There’s not a lot of poetry in killing seals – not in the rifle shot, nor in the swing of the infamous sealer’s club, the hakapik, not in the blood on the ice. But there’s poetry in the ocean. In Sealers: One Last Hunt, a Norwegian documentary film about the end of a way of life that is anathema to most of us in Europe, a group of hunters leap between the floes as the pack ice rises and falls on vast Atlantic swells, a scene that stays with the viewer like a song.
The hunters are returning to the Havsel, or Ocean Seal, a 33m icebreaker out of Alta at the tip of Norway. Its hold is filled with the skins, oil and meat of more than 1,000 harp seals. The captain, perched in a tiny cockpit at the top of the foremast from which he can steer the ship, is Bjørne Kvernmo. Tall and watchful, he is 64 years old and, like a famous tennis player who shares his first name, he favours a headband.
Later, when I meet him, he tells me that jumping between the floes is a young person’s game. The ship’s carpenter confirms this, relating the story of a man who slipped between the closing ice sheets and had all the flesh stripped from his leg, adding: “But the nightmare is to be caught beneath.”
The film was supposed to portray an industry few south of the Arctic Circle will lament being consigned to history as the market for the fur, meat and oil from the blubber was closed off. But since it has started showing in Norway, something has shifted. Right now, as you read, the Havsel is heading north to the pack ice once again, its hunters aboard.
Seal hunters like to stay out of the limelight. Trude Berge Ottersen, a filmmaker from Norway’s south, had heard tall tales about Kvernmo from young fishermen in the bars in Tromsø, an island city beyond the Arctic Circle. “They kept telling all these funny stories about an old captain who was still going to the west ice to hunt seals,” she says.
Ottersen was a vegetarian, despite coming from six generations of butchers. “But when I was in the south and spoke about seal hunting, I realised that even people who eat meat are against it. I thought this is a topic I should make a film about.” She found Kvernmo’s number and called him, only to be turned away. “He’d had too many bad experiences.”
Kvernmo is half-Sami, the indigenous people of the Scandinavian Arctic. His sister appears in Pathfinder, the great film about one of their myths. He went on his first seal hunt in 1973, at a time, he says, when if you said the wrong thing on the boat, you’d be punched. “There were around 30 ships killing seals,” he tells me. “These were handpicked people. They were men who if they said a word, they meant it, otherwise they would say nothing. And if they give you an order, you had to obey.” He pauses. “I liked those men.”
It wasn’t long before anti-sealing campaigners made themselves felt, supported by a wave of public disgust at images of cuddly pups being bludgeoned. Kvernmo says: “In the beginning, in the 1970s and 1980s, I had strong feelings about the protesters. I felt they didn’t know what they were doing and they were being misinformed by the protest organisations and the media.”
He had his argument, that this was a pure food source from a huge population of wild animals that didn’t rely on the grotesqueries of factory farming. “Just look at the Inuit people of Greenland who live on seal meat. They are never sick. When you give them the food we eat they get sick.” The argument wasn’t being listened to. “We didn’t understand. We thought we could stop them,” he says.
Kvernmo learned to be wary and, as it was, sealing was just a small part of his life at sea, the season only running during April and May. He worked as crew on other people’s vessels in all the icy places of the world until finally, in 2004, he bought the Havsel, getting it cheap because it came without fishing licences and had been lying unused for nearly three years. It would be his route back into a hunt that everyone else was giving up.
Ottersen drove the six hours north to Alta and turned up next to the Havsel. “As I had travelled so far he invited me in,” she says. “But I still got a ‘No.’” It was only when she attended a seal-hunting course in Tromsø that he changed his mind, saying: “And so, you are really enthusiastic about this project?” She said yes and was in.
It’s Spring 2015, and the Havsel is slipping out of its northern fjord. Kvernmo is at the helm, supported by a young first mate named Espen Brandal, who comes from a long line of sealers and resents his heritage dying. Financial pressure on the Norwegian government has seen the subsidies that the seal hunters rely on whittled back, making the trip a liability before they even set off. This means “handpicked men” are hard to find, and Kvernmo is worried about a rookie, Håkon. “He could hurt himself,” he says, “because this is dangerous work. Very sharp knives and hooks, and powerful guns and winches.”
Also on board are Ottersen and her filming partner Gry Elisabeth Mortensen. After several days at sea, the Havsel approaches the ice where the seals, having pupped, are lying. The ship stays downwind so as not to spook the animals. Gunmen, using .230 and .270 calibre rifles, shoot the seals in the head at a distance of up to 150ft, a feat when boat, ice and seal are all moving.
The crew are then dispatched on to the ice where they jump between the floes until they reach the seals. Using their hakapiks, they hit them once with the notch on the blunt side to ensure they are dead, and then they spike them with the other, dragging them back to the boat. “You can’t send everybody down there,” says Kvernmo. “You’ve got to have young people in mint condition to do that.” This part of the process is gruesome enough. In Ottersen and Mortensen’s film, the camera lingers on blood frozen to icicles on the ship’s gunwales. But then it really gets dark. The seals are flensed, the skins washed in the sea and then laid flat in the hold and covered with ice. The blubber and meat is packed.
Amidst the killing, the Havsel faces down the weather. At one stage, they make a run for Iceland in a force 9 gale. The crew are thrown across their cabins, walls of water beyond the windows. “It was like there was no gravity,” says Mortensen, whose open face belies a very northern, slightly terrifying outlook. “The floor was the wall, and you were thrown out of bed, and you lost all sense of control and you just had to go with it.”
All through their bruises and vomiting, the crew has to check the boat for damage. “When the boat is spinning round and you have to go down to where you have flattened all the skins, it’s a horrible smell and the skins just slide from side to side,” says Ottersen. “That was the worst part.”
They reach Iceland, the blizzard making the port town look like the last place on earth. And here Kvernmo seeks out the rookie, who swiftly finds himself on shore, abandoned. He is told to find his own way home and that he can have a couple of tubs of seal meat, “If we do well enough.” Kvernmo tells me later: “I am sorry about that. But if you don’t have the right people, you get accidents. And they can be bad accidents. You have to be careful.”
There are other astonishing scenes. A polar bear crosses the ice, jumping up and down on the seals and throwing them around. The hunters follow, killing the maimed seals, then skinning them. When at last the ship returns to the Norwegian coast, it travels from port to port selling the meat to locals, often elderly people, who emerge from their houses looking circumspect and quietly filling buckets with the dark meat. By the closing credits, it feels like a hell of an effort to get some dinner, omega-3 oil and a new pair of shoes.
The death of the Norwegian sealing industry has been a great victory for groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), which was founded in 1969 to stop the hunt in Canada. Its campaign has scored victory after victory, stopping the killing of pups less than two weeks old – the astonishingly cute white and fluffy babies – then getting seal products banned in the US, the EU and even Russia.
As the markets dried up, it was only government subsidies that remained and so, in 2014, victory was declared in Norway, and the focus turned to Canada and Namibia, where hunts are still supported. “Politicians capitalise on the seal hunt to make it look like they are doing something for the coastal communities,” says Sheryl Fink, IFAW’s director of wildlife campaigns in Canada. “But the subsidies could be much better used to look after those communities.”
The Norwegian première of Sealers: One Last Hunt was in the main cinema in Tromsø, the Fokus, during January’s Tromsø International Film Festival. The city was soft under a permanent snowstorm. Other films in the festival dealt with Observer-friendly subjects. Ambulance, for example, followed a rescue crew during the Israeli assault on Gaza, and there was a movie about life in the “triangle of death” in Iraq. The festival is a glamorous event in a sophisticated city, astutely scheduled during the sunless winter darkness.
And while there are those in Tromsø who, quietly, make plain their distaste – “Should we make a sentimental film about the last days of slavery?” whispered one – it was soon apparent this was not a widespread view. The screening stirred something deep within the people. A photo booth had been set up in a bar with props including a hakapik and a stuffed baby seal, and even the hunters themselves (along with Scandi jumpers and fake moustaches). The local paper’s headline the next day was: “Tromsø women go crazy for sealhunter sealfies.” At the screening, the hunters who turned out in numbers took to the stage and were cheered to the roof. The film went on to win the festival’s audience award.
It turns out these northerners think we, in the rest of Europe, are hypocrites. “Eating seal is not politically correct, but for me it’s better than eating chicken and all those animals you don’t know have had a good life,” Ottersen tells me. “People in the cities want to be eco- friendly, but it is a shell they put on.” She is no longer a vegetarian: “But I never eat meat more than once a month and I only eat game.”
Kvernmo had brought the Havsel to Tromsø for the screening, tying up alongside the multimillion dollar trawlers and oil ships, and invited me for dinner onboard, along with his daughter Elisabeth Rasmussen. A film director and producer in her own right, she says she is more at home in Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont than on a sealing ship (despite looking like Queen Nooka from Noggin the Nog). Kvernmo puts several pans on the table, one full of potatoes, another of mushy peas and the third full of chunks of seal meat. I choose a flipper, biting off more than I can chew. It tastes like venison, only even richer.
It’s fair to say Rasmussen’s relationship with her father is evolving, and she says watching the film has made her understand him better. She didn’t know him until, aged 10, she was eating breakfast in her mother’s house in Tromsø. “A local fisherman was being interviewed on the radio,” she says. “I remember I was chewing when my mother said: ‘Oh, it’s your father speaking.’”
She wrote him a letter. “He invited me for the Easter holiday in Lapland. I walked into this house full of kids and my aunt was really warm and I really connected with this family.” She recalls her father pointing at a girl of the same age and saying, “That girl, she can wrestle a baby reindeer. You should do that.” “I replied: ‘But I don’t want to wrestle the baby reindeer. I want to cuddle it.’”
I think having his daughter on board for the first time pleases Kvernmo, but he doesn’t show it, sitting with the crew until finally moving over. He reckons, in his life, he has spent 10 full years on the ice for various reasons. “Today it is melting away,” he says. “Before, when we sailed to the east coast of Greenland, we’d meet the ice border after three days. Today, we have to sail four days. The last three years, it’s been faster. Everyone who works on the ice sees it.”
In the film, on their last day on the ice, Kvernmo tells the crew to put away the guns and he heads out to track the animals in a small boat. “It was a beautiful day,” Ottersen says, “We had been hunting for many hours and then Bjørne said: ‘I want to film living creatures because I think this is the last time I am here.’ He had this real calm and he was just sitting there with a coffee, looking. When we came back to Havsel there was this beautiful light and seals all over the place, hundreds lying on the ice.”
Except, it turns out that wasn’t the last time. Following the screening of Sealers, the film was given a general release in Norway. Ottersen and Mortensen have spent the past months touring the country with their sealfie photo booth. By the end of February, word reached Kvernmo that the government would offer a subsidy were he to make another trip. And just a couple of weeks ago, the figure was set at Kr2m, just short of £190,000.
I call and find him preparing the Havsel. “The crew is ready,” he tells me. There has long been a strain of pro-sealing sentiment in the Norwegian government, so it is difficult to tell exactly how much difference the film has made ( Ronny Berg, the Norwegian state secretary for fisheries cancelled an interview for this article), but Kvernmo feels it’s been effective. “This film has succeeded all over Norway,” he says. “All the seats are full and everyone likes it.”
The Havsel will be the only boat going out, the only one to get a subsidy: “We had the best proposals for selling the skin, blubber and meat ashore.” And things are looking up, says Kvernmo: “The value of blubber is increasing – the oil is very good for your body. We cannot export it to EU, but maybe we’ll be able to export it to your country now you’re not in the EU any more.”
And then the old captain says, once again, it will be his last trip. “I don’t like to go any more for sealing. I’ve worked too long with it, and I don’t feel comfortable with it… We go this year because everyone is talking about it and wants us to go.” Right now, he is steaming north.
