After killing our first bull sperm off the Azores we killed a few more
whales, north of the Line, rorquals and small sperms of no great value.
Then, owing to the warm water of the tropics not cooling our engine
sufficiently, we had more engine trouble on the voyage from the Line to
Cape Town. One day under sail and engine, the next drifting and tinkering
at the engine. At the Cape, however, relief came; a Norwegian expert
at Diesel motors was sent out and he diagnosed the trouble at once,
increased the flow of cooling water, altered the screw slightly and got
the St Ebba into splendid trim, and the old engineer, a Swede, went home.
Under sail and motor our little vessel did a record passage up the
Mozambique Channel, in heavy weather, past Madagascar to the region of
calm seas round the Seychelle Islands, five degrees south of the Line.
We would rather have gone south instead of north, to the Crozet Islands,
for the sea-elephants which we know are there, but, owing to the last two
vessels that called there having been wrecked, insurance rates became
prohibitive; so we acted on the alternative plan we had formed in Norway,
and went to the Seychelles to find if my old whaling chart said sooth
about the sperm there. I had also heard from old whalers that there were
many blue whales, and these we knew had never been hunted, and the sperm
we counted on having increased in numbers; since the sperm-whaling was
almost given up forty years ago. Our forecast was correct; we found both
sperm and rorquals in great numbers.
We set to killing and flinching (or flensing) the sperm whales at sea.
But we soon realised that for one we killed and flinched at sea we could
take and utilise a dozen with a shore station; for the labour, French
Creole, on the Seychelles is plentiful and cheap. Besides, we were losing
not only much oil, owing to the warmth of the water, but also the use of
the bodies of the whales. One of these drifted ashore beneath Government
House. It was very high, and we were politely informed that—that was the
limit!
So we applied to the Seychelle Government for licences for a large land
station in order to utilise both the blubber and the entire bodies of our
whales. Licences were granted to us and we purchased the land site for a
station; and now we are running our little Company into a large affair,
with both British and Norwegian Directors and capital, and the station
is being prepared—a complete land station, to work with several whaling
steamers; capable of turning out, by the latest processes and modern
machinery, several hundred barrels of oil and bags of guano per day, the
guano being produced from the whale’s bones and meat after all oil has
been extracted.
[Illustration]
Now I have come to a point in this relation of the history of the St
Ebba when I find myself in the position of a historical painter who was
decorating a building in New York with a historical frieze of American
history, and he stopped. “Why,” said his patrons, “do you stop?” “Why,”
he replied, “because—you haven’t got any more history!” So our St Ebba’s
history must also stop in the meantime. Possibly we may join her again
and go on with our narration, and paint blue seas and coral strands
fringed with waving palms, and hunt whales where there are never gales,
and turn turtle and catch bonita and tunny and so on. Meantime we leave
her at anchor in the Seychelles in charge of the mate, engineers and two
men. The mate writes that his crew strike at turtle soup more than three
times a week, and Henriksen has gone to Norway about the outfit for the
new station and steamers for our developed Company.
Here it was the writer’s intention to bring in some notes about whaling
in the Antarctic regions, 1892-1893, partly because they might contrast
interestingly with the following recent notes on the Arctic seas, but
this promised to make too large a volume, so we miss the Antarctic and go
direct to notes about hunting and drawing in the Arctic.
[Illustration]