The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American steam-whaler Grampus, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go "to the east'ard of P'int Barrow" for this big whale; since that date the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the "bone" (baleen) at two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the past twenty years, by the back-door route.
Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the Narwhal, in 1907 lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous, but that they are on the move east and north.
The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible; dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks, and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth, fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth. Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B. overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land or marine) induces in most of us.
A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the whaling-fleet. "The farther north the finer fur" is a recognised law. The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns, ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the choicest furs this continent produces.
The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the "feel" of Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs, feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60° and the uttermost edge of things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.
Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon the shingle. "As far as we go!" This is essentially the Island of Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings. We are in latitude 69-1/2° N. and just about 139° west of Greenwich; we are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for twenty years to make their home!
The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one corner,—who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the whaler picked up and attached to his ménage the Eskimo from the mainland in little bunches en famille. Ensuing connubial complications brought the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.
Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers' quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.
North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the Penelope off Shingle Point, the Bonanza off King Point, the Triton on the shores of Herschel itself, the Alexander near Horton River, a little missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship The Duchess of Bedford, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the ocean of her quest.
The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,—a boon more prized by them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.