avid ears in Europe. About 1830, some Reykjavik export merchants began receiving letters inquiring about geirfugels and their eggs and offering princely prices for any that could be found. At least one merchant was quick to grasp the golden opportunity. His name was Siemson—let it be long remembered.
    Siemson made an arrangement with the fishermen of the villages of Stadur and Hafnir at the tip of the Reykjaness Peninsula and each spring thereafter, weather permitting, the local men raided Eldey. By 1843, between fifty and seventy-five geirfugels and an unknown number of their eggs had passed through Siemson’s hands, to end up as jealously guarded treasures in collectors’ cabinets throughout western Europe. There most remained sequestered until changing times brought about the sale of a number of these private collections of natural curiosa. On March 4, 1971, the director of Iceland’s Natural History Museum attended an auction at Sotheby’s famous rooms and bid and paid $33,000 for one stuffed geirfugel, which presumably had been killed on Eldey. The money had been raised by public subscription and, as the director said, he could have raised twice that sum, so eager were Icelanders to restore this dusty fragment of a lost heritage to the island republic.
    Others, whose nations had also contributed to the destruction of the spearbill, were less interested in refurbishing its memory. During the 1960s, Newfoundland biologist Dr. Leslie Tuck, a world authority on the Alcidae (the family to which science has assigned the spearbill),