3

Wake of the Whalers

DURING THE WHALING ERA, WHEN WHALES GREW SCARCE IN RELATIVELY ACCESSIBLE oceans, commercial hunters invaded distant regions. Alaska inevitably drew their attention. Long before the rise of conservation concerns or international agreements on ocean resources, whalers took all they could. Only the limits of commercial value and the vastness of the seas rescued North Pacific whales and pinnipeds from extinction. Public sympathy for ocean species awaited the emergence of nature films and ecological science, probably too late for the North Pacific right whale.

In their relentless quest for comforts and profits, Americans outdid the Russians. Whaling ranked as a prominent commercial venture and a respected social institution. Yankee whalers first visited the North Pacific in the 1830s; they quickly made it their most profitable hunting grounds. Exhausting the concentrations of right and sperm whales in the Gulf of Alaska in the 1840s, they moved north into the Bering Sea in pursuit of bowhead whales. Spearheaded in 1848 by the bark Superior under command of Captain Thomas Welcome Roys and the Ocmulgee under Captain Fred Manter, they followed the bowheads into the Arctic Ocean, eventually operating east of the Mackenzie River Delta. At their zenith in 1852 an estimated 299 whaleships searched the Bering and Chukchi seas.¹ New England Yankees dominated Alaska whaling until the early 1880s.

Whaling in Alaska originated much earlier. Throwing spears smeared with poison from the monkshood root, the Aleuts took orcas, bowheads, grays, sperms, finbacks, and right whales. Pairs of two-man baidarkas crept up on whales; the hunters struck them and retreated to land for three days in hopes that the whales would die and drift ashore.² Koniag Eskimos placed a high priority on whaling and conducted their hunts in a similar manner.³ Northern Eskimos normally killed whales without the use of poison, using harpoons tipped by stone, bone, ivory, or native copper. They subdued large whales, principally bowheads, by hurling spears attached to sealskin floats designed to tire out the quarry.⁴ Eskimos hunted whales at St. Lawrence Island as early as 200 BPE and at Point Hope from about A.D. 800.⁵

In shallower waters, Eskimos pursued belukhas (beluga or white whales). Census taker Ivan Petroff described the process he witnessed in 1880:

Sometimes a hundred or more of the natives proceed to sea on a calm summer day, observing perfect silence and keeping well inshore. As soon as a school of belugas is sighted an old man gives a signal, the kaiaks hurry to seaward of the school, and a tremendous noise begins, with shrill cries and yells, beating of drums and rattles, and splashing of spears and paddles in the water. The hunters gradually approach the shore, driving the belugas before them, until the latter, in the shallow water, fall easy prey to their spears. In former times, when the beluga was more plentiful, from 100 to 200 were secured in a single day in this way.⁶

Koniag Eskimos caught porpoises using spears launched from throwing-boards. Sealskin floats attached to the bone- and stone-headed spears prevented loss of small whales by sinking or escaping. Villagers ate the flesh, blubber, and skin and tanned some hides for boots, kayak coverings, and nets.⁷

Russians, lacking the necessary traditions and skills and preoccupied by the fur business, engaged minimally in whaling. They forced the Aleuts and Kodiak-Afognak Eskimos to hunt whales for food to support fur-seeking operations and sold baleen beginning in the late 1700s. At the Pribilof Islands in 1786–1787, Aleut hunters under Russian control gathered, in addition to fur seal and sea otter pelts, “more whalebone [baleen] than the ship could carry.”⁸

Taking note of the lucrative whaling industry conducted by Americans in the 19th Century, Russian-American Company officials explored the possibility of Russian-controlled commercial whaling. In 1841 they complained of American whaleships in the Aleutians boiling down blubber in inshore waters, the smoke driving away sea otters. About 50 New England vessels visited the Bering Sea that year, each capturing ten to fifteen whales. Whalers refused orders to move out of Russian waters. Russian-American Company director Mikhail Tebenkof proposed to respond by going into the whaling business. The czar concurred, but economics and geopolitics plagued the project. A Russian Finland Whaling Company incorporated in December 1850. Its first vessel, the Finnish-built Suomi, sailed to the Sea of Okhotsk in 1852–1853 and gathered an impressive 1,500 barrels of oil and 21,400 pounds of baleen. A second ship made a similar catch in Alaskan waters in 1853. War in the Crimea intervened, and an English warship captured and burned the third Russian whaler. A few more whaling voyages produced mediocre results, and the Russians’ tenuous position in Alaska induced the Russian government to consider getting rid of its holdings in North America.⁹ Among other factors, the presence of hundreds of American whaling ships in Alaskan waters in the 1840s and 1850s helped convince the Russians that the United States would be the region’s dominant power, which they preferred to their rival Great Britain.

YANKEE WHALING

Whalers rated the right whale as their top prize for years after they discovered it in large numbers off Kodiak Island. Very similar to the Atlantic right whale so familiar to New Bedford seamen, it moved slowly and contained an average of 125 barrels of oil and 1,250 pounds of baleen. French captain Narcisse Chaudiere sailed the first commercial whaler into Alaskan waters in 1835. His ship Gange brought home oil and baleen from seven right whales. Another French whaler arrived in 1836, and at least one American vessel, the Elbe out of Poughkeepsie, New York, followed in 1837. As whale stocks in the southern Pacific gave out around 1840 and news of the promising new whaling grounds spread, Yankee whalers moved north. Baleen for corset stays and skirt hoops came into fashion, driving up the price and focusing attention on right whales. Rapidly proliferating numbers of vessels (Table 3.1) quickly exhausted the pods of right whales in the Gulf of Alaska. By the late 1840s whalers moved through the Aleutian passes into Bristol Bay in the Bering Sea.¹⁰

Inefficient methods of harvesting hastened the decline of the whales. Following a strike by a harpoon, numerous circumstances could result in loss of a whale: the whaleboat being damaged or men injured by flippers or flukes, ropes breaking or being cut by harpoons, men cutting the rope to prevent being pulled down by deep-diving whales or being dragged too far from the ship, harpoons breaking or detaching from the whales, and whales sinking. Men captured well under half the whales they struck, sometimes as few as 20 percent. As whales learned to avoid whaleboats, harpooners had to throw from greater distances, wounding a higher proportion. A large fleet of vessels, each capturing whales and leaving many to die of blood loss or infection, soon decimated the North Pacific right whale population.¹¹

TABLE 3.1. American Whalers and Harvests in the Pacific North of 50 Degrees, 1835–1913

Sources: 1835–1884 figures from A. Howard Clark, “The Whale Fishery,” in George Brown Goode, ed., The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, Sect. 5, Vol.2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1887), 85–86; 1885–1913 data from Reginald B. Hegarty, Returns of Whaling Vessels Sailing From American Ports, 1876–1928. New Bedford: Old Dartmouth Historical Society and Whaling Museum, 1959.

Note: Does not include foreign vessels, about 10–20 percent of total vessels. Harvest data for 1885–1913 listed in year of vessel departure.

Whaling Captain Charles Melville Scammon noted that before the whalers laid waste to them, “the right whales are found singly or in pairs; at times, scattered about as far as the eye can see from the masthead. At the last of the season they are sometimes seen in large numbers, crowded together. . . . Having been chased every successive season for years, these animals have become very wild, and difficult to get near, especially in calm weather.” Portending the ominous future of the North Pacific right whale, he remarked in 1871, “At the present time, but few right whales are taken.”¹² A whaler visited Sitka for repairs in 1891 after grounding in a fog and breaking its rudder while pursuing a wounded whale. It boasted a catch unusual for the time: nine right whales taken in eight days in Prince William Sound. One had dragged a whaleboat underwater and drowned a crew member.¹³ Between 1805 and 1914 whalers landed an estimated 14,480 North Pacific right whales, not counting those struck and fatally wounded or otherwise lost.¹⁴

Whalers sought the sperm whale in the Atlantic and South Pacific and found more in the subarctic waters of the North Pacific. Sperm whales averaged only 45 barrels of oil in their insulating blubber layer. But they carried spermaceti (sperm oil, in the forehead), used to make candles, and the valuable ambergris, an ingredient in perfume. Less favored, the gray whale yielded only 30 barrels of oil and reacted aggressively when attacked. Sulphur bottom (blue), finback, sei, and humpback whales usually swam too fast for the sailing vessels and rowboats.¹⁵

Commercial whalers most highly valued the bowhead, a close relative of the right whale. It migrated between the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, staying close to the pack ice, hence its other name, “ice whale.” When New Bedford whalers first encountered it off the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1843, they realized that it bested the right whale in commercial value. They found bowheads farther north in the Bering Sea.¹⁶ Thomas Welcome Roys examined the reports and determined that there must be a concentration of whales in Arctic waters. As captain of the Superior out of Sag Harbor, New York, he signed a crew for the South Atlantic fishery but took them to the North Pacific. There, in the Bering and Chukchi seas, they discovered a treasure trove of large, slow-moving bowheads. Their catch of eleven set off a rush to the Western Arctic, reviving the whaling industry.¹⁷

A bowhead contained up to 300 barrels of oil (about 100 on average and less as whaling progressed) and a possible 2,500 pounds (1,100 on average) of baleen.¹⁸ Manufacturers used baleen in corsets, women’s hats, buttons, upholstery, suitcases and trunks, fishing rods, buggy whips, and springs. Whale oil served in cooking, lamps, soap, candles, paint and varnish, and as a lubricant. Eskimos had relied on the bowhead more than any other great whale and hunted it for over a thousand years, landing a few each year. The meat and oil furnished food and lighting by stone lamps, the bones a variety of tools and weapons. Eskimos used baleen for many implements: ropes, gillnets, crab traps, containers, sleds and sled runners, snares, spring baits, spear and harpoon tips, knife blades, rivets, and toys.¹⁹

Whalers at first found the bowheads docile, trusting, and easy to kill. After being pursued for a season or two, however, they grew shy and elusive. In 1849, the second year of bowhead whaling in the Chukchi Sea, a ship’s log recorded “plenty of whales in sight but all hands too busy [processing whales] to look at them.”²⁰ The catch of North Pacific whales peaked in 1852 during an assault by nearly 300 vessels (Table 3.1), most seeking bowheads.

Captain William Mogg and bowhead whale baleen, ca. 1916. Willoughby coll. 72-116-12n, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. Mogg and other Arctic whalers depleted the bowhead whales.

Whaling ships normally deployed four or five whaleboats propelled by oars and, in the case of bowhead whales, sails to avoid alarming the quarry. Early whalers threw an iron harpoon, let the whale tow the boat by a 600-foot rope until exhausted, and drew alongside and lanced it to death. This method allowed bowheads to escape under the ice. By 1880 inventors devised a darting gun, a harpoon bearing an explosive projectile that, if properly aimed, could kill a whale instantly. The crew towed the dead whale to the mother vessel and fixed it to the side. Then they carved it so its head and blubber could be hoisted aboard, the blubber boiled for oil, and the head stripped of baleen. Cooking an average bowhead lasted about 36 hours. During the return voyage the crew dried the baleen on deck and tied it in bundles of 22 slabs, each weighing about 80 pounds. Crews received pay based on their rank and the value of the catch. Despite risking their lives in difficult work, seamen usually made no financial gain, often owing money to the whaling companies, from which they bought their supplies at inflated prices.²¹

Technological change kept North Pacific whaling alive in the latter half of the 19th Century. Completion of the transcontinental railroad improved the cost-effectiveness of Alaska whaling, as did the invention of the shoulder-fired harpoon gun and a similar device, the bomb lance. Steamships also revised the economics of Arctic whaling, being less subject to entrapment in the ice. The first steam whaler designed for bowheads, the Mary and Helen out of Maine, entered the Arctic in 1880. San Francisco became the primary supply, shipbuilding, and whale oil processing center for the Pacific. For fuel, steam whalers tapped coal deposits in northwestern Alaska, although most coal had to be shipped from the States. At a high point in 1887 one vessel tallied 28 whales, and a total of 526,000 pounds of baleen reached San Francisco.²²

To capture inshore whales, companies set up shore whaling stations, hiring Eskimo or white crews of about twenty men each. Shore stations could operate earlier in the spring, later in the fall, and closer to the ice pack than whaling ships could. Fifteen such stations operated in the Bering and Chukchi seas by the end of the 1880s. Crews killed whales in a traditional manner except for the use of handheld bomb guns. Between 1852 and 1914, company-controlled and independent Eskimo shore whalers captured an estimated 626 bowheads.²³ From 1848 to 1909, pelagic whalers tallied about 29,500 North Pacific bowheads.²⁴

Charles Brower—who arrived in 1884, became a shore whaler near Point Barrow, and remained as a trader—dispatched a scout in 1888 to investigate rumors of bowhead whales congregating off the Mackenzie River Delta. The tales turned out to be true, setting off a last surge of Arctic steam whaling. Companies sent north the first ships to over-winter in 1890–1891, and one, the Mary D. Hume, stayed two winters. It reaped a plentiful harvest of bowheads on the eastern Mackenzie Delta.²⁵ As many as fifteen ships remained through the winters, most near Herschel Island, to get an early start on summer whaling.²⁶ Ship-based whaling continued until 1916 but made few highly profitable catches after 1899. Beginning in 1870 the price of whale oil had sunk as petroleum products became available. But the price of baleen rose, reaching a peak in 1905. Whalers responded by taking baleen only, wasting the remainder of the whale except for those taken at shore stations and given to Eskimos.²⁷

Eskimo whaling station, Cape Prince of Wales, 1891 or 1892; revenue cutter Bear offshore. Bear coll. 89-193-116, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. Some Natives operated their own shore-based stations, selling the whales or baleen to whaling ships.

Arctic whaling posed dangers for the sailors as well as the whales. Captain Roys related the experience of his bark Sheffield, returning in 1850 full of oil and baleen, as a gale drove it toward the cliffs in the Fox Islands passage through the Aleutians:

With great exertion we got the mainsail upon her. All was done that man could do to save the ship with every man at his post, two men at the helm. Some are weeping, some are praying, some in sullen silence look upon the all exciting scene and calmly await the stroke of death. At this critical moment the gale increases. The tremendous weight of sail is making the ship . . . groan throughout her extreme length. The sea is breaking over her, throwing the spray upon her topsails and wetting down the men at her helm, her leerails are under water. No word is spoken, for the proud ship is laboring with destiny and with fearful speed she staggers on, bearing all on board to safety or instant death. Onward she drives, until only one wave is between us and the rocky bottom, here at a distance of about 100 feet [from shore]. Then the memories of years go flying through the brain, the cheek turns pale, the heart beats thick and the boldest hold their breath. In another moment she is free and a shout of joy resounds through the ship. The rocks are passed and orders to reduce sail are obeyed with alacrity and she runs in safety o’er the sea.²⁸

Captain Henry Pease of the Champion out of Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard recounted an even less enjoyable experience in 1870. After a strenuous whaling effort south of Point Barrow, bad weather forced his vessel southward on October 4. Howling winds and “the heaviest sea I ever saw” drove the ship through Bering Strait, smashing whaleboats, equipment, and barrels of whale oil and leaving the ship covered in ice and oil. It nearly foundered, but the wind slackened just before it would have struck St. Lawrence Island. Pease called the episode “the most anxious and miserable time I’ve ever experienced in all my sea service.”²⁹

As might be expected, whaling vessels often came to grief. Normally the unfortunate ones ran into storms and ice, but even war took a toll. During the Civil War, Confederates sank Yankee whalers off the East Coast. In June 1865 their warship Shenandoah sailed to the North Pacific and destroyed 38 whaling vessels, unaware that the war had ended.³⁰

As dangerous as whaling had been elsewhere, it could hardly outdo the Western Arctic for risk. A combination of ice, storms, and cold conspired to call dozens of vessels and scores of men to untimely ends. Almost every year a few ships went down, and in 1871 most of the Arctic fleet did so. When the bark Japan wrecked off East Cape that spring, 8 men died in a long survival march over the ice. As the fleet worked to the northeast between Cape Belcher and Icy Cape, officers chose to ignore warnings by the Eskimos that the wind would drive the ice pack ashore and trap them. The wind changed and the ice came in, crushing some vessels and forcing eighteen into a narrow strip of water not connected to any escape route. At length the captains decided to abandon their ships and transport their 1,219 passengers and crew southward by whaling boats to open water to be rescued by other whaling vessels. They succeeded in saving all hands despite heavy seas that threatened to swamp the rowboats. Thirty-two vessels had been lost, including Captain Henry Pease’s Champion.³¹

Five years later, in 1876, ice again caught most of the fleet of eighteen American and two foreign whalers. Abandoning their ships to walk to others not icebound, several of the 300 men died of exposure. About 50 elected to remain aboard, of whom only one survived by walking to a village. The fleet lost twelve ships that year and seven more during the next three years. These losses hurt the New Bedford whaling industry, and the Arctic fleet’s home port had shifted to San Francisco by 1880.³²

Arctic whaling revived somewhat as steam whalers entered the trade in the 1880s. But at least seventeen more vessels succumbed between 1888 and 1896 and eleven more between 1899 and 1913.³³ The fleet suffered a telling stroke when ten vessels became icebound off Point Barrow in 1897. About 16 men died trying to reach a rescue vessel. Most of the rest, around 300, remained aboard ship or walked to Charles Brower’s whaling station at Cape Smyth. Brower found lodging for the survivors and bade his Eskimo employees hunt caribou to feed them.³⁴

Attempts to rescue the stranded whalers led to epic struggles against the elements. Third Mate George Fred Tilton of the Belvedere and officer Charles Walker from the Orca volunteered to go for help. Walker chose the Mackenzie River route through Canada. Sledging southward accompanied by two Siberian Eskimos on October 1, Tilton reached Point Hope where the Siberians quit the expedition. Tilton enlisted two local Eskimos, Tickey and his wife, Canuanar. The three drove onward through the winter over mountains and treacherous sea ice, so short of food that several times they had to kill dogs to feed the others. Near St. Michael they met Revenue officers planning to drive a herd of reindeer north to relieve the whalers. No one could be certain the reindeer plan would succeed, so Tilton and his companions kept going. They traversed Katmai Pass in early March and spent three days lowering their sleds and dogs down the steep mountain slopes. While crossing a river to get to the small village of Katmai, they lost half their equipment. At Katmai they found an old dory, and Tilton caulked it using his only suit of long underwear. Then, after 1,500 miles by dogsled, the three rowed 37 miles across Shelikof Strait to Kodiak Island. From daybreak to nearly dark, in rare calm water, Tilton rowed while his companions bailed. At St. Paul the Alaska Commercial Company agent demanded an exorbitant fee to take them to Prince William Sound and also charged for their lodging. The three caught a boat to Portland, Oregon, where Tilton wired his company in New Bedford for relief funds. They refused to believe his story, so the three continued to San Francisco, where Tilton found a company willing to send a supply ship. Tilton and his companions arrived in early March and Walker a few weeks later. Vessels not caught in the ice had returned the previous November, prompting a rescue effort by the revenue cutter Bear.³⁵

While Tilton and Walker strove to alert the outside world to the plight of the whalers, word of the crisis had reached Washington. The revenue cutter Bear headed north to aid the rescue but got no farther than Cape Vancouver on Nelson Island. From there Lt. Ellsworth Bertholf struck out by dogsled carrying provisions to Point Barrow, well over 1,000 miles away. Lt. David H. Jarvis and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Samuel J. Call, separately dog-teamed to St. Michael and on to the Seward Peninsula, where they borrowed two reindeer herds to drive to Point Barrow. Their perilous winter journey in temperatures reaching 60 degrees below zero lasted eleven weeks and ended on March 29, 1898. Lt. Bertholf arrived afterward. Yet their strivings did not turn out to be essential; trader Charles Brower had organized a relief effort and made available all the provisions at his disposal. The contingent of more than 300 whalers suffered negligible loss of life.³⁶

20TH-CENTURY WHALING

The invention of spring steel corsets and changes in fashion reduced the value of baleen in 1907, striking a heavy blow against Arctic whaling. High insurance rates and uncertainty of profits took their toll. American commercial whaling nearly ceased in Alaska except for shore stations. A few more vessels ventured north, planning to make the bulk of their profits by bartering trade goods for furs. Arctic shore whaling stations, the first erected at Barrow in 1885, all closed by 1915. A year later two ships carried out the last regular pelagic whaling trip to the Arctic.³⁷

Eskimo whaling crews continued to harvest bowheads for subsistence, primarily food, as they had before the era of commercial whaling. Between 1910 and 1969 they landed an average of about twelve per year. Siberian Eskimos killed a smaller number, perhaps four annually, similar to their take in the 19th Century. Canadian Eskimos occasionally took bowheads for food.³⁸

Having exhausted the right and bowhead whales and lost most of the baleen market, modern whalers looked for different species found at lower latitudes. Accordingly, southerly shore-based stations lasted longer than those in the Arctic. The first opened in the early 1880s on Killisnoo Island in the Southeast but closed after several years. Tyee Company operated at Murder Cove on Admiralty Island between 1907 and 1913. A wounded whale assisted the station’s closing by ramming and sinking one of Tyee’s motorized schooners in 1909. The United States Whaling Company at Port Armstrong on Baranof Island caught a record 314 whales in its first year, 1912, but went out of business in 1923. Norwegians opened a station at Akutan in the eastern Aleutians in 1907, joined by the American-owned United States Whaling Company in 1912, the year the station tallied 310 whales. American Pacific Whaling Company took over the Akutan facility in 1917 and ran it until 1939. The company opened a substation at Port Hobron on Sitkalidak Island in 1926.³⁹ It operated, except for 1931, through 1937.

TABLE 3.2. Shore-Based Commercial Whale Catches in Subarctic Alaska, 1910–1939

Sources: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Fisheries, Alaska fisheries annual reports, 1910–1939; J.N. Tonnessen and A.O. Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 734.

Note: Does not include figures for Arctic shore whaling stations, for 1908–1909 and 1911, or for 778 belukhas caught between 1917 and 1921. Two of the bowheads listed (in 1917 and 1923) in Bureau of Fisheries data were actually right whales (J.J. Brueggeman, T. Newby, and R.A. Grotefendt, “Catch Records of the Twenty North Pacific Right Whales From Two Alaska Whaling Stations, 1917–39,” Arctic 39, 1 [March 1986]: 44–45).

Catcher boats from these stations concentrated primarily on the faster-moving sperm, blue (or sulphur bottom), humpback, and finback whales (Table 3.2), although they pursued right whales whenever sighted. A company employee estimated the 1913 value of whale species at: humpback $400, finback $500, blue $600, sperm $1,000, and right whale $2,000. In the same year the United States Whaling Company paid catcher boat gunners $5.50 for each humpback returned, $10.50 per finback, $13 per blue, $30 per sperm, and $50 per right whale. By the mid-1920s, blues surpassed sperm whales in value. Kills of right whales ceased in the mid-1930s after the adoption of protection measures.⁴⁰

Employing bow-mounted harpoon guns on motor-driven boats, men prowled for whales in the surrounding ocean waters. From a distance of about 120 feet the gunner fired an explosive harpoon into the quarry. Held fast by the rope, the animal would be played like a fish and hauled in by a power winch. Air pumped into the carcass prevented it from sinking. The boat towed the catch to the shore station for processing. Blubber, bones, and meat went into separate cookers for different grades of oil. Oil from the heads of the relatively scarce and valuable sperm whales went into other casks. The United States Whaling Company station at Port Armstrong could handle 500 whales in a season.⁴¹ Whales supplied oil, fertilizer, dog food, hides (in the case of belukhas), and, to some extent, human food.⁴² Stations at Cook Inlet and Nome (ca. 1917–1920) and Golovnin Bay (ca. 1920) caught belukhas to sell their skins for white gloves. Settlers sometimes objected to whaling because whales helped fishermen by driving the herring ashore and into their nets.⁴³

Between 1910 and 1920, ten shore stations operated from California to the Aleutians. A postwar recession and a glut of oil from Antarctic whaling put most eastern Pacific stations out of business. From the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s only two Canadian stations (Rose Harbor and Naden Harbor in the Queen Charlotte Islands) and two in Alaska (Akutan and Port Hobron) functioned, and not every year. The Great Depression and competition from Antarctic whaling further squeezed the shore stations, closing them for the 1931 season. The 1929 invention of a process to make margarine from whale oil helped keep the industry alive. But aging equipment caused accidents and raised costs. A gun fell backward when fired and killed the gunner. Catcher boats became so frail that the pressure from towed whales nearly stove in their sides. The Akutan station, the only one remaining in Alaska, ceased operation in 1939. Temporarily revived activity at Rose Harbor and Port Ellice, California, ended Northwest whaling in 1942 and 1943 until after the war.⁴⁴

Japan maintained shore-based whaling stations as far north as the Kurile Islands throughout most of the 20th Century. On the eastern side, stations operated from California to Akutan in the Aleutians between 1905 and 1969, run by Americans, Norwegians, Canadians, and Japanese. Whaling at these sites affected Alaska stocks and vice versa because blue, humpback, fin, sei, and gray whales migrated north and south. Blues and seis tended to stay south of the Aleutians, and other species went into the Bering Sea or farther north. Whale migration complicated conservation efforts by adding uncertainty about population levels. It also encouraged the attitude “If we don’t get them, someone else will.” Periods of high profit, principally during World War I and 1925–1928, inspired greed that sanctioned overkill. Perhaps most important, conservation pleas had to combat the pervasive belief that endless numbers of whales swam the seas.⁴⁵

Harpoon gunner striking finback whale near Akutan. Core coll. 01-2928, Alaska State Library. Steam- or gasoline-driven ships and harpoon guns enabled whalers to kill the faster blue, finback, sei, and humpback whales.

By the late 1920s the need for whale conservation had begun to alter national policies. Sustainability for the whaling industry rather than demands by conservation groups motivated the change. Norway passed a law in 1929 forbidding its citizens to kill right whales, young or mothers with calves, and immature whales, or to waste body parts. Two years later a League of Nations–sponsored International Whaling Convention adopted protection for right and bowhead whales and the young of most species. Eskimos could take bowheads for subsistence provided they employ nonmotorized craft and primitive weapons.⁴⁶ They continued to use explosive weapons but killed only for subsistence.

Worldwide whale harvest shot up by 400 percent during the 1930s and included large-scale killing of immature animals in the Antarctic. Conferences in 1937 and 1938 wrote stricter provisions into whaling regulation. In the North Pacific the agreements protected right, bowhead, and gray whales. They allowed whaling by factory ships only in western waters, a concession to the Japanese whose factory operation had recently been launched. Governments rather than companies would keep statistics on whales caught.⁴⁷

Japan, not a signatory of the 1931 Convention or the 1937–1938 agreements, promised in 1939 to fulfill the agreed-upon provisions but changed its position when war broke out in Europe. Competition among Japan, Germany, Britain, and Norway depleted stocks of blue, finback, and humpback whales in the Antarctic. Whaling continued there until 1941 and revived in 1946, further reducing populations. Meanwhile, a 1946 Washington conference produced the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and its related International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling, which went into effect in 1949. Japan joined in 1951.⁴⁸

Right whale at Port Hobron whaling station, 1926. Described as “15 feet high, 65 feet long, approximate weight 250 tons.” Lagen coll. 7557, University of Washington Archives. Company records list the whale at 62 feet. The weight estimate is almost certainly exaggerated. Commercial whaling nearly destroyed the North Pacific population of right whales.

Factory ships accompanied by motor-driven catcher boats could gather whales more quickly than shore stations could, although high operating costs limited their use. A California company sailed the first American factory whaler between Mexico and Alaska in 1921, got 158 whales, lost money, and quit. Another repeated the undertaking in 1926–1927 and got 568 whales. It hunted various parts of the North Pacific until 1937. In 1940 Japan sent its first factory ship into the north, capturing 681 whales in waters extending to the Bering Sea icepack. A similar venture reaped 590 whales off the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1941. Even higher kills resulted from revival of the voyages in 1950, ranging as far east as Akutan. The Russians operated a factory ship in the North Pacific continuously from 1934 to 1961 and then added others. They caught large numbers of blue, finback, and sperm whales between Kamchatka and the Gulf of Alaska. By the late 1960s the bulk of the world whale harvest had shifted from Antarctica to the North Pacific, where only Japan and the Soviet Union deployed ships. The IWC made ongoing efforts to persuade the two nations to improve conservation practices.⁴⁹

Japanese whalers captured 69 North Pacific right whales prior to the creation of the International Whaling Commission in 1946. They killed another 13 under “scientific” permits between 1956 and 1968, when the permits for right whales expired. Russians, who also had not signed in 1931 but joined in 1937, caught 10 in 1955 under the permits. Adding a near-fatal blow to an otherwise slowly recovering population, they illegally killed at least 251 in the western Gulf of Alaska and 121 in the southeast Bering Sea between 1963 and 1967.⁵⁰

The IWC banned harvest of gray whales in 1946 and of blues and humpbacks in 1966. These three species, the bowhead, and especially the right whale emerged as the most depleted of the great whales in the North Pacific.⁵¹ The phasing out of the American whaling industry, followed by pressure from a growing environmental movement, placed the U.S. government in the forefront of efforts to preserve the great whales through IWC regulations.

By the 1990s some whale populations had recovered fully, others less so. Eastern Pacific gray whales, migrating between the Arctic and Baja California, had never been intensively hunted. They increased to more than 25,000 and continued at 2.4 percent annually. In 1994 they became the only great whale species to be removed from the endangered species list. Russian Natives annually harvested more than 100, and Makah Indians in Washington occasionally killed them in traditional ceremonial hunts.⁵²

Northeast Pacific finback whales ranged from Baja California to the lower Arctic. An estimated 5,000 concentrated for summer feeding in the Bering Sea. Population totals and trends remained unknown. Similarly, no firm estimates existed for sperm whales, ranging widely in offshore waters. Commercial whalers took at least 258,000 of this species in the North Pacific between 1947 and 1987. North Pacific humpback whales included a small population summering along the Aleutians and a larger number summering along the coasts from British Columbia to the northern Bering Sea. Researchers counted 127 near Kodiak Island and 404 in Southeast Alaska. Commercial whalers killed at least 28,000 during the 20th Century and may have reduced the total to as few as 1,000. Biologists believed the population to be increasing in the 1980s and 1990s. Natives did not harvest finback, sperm, or humpback whales.⁵³

Western Arctic bowhead whales, originally numbering between 10,000 and 23,000, shrank to an estimated 3,000 as a result of commercial whaling. Tightened protection under the IWC permitted a growth rate of more than 3 percent and an increase from about 5,000 to 8,200 from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. Eskimos, almost entirely on the American side, harvested a yearly average of 54 in the late 1990s, below the limit of 77 calculated to sustain the population. The far less fortunate North Pacific right whale declined from at least 11,000 to the verge of extinction. Occasional sightings in the Bering Sea in the 1990s included no calves and may have been strays from a small Western Pacific population.

Entanglements in commercial fishing gear and being struck by boats claimed the lives of all great whale species, although not in sufficient numbers to endanger populations other than the right whale. Various disturbances such as airborne pollutants, oil spills, and whale watching posed unquantified but probably minor problems. Researchers could not determine the effects, if any, of climatic warming on North Pacific whales.⁵⁴

COMMERCIAL WALRUS HUNTING

Resource exploiters also found profitable applications for the Pacific walrus. Ivory, one of the commodities sought by Russian fur seekers in Alaska, appeared on returning vessels as early as 1755.⁵⁵ In their first year at the Pribilof Islands in 1786–1787, Pribylov’s Aleut hunters killed enough walruses to yield 14,400 pounds of ivory.⁵⁶ During the 1810s Aleuts collected 7,200 pounds of ivory annually for the Russians, hastening the eventual extermination of walruses at the islands.⁵⁷ The last of the Pribilof herd fell in 1891.⁵⁸

Russians forced Aleuts to hunt walruses on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula. Frederick Litke witnessed the process in the 1820s:

The hunters surround them from the water’s edge then rush in upon them, shouting and crying out, and driving them all inwards towards the middle of the sandbank. They then set upon them with pikes, stabbing them where their skin is least thick. One of the most essential precautions is to prevent any of them from getting to the sea because then the whole herd will follow and it becomes difficult to dodge the tusks of these enraged animals and avoid being knocked down by them and dragged into the sea. This dangerous hunt lasts about ten days. When they are preparing to leave for it, the Aleuts always bid farewell to one another.⁵⁹

Between 1799 and 1857 the Russian walrus kill totaled an estimated 500,000.⁶⁰

Whalers turned their attention to the walrus in the late 1850s in the offseason for whaling and as a substitute for whales a few years later (Table 3.3). The bark Carib out of San Francisco brought in one of the first large catches: 100 barrels of walrus oil in 1860 or 1861. Whalers found the best hunting on the ice floes of the northern Bering Sea. For several years they harpooned the animals; thereafter they used rifles. Customarily, a boat carrying three men approached a herd from downwind. A rifleman clothed in white stepped onto the ice floe, crept up to the herd, and tried to shoot one dead lest it go into the water followed by the others. If the first one fell in place the rest of the herd would stay, and the rifleman could approach the herd and kill many or all of them. Accustomed to the cracking of ice, walruses showed no fear of rifle shots. In this manner one whaling vessel secured 700 walruses in 48 hours and 1,600 in less than three weeks in summer 1877.

TABLE 3.3. Recorded Pacific Walrus Harvests by the Whaling Industry, 1849–1914

Source: John R. Bockstoce, “The Harvest of Pacific Walruses by the Pelagic Whaling Industry, 1848 to 1914,” Arctic and Alpine Research 14, 3 (1982): 187.

Note: Does not include Native subsistence kill or animals killed and lost.

After the killing, crew members removed the heads for ivory and the skin and blubber in strips. Occasionally the warm blood caused the ice floe to melt or split, sending the walruses to the bottom and giving the hunters a cold bath. Aboard ship, crews separated the blubber from the skin strips, diced it, and rendered it into oil in the try-pots used for whale blubber. Cooks often fried the liver and heart and made sausages or roasts of the meat.

Ivory went to carvers in New York, London, Japan, and China. Carvers fashioned handles, dice, dog whistles, and other ornaments. American whalers seldom bothered to keep the skins, although Europeans took them for manufacture of harnesses and shoe soles.⁶¹ Weighing 200 pounds or more, skins sold in London for $1–$1.25 per pound for use in metal polishing and other industrial processes.⁶² In the peak walrus-hunting years of the 1870s, whalers discarded all but a few of the skins. On average they got 20 gallons of oil from a walrus, graded equal in quality to elephant seal oil and marginally superior to whale oil. A large bull walrus could contain 60 gallons. Between 1869 and 1880 whalers gathered an estimated two million gallons of walrus oil. They wasted many animals; one herd of 1,600 killed on a beach all washed away in a high tide.⁶³ Catches and herds atrophied.

Effects on Eskimos

Commercial whaling and walrus hunting greatly affected Eskimo culture, mostly in negative ways. It ended the trading system by which Eskimos obtained Russian goods from Siberia and Hudson’s Bay goods from Canada. To augment profits or avoid losses, whalers increasingly carried trade goods to the Eskimos. Inland Eskimos moved to coastal towns for access to trade items and to work as whalers or walrus hunters. By the turn of the 20th Century, several shore-based Eskimo crews operated on their own, selling baleen and keeping what they needed for food. The collapse of whale populations reduced food supplies of those still relying on them. Whalers carried diseases, periodically devastating local populations. Influenza and measles killed about 300 people at Barrow between 1900 and 1902. Liquor imported by whalers, traders, or whaler-traders proved irresistible and socially destructive, as it did among other Native Americans. One quart of whiskey could bring $200 worth of furs or other products.⁶⁴

Liquor and disease hurt the Eskimos more than the loss of walruses did. In 1873, primarily because of Indian troubles in the West, the U.S. government banned the sale of liquor and breech-loading rifles to Native Americans. Revenue cutter patrols appeared in the Arctic in 1879, but liquor smuggling persisted and the gun ban made it more difficult for the Eskimos to get food and clothing. Prostitution and venereal disease escalated. In 1890 an estimated half of Barrow’s population had syphilis. Large numbers of Eskimos died of introduced diseases, as had other Natives.⁶⁵

In 1877 the whaling brig William H. Allen stopped at Cape Prince of Wales and traded liquor for fox furs. That night the Eskimos got drunk. The next day, sixteen men and a woman returned to the ship in an umiak. The men came aboard and demanded liquor. Captain George Gilley, seeing that they had nothing to trade, refused to give them liquor. Becoming more belligerent, the Eskimos began to push the crew around. First Mate Finnegan lost his temper and struck back, whereupon one of the Eskimos stabbed him to death. The Hawaiian crew then attacked the Eskimos, who retreated under the forecastle. They used boat hooks to pull the Eskimos out one by one, clubbed them, and threw them over the rail into the umiak or the sea. Only the woman survived. The incident soured relations between whalers and Eskimos for years and may have induced the murders of several crew members who went ashore.⁶⁶

Hired Eskimos carried out much of the commercial harvest of walruses on which they had traditionally relied for food, boat coverings, dwellings, leather, and ivory to carve into spearheads and other implements. Once at least, their lack of foresight backfired. According to visiting seafarers, in 1878 St. Lawrence Islanders obtained barrels of whiskey from traders. Then came a season of heavy ice, making hunting difficult. Some combination of alcoholism, bad weather, absence of whales and walruses, starvation, and disease caused ruin. During the winter of 1878–1879 all the people of three villages on St. Lawrence Island died, and only one of the island’s eight villages remained viable. People ate skin houses, boats, and dog harnesses. By 1881 two-thirds of the island’s population of 1,500 had died. As news of the disaster spread, some whaling captains brought loads of food to the Eskimos.⁶⁷

Remains of villagers starved at St. Lawrence Island, early 1880s. In Michael A. Healy, Report of the Cruise of the Revenue Steamer Corwin in the Arctic Ocean in the Year 1884, Washington, DC: GPO, 1889, p. 13. A combination of unfavorable weather and depletion of sea mammals visited ruin on island residents.

Modern analysis led to the conclusion that in 1878–1879 an El Niño event caused warm winds to blow from the south, preventing the normal semi-open ice cover on which walruses and seals hauled out. By contrast, a La Niña event in 1879–1880 blew so cold from the north that it left few openings in the pack ice. In neither year could the St. Lawrence Islanders successfully hunt walruses, already depleted by commercial hunting. Of the fewer than 2,300 people, at least 90 percent died. The population continued to decline for two decades or more despite the immigration of culturally similar Yup’ik from the Chukotka Peninsula. Living patterns changed from dispersed groups to concentration in a few villages. Hunting methods changed from solitary pursuit to groups in umiaks. Ironically, the survivors reaped a valuable harvest of walrus ivory and baleen from the schooner Lolita, wrecked on the coast in the fall of 1880.⁶⁸

Ivan Petroff commented in 1880 that

the trading vessels coming to this [Arctic] region . . . have carried such quantities of alcoholic liquor that the natives have acquired a craving for the same that no longer can be subdued, and this causes them to look for no other equivalent for their furs, oil, and ivory than the means of intoxication. At the same time they become utterly reckless in their pursuit of fur-bearing and other animals, thinking only of satisfying their desire for the present without the slightest thought of the future; and if this state of affairs be continued the extermination of the people, consequent upon the exhaustion of their means of subsistence, can only be a question of time.⁶⁹

Captain Michael Healy, commander of the revenue cutter Corwin, stated that in 1884 liquor caused the only significant conflicts between whites and Eskimos. He described the Eskimo men as “kindly and hospitable” when sober but “demoniac” when drunk: “The most brutal fights occur when they are in this condition. Their long, sharp hunting-knives make frightful wounds, and their rifles are used without stint and often with deadly effect.” Their wives, normally well treated, “are frequently brutally beaten when liquor has frenzied the men.” When the Corwin crew conducted a liquor seizure, “[T]he women recognized us as their friends and used every exertion to assist us in our search.” Healy called for stiffer regulation of liquor and for lifting the ban on repeating rifles and ammunition so Eskimos could more effectively hunt for food.⁷⁰ Patrolling by the revenue cutters, however, caused the whaler-traders to take their liquor to the Siberian side. Alaskan Eskimos then traded their furs and ivory for liquor from the Chukotka Natives, who in turn gave the goods to the whaler-traders for more alcohol.⁷¹

Stories about the walruses surfaced in the mass media. As early as 1869 the Alaska Herald of San Francisco lamented, “American whalemen seem to think of [walruses] as of no consequence, being only anxious to secure the tusks, abandoning the carcass.” The complaint would become familiar a century and more later, when Eskimos took the place of whalers. An editorial in the Alaska Appeal of San Francisco related in 1879:

Sixteen of the nineteen vessels of the Arctic which have arrived at this port during the past month have brought 27,500 pounds of ivory, consisting entirely of tusks of the walrus, and 4,000 pounds were lost in the Mercury. This is an average of 1,853 pounds to the vessel. . . . Let us be moderate in our estimate, and say that 10,000 walruses have been destroyed this season. We have characterized this wholesale destruction as wanton; it were, perhaps, more fitting to term it criminal. . . . [We are told by] intelligent and truthful masters of whaling vessels, that “for every one hundred walruses taken a family is starved.” The season’s slaughter, then[,] represents the sufferings and death of thirty-five families, and the word families implies that at least as many helpless mothers have striven ineffectually to ward off the death pangs of their still more helpless little ones. The total value of the ivory brought to San Francisco this season cannot exceed $3,500, for of late years the market has been glutted, and the price at which this article is sold is actually not over ten cents per pound.⁷²

People in the villages between Point Hope and Barrow traditionally consumed about 500–600 walruses annually, but by 1890 they seldom got more than 10.⁷³ One critic of the slaughter, missionary Sheldon Jackson, Alaska’s general agent of education, visited northwest Alaska in 1890. He learned of the steep reduction of sea mammals, caribou, and Eskimos over the previous fifteen years. He blamed the commercial whalers directly for the losses of whales and walruses and attributed the disappearance of caribou to breech-loading rifles the Eskimos had recently acquired. At King Island in 1891 he found the inhabitants in a state of starvation, eating seaweed and, in some cases, their dogs. Captain Healy steamed the revenue cutter Bear 200 miles to the nearest trading post and bought food to tide the islanders over to the next hunting season. Jackson organized a reindeer industry (Chapter 14) as an alternative economic base for the Eskimos.⁷⁴

Cash wages stimulated wants and needs, many artificial, from industrial society. Visits by whalers, traders, and other Europeans or Euro-Americans reinforced values that weakened Eskimo traditional cultures. The shift toward a cash economy increased dependency on outside technology and income opportunities. Eskimos voluntarily participated in the changes, benefiting in some ways and suffering in others.

20th-Century Walrus Hunting

Predation of walruses did not end when the great whaling fleets no longer journeyed to the Arctic. During the Gold Rush era, passengers on steamships bound to and from the Yukon River shot hundreds of walruses from the rails as they passed by. By 1900 the walrus had virtually disappeared south of Nunivak Island. The entire North Pacific herd had been cut down drastically.⁷⁵ The U.S. government halted commercial hunting of the walrus in 1908 after it had become less profitable.⁷⁶

The new law restricted the take of walruses in American waters to Natives for food and clothing, to scientific collectors, and to others in emergencies. But walrus hunters simply moved outside the three-mile limit and resumed operations. Charles Madsen, contracted by the Hibbard Stewart Company in 1909, gathered 100,000 pounds of walrus hides to be used on polishing wheels and for women’s handbags. Hunting in Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea from Nome in the summer, he usually took aboard his schooner Sea-Wolf ten Eskimos and their one-man kayaks plus two umiaks. He picked them up at King Island, Cape Prince of Wales, and Little Diomede. They sailed north until they spotted walruses on ice floes, launched the skin boats, and quietly approached from downwind. First they tried to shoot the lookout animal and, next, as many others as quickly as possible before they slid into the sea. They shot some in the water and speared them with ivory-tipped harpoons tied to sealskin floats to prevent sinking. To be lethal, a bullet had to strike a walrus on the neck vertebrae, in the brain through the eye, or from the side or rear of the head. The Eskimo crew undertook the heavy work of skinning the animals, some weighing 3,000 pounds or more, and feasted on meat, blubber, and clams taken from the stomachs. Successful trips could reap 40 to 50 walruses per day, the skins weighing 300 to 400 pounds each.⁷⁷

Polar bear struck by bullet, off Point Barrow, 1920. By J. Hadley. Powell coll. 64-43-201, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. Explorers, whalers, sport hunters, and others shot polar bears without concern for the survival of the species.

Crews salted the hides and stowed them in the hold, to be sold at 7.5 cents per pound and shipped to Seattle for processing. Each member owned an equal share of the ivory, although Madsen received nearly all of it in exchange for trade goods. Much of the meat and blubber went back to the hunters’ home villages. The crew also shot many hair seals and polar bears. At least five other walrus-hunting vessels operated at that time: Captain Louis Lane’s Polar Bear, Olaf Swanson’s Nanook, C.T. Pederson’s King and Winge, and the Norwegian Kit.⁷⁸ The Kit, a factory whaler, had arrived in 1912 and returned in 1913 and 1914. Unable to find whales, it took on Eskimo hunters and pursued walruses in the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea. It collected about 2,400 walruses, but the owners lost money on the venture and sold the vessel to Russia.⁷⁹

Walrus sport hunter and trophy, Chukchi Sea, 1913. In Edward M. Scull, Hunting in the Arctic and Alaska, Philadelphia: Winston, 1915, p. 124. Sport hunting added, if modestly, to the strain on the walrus population.

Like many undertakings in wild corners of the North, walrus hunting offered moments of peril. Chasing a wounded bull in his umiak, Madsen fended off repeated attacks by the enraged beast, which nearly succeeded in sinking the boat. When an Eskimo arrived to assist, the bull tore his kayak to pieces, and the hunter survived by getting behind the bull’s head and hanging on to the tusks. A near-drowning followed when the walrus dove, the hunter still clinging to it.⁸⁰

Madsen guided sport hunters for walrus, as did other captains. F.E. Kleinschmidt chartered Captain Larsen’s Abler out of Nome for a 1913 trip by four wealthy men from the East Coast. They bagged 14 animals but lost at least 24 more killed or wounded. They noted that the Kit had taken 900 skins that year, raising protests.⁸¹ Sport hunting, while far more modest in impact than commercial ventures, nevertheless aggravated the scarcity of walruses, to the detriment of Eskimos.

Eskimos, however, on their own killed large numbers of walruses from the American shores. They hunted the animals on the ice, removed the tusks, and left nearly all the bodies. Biologist Joseph Bernard traveled 200 miles along the coast north of Point Hope in the summer of 1923 and counted the walrus bodies that had drifted ashore. He found more than 1,000, two-thirds of which had their tusks cut off. The rest, presumably, had been shot and lost. Walruses no longer dared to come ashore where they could more easily be harvested for food. Bernard recommended that a 25-mile stretch of shoreline formerly used as a walrus haulout be declared a walrus preserve, as had been done by the Chukchis on the Siberian side. The preserve did not materialize, but in 1925 the village council of Gambell on St. Matthew Island imposed restrictions on hunting walruses for ivory only.⁸²

During the Great Depression the Bureau of Indian Affairs assisted Eskimos in organizing cooperative stores and a handicraft industry, including ivory carving, as substitutes for the failing reindeer and trapping economies.⁸³ The 1941 “Walrus Act” limited hunting on the American side to Native Americans. It set no numerical limits on kills or on the export of ivory but prohibited killing solely for ivory. Carving expanded into an industry in the 1940s and, by the early 1950s, the economies of King Island, Gambell, Savoonga, and Little Diomede depended primarily on it. University of Alaska student Jim Brooks, one of the first to do research on the walrus, estimated the kill on Little Diomede at six to ten times what would be needed for food and skins. Regarding hunting methods, he observed that

harvest techniques now employed unquestionably destroy, without recovery, more walrus than are secured. The Eskimo hunters, at least the older ones, are not ignorant of efficient killing methods, but fail to practice them when game appears abundant. . . . In so far as the writer could discern, the people of the Bering Strait feel absolutely no remorse over the wholesale loss of animals during the hunt; at the onset they stoically expect to lose more than they recover.

Wasteful practices included uncoordinated shooting, failure to use harpoons, and killing to prevent possible attack by immature walruses.⁸⁴

Compared with an original population of possibly 200,000, the walrus herd in the North Pacific dropped to a conservatively estimated 40,000 by the mid-1920s. Russian seal hunters and Eskimos continued to kill them at a high rate between 1931 and 1957 but phased out the killing by 1962.⁸⁵

After mid-century, walruses recovered but ivory hunting increased. In 1956 Congress amended the law to allow sport hunting, again outlawed by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Walrus numbers rose gradually during the late territorial period, and surveys done in 1960–1961 placed the total at about 85,000. In 1960 Alaska reserved the Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary in Bristol Bay. At that time Round Island in the Walrus Islands functioned as the only remaining regularly used haulout site on the American side.⁸⁶

The State of Alaska maintained jurisdiction over walruses between 1960 and 1972, regained it briefly from 1976 to 1979, and then relinquished it. The state encouraged sport hunting before 1972 and stiffened restrictions to discourage ivory hunting. Recorded walrus kills in the postwar and early statehood years averaged fewer than 2,000 annually. Subsistence kills totaled nearly 3,000 in the 1970s. The walrus population swelled to an estimated 140,000–200,000. But so did killing for ivory, even in the more conservation-oriented villages of Gambell and Savoonga. Eskimos killed for ivory to help pay for new boats, television sets, and other modern goods. As snowmobiles replaced dogsleds and aluminum skiffs succeeded umiaks, the need for walrus skins declined. Hunters concentrated on ivory and justified it by citing their right to subsistence. To them, the discarding of walrus bodies could not be considered criminal while such a high and perhaps excess population of the animals existed.⁸⁷ Yet the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited wasteful killing. In a modern form, conflict persisted among the ideals of mammal protection, communal subsistence living, and modernizing lifestyles.

Eskimo carver, Nome, ca. 1887. Powell coll. 64-43-213, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. A traditional cultural and commercial activity, ivory carving helped sustain the Eskimo economy after World War II.

At the end of the 20th Century, biologists believed North Pacific walruses numbered between 200,000 and 250,000. Eskimos on the American and Russian sides accounted for nearly all known kills; an insignificant number died in fishery-related entanglements. In the 1990s the annual toll, including a 42 percent loss rate of those struck by bullets, averaged about 5,000. Neither hunting nor other known causes of mortality posed a measurable threat to the walrus herd.⁸⁸ But future commercial exploitation of underwater clams could be a problem, and the effects of climatic warming remained to be determined.

Walrus herd at Walrus Islands haulout, Bristol Bay, ca. 1957. By William H. Sholes. Alaska Game Commission, 19th Annual Report, July 1, 1957 Thru June 30, 1958. The islands became one of the first state wildlife sanctuaries in Alaska.

SEA LIONS AND HAIR SEALS

Commercial uses for other pinnipeds cut into their numbers during the Russian and American periods. Alaska Natives, especially Aleuts, had traditionally pursued Steller sea lions and hair seals for food, oil, and hides to make clothing and construct baidarkas for sea mammal hunting. A population of about 15,000 sea lions found at the Pribilofs underwent continuous assault during the fur-seeking era. Organized hunts at Northeast Point on St. Paul Island in the early 1870s proceeded as follows: Aleut hunters selected a moonlit night to approach the rookery. They crept onto the beach, frightened the animals inland, spent up to three weeks assembling them into a group of several hundred, and drove them to the village ten to twelve miles away. To avoid stressing the animals to the point to death, the final trip lasted a minimum of three days. After the slaughter, some of the skins went to the Aleutians for sale at 60 cents each.⁸⁹ Pribilof Islanders kept some for making boats. Aleuts used dried intestines for waterproof jackets, flipper skins for shoe soles, whiskers for hat decoration, and fat for oil lamps and fire fuel.⁹⁰

By the 1870s white commercial sealers looked for the Steller and California sea lions when other, more profitable seal hunting waned. Some obtained oil or skins to be turned into glue, but they made the easiest money in the “trimmings” trade. Chinese bought the whiskers for toothpicks and opium pipe cleaners, the male genitalia as aphrodisiacs, and the gall bladders for medicinal purposes. Hunters approached a haulout site by land, shot a few males before the herd plunged into the water, cut off what they wanted, and left the carcasses. The Steller population fell precipitously in California and did not recover.⁹¹

At the high point of exploitation, sea lions grew so scarce in the Aleutians that skins had to be imported from Baja California.⁹² Hunters allegedly killed sea lions to reduce the supply available to their competitors.⁹³ Unregulated taking of the creatures continued into the 20th Century. In 1913 a lack of fur seals induced the Aleuts to kill sea lions on St. George Island, mainly to feed foxes being raised for fur. The rookery ceased functioning in 1916. At Northeast Point, a breeding colony that numbered 10,000 in 1872 dwindled to 120 adults in 1914. To preserve the Pribilof population the island manager banned harvest of pups and females.⁹⁴ Tolerance of human activity around rookeries varied widely; in some cases the herds survived repeated incursions by hunters. Relying on such precedents, Fish and Wildlife Service officials permitted Aleuts to take sea lion pups from a revived Northeast Point herd beginning in 1949. A decade later the site, the only Steller sea lion rookery in the world accessible to observers on foot, lay abandoned.⁹⁵

Of the four or five known sea lion rookeries in the Pribilofs active in 1867, none showed breeding activity in 1960, although sea lions visited all of them as haulout sites. Walrus Island, formerly the breeding site of the walrus herd, then operated as the only sea lion rookery in the Pribilofs for its partially restored population of about 6,000. Researchers could not determine whether harassment by hunters and tourists might have driven the animals from Northeast Point to Walrus Island or why the population had not made greater recovery in several decades of restricted hunting.⁹⁶

No longer needed for baidarkas to hunt sea otters and less relied upon for food and clothing by Natives, Steller sea lions recovered in the 20th Century. They became best noted for raiding salmon nets. Fishermen shot many of them, and predator control agents (Chapter 13) killed some in the vicinity of fishing operations. Fisheries officials investigated possible uses of the animals to take pressure off fish stocks. They found that leather manufacturers did not want the skins because of numerous cuts and scars. The meat, though palatable, would serve only a specialty market. Fox farmers rated it highly as feed, but the fox business evaporated in the 1950s. Pet and fish food would require removal of most of the fat. Processing, preservation, and transportation from distant sites might impose prohibitive costs.⁹⁷ A revived fur market prompted the killing of 65,000 pups at rookeries between 1959 and 1972. Then the Marine Mammal Protection Act restricted sea lion killing to Native Americans for subsistence purposes and to fishing operations on a limited permit basis. Management passed from state to federal control.⁹⁸

Sea lion breeding male, Northeast Point, St. Paul Island. By Victor B. Scheffer. FWS 428, Alaska Resources Library and Information Services. Heavily hunted for meat and skins, sea lions abandoned Northeast Point as a breeding colony site.

In the 1970s, populations of sea lions, hair seals, and fur seals started a downhill slide. By the mid-1980s they had shrunk by about half, and the trend continued. An ongoing debate and research program suggested that reduced food supply, possibly caused by commercial fishing or changes in ocean temperature, accounted for most of the losses. In 1990 the National Marine Fisheries Service declared the Steller sea lion a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.⁹⁹ By the end of the century the western population (Aleutians to central Gulf of Alaska) numbered a minimum of 39,000, compared with 140,000 in the late 1950s. Now listed as endangered, it continued to decline at more than 4 percent annually despite measures to restrict fisheries in its feeding zones. The Southeast Alaska population, by contrast, rose by an annual 6 percent through the 1980s to a total of more than 15,000.¹⁰⁰

Hunters commercially exploited the smaller but widespread harbor seals beginning in 1889 and took large numbers for bounty payments between 1927 and 1967.¹⁰¹ Alaska Natives traditionally hunted them for subsistence purposes, employing a variety of capture methods. Hunters might sit on the rocks at haulout sites and attract seals by calls and sealskin decoys. When the seals approached, the hunters clubbed or speared them or frightened them into a net stretched offshore. Hunters paddled up to seals sleeping in seaweed, attached hooks tied to sealskin floats, and killed the seals when they tired. Chugach Eskimos stood in the water near haulout sites on stormy nights and speared seals by means of harpoons on long poles. In winter they loaded stones into a skin boat to lower it to the water line and positioned a large piece of ice on the bow. Approaching the quarry, a hunter speared it through a hole cut in the ice. Pulling the dead seal aboard, the hunters threw out an equivalent weight of stones. They repeated the process until they acquired a maximum load of ten or twelve seals.¹⁰²

Tlingits approached swimming seals by canoe or lay waiting in their boats among the ice floes until seals surfaced nearby. They shot or speared the animals and, if the spear had no float attached, they hurried to recover the quarry before it sank. At rookeries they killed pups by clubbing them. Women in camp removed the skin, separated the blubber, and heated it in a pot to render it into seal oil. They dried the skin and soft parts, the latter to be eaten. They sewed skins into footwear, some to be sold as tourist items. Seal oil would be consumed as food or sold for local consumption. A two dollar bounty in 1931, increased to three dollars in 1939, induced some hunters to kill seals for the bounties and discard the bodies. Tlingits used an undetermined percentage of the seals for meat, oil, and handicrafts.

Between 1931 and 1945, hunters, about 85 percent Alaska Natives, collected bounties on approximately 890 seals per year. From 1963 to 1965 a shift in the European fashion industry drove up the price of sealskins, resulting in large-scale killing. A downturn in the fur market and termination of the bounty in 1967 took the pressure off the harbor seals.¹⁰³

A predator control program (Chapter 13) to protect commercial fisheries accounted for about 38,000 harbor seals in the 1950s. From 1927 to 1957 the territory and state paid bounties on more than 358,000 hair seals of all species.¹⁰⁴ The decrease of hair seals may at times have inconvenienced coastal Natives, although no species approached extinction. The 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act ended all commercial killing but, soon thereafter, harbor seals accompanied the sea lions and fur seals in a steep downward trend.¹⁰⁵ In the late 1990s Alaska harbor seal estimates stood at (1) Bering Sea and Aleutians: a minimum of 13,000, possibly stabilized and increasing; (2) Prince William Sound to Unimak Pass: 29,000 and possibly increasing; and (3) Southeast Alaska: 35,000 and increasing. In general the trend appeared to slow or reverse the declines of the 1970s and 1980s. Direct contact with fisheries accounted for little of the mortality, but possible effects of food supply removal by fisheries remained unknown. Subsistence harvest by Natives approximated 2,700 seals annually, about two-thirds in Southeast Alaska.¹⁰⁶ As for sea lions, fur seals, and sea otters, the central causes of population loss likely included killer whale predation, commercial fishing, and climatic change.¹⁰⁷

PROSPECTS FOR WHALES AND PINNIPEDS

North Pacific whales, walruses, sea lions, and some hair seals experienced their most intensive exploitation in the near-absence of public commitment to conservation values. Utilitarian regulatory steps to sustain species generally waited until short-term economic advantage no longer existed, especially under American rule. Even the apparent danger to Eskimo populations proved insufficient to curb the commercial slaughter. Government and corporate accountability extended only to the point of avoiding species extinction—even if, as for the right whale, the efforts might well be too feeble and too late. Almost no public participation evidenced itself, and the scant scientific data available had minimal impact on policy.

Apathy toward most sea mammals in the century before Alaskan statehood stood in sharp contrast to the attitudes of the last three decades of the 20th Century. The lack of concern stemmed from a series of particular conditions. Killing took place thousands of miles away, often in international waters, out of sight of video cameras. Insufficient scientific knowledge of far-ranging oceans made them an alien and mysterious world in the eyes of the public. Virtually no one perceived the ocean as a functioning ecosystem. Almost no one could know the whale as a gentle, intelligent creature. Whale products, primarily oil, eased the lives of vast numbers of people, and the whaling industry enjoyed a venerable reputation. The walrus, to the extent that people held any image of it, seemed ugly and perhaps fearsome. Large numbers of sea lions died to supply boats for industrial-scale sea otter hunting, to which few objected. Euro-Americans placed a high value on salmon fishing and readily endorsed the slaughter of seals and sea lions as nuisances. Technology of the period lacked the capacity to accurately count sea mammal populations and permit timely warning of their endangerment. The wide variety of whales and pinnipeds deterred focus on a single species such as the fur seal or sea otter. And no dominant figure like Henry W. Elliott pled the animals’ cause. Salvation for the sea creatures awaited changes in economics and communications technology.

All Alaskan sea mammal species survived to statehood, albeit some by a small margin. Beyond statehood they encountered a different set of conditions: waning of markets for their body parts (walrus ivory a glaring exception), rising public interest and concern for their preservation, and degradation of their physical environment by commercial fishing, various disturbances, and pollution. Inexorably they moved into the realm of environmental politics.

As the food demands of an ever-multiplying human population exhausted fishing grounds elsewhere, attention turned to the North Pacific. Directly and indirectly, whales and pinnipeds now had to compete against modern fishing machinery for their space and sustenance. Global climate change introduced worrisome uncertainties. Ecosystem sustainability for either consumptive or nonconsumptive purposes called for advanced ecological understanding and international cooperation in research and management. Survival of the sea mammals would tax the knowledge and wisdom of humans into the foreseeable future.