Author Paul Watson has no problem with critics calling him and his marine-life-defending colleagues pirates—it’s far better than helplessly standing by and doing nothing in the face of the violence against animals they have witnessed.
In 1975, Robert Hunter and I were the first people to physically block a harpooner’s line of fire when we intercepted a Soviet whaling fleet and placed our bodies between the killers and eight fleeing, frightened sperm whales. We were in a small inflatable boat, speeding before the plunging steel prow of a Russian kill boat. As the whales fled for their lives before us, we could smell the fear in their misty exhalations. We thought we could make a difference with our Gandhi-inspired seagoing stand. Surely these men behind the harpoons would not risk killing a human being to satisfy their lust for whale oil and meat. We were wrong.
The whalers demonstrated their contempt for our nonviolent protests by firing an explosive harpoon over our heads. The harpoon line slashed into the water and we narrowly escaped death. One of the whales was not so lucky. With a dull thud followed by a muffled explosion, the entrails of a female whale were torn and ripped apart by hot steel shrapnel.
The large bull sperm whale in the midst of the pod abruptly rose and dove. Experts had told us that a bull whale in this situation would attack us. We were a smaller target than the whaling ship. Anxiously, we held our breath in anticipation of sixty tons of irate muscle and blood torpedoing from the depths below our frail craft.
The ocean erupted behind us. We turned toward the Soviet ship to see a living juggernaut hurl itself at the Russian bow. The harpooner was ready. He pulled the trigger and sent a second explosive missile into the massive head of the whale. A pitiful scream rang in my ears, a fountain of blood geysered into the air, and the deep blue of the ocean was rapidly befouled with dark red blood. The whale thrashed and convulsed violently.
Mortally wounded and crazed with pain, the whale rolled, and one great eye made contact with mine. The whale dove, and a trail of bloody bubbles moved laboriously toward us. Slowly, very slowly, a gargantuan head emerged from the water, and the whale rose at an angle over and above our tiny craft. Blood and brine cascaded from the gaping head wound and fell upon us in torrents.
We were helpless. We knew that we would be crushed within seconds as the whale fell upon us. There was little time for fear, only awe. We could not move.
The whale did not fall upon us. He wavered and towered motionless above us. I looked up past the daggered six-inch teeth and into the eye the size of my fist, an eye that reflected back intelligence and spoke wordlessly of compassion and communicated to me the understanding that this was a being that could discriminate and understood what we had tried to do. The mammoth body slowly slid back into the sea.
The massive head of this majestic sperm whale slowly fell back into the sea. He rolled and the water parted, revealing a solitary eye. The gaze of the whale seized control of my soul, and I saw my own image reflected back at me. I was overcome with pity, not for the whale but for ourselves. Waves of shame crashed down upon me and I wept. Overwhelmed with horror at this revelation of the cruel blasphemy of my species, I realized then and there that my allegiance lay with this dying child of the sea and his kind. On that day, I left the comfortable realm of human self-importance to forever embrace the soulful satisfaction of lifelong service to the citizens of the sea.
The gentle giant died with my face seared upon his retina. I will never forget that. It is a memory that haunts and torments me and leaves me with only one course to chart toward redemption for the collective sins of humanity. It is both my burden and my joy to pledge my allegiance to the most intelligent and profoundly sensitive species of beings to have ever inhabited the Earth––the great whales.
Reykjavik, Iceland, November 1986
Despite the criticisms, the name-calling, and the controversy that have arisen from our work since 1975, one indisputable fact emerged from a raid made by my crew (which included Rod Coronado of the U.S. and David Howitt of the UK) on two whaling ships in Reykjavik in 1986 in order to enforce an international moratorium on commercial whaling that had been established that year: it was successful.
The two whaling ships were razed, although their electronics and mechanical systems had been totally destroyed. Insurance did not cover the losses because the owners had stated that terrorists sank the ships, and apparently they were not insured for terrorism.
Most importantly, from that day of November 8, 1986, to sixteen years later in the year 2002, the Icelanders did not take another whale. What talk, compromise, negotiations, meetings, letters, petitions, and protests had not accomplished, we achieved with a little monkey-wrenching activity in the wee hours of the morning.
Were we terrorists? No, not even criminals, for we were never charged with a crime, even though we made ourselves available for prosecution. We had simply done our duty, and we put an end to an unlawful activity.
The only repercussion was that Iceland moved before the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1987 that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society be banned from holding observer status at the meetings of the IWC. After this passed, Iceland resigned from the IWC, leaving us with the distinction of being the only organization to enjoy the status of banishment from the IWC.
How ironic, I thought, to be the only organization banned from the IWC because we were the only organization to have ever enforced an IWC ruling.
It was not much of a punishment. I had never enjoyed listening to the delegates of the member nations barter whales like they were bushels of wheat or pork bellies. I also never had much use for the posturing of the nongovernmental organizations pretending that they were actually making a difference by attending this annual circus. All that we were interested in were the rulings of the IWC, and we fully intended to continue to enforce those rulings.
I have been asked many times why we consider the IWC rulings important. Why not just oppose all whaling everywhere? The answer is that we do oppose all whaling by everyone, everywhere. However, we only actively attack whaling operations that are in violation of international conservation law. The reason for this is simple: We do not presume to be the judges and jury. We simply execute the rulings of the IWC or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) or any rulings from international conservation authorities, and we do so in accordance with the definition of intervention as defined by the 1982 United Nations World Charter for Nature, Part III (Implementation), Principle 21, Section (e): “States and, to the extent they are able, other public authorities, international organizations, individuals, groups and corporations shall… Safeguard and conserve nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction.”
As a seaman, I have a great and abiding respect for the traditions of the law of the sea. To attack without a vested authority would be piracy. Thus, the difference between a privateer like Sir Francis Drake and a pirate like Blackbeard was that the former was in possession of a letter of marque from a sovereign authority and the latter practiced the same trade solely upon his own authority.
I have never considered it my place to judge the illegal activities of others. However, I feel that when there are laws and international treaties that it is the responsibility of individuals and nongovernmental organizations to strive toward the implementation of these rulings, especially in light of the fact that there is no international body empowered to police these international laws. Nation-states intervene when it is advantageous for them to do so, but little enforcement is carried out in the interests of the common good of all citizens of the planet.
It is worth noting that it was not the British or Spanish navies that brought the piracy of the Caribbean under control in the 17th century. There were too many conflicts of interest, too much corruption, and too little motivation for any real action to have been taken. The bureaucracies in the British admiralty and the Spanish court did nothing because the very nature of a bureaucracy is the maintenance of the status quo. The achievement of first shutting down piracy on the Spanish Main is attributed to one man––a pirate himself.
Henry Morgan did what two nations chose not to do: he drove the pirates to ground and ended their reign of terror. As a result, the “pirate” was made governor of Jamaica, although history would show that the man was far more effective as a pirate than as a politician. In fact, he was more of a pirate as a politician than he was as an actual pirate.
When Andrew Jackson failed to get the support of the merchants of New Orleans to back his attack on the British, it was a pirate who came to his service in the personage of Jean Lafitte. When the United States successfully endeavored to cast off the yoke of British rule, it was a pirate who achieved the most dramatic and successful naval victory at sea. That person was captain John Paul Jones. Consequently, it is a pirate who was the founder of what is today the world’s most powerful navy.
Today, with the pirates of corrupt industry aided by corrupt politicians plundering our oceans for the last of the fish, killing the last of the whales, and polluting the waters, we find that there is very little real resistance to their activities upon the high seas. Once again it is time for some good pirates to rise up in opposition to the bad pirates, and I believe that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is just such an organization of good pirates.
When our critics call us pirates, I have no problem with that. In fact, we have taken their criticisms and in an aikido-like manner; we have incorporated their accusations into our image. Our ships are sometimes painted a monochromatic black. We have designed our own version of the pretty red [a flag which, when translated to French, becomes “joli rouge” and is rumored to have inspired the “jolly roger” phrase applied to pirate flags], and our black-and-white flag flies from our mast during campaigns. We even carry cannons, with the difference being that our guns fire cream pies and not red-hot balls.
As good pirates, we have evolved to suit the time and culture in which we live, and this being a media-defined culture, our primary weapons are the camera, the video, and the internet. Like modern-day Robin Hoods, we take from the greedy and give back to the sea. We don’t profit materially, but we profit tremendously both spiritually and psychologically.
Author Bio:
Captain Paul Watson is a Canadian-American marine conservation activist who founded the direct action group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977 and was more recently featured in Animal Planet’s popular television series “Whale Wars” and the documentary about his life, “Watson.” Sea Shepherd’s mission is to protect all ocean-dwelling marine life. Watson has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including Death of a Whale (2021), Urgent! (2021), Orcapedia (2020), Dealing with Climate Change and Stress (2020), The Haunted Mariner (2019), and Captain Paul Watson: Interview with a Pirate (2013).
We wouldn’t say “it” or “that” when referring to humans, so why would we for other sentient individuals?
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
By Debra Merskin, Carrie P. Freeman and Alicia Graef
Happy has to be one of the most ironic names for an Asian elephant whose living conditions have prompted groundbreaking legal action on her behalf. Her advocates are certain that she is not happy at all and are seeking to free her from her current confines.
Happy was born in the wild but was captured as a calf in the early 1970s. She ended up at the Bronx Zoo in New York City a few years later, where she’s been ever since.
Given what we know about how physically and psychologically detrimental captivity is for elephants and how vastly different their lives are in the wild, it’s virtually impossible to draw the conclusion that Happy is content at all after enduring decades of confinement that include years of isolation.
We also know that she’s a sentient being, which means she is self-aware—in 2006 she became the first elephant ever documented to pass the “mirror self-recognition test”—and she’s the first elephant to be considered in court for legal personhood under a writ of habeas corpus.
Her lawyers at the Nonhuman Rights Project argue that Happy possesses such complex cognitive, emotional and social abilities and deserves fundamental rights to “bodily liberty” and “bodily integrity”—something we are automatically granted just by virtue of being born human.
If successful, her liberation would be a landmark step toward breaking down the legal wall that separates humans from nonhuman animals. Yet nonhuman animals still remain behind a wall of our speciesist perception, which also desperately needs to change.
Nonhuman animals value their own lives, have their own interests and experience a range of emotions similar to our own that run the gamut from joy and fear to pain, anger, sadness, stress and grief; they have their own cultures and dialects; they play, work cooperatively and use tools; they remember and plan for the future; they love, form long-lasting bonds and show empathy. The conclusion that they have rich emotional lives isn’t mere anthropomorphism; it’s backed up by research in multiple fields, including cognitive ethology, evolutionary biology and neuroscience.
Despite our growing knowledge about nonhuman animals, instead of appreciating them for their uniqueness, beauty and complexity, we’ve focused mostly on what utilitarian purposes they can serve.
Even as we advance technologically, human behavior becomes increasingly objectionable. We raise and kill a staggering number of land and aquatic animals every year for food in an inherently and systemically abusive system.
We confine nonhuman animals to prisons that are zoos and aquariums, force them to entertain us, and use them as test subjects in biomedical research, much of which is senseless, or aimed at treating chronic diseases that are a result of human consumption of animal products.
In the wild, species are disappearing at staggering rates. Scientists have warned that we’re facing a sixth mass extinction. Wild animals continue to be taken by traffickers to be killed for parts or sold in the exotic pet trade. They’re killed simply for fun, including by government agencies under the guise of “management,” while their habitats are being polluted, fragmented and destroyed by humans in the name of development.
Human disregard of the natural world and the species with whom we share it led to a global pandemic that has had a devastating impact around the world, which, worryingly, likely won’t be the last we see of deadly zoonotic diseases—even as we continue to face a very real climate crisis.
Much of the way humans treat nonhuman animals, both legal and illegal, happens behind closed doors and out of sight. It’s in the best interest of industries that exploit them for profit to keep it that way. While there is increasing awareness about the plight of nonhuman animals, far too much of the information we’re regularly exposed to about them, particularly in the media, doesn’t give a “voice to the voiceless.”
Instead, it both subtly and overtly reinforces speciesist views, especially by misrepresenting nonhuman animals and their lived experiences by referring to them as if they were inanimate objects, as it, that and which.
This misrepresentation perpetuates their objectification and fails to show humans exactly who these animals really are, and how they suffer from widespread institutionalized oppression and systemic injustices on a daily basis. This must change to reflect their existences as conscious beings—a nonhuman animal is a who, not a that. A someone, not a something.
The way we use words is indicative of how we relate to the world around us; our words represent our thoughts about others, convey the value we place on other lives and actively shape the course of our relationships and actions. Calling someone it distances us from them, rather than acknowledging our relationship with them. Dismissing someone as an it communicates a thoughtless reference, as if the it in question has no rightful place in this life or is somehow separate from our own existence; that they are less than and we are superior.
Our choice of words builds a framework that can encourage healing or cause harm. This is also visible during interactions between people where there is a lack of acknowledgment, which can prove to be devastating.
Using proper personal pronouns for nonhuman animals, or the gender-neutral they when we are unsure of their sex, would reflect the fact that they, like us, are sentient beings.
If not for our hubris and denial of what it means to be an elephant, Happy could have lived her life in the wild among a multi-generational matriarchal herd, where she would have shared lifelong bonds with her mother, family members and others of her kind and enjoyed the simple act of making decisions about her life.
Instead, she is confined and alone, and while her case is being appealed, she can’t do anything about it but quietly wait day after monotonous day, either for us to acknowledge her reality and send her to an accredited sanctuary, or to simply die where she is.
While she is physically isolated, she is not alone in that billions of other nonhuman animals are waiting for us to see them too; to understand them; to overcome speciesist prejudices we hold; to end their oppression; to stop considering them renewable resources; to save their homes; to stop justifying our consumption of their bodies; to stop owning them as property; to stop using them as test subjects; to stop referring to them as things, and to acknowledge they, too, are conscious beings who have a rightful place in this world.
We are past the point of needing scientific evidence that animals are conscious beings, and it is time to update the way we talk and write about them to recognize this fact and to acknowledge that as humans, we exist as part of a whole on this Earth, not separate from it. We share this planet with a mind-blowing array of incredible, awe-inspiring, sentient nonhuman animals whose lives matter to them and who each deserve the dignity and respect of us acknowledging that and referring to them as who, not that.
Debra Merskin, PhD, is a professor of media studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon and is a co-founder of Animals and Media. Her expertise is in the re-presentation of animals in media and popular culture.
Carrie P. Freeman, PhD, is an associate professor of communication at Georgia State University and is a co-founder of Animals and Media. She publishes and teaches on media ethics, activist communication, environmental communication and critical animal studies.
Alicia Graef of In Defense of Animals is a lifelong animal lover and freelance writer with a BS in animal and veterinary science. She has covered issues relating to animals for more than a decade.
This article is the second part of a series that originally appeared on Climate and Capitalism. You can read the first part here.
by Ian Angus
“In the sixteenth and partly still in the seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode of production and the rise of the capitalist mode.” — Karl Marx[1]
Accounts of transatlantic trade in the 1500s typically focus on what Perry Anderson calls “the most spectacular single act in the primitive accumulation of European capital during the Renaissance” — the plunder of precious metals by Spanish invaders in South and Central America.[2] Year after year, well-guarded convoys carried gold and silver to Europe, simultaneously enriching Spain’s absolute monarchy and destabilizing Europe’s economy.
Spain’s treasure fleets certainly played a big role in the long-term development of European capitalism, but they were not alone in creating a disruptive transatlantic economy. While Spanish ships carried silver and gold, a parallel trade involving far more ships developed far to the north. Historians of capitalism, including Marxists, have paid too little attention to what Francis Bacon called “the Gold Mines of the Newfoundland Fishery, of which there is none so rich.”[3]
‘Swarming with fish’
Remarkably little is known about the Venetian navigator who sailed from England to North America in 1497. His real name was Zuan Cabotto, but he was known as Juan Caboto in Spain and John Cabot in England. In 1496, Henry VII granted him letters patent “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.”[4] With financial backing from Italian bankers and merchants from the west England port of Bristol, he sailed west on May 2, 1497, in a small ship with about 18 crew.[5] Thirty-five days later, he “discovered” new territory on the far side of the Atlantic.
Of course, the large island that became known as Newfoundland had been discovered long before: there is evidence of human settlement on the island nine thousand years ago, and the Beothuk people had been there for 1500 years when Cabot claimed it for the English king and the Catholic Church. Cabot wasn’t even the first European — Viking explorers briefly settled in Newfoundland around 1000 CE, and it is possible that Basque and Portuguese fishers sailed to the cod-rich waters earlier in the 1400s. Nevertheless, Cabot’s rediscovery of Newfoundland is important to the history of capitalism, because it alerted Europe’s fast-growing merchant class to a major opportunity to profit by expropriating nature’s free gifts.
Like Columbus, John Cabot was seeking a direct route to Asia — as historian Peter Pope writes, he “sought Japan, but his greatest discovery was cod.”[6] Shortly after the Matthew returned to Bristol in August 1497, the Milanese ambassador in London wrote to the Duke of Milan:
“They assert that the Sea there is swarming with fish which can be taken not only with the net but in baskets let down with a stone, so that it sinks in the water. I have heard this Messer Zoane [Cabot] state so much. These same English, his companions, say that they could bring so many fish that this Kingdom would have no further need of Iceland, from which there comes a very great quantity of the fish called stockfish.”[7]
Gold rush
Within a decade of Cabot’s return, fishing “opened up in Newfoundland with the enthusiasm of a gold rush.”[8] By 1510, dozens of ships from France, Spain and Portugal were travelling to the land of cod every spring, and by mid-century there were hundreds. The Newfoundland fishery drove “a 15-fold increase in cod supplies … [and] tripled overall supplies of fish (herring and cod) protein to the European market.”[9] Cod, formerly a distant second to herring, comprised 60% of all fish eaten in Europe by the late sixteenth century.[10]
Some accounts of early modern fishing give the impression that Newfoundland cod were caught by brave independent fishers who crossed the Atlantic in tiny boats. A few may have done that, but not enough to a cause the immense leap in commodity fish production that historians have dubbed the North Atlantic Fish Revolution. That was accomplished by thousands of skilled fishworkers who crossed the ocean in large ships that were financed by merchant capitalists. Transatlantic fishing was big business from the beginning.
Beginning in the 1500s, the Newfoundland fishery developed in two main forms that continued for centuries.
Inshore: Most fishers targeted the cod that come near land to prey on smaller fish each summer. The fish were caught from small open boats and taken ashore every day for processing.
Offshore: Late in the century, French ships began working the Grand Banks, a large, relatively shallow area that extends about 300 kilometers (200 miles) south and east of Newfoundland, where cod gather to spawn. The fish were caught and preserved on the ships, eliminating frequent trips to shore.
Both fisheries developed factory-like operations, with a structured division of labor between workers skilled in the various tasks of catching and preparing fish.
The offshore fishery caught and preserved fish on ships similar to the Dutch herring busses described in Part One. In each ship, up to 20 men worked long days in production lines. The cod were caught by fishers, each working several baited lines at once. Preparers beheaded, gutted, split, and deboned the fish. Particularly valuable parts such as the liver were set aside, and the rest of the animal was heavily salted and stacked in the ship’s hold. When the hold was full of what was called wet or green (actually pickled) cod, the ship returned to Europe. Some made two or three roundtrips each year.
Inshore operations involved more ships and workers, but were more time-limited, because the best inshore fishing occurred from June to August, when millions of capelin (a small smelt-like fish) spawn in shallow waters, attracting hungry cod.[11]
Each spring, cargo ships travelled from western Europe to bays and inlets along the Newfoundland coast. Each ship carried up to 150 workers, many barrels of salt, and a dozen or so open fishing boats that had been built in Europe, then disassembled for compact storage. Long beaches known for particularly good fishing attracted multiple ships, so some seasonal fishing camps housed thousands of workers at a time.
After landing in May or early June, the workers assembled their boats and built wharves, sleeping huts, work sheds, and outdoor drying racks. As on the offshore ships, there was a factory-like division of labor. Three or four men rowed out in each small boat every morning. When a boat was full — each could hold hundreds of fish — it returned to shore, where skilled workers beheaded, gutted, split, and deboned the cod. Summers in Newfoundland were too warm for the Norwegian method of freeze-drying, so the fish was lightly salted before being laid out in the sun and turned frequently for several weeks. The result, known as salt-cod or Poor John, was tastier than Norwegian stockfish, and largely replaced it as the leading mass-produced food commodity in England and southern Europe.
The cod were so plentiful that often more were caught and dried than one ship could carry, so an intermediate trade developed in which Dutch merchants on sack ships purchased dried fish from Newfoundland beaches during the season and resold it in Europe.
Through the 16th century, cod fishing was concentrated on Newfoundland’s east and south coasts. A different extractive industry developed near the island’s northwest corner.
The world’s first oil boom
In the 1970s, Selma Huxley Barkham radically changed our understanding of the 16th century fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador. With little institutional support — she taught English part-time to pay her bills — the Canadian archivist spent years in northern Spain, digging through libraries and archives in search of references to 16th century Basque voyages to Terranova. Her discoveries rewrote the history of sixteenth century Newfoundland: she found convincing evidence that in addition to the thousands of men who came for cod, up to 2,000 Basque whalers spent each year in the area now known as the Strait of Belle Isle, between the island’s northern peninsula and the Labrador mainland. Following her leads, archaeologists have found several sunken ships and the remains of over a dozen 16th century whaling stations on the Labrador shore.
Basques from France and Spain had dominated commercial whaling in Europe for five hundred years. Hunting in the Bay of Biscay, they primarily targeted bowhead and right whales, which were large — up to 17 meters long — but much smaller than the animals that deep-sea whalers later hunted to near-extinction. Rights and bowheads were slower, and — a major advantage to the rowers who had to tow them ashore — they remained afloat when killed.
Basque merchants sold salted whale meat, which could be eaten on holy days because the whales were thought to be fish, and baleen, a flexible cartilage that was used to make corsets, buggy whips, umbrellas and such. But the big money maker was whale oil, produced by slowly heating blubber in large cauldrons. Barrels of Basque whale oil were used as far away as England and Germany for textile manufacturing, lighting, soap-making, and caulking ships.[12]
At some point, probably about 1530, Basque fishers discovered that each summer and autumn bowhead whales migrated in large numbers through the Strait of Belle Isle, where they could be caught relatively easily.[13] Intensive whale hunts soon began, with hundreds of teams of Basque whalers travelling annually to the Strait in “ships as large as anything afloat … some of them were capable of carrying up to two thousand barrels of whale oil, which weighed three hundred pounds each.”[14] For four to six months each year they lived and worked in whaling stations that were similar to the temporary cod fishing villages, with a major exception: instead of drying racks they built tryworks — rows of large stone ovens sheltered by tile roofs, where blubber was boiled down.
Whaling was dangerous work for the men and brutal for the whales. When whales were sighted from shore, several teams set out in chalupas — 8-meter long open boats — each crewed by a harpooner, a steersman and four or five oarsmen. Archaeologist James Tuck describes the usual method of attack:
“Whales were approached by rowing the boats to within as close as a meter, at which point the whale was harpooned with a barbed iron harpoon .… [on a rope that was attached] to a “drogue” or drag which the whale towed through the water until it tired…. Often several harpoons were thrust into the same whale and even then the chase might have taken hours and covered miles before the whale could be approached safely and killed by repeated thrusts of a razor-sharp lance. … Once the whale was killed it was towed by several boats — often against tide and wind — to one of the shore stations for processing.”[15]
On shore, flensers (whale butchers) removed the whale’s blubber in long spiral strips and cut it into thin pieces. Tryers heated the blubber slowly in copper cauldrons, controlling the temperature to avoid burning, and periodically skimming off oil and moving it to cooling pots, a process that required days of constant attention and work. The cooled oil was stored in 200-liter barrels that coopers assembled onsite.
Barkham’s research showed that whaling operations in the Strait of Belle Isle were “a resounding financial success from their inception.” She estimated that the Basque whalers produced upwards of 15,000 barrels of whale oil each year, and sold most of it on the way home in Bristol, London and Antwerp.[16]
But as so often happens when natural resources become mass commodities, the exploitation of whales in Newfoundland soon undermined the very basis of the industry. It’s obviously impossible to get exact numbers, but an authoritative study estimates that “as many as a third of the western Atlantic bowhead’s pre-hunt numbers were killed during the course of the 16th century.”[17] Bowhead whales reproduce slowly — females take 15 years to reach sexually maturity, and typically they have only one calf every 3 or 4 years — so the removal of a third of the migrating whales in a few decades had devastating effects.[18] By the early 1680s, overhunting had so reduced the bowhead population that some ships returned to Europe half-empty.
Over the next two decades, whalers shifted their hunts west to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and north to the Arctic, and intensive whaling in Newfoundland’s coastal waters ceased for nearly 300 years.
England vs Spain
Declining catches undoubtedly motivated Spanish Basques to hunt elsewhere, but the geographic shift was made more urgent by conflicts on the far side of the Atlantic.
For most of the 1500s, English ships and fishers were a distinct minority in the Newfoundland fishery, but by the end of the century Spanish ships had all but disappeared, and the English presence was growing rapidly. In the 1570s, about 50 English ships travelled to Newfoundland each year; by 1604 the number had tripled.[19] To understand how and why that happened, we must take a brief detour into European geopolitics.
Part 3 of this article will discuss how England replaced Spain, the role of the Newfoundland fishery in the development of English capitalism, and the environmental impact of early capitalist fishing.
You can find the original publication of Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism here: Part 1Part 2
Notes [1] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, (Pelican, 1981) 450-1.
[2] Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 61.
[3] Quoted in D. W. Prouse, A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial and Foreign Records (London: MacMillan & Co., 1895), 54.
[4] “First Letters Patent granted by Henry VII to John Cabot , 5 March 1496,” The Smugglers’ City, Department of History, University of Bristol.
[5] By comparison, five years earlier Columbus had sailed from Spain with three ships and a crew of 86.
[6] Peter E. Pope, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot (University of Toronto Press, 1997), 176.
[7] Quoted in Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington: Island Press, 2007), 33. Stockfish was dried cod.
[8] Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker Publishing, 1997), 51.
[9] Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research, 2019, 2.
[11] Although the cod are gone and capelin stocks are much reduced, the annual “capelin roll” still attracts large numbers of seabirds, whales, and tourists to beaches in Newfoundland and Labrador. The fish swim close to the beach, where they can be easily caught in small nets or even buckets.
[12] Brad Loewen, “Historical Data on the Impact of 16th-Century Basque Whaling on Right and Bowhead Whales in the Western North Atlantic,” Canadian Zooarchaeology, no. 26 (2009): 4.
[13] Until recently, historians believed that Basque whalers caught right whales in summer and bowhead whales in autumn, but DNA analysis of whalebones shows that bowheads made up almost the entire catch. B. Mcleod et al., “Bowhead Whales, and Not Right Whales, Were the Primary Target of 16th- to 17th-century Basque Whalers in the Western North Atlantic,” Arctic 61, no. 1 (March 2008), 61-75.
[14] Frederick W. Rowe, A History of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1980), 46.
[15] James A. Tuck, “The World’s First Oil Boom,” Archaeology 40, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1987), 51.
[16] Selma Huxley Barkham, “The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536-1632 — A Summary,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (December 1984), 518.
[18] The population impact was increased by the common practice of targeting mother-calf pairs: the calf was easy to kill, and the mother could then be harpooned when she approached to save her child.
[19] Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577-1660 (University of Toronto Press, 1969), 602, Kindle.
Derrick Jensen interviews activists each week. This week Derrick interviews Cayte Bosler.
Cayte is an investigative environmental journalist and a graduate student at Columbia University. She researches solutions for protecting biodiversity and has worked with land-based communities and wildlife defenders throughout Latin America. Her interest is in chronicling community-led resistance to exploitation and ecological abuse to inspire resistance elsewhere. Today we talk about whales.
[Whales] are some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. They spend 99% of their lives under water, far beyond any of our observational tools. Even with the sliver of what we do know, it’s so fascinating.
We’ve only barely begun to understand their rich languages and music. It wasn’t a common knowledge until 1970s that whales could sing. We heard them singing on these amazing recordings that were release then and were part of what inspired this very effort to save them.
We don’t even know their migration routes or where they go in the oceans. A few years ago, we discovered – I’ve trouble with the word discovered. It’s not like out there waiting for us to discover them. But, they were discovered to science, off the coast of Japan species species of beaked whales.
There are about 89 species of cetaceans known to science. Cetaceans include whales, dolphins and porpoises. They’re generally categorized into baleen whales and toothed whales.
Baleen whales are the massive gentle giants. The blue whales, which is one of the biggest creatures ever to exist on planet Earth. Some fun facts: Their heart is the size of a car. Their tongue alone weighs more than an elephant. It’s said that they can fill 2000 balloons with a single breath. (I hope no one actually goes out and tries to test this. That will be a lot of plastic pollution we don’t want.) Some other baleen whales are right whales, humpback whales, or some of the most studied ones, minke whales, grey whales.
Even to understand where their feeding grounds are, we’re using tools like GPS to locate them. That’s really important so we can avoid collisions with ships and some other threats.
They’re just so intriguing. They have some of the biggest brains. We’re starting to try to come up with all these experiments to interact with them, have conversations even. It’s really a shame because I studied lots of different animals and I fall so in love with them and what they are capable of, and at the same time, I’m learning how we’re losing them, and the richness they bring to the world and how that’s being ousted as well.
Trinity writes about The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the seven ‘Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty’ (SHAC 7) members who were originally charged with violating the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Trinity La Fey is clear in her writing: we all need to act as one to stop the destruction.
“People care about winning. They care about victory and that’s the most beautiful thing about the Huntington Life Sciences Campaign: we’re not here to tell you how to behave. What we’re here to convince you to do is to take the personal initiative to shut the fucking lab down.”
He knew how to write a speech. He went on to do time as a consequence of his advocacy for animal rights. The lab did not get shut down. It was bought out and he didn’t go down for a thing he had done, but for what he had said. He knows about commitment. He continues to speak.
His speech, however dangerous, terroristic, insidious or seditious it was deemed in a court of law, did not and could not end animal testing. The only thing that gave the surviving victims of that institution’s abuse half a fighting chance were the people who physically broke into the laboratory and removed them. Even then, at such a late stage, it is harm reduction, not amelioration or prevention. The elusive source of this process: the belief in the necessity of, or disregard for, or pleasure taken in this suffering, simply got better at becoming invisible.
Daniel Sloss, a comedian from Scotland recently performed:
“Don’t make the same mistake I did, which is just sitting back and being like, ‘well, I’m not part of the problem, therefore I must be part of the solution.’ ‘Cause that’s just not how this fuckin’ shit works. I believe and deep down I know, that most men are good. Of course we are. But when one in ten men are shit and the other nine do nothing, they might as well not fucking be there.”
He knows how to put on a show, but I don’t know if he is qualified to be the judge of goodness in man. I know for sure that I am not. My senses are my own. I must judge for myself always.
At the time of the SHAC 7’s trial, snuff films of human women were already in existence. While the jury was not allowed to see the snuff of a rhesus monkey that prompted the activists to so vociferously organize, the ACLU had long sided with pimps and pornographers, as they do today. They didn’t stand a chance. Not with so many humans mere demonic hosts for a Rabies of the Soul, or wetiko as Jack Forbes calls it.
People do care about winning, but victory is expensive. For those to whom winning means leaving a living planet where we found one, there will be a different price paid than for one to whom it means ruling atop a technocratic pornscape. Who can afford to pay what? What are our commitments?
On the edge of a river she loves, Jennifer Murnan once told me,
“There are a few simple rules and it is everyone’s job to enforce them.”
She knows that river. She knows the rules which are not ours to add or subtract, but to notice in time, as she has. What’s right and wrong are simple, clear things, the few big things: don’t torture; don’t take more than you need and never all; give thanks; give everything back.
It is not my job to judge for you what your senses are saying, or what the lab is for you, where you are. It is all of our jobs to shut the fucking lab down.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
