At this day we can scarcely even imagine what were the scenes of butchery some two hundred years ago; while the Whales swam in shoals and every shore swarmed with the amphibii. The enormous massacres polluted the ocean with blood to an extent such as our human battles, from the earliest day, cannot even begin to compare with. In a single day, from fifteen to twenty Whales were killed, and fifteen hundred Sea Elephants! And this was mere killing for the sake of killing. For what was to be done with so many of those huge creatures, each of which had so much blood and so much oil? What was the meaning of all this cruel slaughter? What the result? Just simply, to redden and pollute so many miles of the pure Ocean! To have the cold and cruel enjoyment of most brutal tyrants; to watch, with cruel eye, the lingering agonies and the fierce, but impotent struggles, of one of God's noblest and most inoffensive creatures! Peron relates, with a disgust which does him honor, that he saw a brutal sailor thus slowly and brutally butcher a female Seal. She groaned and writhed like something human; and whenever she opened her poor, bleeding mouth, he dashed the oar into it, breaking her poor teeth at every thrust.
Durville tells us that at the new Shetland isles, in the South Seas, the English and Americans actually exterminated the Seals in four years; killing, in their blind rage, alike the newly born and parturient female, and often they killed only for the skin, losing the vast and very precious amount of oil.
Such slaughter as that is really a disgrace to our common humanity; such butchery reveals a terrible, a loathsome, instinct, that makes us shudder as we look around upon even our best and kindliest, and reflect how soon and upon what slight temptation they, too, may become cruel! On a smiling shore and among a notably amiable people, we remember one of these murderous massacres to have taken place. Some five or six hundred Tunnies were driven into a lovely bay that they might be ignominiously murdered in a single day. The drag nets, so vast that the capstan and the bars had to be brought into requisition, to heave, rather than draw them in, brought the poor creatures into that beautiful bay, to them, a veritable chamber of death, and all around were bronzed, hardy, and cruel men, armed with harpoons and pikes. And from distances of even twenty leagues around, fair women—shame to our nature!—yea, women sat or stood to witness that truly brutal butchery. The signal is given and the dastardly butchers strike, and the pierced and bleeding victims writhe, bound, agonize—as though they were human, and pitiless woman applauds the prowess—Godwot!—of pitiless man! The waters, agitated by the vain, though mighty struggle of the victims, is polluted and discolored with blood and foam, and woman—Woman looks on this horrid scene and, when the last victim has given its last gasp, sighs deeply and departs, wearied, but not satisfied, and whispers—Is that all? And yet we call ourselves only, "a little lower than the angels!"
THE LAW OF THE OCEAN.
A great and deservedly popular writer, Eugene Noël, who throws a bright, broad light upon every subject which he touches, most truly says, in his important work on Pisciculture, the following words: "We might make the Ocean an immense food-factory, more productive than even our earth itself, fertilizing and supporting everything, seas, rivers, lakes, and Lands. Hitherto we have cultivated only the lands—let us now cultivate the waters. Nations! Attention!"
More productive than the land? Eh! How is that to be?
M. Baude explains the matter very clearly, in his recently published and very important work on Fishery. He shows very clearly that, of all creatures, the fish consumes the least, and produces the most. Merely to keep that creature alive, nothing, or next to nothing, is required. Rondelet kept a carp three years in a bottle of water, and gave it nothing save what it could extract from that water; yet, in that time, it so increased in bulk that he could not get it out of the bottle! The Salmon, during its stay, of two months, in fresh water, scarcely feeds at all, and yet in that time scarcely loses flesh. Its stay in salt water, during the same space of time, gives it the enormous increase of six pounds in weight. How little that resembles the slow growth of our land animals! If we were to pile up into one heap all that it takes to fatten an Ox or a Pig, we should actually be astounded at the amount of food required for the like increase of weight.