Whaling is like salmon-fishing, but the waiting part is on an enormous
scale, bigger in proportion than even the game or the tackle, however
huge that is. Fancy waiting and fishing for nine months for your first
fish. That was my first whaling. Henriksen in Japanese seas on his first
whaling command was, I think, a year before he saw a whale. Then he had a
lot of shots in succession and missed every time, till he discovered the
powder was at fault, and then he killed about ninety in three months.
He sometimes gives me thumb-nail jottings of his experiences.
Once he ran into port. Yusako, I believe, and the harpoon-gun on the bows
was still loaded, and the Japanese Bos’n fiddled with it and let it off.
Two white chickens were resting on the forego (coils of rope under muzzle
of gun), and Jap shoemakers, tailors with their goods and chattels,
were on foredeck, sitting on the line, and they were all upset by its
tautening suddenly. The boom brought Henriksen on deck, he found his
bos’n standing pale as china, and a few white feathers floating in the
air—a rather Whistleresque picture, is it not? Another time he himself
upset all his poultry. He had quite a lot of hens on board, and they
rather took to him. He had stood for hours on hours chasing two finners
that never gave him a chance of harpooning them, and just at twilight he
grew tired waiting and let drive a long shot on chance, never noticing
that the fowls had collected round his feet and on the coiled forego.
Overboard they went, every hen and chick of them, and great was the
retrieving in the pram.[2]
Another curious mistake by a gunner I have heard of. He’d been chasing
for a long time and fired at a whale, as he thought, but could not see
where the harpoon went for the smoke. “Have I got the beggar?” he said,
turning round to the Jap at the wheel. “Yes, captain, veree good shot.”
The smoke cleared and a moak or gull lay with its head off, a bight of
the forego had chopped it off; the Jap on bridge had seen no whale and
thought the captain fired at the gull. The gunner’s expletives followed,
and he threw his hat overboard, and stamped and swore accordingly.
And now here we are tied up, waiting again in Lerwick in September, and
on the 1st of June we should have started fishing between Iceland and
South Greenland, at a place we know there are certain to be the small but
valuable Atlantic Right whale, Biscayensis, or Nord-Capper, as the Norse
call it, a small edition of the Greenland Bowhead or Mysticetus (see page
26).
We waited and waited all that August in Norway, our grouse-shooting has
gone, and now partridges are going, and we wait still. This last wait is
due to an entanglement in red tape, a difficulty in getting our vessel
registered here. We have the British Consul’s form of registration, a
temporary affair from Norway, that has to be renewed here.
Soon after dropping anchor those agreeable and necessary officials, the
Customs officers, came on board, in oilskins, which they discarded,
disclosing blue jumpers and his Majesty’s brass buttons, all showing
the effect of the climate, and they set to work overhauling our stores
most carefully. If officials are to be maintained work must be found for
them and we must all pay; we have assisted the Norwegian and British
governments incalculably for weeks and months past. They earn their
country’s pay by overhauling poor mariners’ tobacco and provender, only
intended to be chewed and eaten far away in the North or the Southern
Seas. Their chief, I knew at once, came from our west or north coast, by
his soft accent, which was much to my taste; how much there must be in a
voice if it makes even a seafarer almost welcome a Customs officer!
As he opened the stores and checked coffee and tobacco, we “tore tartan”
a little. I said my heart was in Argyll but my people came from
Perthshire, and suggested he might be from Islay. And from Islay he came!
the island of Morrisons and whisky. But MacDiarmid was his name. “But
that’s a Perthshire name,” I said. “Yes, yes,” said he, “to be sure, from
Perthshire my people came.” “And from Glen Lyon, possibly?” I said, “and
the Seven Kings?” And “Yes, yes,” he said, “to be sure, and it is Glen
Lyon you know? Well, well, and that is the peautiful glen—and that wull
be suxty poonds of coot tobacco, and wan hundred and suxty poonds of
black twust. And did you see the Maclean was back to Duart Castle? Aich,
aich! it was a ferry fine proceeding! You see, his mother’s grandmother’s
daughter’s niece she would come from Glen Islay, and so it wass they came
to their own again. Noo hoo much tae will you have here—we must mark it
a’ doon seeing you may be callin’ at another Brutish port or in the back
parts o’ Mull or maybe in Ireland too.”
His junior was Irish, with a Bow Bells accent, and the speech of both
was very pleasant to me after months of Norse. The junior leant against
the galley door as I had morning coffee, and leisurely interviewed our
very busy cook—told him about Lerwick, asked him, “Did yew ’ave a good
viyage, stooard?” to which pale Hansen with the golden hair answered,
“Yah, yah, goot,” indifferently, but he brightened up when told of the
fish to be had in Lerwick. “Wy, yuss, for a shillin’ you can git as much
’ere as will feed all ’ands, woy, for a sixpence or fourpence you can
git a cod ’ere of saiy fourteen or sixteen pounds!” “Yah, yah, but vill
it be goot?” said incredulous Hansen. “Yuss, you bet y’r loife. Ain’t
no Billinsgaite fish ’ere, matey! wot I mean is you git ’em ’ere ’alf
aloive! But did ye git any wyles?” he continued, “on yer weigh accrost?”
“Wyles?” repeated Hansen. “Wy, yuss, wyles, wyles I say; you’re a wyler,
ain’t yer?” and it dawned at last on Hansen—“Vales! nay, nay, ikke
vales—no seed none.”
We went ashore with the brass-bounders rowing hard against wind over
the fizzling sea amongst hundreds of tame herring gulls, most of them
in their young brown plumage, and amongst armies of these sea-robbers,
scarts, or cormorants, that are here as tame as chickens and numerous
as sparrows. Why they are allowed to exist is what we trout and salmon
fishers wonder at; in Norway the Government pays fourpence a head. I wish
we were as fond of eating them as the Norwegians are.
On shore we got fairly messed up with red tape at the Customs office. The
officials were charmingly polite and really wished to be of assistance,
but duty first; and the very young man in authority showed us, with the
utmost patience, how essential it was for the interests of everybody that
we should be able to prove that the makers of the St Ebba made it really
for us, and that the British Consul in Norway should also believe this,
and certify that the Norwegian builders had really built it, and also
that they had done so to our order, for if they had not done so, it might
belong to someone else. Consequently if they, his Majesty’s Customs House
officers in Lerwick, were to register it as ours, and it wasn’t ours,
many things might happen, and so on and so forth. And we went back and
forward to the ship to get papers and more papers, and each helped, but
each and all were smilingly explained to be not absolutely the documents
necessary to satisfy his Majesty’s Government that—that—we weren’t bloody
pirates. So give us School Board education and Socialist officialdom and
we see the beginning of lots of trouble. Finally, after much pow-wow,
we telegraphed the gist of this to Norway, asking the Consul there, in
polite language, why the devil he hadn’t given us the papers needed to
prove we were we, and the St Ebba was the St Ebba, and not another ship,
and that it belonged to her owners—that is, to a little private British
Whaling Company.
And poor Henriksen, who had spent days and more days getting all these
formalities arranged with the Consul in Norway (whilst I used to wait
outside under the lime-trees flicking flies off Swartzen), seemed to be
almost at breaking-point of patience, and I wondered in my soul how ships
ever got out and away to sea free from red-tape entanglements.
A pleasing interlude and soothing was the pause we sometimes made between
ship and office to watch the fish in the clear green water along the edge
of the quiet town. The water was clear as glass above white sand, and
against the low stone quay or sea face were driven, by cormorants, shoals
of fish, dark, velvety-green compact masses, of saith or coal-fish,
actually as thick as fish in a barrel. These ugly dusky divers paid
little heed to people on shore, but in regular order circled round the
shoals, coming to within eight yards of us, and every now and then one
would dive under the mass of fish and fill itself as it went, and an
opening through the mass would show its horrid procedure as it straddled
across white sand under the fish, till it came up with a bounce at our
feet, shaking its bill with satisfaction and then go back to do its turn
at rounding up, whilst another of its kind took its turn at eating the
piltoch.
No wonder, with this wealth of fish and fowl round the shore, that the
Norsemen rather hanker after their old islands; they cure these saith and
eat them through winter, and very good they are, and they also eat the
cormorants (I give you my word, they are bad; I’ve eaten many kinds of
sea-fowl and the cormorant is the worst). The reader may have heard that
Norwegians claim the Shetlands, for they say Scotland only holds them in
pawn, for the dowry of Margaret Princess of Denmark, wife of King James
III., estimated at 50,000 florins, which has not yet been paid. So when
Norway offers the equivalent, plus interest, which now amounts to several
million pounds sterling, the islands may be returned to Norway. Possibly
international law, recognising the amalgamation of the two companies,
Scotland & Co. and England & Co., into Great Britain & Co., may not now
admit the claim.
A specimen of a really stout Shetlander came on board with the Customs
House men, Magnus Andersen, a burly, ruddy type, not so intellectual or
finely drawn as the typical Shetlander—a pilot by profession—what seamen
call a real old shell-back, with grizzled beard and ruddy cheeks—about a
hundred years old and straight as a dart, stark and strong, with a bull’s
voice and a child’s blue eyes. I said: “Why don’t you have an oilskin
on?” It was raining a little and blowing. “I’ve been at sea all my days,”
he said, smiling, “and never wore an oilskin”; one of the old hardy
school, with a look of “Fear God, but neither devil, man, nor storm.”
He spoke of all the lines he’d been on—old flyers like the Thermopylae,
and others, sailing cracks that we read of, Green & Smith companies, and
the old tea traders, and then he told me he had been at the Greenland
whaling, and mentioned a Captain Robertson, and I said: “D’ye mean ‘Café
Tam’?” and he looked at me with a little surprise, but was so pleased
to hear the nickname of his old skipper. “Why,” I said, “I was with him
on board his last ship, the Scotia, in Dundee, not a year ago, and,
bar a slight limp, he’s as good as a two-year-old.” And from that we
started off yarning for as long as there was time, which was not much.
Old “Bad-Weather” and B⸺ Davidson I asked about. He knew them from their
boyhood: old B.-W. came here to Lerwick on his last voyage and ordered
Magnus on board. He was to go whether he did a hand’s turn of work or
not. Magnus admired B.-W., even though he had the common failing; but
now he has gone——? may peace be with him. Magnus blamed the steward and
mate for his end, on that last voyage, blamed them for not having his
temptation in greybeards thrown overboard. My opinion is that the ice
finished him. Take a boy as a mill hand and let him struggle through the
fo’c’sle to be bos’n—second mate—first mate and master, then keep him
whaling year after year with ice perils and whaling problems and the
intense strain and excitement of Arctic ice navigation, and he must die
before seventy! Ice navigation is a severe strain.
I’ve known of a strong man, a Norwegian skipper, who when he saw the ice
for the first time, and got his vessel well into it, was so scared that
he locked himself into his cabin and was fed through the skylight for a
week!
Another old whaler (I mean this time a man of thirty-five) I met
in Lerwick. I heard he wanted to see me, for he said he had been a
“shipmate” of mine; “shipmate” to one who only plays hide-and-seek with
the sea sounded rather pleasant, so we shook hands very heartily for a
few seconds, but we had no time for a “gam,” for I had to go about our
business with these horrid Custom affairs. He seemed to be doing well;
he had some harbour office and was neatly dressed—his name was Tulloch. I
must meet him again and have a yarn when there is more leisure.
We have additional worry here besides the registration. We have to have
our vessel remeasured to satisfy our Board of Trade. I fear it gave the
registrar some trouble to come from Aberdeen in rough weather, and he was
very sick; if his eye ever falls on these lines, here are my thanks and
sympathy. If we had gone to him at Aberdeen he would have put us into dry
dock and kept us for weeks, but here we knew there were no dry docks.
At this point in our proceedings the writer left the St Ebba and took
the high road over the island, and left the measurement business to
Henriksen, for that is a matter that required tact and patience rather
than the English language. I went to see my friend R. C. Haldane, who has
the property of Lochend on Colla Firth, also to see our Alexandra whaling
station there, of which this writer is a Director. I hardly dare mention
this in Lerwick for the herring-fishers are jealous of whalers—whaling,
they say, has spoiled their herring-fishing—and yet the herring-fishing
is better than it ever was! The fact is, if the Man in the Moon made a
half-penny more than they did, at his trade, which I am told is cutting
sticks, they would eat their fingers off. Being numerically superior to
us whalers they carry the vote—and so _our Government has forbidden us
to kill whales within forty miles of our Shetland shores during the best
of the season, whilst any Dane, Dago or Dutchman may kill them up to the
three-mile limit_!