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 Amer

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.”