Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 June 1887 — The Butchery of Seals. [ARTICLE]

The Butchery of Seals.

With regard to the cruelties so often spoken of in connection * with sealkiliing, nothing, Capt. Gray states, could exceed the atrocit es common some years ago, and the sight of the infant seals, often shockingly wounded, deprived of the mother seals which gave them their sustenance was piteous in the extreme. Since the close time was instituted, however, the young seals are old enough to be killed for their skins, and there are no such harrowing sights to be seen on the ice as was formerly the ease, because, in fact, young and old are slaughtered together—“every mortal thing, in short, is cleaned off the ice.” As soon as the ships have got into the center of a pack of seals all hands are sent over the ice at break of day, each armed with a butcher’s knife and steel, a seal-club, and what is known among the sailors as a “Lowrie tow”— a rope, about five fathoms long, so called from the name Lowrie (or Lawrence) —common among the Shetlanders. The men immediately scatter themselves over the ice and kill the first young seals they find, flench them, leaving the blubber adhering to the skins, and then, attaching them to the “Lowrie tow,” drag them to the ship. This goes on from (day to day, from daylight to dark, as long as there are any seals to kill. The ship is then put into as snug quarters as she can get among the ice, and all hands are employed from morning to night separating the blubber from the skin. The skins are salted away by them selves and the blubber is put into the ship’s tanks and sealed up for the voyagfi, to be boiled into oil on reaching home. Since steam was introduced, however, a vessel can follow the seals and go as fast as they do. The seals, in fact, are allowed no rest on the ice, and so hard have ’ they been persecuted that they have changed their dispositions and will hardly take the ice at all. “We will see them sometimes standing up on the ic3 like men, looking at the ships coming up, when we require a powerful telescope to see them. Twenty years ago it was no uncommon thing for the seven harpoouers belonging to a ship to shoot 1,000 old seals in a single day; now it is a very rare thing indeed for a ship to get 1,000 in a whole season.”— Pall Mall Gazette.