CHAPTER I
It blows, it blows, at Balta Sound, a cold, strong wind, and yet we are in June. I think it always blows at this northern end of Shetland, but we on our little steam-whaler, the Haldane, are sheltered from the sea by the low green shore and the low peaty hills half shrouded in mist.
One after another herring steam-drifters come up the loch and collect round the hulk of a retired sailing-ship to sell their catch on board it by auction. The hull of the wooden ship is emerald-green and the small sombre-coloured steamers crowd around it. On their black funnels each shows its registered number in white between belts of vivid scarlet, blue or yellow.
Our Haldane lies at anchor somewhat aloof from these herring-boats, as becomes our dignity and position, for we are whalers!—in from deep-sea soundings—hunters of the mighty leviathan of the deep, the Balænoptera Sibbaldii, the Balænoptera Borealis, the Balænoptera musculus: commonly called Blue, all of which we call Finners, the largest mammals living or extinct. We are smaller than the herring-drifters. They are a hundred to a hundred and twenty feet long and we are only ninety-five, still we consider ourselves superior: are we not distinguished by a crow’s nest at our short foremast, and all the lines of our hull are classic—bow and stern somewhat after the style of the old Viking ships—meant for rapid evolutions, not merely for carrying capacity?
Our colour is light greenish khaki, and if red lead paint and rust show all over our sides, it is an honourable display of wounds from fights with sea and whales—better than herring scales!
We enjoy the enforced rest: all last night we towed a big whale alongside—seventy tons’ weight in a rising gale! The bumps and thumps and jerks and aroma were very tiresome.
We towed it ninety miles from the outer ocean to our station at Colla Firth, on Mr R. C. Haldane’s property of Lochend, in the early morning (it is light all night here), and left it floating at the buoy, went alongside the trestle pier, helped ourselves to more coal, and slipped away again before the station hands had time to rub their eyes or show a foot.
We came up through the islands, ran to the north of Shetland, passed Flugga Light, then turned tail like any common fishing-boat and ran back before a rising gale to this Balta Sound on the east for shelter.
Our little Haldane doesn’t care a straw for heavy weather, but we on board her can’t harpoon well or manage a whale in heavy seas, so “weathering it out” only means waste of coal.
Therefore we spend the morning in shelter, tramping our very narrow bridge (three steps and a spit, as the sailors say), and we talk and sometimes go into our tiny chart-room and draw; and Henriksen plays Grieg on the melodeon! Henriksen is a whaler by profession, an artist under the skin; and the writer is an artist by profession and harpooneer on this journey from choice and after long waiting.
As we draw and chat we notice with admiration Swedish line-boats like the Norwegian pilot-boat in type, sailing-boats with auxiliary motors, coming up the loch with their sails down, pit-put-a-put, dead in the wind’s eyes! We know they have been cod and ling fishing in the North Atlantic for several months, and are now full of fish packed in ice.
“Ah,” sighs Henriksen, “if I had a boat half the size of this Haldane, with a motor and crude oil like them, I’d make a good thing of whaling round the world,” and the artist agrees, for both have seen many whales in far-away seas. Henriksen knows the Japanese seas where there are Right whales—Australis with bone, and Sperm, or Cachalot, with spermaceti; and the writer has seen sperm in other warm seas in numbers, and big Finners or Rorquals in the Antarctic seas by the thousand. So we blow big smokes in the chart-room and draw plans in the sketch-book of a new type of whaler. And she will be a beauty!
The Haldane we are on is second to none of the modern kind of steam-whaler, and we have killed many whales with her up to seventy or eighty tons in weight. But she requires to be frequently fed with coal, and has to tow her catch ashore, possibly one or two whales, or even three at a time, for thirty, forty or even ninety miles to leave them to be cut up at the station.
We plan a vessel that shall be able to keep the sea for a long time without calling for fuel like these Swedish motor-boats, and that will hunt whales and seals round the world, and carry the oil and bone of its catch on board.
Can there be any drawing more fascinating than the designing of a new type of vessel for whaling round the world, for warm seas where the grass and barnacles will grow on her keel, and for high latitudes where cold seas and perhaps ice will polish her plates all clean again?
So after some more whaling and planning, round the Shetlands in fine weather and storm, the writer goes south with rough plans, and in a few days two good men and true have agreed to be directors of a little whaling company; and, the whaling season over, Henriksen goes home to Norway, and with a shipbuilder they draw out our plan in detail, for a new patent Diesel motor-whaler for hunting all kinds of whales and whaling-grounds round the world, a combination of the old style and new, with sails and motor to sail round the world if need be with never a call at any port for food or fuel.
All winter Henriksen the whaler and another Henriksen a shipbuilder toiled at the planning and building of the St Ebba, Henriksen driving every day from his farm five miles into Tonsberg with his sleigh behind slow Swartzen; and the writer pursued his calling in Edinburgh, receiving occasionally fascinating drawings or detail plans of the whaler in white line on blue paper, and then he joined Henriksen in summer in South Norway and both together they drove out and in to Tonsberg, behind slow Swartzen, day after day for weeks, till weeks ran into months, and it seemed as if our ship would never be done.
A coal strike in Britain was the first cause of delay, our Colville plates were kept back by that. Still, we had her launched in little more than a twelvemonth from the time we first planned her, which we thought after all was not half bad.
We called her the St Ebba—why, it is hard to say.
It would take volumes to describe the trouble there is in preparing a boat for such a purpose, especially a new type such as ours. Further on in this book the reader will be able to understand from the drawings and descriptions the different styles of whalers of the past and present.