Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat

also they are a great furthering of divers ships voyages, because the abundance of them is such that the fishermen do bait their hooks with the quarters of Seafowle on them: and therewith some ships do yearly take a great part of their fishing voyages, with such bait.”
    It was easy enough to do.
    Nicolas Denys, making a raid on the rookeries at Sambro Island near Halifax, found “so great an abundance of all kinds [of sea-birds] that all my crew and myself, having cut clubs for ourselves, killed so great a number... that we were unable to carry them away. And aside from these the number of those which were spared and which rose into the air, made a cloud so thick that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate it.”
    Pressure on the bird colonies to furnish bait mounted inexorably. In 1580, more than 300 European ships were already fishing the northeastern approaches, and that number quadrupled before 1700. In 1784, there were 540 deep-sea vessels alone, most of them using birds for bait during at least part of the fishing season. By 1830, an additional fleet of several hundred New England schooners was fishing the Labrador coast and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, making extensive use of birds.
    Apart from the shipborne fishery, growing numbers of planters and by-boat (transient) shoremen fished from innumerable coves and harbours, and all of these regularly used seabirds for bait. Some continued to do so, particularly in Newfoundland and Labrador, well into modern times.
    Dr. Arthur Bent visited the Magdalen Island Bird Rocks in 1904 and found that they were being regularly raided by bait-seeking fishermen who would scale the cliffs with ladders and ropes and slaughter as many as 500 gannets in an hour. Bent noted that forty vessels were supplying themselves from the Bird Rocks, the gannets “being roughly skinned and the flesh cut off in chunks.” Another method, still in use in the twentieth century at Cape St. Mary’s, where the sheer cliffs guarding a gannet colony cannot be scaled, was to set water-logged planks or logs adrift nearby, with a herring tied to each. The gannets, diving in their spectacular way from great heights, would not detect the fraud in time and so would break their necks in scores and hundreds. Gannets, murres, razorbills, and other deep divers were taken in quantity with small-mesh nets into which the birds swam, and drowned.
    Even cormorants were used for bait. Although initially their colonies were to be found everywhere along the coasts at least as far south as Georgia, by 1922 they had been so reduced that the great cormorant was for a time thought to have been “extirpated as a breeding bird in North America.”
    Until late in the nineteenth century, American and Canadian bankers used to make an early voyage that depended for bait on adult oceanic birds. Called the “shack fishery,” it mainly used the flesh of the graceful shearwaters and fulmars. The birds were killed by dorymen using five- or six-fathom lines to each of which a multitude of small mackerel hooks baited with cod livers was affixed. The procedure they followed is described in an 1884 report to the United States Fish Commission.
    â€œThe fishermen derive much gratification from the sport, not only from the excitement it affords but on account of the prospective profits in obtaining a good supply of birds for bait. When a victim has been hooked it struggles most energetically to rise in the air, or by spreading its feet it holds itself back as it is dragged through the water. At times a bird may disengage the hook but usually the barbed point is well fastened and the bird is landed in the boat. The fisherman crushes its skull with his teeth or strikes it with his ‘gob stick’. This may continue until perhaps two hundred birds are captured.”
    Sometimes shearwaters were taken to the ship alive.
    â€œPerhaps a dozen or so of them are put in a hogshead on the deck of the vessel