Sea of Slaughter [Paperback]

Farley Mowat (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1996

With the dedicated reasearch and highly readable prose that are his hallmarks, Farley Mowat painstakingly recounts the grim fate of the wildlife of the North Atlantic seaboard after the arrival of European man. This "howl of outrage" (Kirkus) chronicles how whales, once one of the most complex and stable life forms on Earth, became virtually eradicated; how great auks, numbering the hundreds of millions, were driven extinct; how creatures as diverse as walruses and seals, cod and cormorants, nearly suffered the same fate.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Mowat's most important book yet." - Roger Tory Peterson

From the Publisher

"A hymn and a plea for life, yet also a symphony of death...a caring, compassionate, prophetic vision...as Farley Mowat shows so well, there are no more excuses."
-The Globe and Mail

"In this masterpiece, Canada's most beloved naturalist-author is as angry about the assult on the living sea as Rachel Carson was about the land in Silent Spring."
-Roger Tory Peterson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 446 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1576300196
• ISBN-13: 978-1576300190
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,369,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps youre not the slaughtering kind, April 6, 2000

By 

Owen Hughes (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sea of Slaughter (Paperback)

Since reading Mowat's "Sea of Slaughter," I can't get a certain picture out of my mind. It is of a sandy ocean beach, miles and miles long, where tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of morse came to socialize every summer until the middle of last century. The morse, or northern walrus, was a stupendous animal, of impressive bearing: a veritable lion of the sea. Yet it comes no more to those grounds, once the largest colony of its kind, out on Canada's Magdalene Islands, off the coast of Québec.

To think that the morse were just a side-show to it all. To think that eventually, with the same energy and relentless mechanical force, we would come to decimate the northern fishery more or less entirely, leaving thousands of perplexed fisher folk stranded in coastal villages, wondering perhaps, just where that many fish could possibly have gone.

On land, as in the water, nature's bounty was scarcely less prolific, the European's first reaction, scarcely less horrendous. Could this be the true, unknown history of North America, lying behind and directly concerning those early pilots and navigators like Cabot and Columbus. 400 or more years of unbelievably short-sighted culling of mighty herds, whether they were whales or bison or a hundred other species of birds and mammals known to have been hunted to the last. This is Mowat's sad chronicle. This is his portrait of what one day perhaps, will generally be known and accepted as history. And the only thing that may stop us is that we find we really don't want to ever learn this sort of truth.

Besides being a remarkable contribution to the literature of ecology and environment, this is also one of Mowat's finest personal efforts. You can see by the very nature of the material that it took a being of remarkable strength just to tackle a project like this, let alone bring it to a conclusion. It's probably true that one can prepare all one's life for just one event. In Mowat's case, without negating any other part of his remarkable œuvre, this may just be it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Slaughter for Profit, August 6, 2005

By 

Mark (Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sea of Slaughter (The Farley Mowat Series) (Paperback)

Passionate, well-written account of what has become of animal life in North America since the arrival of the Europeans in the early 1500's. Amazing. I will never look at the world in the same way. Farley Mowat, focusing on the North-east of North America, paints a vivid picture of what animal life was like from 1500 to the present, frequently quoting those who saw it in its near natural state hundreds of years ago -- the great awk, the white bear, the buffalo, the whales, the dolphins, the seals. The European intruders saw this great abundance of life as an opportunity for profit, saw the millions of whales as so many tons of train oil. From one chapter to the next, the animal "nations" were slaughtered with no thought of the future, until there was no more profit to be made. "Sea of Slaughter", as sad and painful as it is, is a must-read book. A sampling of Farley Mowat's words (I am sure he won't mind):

"So ends the story of how the Sea of Whales became a Sea of Slaughter as, one by one, from the greatest to the least, each in turn according to its monetary worth, the several cetacean nations perished in a roaring holocaust fuelled by human avarice.
Now that there are no longer enough of them remaining to be of any significant commercial value, the fires that consumed their kinds are burning down. But it is unlikely -- our instincts being what they are -- that even the far flung scattering of survivors will ever be secure from our rapacity unless, and until, they receive worldwide protection.
Surely this is the least we can do to make atonement for the evil we have done to them. And it WAS evil -- of that, make no mistake."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars shocking and utterly mind-blowing, July 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sea of Slaughter (Hardcover)

Mowat wanted to write about life, humanity, and extinction. Obviously the topic was too broad, so he narrowed himself down to just discussing the North Atlantic and parts of the New World. I finished this book and was stunned by how much life there USED to be around here. Polar bears in Massachusetts? 12-foot sturgeon in the Chesapeake? Birds flocking in the millions that I had never even heard of? WE NEED MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS AND WE ALL NEED TO READ THEM!