Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
8
IN
1705,
A
French sealing captain, Sieur de Courtemanche, commented on the morbid, and unaccountable, spec-
tacle of thousands of whale skulls littering the beach near Red Bay, Labrador, on the Strait of Belle Isle. It
would be nearly three centuries before the mystery of this marine mortuary was solved, when documents were
uncovered by historical geographer Selma Barkham in 16th-century Spanish archives. They told a story of
Basques in Terranova—Labrador—where, beginning as early as 1547, this maritime people prosecuted a lucrat-
ive whaling industry, exporting the oil to European centers such as Bristol, Southampton, London, and Flanders.
Like most Europeans, the Basques were first drawn to the New World by the bounty of cod, reported by
Cabot half a century before. Having pioneered the whaling industry as early as ce 1000 in the northeast Atlantic,
the Basques would also have immediately recognized the commercial potential for hunting whales, especially in
the narrow strait, where they could be easily pursued from shore stations. The result was North America's first
oil boom—and the first large-scale industrial decimation of a wildlife species.
When I visited Red Bay in the early 1980s, the burned blubber of the rendered whales still clung like black
lichen to the remains of the stone tryworks, and some of the moldering, moss-covered bones of the great anim-
als were still visible along the shore. Examination of those bones has revealed that they belonged to two species:
the Arctic bowhead and the North Atlantic right whale, both endangered and now seldom if ever seen in the
Strait of Belle Isle. Over five decades, it is estimated that the Basque whalers killed many thousands of rights
and bowheads, more than enough to precipitate a population decline from which these whale stocks have never
recovered.
Before shifting their operations to the other side of the Atlantic, the Basques had already eliminated the popu-
lations of right whales in the Bay of Biscay and other nearshore northern European waters, and there are perhaps
as few as four hundred right whales fighting for survival today in the Northwest Atlantic. After Red Bay, other
New World extirpations followed, as well as the extinction of three species—the great auk, Labrador duck, and
sea mink—in the 19th century. More recently, in the last decade of the 20th century, we have witnessed the un-
thinkable: the commercial extinction of the northern cod stock, the very species that first drew Europeans to
North American shores.
From the Shore to the Deep Blue Sea
The new science of marine historical ecology has documented the pattern of exploitation that has
led—inevitably, it seems—to the tragic loss of species and wholesale degradation of marine ecosystems on both
sides of the Atlantic.
This lamentable picture of blind destruction has been reconstructed employing a multitude of sources: the pale-
ontology of soils and marine sediments, the archaeology of prehistoric middens, descriptions of early naturalists
exploring the New World, lists of species sold in medieval fish markets, recipes in historical cookbooks, and the
logbooks of whalers, to name a few. What has emerged is a very consistent narrative of humans moving inexor-
ably from freshwater to the seashore, then into deeper and deeper waters, leaving behind them a trail of destruc-
tion.
