Whaling has its seamy side. We met it outside the loch going up west of
Shetland—the wind had almost dropped, but the cross sea it left was as
if several Mulls of Cantire had been rolled together, and neither our
little whaler nor its crew liked it a bit. Rocky capes and islands were
blurred in mist and spouting foam, and sometimes obscured by passing rain
and hail showers. About eight or nine, morning, we were off Flugga, the
most northerly point of Britain’s possessions, and the weather was simply
beastly; by two in the afternoon, we were about sixty miles north-east,
in an intensely blue sea, with immense silky rollers, it might have been
in the N.E. Trades. It was just what I expected; thirty to forty miles
north of the islands you strike sun and clear sky—we always do, then go
west fifty miles and you come up against a curtain of rain.
At three-five we are sloping along half-speed north-easterly over a
splendid silky swell, all our eyes sweeping the horizon. The boy beside
me at the wheel is the first to spot a blow, to which we promptly swing
our whaler, and immediately after, on the horizon, we discover the
faintest possible suggestion of a blow, a minute cloud hardly enough to
swear by, as big as the tip of a child’s little finger. It fades away
and we are sure it is the blow of some kind of whale, and the boy rings
up the engine-room and, grinning, shouts down the tube: “Megat Stor Nord
Capper, full speed!” This to make the stokers lay on, for a Nord Capper
means £1 apiece bounty money to each of our crew of ten men.
At three-ten we begin the hunt; we go seven miles towards the first blow,
when there is a shout from the look-out in the crow’s nest, and we find
big spouts within a mile from our left. So the skipper goes forward to
his beloved rusted swivel gun or cannon, in his weathered green jacket, a
picturesque figure against the immense blue silky sunny swell.
Five minutes the whale stays down, then comes up to starboard. “How
many were there?” says Jensen to the look-out in the crow’s nest. “Two
big and a calf.” Eight minutes they stay down and appear half-a-mile to
starboard; there is the lovely silence of a sailing-ship as we wait with
the engines stopped, studying fleecy clouds and the silky blue stripe our
track has left on the swell. It is this rapid contrast that gives the
charm to whaling—this morning, in hail and black-eyed sea, a blurred sea
and landscape of beaten cliffs and capes; this afternoon a wide horizon,
and not a ship in sight, the colour and width of it! But here he is!
He came up half-a-mile to port—appeared two or three times, at a few
seconds’ interval, then “tailed up,” that slow, farewell turn over of the
after part of the body as it goes down for a deep dive; and we follow its
general direction. In ten minutes he appears a mile to N.W. It is four
o’clock, the air S.W. and cold, and bright enough to be N.E.
“Saghte!” (Norse for softly, slowly), he ought to be up soon.... 4.3 P.M.
There he is half-a-mile to east—we hear the blast. These North-Atlantic
whales don’t make half such a resonant loud blast as the Antarctic
whales ... another whale blowing to E. by S.... Four-twelve. Within two
hundred yards, a little to port—we follow, a stern chase—note blue sky
reflected on wet plum-coloured back ... within fifty yards when he made
his last dive, Jensen had the gun swung ... separate whale appears to the
right—very large ... nearly fired. Four-twenty. Behind, to port, we swing
round—we are lacing the rippling swell with blue silky bands—“Lord!”
there it is! at the second rise under our bow—BANG!
* * * * *
A splendid shot!—away goes the line at seventy miles the hour and we are
hauled quickly round, and are taken in tow eight miles an hour and the
engines going eight miles astern, if that is not exhilarating!
Jensen wipes his nose on red handkerchief—the cook and engineer are
at the winch brakes—there is a thin furrow of Union Jack colours, red
blood, white foam in the blue of ocean—and the line still whirling out
at intervals. We “fish fine,” the casting line is sixty fathoms, the
rope four and a half inches in circumference, the finest Italian hemp
procurable, with a backing of two thousand one hundred and sixty-six
feet, five-and-half inches rope to port, and the same to starboard, a
total of eight thousand six hundred and twenty feet. The line passes five
times round the two barrels of a sixty-five horse-power winch. It is
“fine tackle” compared to the seventy or eighty ton fighting finner that
we are playing.... 4.25—not much line out, only about one thousand five
hundred feet—now we go more slowly in tow.—It was a well-placed shot ...
a few Mother Carey chickens come and some fulmar petrels, later a solan
goose!—there is a little blood now in its feeble blast, it thrashes with
its tail—more line going out—we go astern to drown it. The nose appears,
exactly the colour of a salmon at a distance—it turns over. 4.33—White
ribbed underside up—now it is dead and it sinks. The line is rove over
large iron snatch block[7] up the mast and the steam winch begins to
turn slowly, raising the whale from the depths; a slow, steady, funereal
clank; a great chain is manœuvred round the tail and it is hauled up to
the side of the bow by the winch; getting the tail chained up to the bow
is a complicated, heavy bit of seaman’s work. A magnificent and beautiful
thing is the tail in colour and form; so wide and big and yet so delicate
in design and finish and plum-like colour and so immensely strong. The
body swings alongside, the head reaches our stern quarters, the line is
cut clear of the harpoons in its body. 4.55—Two hours after we first
sighted the whale, a quick hunt, play, and kill. 5.3—Blowing it up and
off for second whale.
Blowing up, as already described, is putting a hollow lance into whale
and blowing through it air and steam, which makes the body slightly more
buoyant and more easy to tow.
5.30—Sight another whale. Meantime Jensen has been cleaning out the
whale gun on the bows with tow and cleaning rod and the charge is put
in, and the india-rubber wad driven home on top of three hundred and
eighty-five grammes of black powder. The second line from the port
side of the hold is made ready, and a new harpoon, one and a half
hundredweights, slung from the hold. The line is spliced to the twisted
wire grummet or ring that travels in a slot in the shaft of the harpoon,
which is rammed into the gun so that line and ring hang from the shaft
at the muzzle of the gun. Getting this done and putting chains and ropes
in order takes time and a considerable amount of work for five men, and
meanwhile we on the bridge are conscious, as we roll, of occasional
whiffs from the galley of roast whale steak and onions. For merit I place
caribou meat first, whale and black bear about equal, in second place,
and beef third.
Five-forty-five. We have screwed on the explosive point to the harpoon
(over the time fuse), swung round the gun, and are off in pursuit of the
whale we sighted at five-thirty. By six-thirty he has appeared several
times, made two or three handsome blasts and gone down “tail up,” and we
followed, as we thought, in the direction he took, but he always appeared
right off our track. I use the term “tail up” not quite accurately here;
the expression really means the whole tail going into air as the whale
goes down for a long dive. In the case of these northern finners it is
generally only the part of the back next to the tail that is raised, not
the flukes, and this rising tells you the whale intends to go down deep
for twenty minutes or half-an-hour. “A wrong vone,” the engineer says—“he
be chased before.” You see the engineer, when his mate is below, joins in
the sport of watching, ahead, to port, to starboard and astern, and works
the winch when we are playing the fish; always there is work for all, and
little enough time for meals, if any.
Whilst we roll about in the swell waiting for the leviathan to make our
closer acquaintance, I may relate some of the thrilling dangers with
which the track of the modern whaler is beset. Novel, unfamiliar dangers
must always make interesting reading when people are tired of hearing of
the risks we all run at any crossing as pedestrians or motorists.
[Illustration: TWO WHALES BEING HAULED ON TO A SLIP
The nearest whale is a Bull finner. A man is seated on the farthest. The
men in the foreground are cutting meat from the spine of a third whale.]
Off Norway, several steam-whalers have had sea-water and daylight let
into them by careless whales, and a whale here, some years ago, when
the industry was new, took offence at being fired at, and flew at the
innocent little steamer (seventy tons solid life and energy against a
ninety-five-foot boat) with jaws wide open and generally chewed-up rails
and superstructures, so the owners hardly knew it when it came back to
the station. But whales are not in the habit of behaving like this. I did
myself, however, experience a mild charge last year; possibly the charge
was unintentional, but certainly the whale came straight at our starboard
bow, and had we not been quick enough to swing and depress the gun’s
muzzle and shoot at six yards, something might have happened; as it was
the whale came on and struck a dead whale we had alongside, and with its
impetus it gave our little ship a considerable dunt in the ribs. “If” it
had not been hit and “if” it had struck us a little harder, say twice,
we would have had to row home a hundred miles in the boats, which would
have been rather a come-down from steaming the wide seas o’er, on our
up-to-date little whaler, the Haldane of Colla Firth.
“If” another whale a few nights ago had pulled a little harder, when it
suddenly changed from towing us forward to towing us astern, we might
have been quite upset, whereas we were only half-seas over. But alas,
there was a really very sad and dreadful experience here, two years ago.
Captain Torp, a fine man and a good gunner, fired at a whale and the
harpoon ricochetted, and three hundred and eighty-five grammes driving
a one-and-a-half-hundredweight harpoon burst the five-inch cable, and
the inside end came back and wound round him and broke him unspeakably
from head to foot, and yet he lived two days, and fourteen ounces of
chloroform had little effect.
Then, too, one sometimes gets sunk whilst whaling. Casperg, a master
in Ronas Voe, our next-door station, had that experience—went down in
his cabin with pipe and tobacco pouch in hand, felt himself kicking the
rock with his sea-boots under the kelp before he had time to strike
a light. He came up all right, but four of his crew stayed down; that
was recently. And my friend Sorrensen, engineer of the Haldane, told me
comfortingly last year, as we chatted in the warm engine-room one dismal,
dark, rough night, when we were trying to find land, that on his last
whaling trip to Iceland, in making land in a gale of snow and wind, “on
a night like this,” he observed a large rock suddenly protrude itself
through his engine-room floor, which finished his trip for that year.
“Yes, yes, two tree skip do so,” he said.
The wonder really is that more accidents are not met with. The whale’s
head is such a weight of bone; the pointed mass on the upper jaw or beak
meeting the huge bent bones of the lower make a most formidable ram.
Another close shave there was the other day. A⸺ tried to lance a whale
in its death-struggle from the little steamer’s bows. We have tried this
ourselves with and without success. On this occasion the whale raised its
huge flipper, swung it across the gun at the bow, which was loaded with
the harpoon in it, and its muzzle was thrown round so heavily that the
harpoon was shot out on deck and the shell exploded. No one was hurt, but
A⸺’s oilskin coat had holes torn in it between his legs—and so on....
By eight P.M. we had eaten our whale steak (meals are at any hour or no
hour when you are whaling), discussed the latest type of whaler, Captain
Larsen’s three-gun boat, and had given up that wily old dodger of a
finner, and now we peg away over the blue sea to the N.E. The sun swings
round with us to dip quite near the north, whilst we wait and rest until
it comes up again in a few hours to form our gallery. True, we have
another companion beside the few petrels. The Busta, our sister ship, is
in the offing. She also has a whale alongside; we can make it out with
the glasses as she rises over a blue surge; and as I write, far to the
west I descry an almost invisible smoke, which I hope is a boat of our
Alexandra Company, the Queen, or the Haldane.
[Illustration]
At nine-thirty the sun slants below the horizon and the colour display
begins toning down to soft, warm light in the north and violet in the
south and west. It is very still, the only sound the surge of the water
over the white-ribbed flounces of our whale’s underside as it tows
alongside. We speak little; there is the skipper, and the man at the
wheel, on the bridge, and one above us in the crow’s nest; the rest are
sleeping below. It is the romantic, beautiful time at sea, formality
goes, we talk a little of home and families we have, or may have, and
the night, as it were, just droops her golden eyes, and in a very little
while raises them on another day, blue and fresh as ever, and we begin
another day’s hunting, to get, if we can, one more whale to tow to our
harbour in the south, there to provide work and pay for Shetlanders and
Norwegians, food for Danes and ourselves, and fertilisers for farmers’
crops and cattle, each of which subjects could not be treated of in less
than a page of these notes for itself. But one word I may be allowed here
for readers who are interested in fertilisers for vegetables, and cattle
foods. For both these purposes the cooked and ground-down whale meat and
bone is invaluable, and it costs about one-sixth the price of ordinary
fertilisers—but beware, don’t use it for the latter purpose without
digging it into the soil. The gardener of my friend, C. A. Hamilton of
Dunmore, Stirlingshire, did so—put it on the top of the soil in a vinery,
and was “maist astonished.” “Ma gosh, Maister Hamilton,” he said, “you’d
hae thocht I’d plaunted pussey cawts!” it was so mouldy. The same worthy
used it properly for turnips, dug it in, and exhibited the result at the
local show, and was disqualified! The judge said: “Mon, it’s turnips is
the exheebut—yon’s no turnips—wha ever saw neips like that—they’re faur
ower big.”
* * * * *
A cool, sunny morning, with rolling glassy grey swell and warmer. We are
in tow of a large finner; we began to hunt a herd (pod is the old name,
it means a family party) at five-thirty. It has taken five hundred yards
out with several rapid rushes of forty to fifty miles an hour, and there
is a smell of the burning wood of the breaks; it is very quiet, Jensen
has come up beside me at the wheel. I noticed after the shot he again
rubbed his nose with the red handkerchief, a little nervous, colourful
touch. The whale blows occasionally and turns the swell into white and
red; it looks as if we must lance it from the small boat, or get another
harpoon in. It was a most interesting chase; five monsters blowing
half-a-mile apart seemed quite a crowd. We got in between two, feeding,
and after an hour’s hunt altogether one rose a few yards to starboard.
Jensen refused it, coolly waiting for the bigger one behind to come up in
front, to the left, and mercifully it did, slowly; you could see down its
blow hole, then its great back came out, and into, I think, its last ribs
the harpoon went, and at the wheel we were all in smoke and tow. The
smoke cleared and the wads lay in the swelling vortex the monster left,
and then the line rushed!
[Illustration]
Who can describe the heart-stopping thrill as the monster breaks the
surface within shot, only perhaps the dry-fly man, he must experience
exactly the same in a minute degree.
But this whale will not die, we must lance it; an eighteen-foot spear
is the lance—half iron, half wood. The pram is swung out—we are dropped
half on top of our dead whale and slide off somehow. Jensen is handed the
lance and away we go, double sculls. Over the glassy rollers we go at
a good pace, the whale is six hundred yards away or more and wandering
from left to right, and ahead, in the deep swell, it seems as if it would
be a long business to get into reach. We back the stern in and Jensen
makes a great lunge and the spear goes in five feet and is twisted out
of his hand and the vast body rolls over, the tail rises up and up and
comes down in a sea of foam. We pull clear back in again at next rise and
draw the spear all bent, straighten it, and one more thrust finishes the
business and the whale spouts red and dies.
It is a quarter to eight when we finally get the tail up to our port bow
and go off easterly; we must be seventy miles N.E. off the Shetland Isles.
Whales seem to be such good beasts, and have such kind brown eyes—nothing
of the fish in them, and their colouring is that of all the sea; their
backs are grey-black to dove-colour, reflecting the blue of the sky, and
the white of their underside is like the white of a kid glove with the
faintest pink beneath, so white it makes the sea-foam look grey as it
washes across it to and fro, and the white changes to emerald-green in
the depths to the blue-green of an iceberg’s foot. It is strange that
this skin should be so extremely delicate in such a large animal; it is
too thin to be used as leather.
Our first whale was fifty-four feet, say fifty tons, equal to twenty-five
to thirty barrels of oil. Second whale, seventy feet, say forty barrels
of oil.
The second whale was a bull “fish,” according to S. Johnson of Fleet
Street, and the dark colouring came farther over the white corduroy
waistcoat than in the female. It is curious how the grey colour blends
into the white exactly as if it were drawn with a lead pencil on ivory
in perfect imitation of hair; from a few yards you think it is hair, for
its formation so resembles the lie of hair on other mammals. I have never
heard of this having been observed by naturalists. I am sure a Darwin
might make endless deductions from it, coupled with the belief of the old
neolithic Indians of Newfoundland that the caribou had gradually changed
into whales. The colour of the caribou is quite like the colour of these
Seihvale. But we must keep off speculations on the origin of species,
and these marks in particular, and the whale’s pedigree, opinions, and
domestic life. It is such a large subject, though fascinating. Many
authentic and startlingly new facts have been gathered since this modern
whaling began. For example, a whale was killed last year “wid six leetle
children in it.” This will rather astonish naturalists—it horrified a
Shetland lady in whose hearing a polite Norseman made the relation—but
that there were six embryos is a fact I vouch for. I hope some naturalist
of means will some day charter a vessel and suitable observers to make
a few years’ study of the subject round the world. H.S.H. the Prince of
Monaco has set the example, particularly in regard to the study of the
sperm whale.
It was grey all day, grey sky reflected in lavender-grey water, the
surface hardly indicated till an endless shoal of dolphins came out from
the shadow of a cloud in the east. They were pretty enough to watch, but
we had little time for two finners led us miles here and there over the
ocean, but eluded us ever; we had little chance of circumventing them by
reason of our two whales in tow. We gave them up and went after spouts
like cannon shots against the dark rain-cloud to the east; and this time
cleared ourselves of our bag; slipped the heavy chains, fastened a buoy
with a tall flag to the two bodies and left them in charge of the Molly
Mawks or Fulmar Petrels. But the family of finners we pursued were very
wide awake, and though we pursued them for weary hours we never got quite
within shot, though dozens of times we whispered to ourselves “A certain
shot!” So with more trouble we took our two whales in tow again, and
left the gulls lamenting, for already they had begun to pick away the
delicate white skin. Then we “up sticked” and steered away south-west to
this sunny part of the sea, and dozed comfortably as we went, our best
speed about six knots, for home.
A fisherman is not to be pitied coming home with seventy tons to port
and sixty to starboard, enjoying the sense of comfort and well-being
that comes after the first hardening days at sea, enjoying the pure air
and the scent of roasting coffee. We do ourselves well on our Norwegian
boats this year; at least the coffee is good. As we imbibe it and think
our sport is over, we come into warmer weather, a froth of soft white
and grey clouds reflected in the swell, two whalers on the horizon and
finners in sight. So it’s all alive-o! Off with the guns’ coverings—we
may have a third whale to show the girls on shore—(if there were any!).
And we chased these too in the silky silence of that space of sea and air
and reflections of fairy lands of softest, most pearly cumulus clouds
with only a spot of frosted blue overhead to give force to the faintest
yellow, the only sound, the soft thrum of our subdued screw beat and the
occasional surge as we crushed down on the glassy swell, and every now
and then the great deep, deep sigh of the seventy-ton finners rising in
front, alas always just out of reach. One of the whales bore a scar where
we think a harpoon had glanced off. The Fritjiof, a neighbour whaler,
also occupied this ocean chamber a few miles off and quietly went about
in tow of a whale; we saw her fire one shot and noted the colour of the
smoke, blue against her hull fading to rusty brown across the sky. She
had four lines into the beast when we called on her later, and chatted
across the swell to the harpooneer.
Now we have again picked up our prey of dead whales and are toddling
home five to six miles an hour at full steam, and ought to be in by
dinner-time to-morrow, Wednesday—that is, twelve o’clock.
Wednesday morning, it is, it must be! But it seems months since
Wednesday last week. Yesterday seemed a week, with its endless gallery
of magnificent sky and sea pictures. Now there is time for a shave and
a wash in the sun on the top of the engine-house. What intense luxury!
What joy to sit and shave and be unconscious of the roll, how superior
we feel compared to the townsmen who left Leith a week ago. There’s the
rush and sound of many waters over our whales on either side, the largest
a little less than our own length. All hands have an easy time. It takes
two watches (eight hours each) down the Shetland shore to our station,
and no whales about. Of course the land is clouded, and we regret that
sunny chamber to the N. and E. of Shetland. I speak to Jensen as we pass
the western cliffs and he verifies my experience; to the N.W. you come
against dark hangings of rain, N.E. you are in sun, back to land and you
are in clouds again. It is no wonder that sunny, crystalline stretch of
sea a hundred miles north of Flugga Light calls to one in town to go
a-whaling.