Perhaps it will be as well for me to hark back here and make some
extracts from my last year’s whaling log and sketch-books, for who knows
when this St Ebba will fall in with whales; in this way the reader will
the sooner be made acquainted with the procedure in “Modern Whaling.”
The extracts that follow have appeared in magazines—in The Nineteenth
Century, The Scottish Field, and in Chambers’s Magazine, and Badminton,
but possibly the reader may not have seen them; and I am sure that the
illustrations have not yet been submitted to the criticism of the general
public.
The first begins one evening in June a year or two ago, when we were
fishing sea-trout in the Voe at Lochend, beside our whaling station,
putting in the time till our whaler came in from the outer sea.
* * * * *
On the evening of the second day of waiting a fair-haired, rosy-cheeked
boy with great grey eyes and a ragged red waistcoat came down from the
hill bare-footed and breathless, and said: “She is there!” and went off
in astonishment at the unfamiliar silver. Then we got our bag down to the
shore and waited for the smoke above the headland which would tell us
that our little steam-whaler had been into the Colla Firth station and
had left the last captured whale there, had taken coal on board, and was
coming out again for the high seas.
Henriksen has heard of our arrival and, as she swings into the bay in
front of Haldane’s house down comes her pram, and two Norsemen come off
in it and take the writer on board.
Ah! it is good to feel again the rolling deck, on “the road to freedom
and to peace,” to the open sea and big hunting, and to read in a note
from the Works Manager that we have at last to act as harpooneer.
Yell Sound is calm as a mill-pond, with swiftly running tides as we go
south and east past the Outer Skerries. We aim at a latitude N.E. of the
Shetlands beyond the “forty-mile whaling limit” made against British
whalers only.
Even with a glassy calm a steam-whaler has a rolling send. She seems
to make her own swell to plunge over, but it’s a silky, quick, silent
motion that, once accustomed to, you never notice; though old seamen are
prostrated with it when they first experience it. Round about the islands
we see many seals and an endless variety of divers and other sea-birds
and some herring-hog or springers, a small finner whale (Balænoptera
Vaga), and porpoises in great numbers, so we practise swinging and aiming
our gun in the bows at them, against the time when we have to fire at the
mighty Fin whale (A), Blue whale (B), Seihvale (C), Nord Capper (D), or
Sperm (E),[3] for even Sperm and the Nord Capper we have killed in the
last two years off the Shetlands, yet the Nord Capper or Atlantic Right
whale, Biscayensis, was supposed to be extinct! and the sperm or cachalot
is a warm-water whale and only occasionally is found as far north as the
Northern Shetlands, or as far south as the South Shetlands south of Cape
Horn.
The modern whale gun or swivel cannon is on the steamer’s bow and is
swung in any direction by a pistol grip. It weighs about two tons, but it
is well balanced when it has the one-and-a-half hundredweight harpoon in
it so that a hefty man can swing it fairly easily in any direction. The
difficulty for the landsman shooting is, of course, in his sea-legs—you
must be absolutely unconscious of them and of the vessel’s movement, or
of pitch and roll, and the wet of cold, bursting seas that may come over
you at any time in the pursuit; but, given good sea-legs and indifference
to a wetting, and there is nothing in ordinary circumstances to prevent,
say, a fairly quick pistol shot from killing his whale, a certain amount
of strength and nerve is required for the final lancing from the pram
or small boat, but that is seldom done nowadays, for a second or third
harpoon is usually resorted to, as being more effective and less risky.
At midnight we turn in with regret from the pink light and calm sea, for
Henriksen the master, and the writer, have much to talk of about whales
in other seas; but a few hours’ sleep we must have if we are to be steady
in the morning.
You turn in “all standing” on a whaler, you have no time to dress when
the call comes; so much time is saved out north-east. At three A.M.
perhaps you tumble out, there is enough daylight to read by all night,
but between eleven and twelve, and three o’clock, you are pretty safe to
have a nap, for you cannot then see a whale’s blast beyond a mile or two.
We are now (five A.M.) going N.E.—a lovely smooth sea—nothing more
idyllic we think than at five in the morning to be steadily pegging
away over the silky swell seventy miles north of the Shetlands into the
sunrise on a warm morning, watching the circle of horizon for a blow. One
man is in the crow’s nest on our short foremast, another at the wheel,
and you lie your length on the bridge, on the long chest used for the
side lights, which of course are never used here, with glass in hand,
watching. The gun is ready in the bow, and the harpoon and line are all
in order. There is no hurry for a blow, you have to-day, and to-morrow,
and the next day before you to hunt in, food and fuel for a week, and the
wide sea to roam over in what direction you please, towards whichever
cloud castle you choose, and if rough weather comes, you are confident
your little ninety-five-foot whaler will ride out anything, if she is not
pressed.
It is turning out a beast of a morning for whaling. Oily calm but a lumpy
swell, making us crash about, and never a blow in sight; I have been
handling gun for practice, an excellent opportunity in this swell from
the N.W. crossing the swell from N.E., the gun muzzle yaws a bit and
our feet are apt to be insecure on the little platform in the bows, and
there is nothing to hold on to but the pistol grip of the gun. We pursue
our north-easterly course, then go at forty-five degrees, say ten miles
N., then say ten miles N.E. again, a simple way of keeping our position
on the chart. Of course whenever there is anything like “a blow,” we
swing about in that direction; rather a charming feeling after the usual
experiences of travelling at sea in one dead straight line. It makes you
feel as if the ocean really belonged to you, and you are not merely a
ticketed passenger sent off by the time-table.
In the forenoon we fall in with three whalers from Olna Firth, the
station of the Salvesens of Leith, and all of his had been scouting in
different directions, over hundreds of miles, and not one had seen a
spout, and yet where we are, there were numerous whales only a few days
ago. Like trout, whales seem to be unaccountably on the rise one day, and
utterly disappear the next. So we resort to music and painting. Henriksen
plays Grieg on the weather-worn melodeon and the artist paints sea
studies.
At twelve comes a meal, usually called _middag-mad_ on a Norse whaler,
Henriksen calls it tiffen. It is simple enough—a deep soup plate of hasty
pudding (flour and water boiled), on this you spread sugar half-an-inch
thick, and then half-a-packet of cinnamon, on your left you have a mug
of tinned milk and water, on your right a spoon, and you buckle to and
eat perhaps half-way through or till you feel tired; it is awfully good;
then you eat smoked raw herrings in oil from a large tin, black bread,
margarine and coffee, such good coffee. I’d defy anyone to be hungry
afterwards or ill-content. Dolphins pass us and we pick up a drifting
rudder. Henriksen sniffs at its workmanship and says: “Made in Shetland,”
so I quote the Norse saying: “The family is the worst, as the fox said of
the red dog.”
However, I suppose we will stay out till we do find whales or finish
coal. It almost looks as if whales could stay below and sleep. One day’s
blank waiting seems a long time from three A.M. to eleven or twelve
P.M. We growl together on the bridge, skipper, self, man at wheel and
the cook. There is no hard-and-fast distinction of rank on a Norwegian
whaler’s bridge, and Henriksen counts up our mileage, one hundred and
sixty-nine since last night. “We might be having cream and fruit in
Bergen,” he remarks; we are about half-way across, and we all wish we
were there. Henriksen says, by way of consolation: “Well, I was once six
months whaling for Japs off the Korean coast, and I never saw a fin, and
fine weather just like this”; and I tell him of our being surrounded in
the Antarctic with hundreds of whales up to and over a hundred feet in
length without sufficiently strong tackle to catch them; don’t we both
long for one of these huge Southern fellows in this empty ocean.
At evening meal, or _aften-mad_, are potatoes, tinned meat and anchovies,
bread, butter and coffee, and we feel vexed that we do not have whale
steak and onions as we expected. The cook explains that owing to warm
weather his last supply went bad, a grievous disappointment, for whale
meat is worth travelling far to eat[4]; it is superior to the best beef,
in this way, that after eating it you always feel inclined for more. The
evening we wiled away by making an invention to kill mackerel, of course
keeping a keen watch all the time for a blow. Mackerel shoals appeared
in every direction in patches, rippling the smooth sea for miles. Our
plan, inside the three-mile limit may sound infernal; a hundred miles out
it didn’t seem so wicked, especially as we had keen appetites for fresh
fish. We filled a quart bottle half full of gunpowder, put a cork and
foot of fuse into it, slung a piece of iron under it, lit the fuse and
dropped it into a shoal of mackerel, and sheered off. The result ought
to have been lots of stunned fish. A little thread of smoke came quietly
up through the falling sea—and then—nothing happened!—a faulty fuse, we
supposed. We tried a dynamite cartridge and fuse later, but the fish had
gone, and of course, it went off; and gave our little whaler a knock
underneath as if with a hammer, then we hove to, and all went asleep, and
the Haldane watched alone in the half light of the Northern night for a
few hours.
At three A.M. Sunday, we were under steam again, the day very grey and
the wind rising slightly from W. by S. “Like to be vind,” said a young,
blue-eyed Viking with long fair hair and a two-weeks’ beard, but I
doubted it; youth is apprehensive or too sanguine—age is indifferent.
Which is best?
[Illustration: MOUTH OF A FINNER WHALE
Showing the hairy surface of the whalebone plates on the palate.]
We are heading west again, east to west and back again and north and
south, we go in any direction we fancy, but never a whale, so the
Sabbath is devoted to the melodeon and painting. We have a book to read
but the cloud pictures and their reflections always take our eyes from
the print.
So we live on a whaler, in old clothes, seldom changed. I think we
rather affect worn, patched clothes. Our cook or steward, a man of
means, I have no doubt, in his own country, has a faded blue jersey, the
darning of which must have pleasingly occupied many of the few hours of
leisure he has on board, and the men, too, have most artistic patches
on their clothes. They differ from their superior the skipper in that
their coats are torn and darned, and his is torn and not darned. The
writer’s is neither, but will be shortly, and the crease in the trousers
is a memory; it goes soon on a whaler, where you waste no time changing
clothes—certainly not oftener than once a week. But, though we are
roughly clad, we have Grieg’s music, rye bread, and whale meat, luxuries
we often have to do without on shore; the black-bread Socialists will
have none of it, and the meat for which the Japs, even for the fat, pay
twenty-five cents a pound.
The melodeon player’s biography would make good MS. He is young and big,
weaned from shore to sea by his skipper father at thirteen; master’s
certificate at seventeen; then mate on a sailing ship to the Colonies;
master and gunner on a Japanese whaler; twenty pounds a month; seven
pounds for each whale and all found; large pay in Norway; purchaser
of his own island; farm, wife, three children; a sixteen-hand fast
trotter, sleighs, guns, rifles; six months on shore; six at sea; youth
and exuberant spirits and as keen about securing a guillemot for the pot
as for a four-hundred-pound sterling Nord Capper.... The day passes and
it seems as hopeless as ever, but I find Henriksen knows some useful
fo’c’sle language for the relief of feelings; it gives a little lurid
colour to the otherwise monotonous soft pigeon-grey landscape.
For hours at a time the fascination of watching the horizon for a blow
is enough to keep one’s mind fully occupied, but at length and at last
the writer begins to count painting and reading as of equal interest—a
deplorable state of affairs. It is almost hopeless, from a whaling point
of view, so we are going to give up this ocean north-east of Shetland,
and go south-westwards some seventy-five miles till we see the Flugga
Lighthouse, thence we will make a new departure and go and have a cast in
the North-West Atlantic.
Ah! but I have hopes—there were big finners in families out there last
year, at about this time they came up from the south, possibly from even
south of the Line. I remember the oldest members were very exclusive,
but some of the younger people made our acquaintance. There was one, an
island!—may I have a shot at it is my prayer, then would there be some
real interest in life for us all.
So we practically put in the Sunday without work, only watch and hope,
and make a passage; but the two engineers and two boy stokers work. One
of the stokers looked as if he did so hate work this morning—came on deck
with his black face disfigured with an expression that meant: “I could
kill anyone if I was strong enough!” He is such a sleeper that Larsen,
his master, to waken him, took down the foghorn in the small hours and
blared it into his ears. Henriksen in the chart-house where he sleeps,
jumped at the sound, and I too, sleeping aft over the rudder, dreamt I
heard the sweet note.
It is a curious little family party we are; bit by bit, I begin to know
about the individual, gentle, blue-eyed Vikings, about their farms, and
boats, at home; for farms and even sheep have a certain interest at sea,
when you are not watching for whales.
One of them, a long, young man, with pale eyes and three or four fair
hairs on his chin, has such a kind expression, and a stutter! It is
the funniest thing in the world, in the beginning or the middle of
a chase, if he is at the wheel, to listen to him, as he tackles the
speaking tube. He spits hurriedly, then in a sing-song note, he says:
“F-f-ulls-s-speed,” twists the wheel and spits again, saying some Norse
expression for “Tut-tut” or “Oh, bother,” and then the same performance
at “S-s-saghte” (_i.e._ Slowly). Finally he gives up stuttering words
down the tube and resorts to the engine-room bell for signalling.
I have already touched on the interesting subject of meals on a
whaler; I have known one begin at five P.M. and finish at eleven P.M.,
the prolongation being the result of frequent dashes from the minute
mess-room to the gun platform in bows or to the bridge, in the immediate
prospect of getting alongside a whale. To-day we begin our midday meal
at the sweet end—why, the Norse only know!—prunes and rice, winding up
with tinned herrings and coffee. After food we studied Art, did bits of
sea from the bridge and pretty faces from fancy, the skipper played on
the melodeon, and we exhibited in the chart-room, and each of the unshorn
Vikings as he came to the bridge for his trick at the wheel or on one
excuse or another came in and looked long and admiringly. Of course I had
painted to the gallery—the girls had blue eyes and fair hair, the colours
of birch bark, the silvery harmonies of nature beloved by the Norse and
the artist.
At three in the afternoon we got sight of the Shetlands and Flugga to the
west, and made a new departure to the N.W. We were only three miles south
of our dead reckoning; not so bad, after several days lying hove to, and
dodging about in all directions, with neither sextant nor chronometer;
a chronometer gets knocked out of time in such a small craft with the
shock from the gun. Towards night the Haldane’s engines slowly stopped
in accordance with orders; which orders our friend the stutterer at the
wheel did not know about, and his muttered imprecations on the lazy
engineer stopping, as he thought, for a rest, made us all on the bridge,
skipper, steward, and two of the crew, laugh till the tears came! a
little goes such a long way at sea in the way of a jest (in fine weather).
So we lash the wheel to windward and roll about just over that scandalous
limit line—forty miles N. of Shetland—inside of which any foreigner may
whale, but we may not! We have seen nothing for twenty-four hours and
the sea is as empty as the Sahara of herring-boats; the crew have three
hours’ sleep.
Monday, 4th July, three A.M. A most bilious morning, enough to make a
seagull ill or upset the hardiest shell-back; the world seems just a bag
of hard wind and cold water, squalls, and scraps of rainbow, and tossing
seas, with the eerie sough in our scanty wire rigging. We bury our bows.
For five minutes our faces pour with rain and spray, the next five we dry
and shiver in the cold and early sun, and vainly search the horizon for a
whale. We think, almost with regret, of warm rooms in town in the South.
There is no rest anywhere, aft or forward, or on the bridge, and we plug
on northwards, and there’s never a blow anywhere in this useless bit of
the world. It requires extreme æstheticism to see beauty in such cold
water and sky, and hope to see sunshine through these squalls. We peg
away in silence; yesterday, we could talk; to-day it is too cold. We bury
our hands in our pockets and weep with the sting in our eyes. Yesterday,
we discussed, as far as we could, the reason why whales suddenly will not
rise; like trout, they do so one day and not the next, but unlike the
trout-fisher, who is usually ready with a theory to explain the lethargy
of trout, our Norse whaler simply says: “I doan know; der yesterday now
gone; vee go vest hoondred twenty mile p’r’aps vee find ’em der.”
By midday we are thirty miles beyond the limit and are going west, and
the day seems to have regretted its angry rising and is now making amends
to us by putting on all its best things. The colour of the water has
turned from dull lead to sunny emerald-green with belts of purple, and
over it all is a lacework of lavender, the tracery of reflected sky,
picked here and there with white sea caps. A jolly exhilarating sea
occasionally comes on board, and rollicks sparkling round our deck, full
of good intention, and we make it welcome and enjoy it, and let bygones
be bygones and pretend to forget it is not always in such a jolly mood.
I knew we would get sun and warmth out N.W.; there is a space of ocean if
you can only find it just between W. and E. that is always sunny and full
of whales. I know it, but cannot give exact latitude and longitude; that
is why it is so hard to find, but you are sure to strike it in time; so
probably we will do so again to-day. We are getting the sun now, we only
need the whales, and a little less sea for pleasure and comfort.
[Illustration: LEAVING OUR TWO WHALES AT THE STATION]
[Illustration: A FINNER WHALE BEING CUT UP
Commencing to cut strips of the blubber with a flensing knife. The
blubber is being pulled away as the man cuts by a chain and steam winch.]
The writer and the skipper were discussing the colours of the sea;
Henriksen, unlike the average whaler, does not despise things æsthetic;
on the contrary, he takes delighted interest in Nature’s picture-book. As
we painted, and discussed how to get this effect, and the other, there
came from the crow’s nest the welcome cry of “A blast!” and the response
from the bridge: “How far?” We were bowling south with a blustering,
following wind, really too rough for whaling, for the sea made us yaw
this way and that. However, there was no choice; there was half-a-chance
and it was not to be missed. It did not turn out to be a long chase; it
was a solitary finner and we swung after his first blow a mile to port
and at his third blow were within a quarter of a mile. Then he sounded,
and in twenty minutes came up again and blew a twenty-foot blast of
steam into the bright windy air. Again we pursued and were nearly in
shot at his second blast, and were following him north against the sea
with the foam coming splendidly over us at every dive, making one fairly
gasp with excitement and cold, but feet and legs held good; they shake
a little, we notice, whilst we look on at another gunner. We were all
wrong at the third rise; a mile out and very disappointed, then, to our
astonishment, three minutes after appeared a blast to leeward, and the
huge, plum-coloured shoulders of a leviathan coming right across our
course—the same whale or another we could not tell. A turn of the engine
then “Saghte” (Slowly), and we surged ahead, rising and falling on the
far too big waves. Then a strange and rare sight came; owing to the
position of the sun, the light shone right into the banks of waves, and
inside one and along it, we obtained a splendid full-length view of the
whale under the greeny water looking almost yellow and white. We have
only on very few occasions obtained such a complete view of a whale, when
looking down on one, but in this case, it was a complete side view. Up we
rose in a thirty-foot surge, and the top of his dark shiny head appeared,
up rushed the blast, and over went his enormous back. How we wished it
was higher out of the water. As we plunged down a wave its back showed
at its highest, and we pulled the trigger, aiming almost uphill as we
plunged our bows under. It was a longer shot than usual, about forty
yards and in rougher weather, and the harpoon plunged in at the centre of
the target! What a boom and whirl of rope and smoke, and what a glorious
moment of suspense and then intense satisfaction when the great line
tautened up and began to run—some excuse for a wave of the cap.
[Illustration: Harpooning a Whale]
But wait...! What is this? the line is suddenly slack. There was no
miss—what has happened we cannot tell. All we can do is to wind up—we
have lost him, somehow or other!
I know men who feel almost relieved at missing a whale, for they say
they have had the hunt, which is better than the actual harpooning, and
after-play, and so I have heard some salmon-fishers talk, who say they
hook their salmon, then hand the rod to their gillie. Not so with the
writer; one part of whaling or fishing is as good as the other to me, and
to harpoon your whale and lose it is too distressing for words.
At last the harpoon comes on board—the flanges have never opened!—there
is flesh on them, and a foot up the shaft—two and a half feet it had
entered, and yet came out! possibly the marlin round the flanges was too
strong to allow of them spreading. Possibly the explosive point made too
great a hole and allowed the flashes to miss their anchoring hold. It was
bad luck for us and for the whale. Our leviathan disappeared and we wound
up, very melancholy.[5] A slight consolation was that a neighbouring
whaler was seen to fire at another whale; we heard the boom and saw the
smoke, and nothing more—she had made a clean miss! probably owing to the
roughness of the sea.
[Illustration: View of Whale under Water]