The seal hunters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in what is now Atlantic Canada were heroes of local folklore by the beginning of the twentieth century, men who endured the hardships of the hunt to eke out a living for their families. From the 1960s into the 1980s, the global outcry against the inhumanity of the seal hunt turned this history inside out. The consumers of luxury furs increasingly began to see these onetime heroes—called “swilers” by Newfoundlanders—not as hunters on a hunt, but as barbaric men on a rampage, clubbing bawling baby seals to death, stealing the beauty from a white spring morning.
To the shock and anger of the swilers, the whole world seemed to turn against them. Conservationists were declaring the harp seal population to be endangered by overharvesting. Government officials were imposing one regulation after another. Activists were interfering with the hunt. And markets were becoming unstable as increasing numbers of consumers began to look upon the life of a swiler with disgust. Commercial sealing in Newfoundland went into decline. All of this made little sense to the swilers, who saw the hunt for “whitecoat” harp pups (from 6 to 12 days of age) as more, not less, humane than cattle, pig, or sheep farming.
Then, in 1983, the European Community—by far the largest market—imposed a two-year ban on the import of whitecoat pelts. It was the beginning of the end. The European ban was renewed in 1985. With an anti-sealing boycott of Canadian fish products gaining momentum in both Europe and the United States, the Canadian government surrendered to the global outcry in 1987 and banned the centuries-old spring hunt “to the ice” for whitecoats.
To understand why this happened, we need to compare the emerging power of activist groups from the 1960s to the 1980s, with the relative political and economic decline of sealers during this period. Doing so reveals complex, often subtle and hidden, ways that the globalization of environmentalism and the globalization of consumer markets can interact to shift ecological shadows of consumption. Examining why the commercial hunt of older seals resumed in the mid-1990s adds further to our understanding here.
Setting the stage for this analysis, this chapter sketches the history of the commercial seal hunt from its beginnings in the eighteenth century, through its heyday in the nineteenth century, to the start of the activist anti-sealing campaign in the 1960s. It focuses on the impact of changes in hunting practices, processing technologies, and consumer markets on the sustainability of the harp seal herds. And it shows how, as entrepreneurial traders became increasingly efficient at bringing home this natural resource, some ecological shadows of consumption were forming and lengthening centuries ago.
It begins with the ill-fated voyage of the SS Newfoundland in 1914, a voyage honored in the songs and legends of Newfoundland as a tale of courage and hardship—one of the many chapters in the story of sealing that animal rights and environmental activists would later rewrite as one of brutality and depravity.
The Story of Albert John Crewe
When the wooden SS Newfoundland steamed out of St. John’s harbor on a black midnight in early March 1914, Albert John Crewe was just 16 years old. Along with his father, Reuben, and hundreds of others, Albert was heading to the ice off southeastern Labrador and northeastern Newfoundland—what the swilers called “the Front”—to hunt seals.
The older swilers, like 49-year-old Reuben, knew what dangers lay ahead. On the 1911 hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, ice floes had crushed Reuben’s steamship, the Harlaw, during a storm. Somehow, he’d managed to scramble over the ice and up the sharp cliffs of St. Paul’s Island. When he finally made it back alive, he vowed to his wife, Mary, never to return to the ice again.
But then, just three years later, his oldest son, Albert, was offered a berth on the Newfoundland under Captain Westbury Kean. Albert was thrilled: Captain Wes Kean was a rising star in the sealing fleet and the son of Abram Kean, the most famous sealing captain of all time (who, in 1934, after 45 years of swiling, would land his millionth seal). But Reuben didn’t want Albert to ever join the seal hunt: swiling on the jagged and shifting “pans”—floating sheets of coastal ice—was just about the toughest work imaginable; the sealing industry had a long history of exploiting men eager to scratch anything at all out of the harsh landscape of their birth.
The hunters, Reuben knew, would be seeking primarily “whitecoat” harp pups from 6 to 12 days of age, whose pelts (skins with the fat) were the most profitable.1 To reach these seals, the wooden Newfoundland would need to navigate treacherous ice pans, which collided and ground together with the power to crush the ship as though it were made of toothpicks.
Weather permitting, the captain would search for patches of whitecoats and, if lucky, sight the “main patch,” which he’d announce by hollering “Swiles!”2 He would then wedge the boat against the ice and send the swilers over the side to kill the whitecoats. The trek across the jagged and shifting ice pans would test Albert’s strength and agility. He would need to learn how to clamber over peaks and ridges of ice with his gaff and towrope and how to leap from pan to pan—a skill known as “copying.”
The dangers would be constant: a fall into the freezing Atlantic could mean death in a matter of minutes. Sudden snowstorms and fog could strand sealers on the ice at any time. Once he reached the whitecoats—once he was what the swilers called “in the fat”—Albert would need to overcome any instinctive sympathy for the bawling week-old fluffy white pups lying helpless on the ice. Standing over one, he’d need to raise his club high above his head. And even though the pup’s large brown eyes would stare at him and seem to pour tears, he’d need to strike with enough force to crush its skull in a blow or two.
Afterward, with the pup’s swimming reflexes still quivering, he’d need to take his sculping knife and slice the pelt from the carcass as fast as possible. There’d be no time to feel nauseous, much less worry whether the pup was really dead—time was money for the swilers, the captain, and the shipowners. A “good hand” was expected to haul in 120 pelts a day; a few, in ideal conditions, were said to take 300.
Pride was at stake, too. The first vessel to reach port with a full load of pelts would win the title of “highliner”—a glory some captains and crews would take great risks to achieve, such as running a ship loaded with heavy pelts through bad weather. Newfoundlanders would be betting on which vessel would win. The captain of the highliner ship would receive a silk pennant (a tradition that began in 1832); the crew might win prizes, too, perhaps even a crate of oranges.3
Albert would have little time to rest once the killing began. The swilers would need to haul the heavy pelts with towlines either to collecting pans or back to the ship. Then the men would need to prepare the tens of thousands of pelts for storage for the trip home. These would soon bathe the ship and all the men in grease. When the supplies of salted cod and pork ran low, the men would eat seal hearts, seal livers, and boiled flip-pers. The stench of seal would seep into every cranny of the boat; the cramped sleeping quarters would become filthy, slippery with fat and blood. Once the hold was full, the captain might even force the crew to sleep on top of greasy pelts.
The trip would indeed be fraught with infernal dangers and hardships—no place for a lad. The night Albert burst in with the news that his Uncle Ben had secured him a berth of the Newfoundland, Reuben and Mary tried hard to dissuade their son. But Albert fought even harder to go. He saw the trip as a grand adventure, a way to prove his manhood, to join the generations of Newfoundlanders brave enough to go to the ice. By evening’s end, his parents relented: Albert could go to the ice, but Reuben would join him and remain at his son’s side the entire time.4
Albert’s grand adventure started inauspiciously. When the Newfound-land became locked into the ice for days on end, the crew suspected fate might be against them. All the more so after two stowaways—a surefire way to anger the spirits of bad luck—were found on board.
The men labored with steel-tipped poles to break up the rafted ice piling against the sides of their ship. They shoved dynamite under the ice, whose southward drift kept pushing them backward. Then, through the now exploded and buckling ice, the Newfoundland inched its way toward the larger steel steamers of the main sealing fleet. Finally, early in the morning on the last day of March, frustrated at not making greater headway, Captain Wes Kean sent 166 of his men walking across the ice in search of patches of whitecoats many miles off.
The sky, to many of the experienced swilers, began to look threatening. Mid-morning, after trekking four miles over rough ice, 34 of the men, convinced a storm was brewing, turned back to the Newfoundland. This they did to shouts of “Cowards!” from the others, who pushed onward, some with bravado, others simply obeying orders and trusting their team leaders and captain, toward the Stephano, a steel steamer under the command of Abram Kean.
No one will ever know what was going through the minds of Reuben and Albert Crewe. But both went forward. At 11:20 a.m., their group managed to reach the Stephano. Then, while feeding the men a quick meal, Captain Kean steamed away from the Newfoundland toward a patch of whitecoats. He dropped the men over the side, some still exhausted from their trek to the Stephano, instructing them to sculp the whitecoats and then hike back to the Newfoundland.
Within hours, a blizzard was raging. Reuben and Albert, along with 130 other men, fought their way across jagged and shifting ice pans in search of the Newfoundland. Captain Kean had dropped them far from the Newfoundland—much farther than anyone thought, including Kean himself. Lost and exhausted as night fell, the men built a wall of ice and snow, huddling behind it as snow and rain and sleet whipped around them.
Somehow, Reuben and Albert managed to survive a night when men froze into lumps on the ice pan all around them. By mid-morning, however, both could go no farther. Albert lay down. His father lay next to him, holding on tight, tucking Albert’s head under his thick Guernsey sweater in a desperate bid to keep his son warm. They died a short while later, frozen together.
After two days and two nights in this hell, two men, their limbs dead and swollen, staggered to the steel steamer Bellaventure (no one was searching for the men because captains Wes and Abram Kean each thought the men were on board the other’s ship). Alerted, search teams hurried across the rough ice to find survivors in excruciating pain, some stumbling about in a daze, others huddling behind stacks of frozen bodies for shelter. A silent and solemn crowd of 10,000 waited all day in St. John’s for the return of the Bellaventure. Reuben and Albert were only two of the 78 men to die in the “Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914.”5
This tragedy is just one in a long series for the Newfoundland sealing industry. The same storm that took Reuben and Albert sank the Southern Cross with all hands (173 men) as it raced from a hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, heavily loaded with whitecoat pelts, for the honor of being highliner of the fleet.6 Weather was only one of the many hazards of sealing. The ice could, as Reuben Crewe tried so hard to tell his son, trap and crush the wooden sealing ships with little warning. Boilers could explode at any time; so could stores of dynamite and gunpowder. It was routine to “lose” ships—a cost of doing business. Over the course of the nineteenth century, more than 400 wooden sailing vessels were lost during the seal hunt. One of the worst disasters of this era was a hurricane in 1832 that destroyed 14 schooners and killed over 300 men. The number of wooden steamships—which locals called “wooden walls”—lost in the latter half of the nineteenth century reveals the terrific dangers of sailing in these ships and the owners’ near-total disregard for the safety of swilers. The first wooden steamer went to hunt seals in 1863; by 1900, 41 of the first 50 to go sealing were lost at sea. The early twentieth century was no safer: between 1907 and 1912, 11 more wooden walls went down during the spring seal hunts.7
At least 1,000 Newfoundlanders have died from unsafe ships, the treacherous ice, and the freezing Atlantic during the brutal history of this industry. Understanding how it came to sacrifice men for pelts requires us to step back and survey the biology, technology, and consumption shaping the sealing industry since the first commercial hunters of the eighteenth century.
Every year, harp seals migrate in loose herds of a few hundred between arctic and subarctic regions of the Atlantic. They spend the summers in the eastern Canadian Arctic and off western Greenland. The northwestern population then travels from the Davis Strait to whelping grounds off southeastern Labrador and northeastern Newfoundland (the Front) and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (known colloquially as “the Gulf”) east of the Magdalen Islands.
Females generally give birth to a single pup on the ice floes in late winter and early spring. The pups are thin, yellow, and scraggly at birth. The rich milk of mother seals allows the pups to fatten at a rate of over two kilograms (around 5 pounds) per day. After six days or so, the pups have soft, thick white coats that last until about 12 days of age. These whitecoat seals are placid and sleep for long stretches in the sun, generally avoiding the freezing water until they have enough blubber to survive. The mother seals, who generally do not defend their pups, wean them after 12-15 days, then head off to join the adult males for mating. After weaning, pups lose fat and thus potential oil.
The pups begin to shed their long white fur between 10 and 14 days of age—rubbing against the ice as if to scratch a nasty itch. The coat becomes ragged and coarser until they finish molting 2-3 weeks later. Sealers call the pups during the molting stage “ragged jackets.” Once a pup fully molts, it’s called a “beater” until it’s one year old. Beaters have sleek silvery coats with black spots.
The Beginnings of a Sealing Fleet
The First Nations peoples of what is now known as Newfoundland and Labrador relied on harp seals for subsistence for thousands of years before the first Europeans began to hunt them in the sixteenth century. Native peoples and early European settlers alike ate seal meat and burned seal oil for light and warmth. Sealskins were made into warm winter hats, jackets, mittens, and boots. The first commercial sealing began when the British set up a sealing post on the Labrador coast in 1765. This post and posts in Twillingate and Bonavista Bay on the northeast coast of Newfoundland generated an average income from seal oil exports of nearly £10,000 per year in the 1770s.
Seals seemed as plentiful as blackflies to the early explorers. A French sealer in 1760, coming upon a herd of seals sweeping over the horizon, wrote that it took 10 days to sail past. Until the 1790s, most seals were caught by “landsmen” using nets close to shore in winter, when south-ward migration during the winter months brought the seals near land.8 The seal catch was small over the eighteenth century: with an annual average of about 27,000 from 1723 to 1803. By the end of the 1700s, however, commercial sealing was starting to take off as schooners and brigs, with crews of up to 50 men, began to sail to the ice in spring.9
Sealing in the Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century was the heyday of the Atlantic sealing industry. Sealing accounted for up to one-third of Newfoundland’s total exports in the first half of the century; only salted cod exceeded seal oil in terms of export value for Newfoundland over this century.10 Sealers managed to land over 500,000 pelts in 11 of the 35 years from 1825 to 1860. Sealers off Newfoundland landed, on average, 470,000 seal pelts per year from 1831 to 1840 and 440,000 pelts from 1841 to 1850. The all-time high was in 1832, when sealers took over 740,000 seals during good weather conditions.11 The biggest hunting effort ever was in 1857, when 370 vessels and 13,600 men went to the ice off the northeast coast, although sealers were able to land “only” 500,000 seals.
The main seal products at this time were seal oil and sealskins in that order; the primary market was the United Kingdom. Seal oil was used for soaps, lamps, and lubricants (such as for sewing machines). The thin seal hides often ended up as fine leather for wallets, handbags, bicycle seats, shoes, boots, cigar cases, and bookbinding. There was no market for whitecoat furs yet because sealers didn’t know how to treat the lanugo fur to prevent it from falling out, but demand for the oil and fine leather from the 6- to 12-day-old whitecoat pups was high.
Hunters during this time relied mainly on a 3-foot wooden club or a gaff—a wooden pole with an iron hook—to kill the whitecoat seals. The gaff was the more common tool because it helped sealers test the ice, keep themselves steady when leaping from pan to pan, hook onto the ice should they fall into the sea, and haul other men out of the water and onto boats.
The ability to catch whitecoats depended on the weather and the condition of the ice. Sealers would leap from pan to pan when the ice was broken up—or sometimes use punts to transport men and pelts across open patches of water. They did their best to fill the ship’s hold with whitecoat pelts, but this was often impossible, so they would turn to shooting beaters and adults with long sealing guns from a punt. Some-times, after filling a hold with whitecoats and dropping these off at a home port, sealers would return to the ice later in the season to hunt beaters and adults.12
Under the onslaught of such large commercial hunts, the population of the northwestern Atlantic harp seals began to decline in the second half of the 1800s. The average annual seal catch off Newfoundland from 1851 to 1860 fell slightly, to 430,000, then dropped to 290,000 from 1861 to 1870.13 In the last third of the nineteenth century, environmental pressures intensified as wooden steamships, more maneuverable than schooners and with crews that could exceed 200, joined the Newfound-land seal hunt. The number of wooden steamers rose steadily, from 18 in 1873 to 27 in 1880-81. (The first steel steamers, with hulls shaped to ride onto the ice and crush it, would not join the seal hunt until 1906.)
Wooden steamers were more efficient than sailing vessels, requiring half the crew to obtain the same number of seals. These larger and more productive ships also allowed larger firms in St. John’s to take control of the sealing industry by the end of the nineteenth century.14 Because the herds were now smaller, however, seal catches didn’t reach the heights of the 1830s and 1840s. The average annual catch off Newfoundland between 1881 and 1900 was 270,000.15 By the end of the century, a total catch of over 300,000 was a good year—hundreds of thousands less than an average year in the mid-1800s.
The Decline of Sealing: 1900-1945
Hydrogenation, which saturates unsaturated (liquid) oils with hydrogen, turning them into saturated (solid or semisolid) fats, created new markets for seal oil, such as for margarine and chocolates, in the first half of the twentieth century; nevertheless, the sealing industry continued to decline. The average harp seal catch from 1895 to 1911 was just 249,000.16 World War I reduced the Newfoundland sealing fleet from 20 vessels to just 12 in 1918 (all wooden steamships). By 1923, only two firms— Bowring Brothers and Job Brothers—continued to hunt seals. The Great Depression further eroded the Newfoundland sealing industry, and only four vessels, with fewer than 100 men, went to the ice in 1932. From 1915 to 1936, the Newfoundland sealing fleet managed to surpass 200,000 pelts in only 6 of 11 years; from 1912 to 1940, the average annual catch of harp seals fell to just 159,000.17
For several reasons, the number of landed seal pelts was less— sometimes far less—than the number of seals killed. Many beaters and adults were “struck and lost,” swimming away mortally wounded or sinking before sealers could gaff them out. Typically, sealers would creep up on the more mature seals and shoot them on the ice, but, even then, some of those shot in the lungs or neck would tumble into the ocean. Captain Abram Kean estimated that as many as twenty adult seals were “lost” for every one caught during the sailing era.18
The practice of “panning,” which began during the wooden steamer era, added to the loss of many whitecoat pelts as well. Instead of towing pelts back to the ship, sealers would gather them on large and stable “collecting” pans, marked with a flag bearing the ship’s insignia. This allowed them to catch more whitecoats during daylight hours. Sometimes sealers would mark the pan with a kerosene torch so ships could collect the pelts at night. Panning proved to be extremely wasteful, however: changing weather or ice conditions could make it impossible even for steamers to collect pelts from the pans; thousands of pelts could simply disappear if the ice shifted and waterways opened up.
By the 1920s, some people were calling on shipowners to halt the hunt for a few years to allow the northeast Atlantic seal herd to recover. Already, as far back as1887, the Newfoundlan government had imposed a 12 March-20 April hunting season for steamers and prohibited second trips after 1 April. The intent was both to allow sailing vessels to compete with the faster steamers and to ease the commercial pressure on adult breeder seals. In 1892, the government shortened the season for steamers by two days and banned all second trips. In 1916, in another effort to ease the death toll among breeder seals and to keep the focus on whitecoats and beaters, the Newfoundland government restricted the number of rifles to two per ship. In 1931, the government banned rifles altogether, although, later, ships were allowed one rifle apiece.
Such actions, along with World War I and the Great Depression, may explain why the population of harp seals appeared to stabilize in the 1930s. World War II again took pressure off the seal population when most fit men went overseas and sealing steamers were pressed into military service. Fewer than 1,000 Newfoundlanders, for example, took part in the 1941 hunt (the lowest number since 1932). This respite in the commercial hunt at the Front and in the Gulf allowed the population of harp seals to recover somewhat by the end of World War II.
Just before World War II, the United Kingdom was importing 72 percent of Newfoundland sealskins and the United States 26 percent. By 1946, the United States was importing 61 percent of Newfoundland sealskins, Canada 21 percent, and the United Kingdom 18 percent. The market for seal oil—by then, an ingredient in a wide range of products from chocolate, margarine, and nondairy whipping cream to cosmetics and machinery lubricants—shifted even more than the one for sealskins. To assist the Canadian war effort, Newfoundland diverted its seal oil to Canada (which it would not join until 1949); by 1946, it was exporting 98.5 percent of its seal oil there.19
Sealing toward a Crisis: 1945-1965
Because the Norwegians had found ways to prevent the lanugo fur from falling out of a dressed fur, the market for whitecoat furs began to expand after the war, although this didn’t halt the decline of the sealing industry in Newfoundland during the 1950s. The decline reflected broader social trends that arose from Newfoundland’s joining Canada in 1949: sealing was no longer as vital to the new province’s economic welfare. But Norwegians and Nova Scotians soon began to replace Newfoundlanders at the seal hunt.
The first Norwegian vessel to join the hunt went to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1913. But interest soon waned, and after World War I, the Norwegians went back to their traditional hunting grounds in the White Sea near the Soviet Union. By the late 1930s, however, after the stocks of seals in the White Sea and off Jan Mayen Island near Greenland had declined, Norwegian sealers were arriving in force at the Front.20 By the 1960s, more than half of the ships at the large-vessel hunt were from Norway. The Nova Scotian sealing industry was flourishing, too; by 1954, more ships went to the ice floes from Nova Scotia than from Newfoundland. In 1961, only 4 of the 28 vessels at the Gulf and the Front were from Newfoundland (although Newfoundlanders were part of the crews of non-Newfoundland vessels).
The Norwegians and Nova Scotians brought with them better ships and better equipment, such as refrigeration, radar, and helicopters. As the hunts became increasingly efficient, the average annual catch went up, to 255,000 seals (excluding the average landsmen harvest of about 55,000) in 1946-61, or almost two-thirds more than the average annual catch of the sealing fleets during the steamer period (1929-39): 156,000.
To maintain such large catches, sealers in the post-World War II era were hunting more mature seals. Not bound by Canadian regulations, the Norwegians continued to hunt after the official end of the Canadian season, a date designed to protect adult breeder seals during their northern migration in May (and thus ensure a healthy whitecoat population for the next season). Before World War II, whitecoats had accounted for about 90 percent of the harp seal catch of the Newfoundland fleet; by 1955, they accounted for only 60 percent of the entire northwest Atlantic harp seal catch.
The postwar resurgence of the Atlantic sealing industry led to a further decline in the population of northwest Atlantic harp seals in the 1950s. An aerial survey in 1950-51 put the population at 3.3 million (with 645,000 pups—215,000 in the Gulf and 430,000 at the Front). Little was done to conserve the stocks, however, and the average annual harvest from 1951 to 1955 was close to 330,000 seals. As stocks fell, the harvest tailed off to just over 300,000 per year from 1956 to 1960. Canadian sealers pointed to the increasing number of breeder seals killed—twice as many as before the war— blaming Norwegian vessels for hunting seal herds well into May. The next survey in 1959-60 put the total Atlantic harp population at just 1.25 million (with only 360,000 pups—150,000 in the Gulf and 215,000 at the Front). Still, sealers took an annual average of 285,000 seals from 1961 to 1965.21
By now, an increasing number of individuals, Canadian government scientists, and groups like the Canadian Audubon Society were beginning to worry openly that the harp seals would not survive without stricter controls on the hunt. Before long, as chapter 20 will document, animal rights activists were joining forces with environmentalists to call for an end to this 200-year-old commercial hunt.