Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat, David Suzuki (Foreword by)

The northeastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, from Cape Cod to Labrador, was the first region in North America to suffer from human exploitation. In this timeless narrative, Farley Mowat describes in harrowing detail the devastation inflicted upon the birds, whales, fish, and mammals of this icy coast—from polar bears and otters to cod, seals, and ducks. Since its first publication some 20 years ago, this powerful work has served as both a warning to humanity and an inspiration for change.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Environment, Nature, Science, Animals, Canada

438 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Farley McGill Mowat was a conservationist and one of Canada's most widely-read authors.

Many of his most popular works have been memoirs of his childhood, his war service, and his work as a naturalist. His works have been translated into 52 languages and he has sold more than 14 million books.

Mowat studied biology at the University of Toronto. During a field trip to the Arctic, Mowat became outraged at the plight of the Ihalmiut, a Caribou Inuit band, which he attributed to misunderstanding by whites. His outrage led him to publish his first novel, People of the Deer (1952). This book made Mowat into a literary celebrity and was largely responsible for the shift in the Canadian government's Inuit policy: the government began shipping meat and dry goods to a people they previously denied existed.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship RV Farley Mowat was named in honour of him, and he frequently visited it to assist its mission.

Reviews

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Farley Mowat (1921–2014) was a famous Canadian nature writer, a fire-breathing critic of modernity’s war on wildness. He spent much of his life close to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, and was an avid outdoorsman. By 1975, he and his wife were becoming acutely aware of the sharp decline of wildlife during their own lifetimes.

Mowat chatted with 90-year olds who confirmed his suspicions, and revealed even more tragedies. Then he began researching historical documents, and his mind snapped. Early European visitors were astonished by the abundance of wildlife in North America, something long gone in the Old World. To them, the animals appeared to be infinite in number, impossible for humans to diminish, ever!

At this point, spirits of the ancestors gave him the heart-wrenching task of writing the mother of all horror stories. His book, Sea of Slaughter, focused on the last 500 years in a coastal region spanning from Labrador to Cape Cod. The book has five parts: birds, land mammals, fish, whales, and fin feet (seals, walrus).

For thousands of years, Native Americans hunted for subsistence, taking only what they needed to survive. Europeans were strikingly different. They suffered from brain worms that inflamed a maniacal obsession with wealth and status. They were bewitched by an insatiable greed that was impossible to satisfy — they could never have enough. Today, scientists refer to this devastating, highly contagious mental illness as get-rich-quick fever — the villain of this story.

In 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed by the Isle of Birds, a rookery for auks (northern penguins). He wrote, “This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been removed.” Auks were large, flightless, fat, and laid eggs in accessible locations (not cliff side nests). Vast numbers were clobbered, salted, and loaded on ships. Others were chopped into fish bait. Many were boiled in large cauldrons to extract the oil from their body fat. In Europe, it had taken over a thousand years to exterminate the auks; in the New World, advanced technology got the job done in just 300 years. The last two died in 1844.

Prior to the emergence of the petroleum industry in the late nineteenth century, civilization acquired large amounts of oil from wildlife — seabirds, whales, walrus, seals, porpoises, and fish. An adult polar bear killed in autumn provided lots of meat, a valuable pelt, and twelve gallons (45 l) of good oil. Animal oil was used for lamp fuel, lubrication, cooking oil, soap, cosmetics, margarine, and leather processing.

There are a number of repeating patterns in the book. The hunger for money was the heart of the monster. Nothing else really mattered. If there were just ten whales left in the world, and they were worth money, the hunters would not hesitate to kill them all. God made animals for us to obliterate. Whenever possible, wildlife massacres were done on an industrial scale — kill as many as possible, as fast as possible.

Conservation was an obscene, profit killing, four-letter word. When there were fewer cod, whales, or seals, the value of each corpse increased. So, the industry got more and bigger boats, used the latest technology, and raced to kill as many as possible, before competitors found them. Rules, regulations, and prohibitions were always issued far too late to matter, and they usually included enough loopholes to make them meaningless. The slaughter industry ignored them, and bureaucrats winked and looked the other way.

Five hundred years ago, cod grew to seven feet long (2.1 m), and weighed up to 200 pounds (91 kg). An observer noted, “Cods are so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them.” Today the average cod is 6 pounds. For many years, they were killed in staggering numbers. By 1968, the cod fishery was rubbished. It has not recovered, because fish mining has also depleted small fish, the cod’s basic food.

Nobody ever confesses to overfishing or overhunting. What happened to the cod? Obviously, they moved somewhere else, we don’t know where. Efforts are made to find them. When searches failed, it was time to seek and destroy scapegoats: whales, porpoises, loons, otters, cormorants, and many others.

In 1850, loons lived in nearly every lake and large pond in the northeast, from Virginia to the high arctic. Hunters rarely ate them, but they were excellent flying targets for gun geeks. When folks noticed salmon and trout numbers declining, it was time to look for loon nests and smash their eggs. Cormorants got the same treatment. Their rookeries were invaded, and all eggs and chicks destroyed. Sometimes they sprayed the eggs with kerosene, to kill the embryos. Birds continued sitting on lifeless eggs, instead of laying new eggs.

Big game hunting was a profitable industry, catering to who found killing to be thrilling. It generated the shiny coins that make men crazy. What could be more fun than cruising around shooting beluga whales? In the old days, many beaches were jam-packed with walrus that could grow to 14 feet long (4.2 m), and weigh up to 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg). Rich lads enjoyed walrus hunting competitions. One guy, in three weeks, killed 84 bulls, 20 cows, and a number of youngsters, not counting those that died unseen after being wounded.

Mature whales and walrus had no natural predators, so they never evolved defensive aspects or strategies. They didn’t need to be aggressive or speedy. They were often curious and friendly. Hunters preferred to kill black right whales. Their bodies had a layer of blubber up to 20 inches (51 cm) thick, containing up to 3,500 gallons (12,250 l) of oil. Abundant blubber meant that the dead ones floated. Other species sank when killed, and were lost. With regard to all whale species, it was common for the number of lost carcasses (sinkers) to exceed the number landed and butchered. Extreme waste didn’t matter as long as the carcasses landed were profitable.

Anyway, Sea of Slaughter is over 400 pages of back-to-back horror stories with no rest stops. The book is painful, disgusting, and illuminating — a mind-bending experience. Reading it puts you into an altered state of consciousness, an otherworldly trance state. Our brains aren’t designed to process flash floods of stupidity.

Many readers will be shocked to see the degree to which screw brained beliefs can turn ordinary people into mindless monsters — an important concept for folks trying to understand the world. Some readers may be tempted to dismiss the foolish destruction as an aspect of the bad old days, when we didn’t know any better. Readers having a larger collection of working brain cells will realize that the greed is still with us, in a multitude of new forms, and it’s destroying more than ever before — a vital idea to grasp.

It’s much easier for us to acknowledge horrors that happened in the past, rather than the horrors our shopping is causing today. History can be powerful medicine when it is taught by competent elders, instead of the usual cheerleaders for wealth, empire, progress, and human supremacy. Mowat was an excellent wordsmith, and a passionate storyteller. You will never forget this one.

Postscript. In 1985, following the publication of Sea of Slaughter, Mowat was scheduled to do a book tour in the U.S. Shortly after boarding his plane in Toronto, customs officials escorted him back off. He learned that he was forever forbidden to travel to the land of freedom — and they wouldn’t tell him why. This was the Reagan era, and Mowat had pissed off many conservatives. Banishment inspired him to write a smart-assed new book, My Discovery of America.

The Sea of Slaughter documentary, with Farley Mowat (1 hr, 45 min) is HERE.

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's horrifying, disgusting, morbid and apalling. It isn't a happy subject matter, but it is well written and intersting. :)

[Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since reading Mowat's "Sea of Slaughter," I can't get a certain picture out of my mind. It is of a sandy ocean beach, miles and miles long, where tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of morse came to socialize every summer until the middle of last century. The morse, or northern walrus, was a stupendous animal, of impressive bearing: a veritable lion of the sea. Yet it comes no more to those grounds, once the largest colony of its kind, out on Canada's Magdalene Islands, off the coast of Québec.

To think that the morse were just a side-show to it all. To think that eventually, with the same energy and relentless mechanical force, we would come to decimate the northern fishery more or less entirely, leaving thousands of perplexed fisher folk stranded in coastal villages, wondering perhaps, just where that many fish could possibly have gone.

On land, as in the water, nature's bounty was scarcely less prolific, the European's first reaction, scarcely less horrendous. Could this be the true, unknown history of North America, lying behind and directly concerning those early pilots and navigators like Cabot and Columbus. 400 or more years of unbelievably short-sighted culling of mighty herds, whether they were whales or bison or a hundred other species of birds and mammals known to have been hunted to the last. This is Mowat's sad chronicle. This is his portrait of what one day perhaps, will generally be known and accepted as history. And the only thing that may stop us is that we find we really don't want to ever learn this sort of truth.

Besides being a remarkable contribution to the literature of ecology and environment, this is also one of Mowat's finest personal efforts. You can see by the very nature of the material that it took a being of remarkable strength just to tackle a project like this, let alone bring it to a conclusion. It's probably true that one can prepare all one's life for just one event. In Mowat's case, without negating any other part of his remarkable œuvre, this may just be it.

[A.K. White · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a game changer for me. I read it with Diet For a New America by John Robbins and come out the other side - vegan. Well, that was a lot of years ago and I'm still vegan. Thank you, Farley and John, for telling the terrible truths. Yes, books can change lives.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books we ALL should read and remember forever!

[SD Mittelsteadt]

I'll return to this book. Very depressing and hard to stick with it.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, powerful. One of the most moving books I've read. 20 years later, the images still stick with me.

[East Bay J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily the most depressing book I’ve ever read, the most horrific horror story. I love Farley Mowat’s writing and it is as good here as ever. The subject matter, however, is diabolical.

Human kind’s ability for and propensity toward cruelty and destruction in the name of progress, be it financial, spiritual, territorial or what have you, is surely one of the most powerful forces ever. European invaders arrived on the east coasts of what we now call Canada, the United States and South America and systematically devastated every plant, animal and human they came upon, from sea to shining sea. This wholesale, cross species genocide, sanctioned first by kings and later by presidents, was carried out by the people with a malicious, lustful glee that would have made any Nazi green with envy.

What I mean is, not only did these plague rats kill everything in sight, they also managed to almost always do it in the most painful, inhumane way possible. Nor was killing one or two or ten our a thousand or ten thousand ever enough. Always, always, as many as could killed would be killed, with the common result that more many slaughtered animals were left to rot where they died.

Sea Of Slaughter is the history of this destruction. Mowat pulls no punches in relating the stories and the statistics. The reader discovers the abundance of life that existed previous to European presence, watches as wave after wave of people shoot, stab, beat and explode thousands upon thousands of animals in the air, on land and at sea and is finally left standing in a modern wasteland, an environment teetering on the edge of total collapse.

The loss is staggering. There used to be penguins as far south as Maine. Polar bears only became known as “polar bears” after all of them south of polar climes were exterminated. The bald eagle, our “symbol of freedom and liberty” here in the U.S., once numbered in the hundreds of thousands before they were made nearly extinct through trophy hunting. Cod today weigh about six pounds; in the 1500’s, cod were often 200 hundred pounds. In the early 1800’s, lobster was called “poor man’s meat” and remained so until it was discovered lobster could be canned and exported, causing what was known as the Lobster Klondike. Early ships arriving in the new world were greeted by the sight of thousands of whales of all species, surfacing and blowing, as far as the eye could see. Today, we pay to go on whale watches, hoping to catch a glimpse of these rare and elusive creatures.

It’s not just the scale of the destruction, however. The sadistic cruelty with which so many animals were killed knows no bounds. Halibut was once considered undesirable and were quite a nuisance to early fisherman. Such a nuisance, in fact, that wood was often wedged in their gills, the fish thrown back and great amusement taken watching it try to get it’s head under water before it finally died. Whalers used enormous harpoons with explosives in the tip. The harpoon would detonate inside the whale, ejecting reversed barbs, which would typically disembowel the unfortunate beast. It could take hours for the whale to die. And it is well documented that baby seals were often skinned alive during seal culls when the initial blow of the club was not enough to kill.

And when a species approaches extinction, still more are murdered in the name of science, so that they can be studied when all living examples of that species are gone.

Never mind the sportsmen. I tend to differentiate them from hunters in the sense that they are not killing for food or clothing. As Dr. Arthur bent said, “gunning is not so much a means of filling up the larder as an excuse for getting out to enjoy the beauties of nature and the way of its wild creatures.” These “sportsmen” pit their technology against animals and call it “sport.” They disguise their blood lust as a love of nature and kill with impunity. John Rowan, an Englishman visiting the Canadian seaboard in the 1870’s, said, “The most luxurious anglers are the Americans… Their rods, their reels, their flies are all works of art; expensive ones, too, as they take care to inform you. They are always self-satisfied, always droll, always hospitable. They never go anywhere without pistols and champagne.” The idle rich, committing active murder.

Did you know the sperm whale got its name because some idiot thought the substance in its head, used as a lubricating oil for fine machinery, was its sperm? If these were the intellectual giants involved, it’s a wonder any animals are left alive at all.

There is also the environmental damage humans have done, resulting in the inadvertent destruction of many species. Oil, in particular, has had a devastating effect on sea life. Mowat talks about a runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico; were we surprised when it happened again in 2010? Consider this; petroleum products replaced many of the products that had previously come from the butchery of whales.

“The secretary of the Smithsonian Institution was said to have remarked that if the current trend continues, there would be few wild creatures ‘bigger than a bread box” left alive by the middle of the twenty first century except those maintained by us for our own selfish purposes.”

Fortunately, the current trend did not continue. It’s been about twenty nine years since Sea Of Slaughter was published and much has been done to rectify the mass destruction humans have wrought on this continent. Not enough, by far, and big business continues to find ways to threaten and endanger plant and animal life, but the level of awareness between 1984 and 2013 is quite improved. And I suppose it’s that desire to increase my own level of awareness that compelled me to read this sad, horrific, depressing history of human depredation. “The living world is dying in our time,” says Mowat; it is still dying, but we have found the cure. The question is, can we get there in time?

“Some who read this book in manuscript found the stories it tells so appalling that they wondered why I had committed myself to five years in such a pit of horrors. What did I hope to accomplish? It is true that this book describes a bloody piece of our past – it records what we have accomplished in one special region during 500 years of tenure as the most lethal animal ever to have appeared on this wasting planet. But perhaps, with luck, this record of our outrageous behavior in and around the Sea of Slaughter will help us comprehend the consequences of unbridled greed unleashed against animate creation. Perhaps it will help to change our attitudes and modify our future activities so that we do not become the ultimate destroyers of the living world… of which we are a part.”

[LibraryCin · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

Farley Mowat looks at the history of some Canadian species of wildlife and how many came to be endangered. This was, of course, mostly due to humans and often the cruel ways they hunted or, in some cases, purposely tried to destroy those animals. Each chapter looks at a different animal or a group of similar animals.

This took me months to read. I started (just) before I had eye issues. My copy of this book is a mass market paperback with small type, so it was (and is) hard for me to read, with only one properly working eye at this point. This is why it took so long to read it. Unfortunately, early on, I sometimes skimmed – not due to the subject matter, but simply because it was hard on my eyes. But when I finally started using an additional targeted light, I found it a very good (though sad and often frustrating) read.

There is a lot of good information (though sad and heartbreaking and often hard to read (and not because of my eyes!)). The book is out of date, however (though I suspect not much has changed). It was originally published in 1984 and there is a very short afterword for the 1997 edition I read, but the afterword pretty much said to update it would really mean writing an entirely new book.

[Riley Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I choose to read this book for my biology book report and for my English book review. I choose this book because it's about the oceans, and I like learning about the oceans. When I started reading this book it was really good but as the book went on and on talking about the same concept it just started to get boring. This book is about the destruction of the north Atlantic seaboard and its wildlife. This book is in third person point of view because its a lot of different people telling Mowat what they think of whats happening and what they have discovered. This book is about how marine life the the North Atlantic Ocean is becoming extinct or is on the verge of becoming extinct. In this book it tells the reader all these different species that were endangered because of humans. This book has like 12 chapters and has 4 or 5 different parts. This book is fiction because its real and has already happened and still is happening. This book is by Farley Mowat. I gave this book a 4 out 5 stars because it just keeps on going about the same stuff but its still really good.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depressing, infuriating, horrifying, frightening - there just aren't enough adjectives to do justice. A passionate chronicle of man's greed and ignorance leading to the destruction of the East Coast ecosystem. Mowat's well-researched descriptions of the incredible abundance of birds, land mammals, fish, whales, and seals - skillfully contrasted with what we are left with today - are eye-opening. Worst of all, the slaughter goes on today - man just changes aims his avarice a new species.
If I had to criticize this book, it's that it becomes repetitive. The story of a "resource" being depleted to the point of "commercial extinction" is a recurring theme. Unfortunately, it's also the story of man's tenure in the New World.
I came away from this book with the feeling that homo sapiens has no right to occupy this planet. I find myself hoping for a pandemic - or alien visitors with a taste for humans. It would serve us right.

[Joshua Diaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the novel,"Sea of Slaughter," I enjoyed how Farley Mowat introduced one of the subjects and was never opinionated, Always supporting the readers with facts and examples. The Foreword by David Suzuki was very well written and set the tone for the rest of the story, in my opinion. It was important to hear an example as a reader of the northern lands and waters where these problems were occurring and how some of the people who have lived there for so long have witnessed them firsthand. Overall it is a very good book and while reading it I can see the great deal of research Mowat did to make this book possible.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very tough to read if you like wildlife, and also a bit dry. But it tells a sad, sad story about our willingness as human beings to deplete the planet of wildlife to fill our greed, bloodlust, and ego.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very hard to read book. Story after story of animals brought to extintion. Quite dry, especially for a Farley book.

[Theresa]

Farley MOWAT, Canadian Legend, so good at tellign the story with details , all the while making it a page turner you can't put down,, this one I will keep!

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sea of Slaughter: A Chronicle of the Destruction of Animal Life in the North Atlantic by Farley Mowat (Chapters Publishing 1994) (333.954) (4014).

Author Farley Mowat was a Canadian naturalist and historian who frequently wrote about the terrible slaughter that Western man has wrought upon northern wildlife. I am a frequent reader of (and sympathizer with) Farley Mowat’s work. This volume is Mowat’s well-written account of the slaughter of untold millions of Canadian fish, marine mammals, land mammals, and seabirds by European market hunters to satisfy man’s greed beginning in the 1400s with the discovery of “The New World.” Sadly, these events continue through the present day as thoroughly chronicled by the author.

This will make you ashamed to be a human being on this planet. Sympathetic readers can take heart in the hope that remnant populations of many of the extirpated species are still sprinkled around the globe and thus will be able to repopulate the Earth with these creatures once man has either disappeared or been reduced to a fraction of the current human biomass.

Shame, shame, shame on all of us.

I purchased a used PB copy in good condition from my local used book seller for $1.50 on 7/1/25.

My rating: 7/10, finished 1/20/26 (4014).

PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

[Kevin Prinoski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wherever humans spread, animals decline sharply in terms of numbers and species. "Sea of Slaughter" documents this sad and repeated occurance primarily with respect to Atlantic Canada. The consistent decimation of wildlife is summarized from historical eye-witness accounts of sailors, Aboriginal Peoples, explorers, fishermen, farmers, and merchants over the past 500 years. Modern scientific evidence is referenced as well. Animal populations and variety of the 21st century are mere vestigial remnants of those when Europeans first landed in the "New World". Among many other species, Atlantic Canada was once home to numerous walrus, polar bears, and vast rookeries of sea birds - all greatly reduced or exterminated by ignorance, blood-lust, and greed that continues to present day. This book is an epitaph for animals and a world that was much biologically richer than ours of today. Highly recommended.

[Steve LaForest · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the gut-wrenching story of how humans progressively destroyed the wildlife of the Eastern Seaboard of North America. From fish to birds to mammals - to any creature that swims, crawls, walks or flies - the rapacious men who came to this continent showed shown no rationality, no sentience, no mercy whatsoever.

Whether your patron saint is Columbus, or Cartier, or Cabot - this is the relentless story of the plunder of our natural world.

I understand that Farley Mowat is persona non grata in the United States - it is apparently still much easier to blame the messenger than the perpetrators. This is not to say that there isn't plenty of blame to go round - those of us north of the border must accept our share of culpability. Not to mention our forbearers back in the old country - those nations with empires that demanded the conquest of every single continent and the requisite destruction of their ecosystems.

[Mark Geisthardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a hard read. In its pages Mowat tells the story of humankinds rape of the sea, and land, and birds of the air who call the far north home, many of which who are only in the far north because they've been killed farther south. As he gives this history lesson he goes species by species, where they used to be in terms of population and location and where they are now (as of 1985) in terms those two same items, population and location along with the causes of their decimation, human greed. It is an important read but not a good one.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

heart breaking

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad, but really thought provocking

[Tracey]

SDMB recco - md2000