Modern Whaling & Bear-Hunting / A record of present-day whaling with up-to-date appliances in many parts of the world, and of bear and seal hunting in the Arctic regions

by W. G. Burn Murdoch

CHAPTER II

In August I went to Tonsberg, the capital of the old Viking days, and over the wooden housetops saw the two bare pole masts of our ship and a little later saw her entire hull! How infinitely satisfactory, to see our dream of a year ago in Balta Sound realised in hard iron and pine on the slip. She is one hundred and ten feet over all, with twenty-two-foot beam—just a few feet longer than the Viking ship of the Norwegian princes that was found a year or two ago buried within a mile and a half of where our vessel is being built. Tonsberg was the Viking centre, now it is the centre of the modern whaling industry of the world.

Years ago we thought of whaling as connected with the hunting of whales in the Arctic regions, or of cachalot or sperm whaling in sub-tropical seas, carried on by sailing-vessels which had several small boats and large crews: in the eighteenth century 35,000 men and 700 vessels hunted the Greenland Right whale.

This modern whaling, however, that I write about just now is a new kind of whaling of only forty-eight years’ growth. It has grown up as the old styles went more or less out of practice.

Two or three New Bedford sailing-ships still prosecute the old style of sperm whaling south of the line, but the Greenland Right whale hunting has been almost entirely given up within the last two years. The Dundee whalers gave it up in 1912, because this new whaling brought down the price of whale oil, and because the Right whale or whalebone whale, Balæna Mysticetus, had become scarce and so wary that it could not be killed in sufficient numbers to pay expenses.

This Balæna or whalebone whale has no fin on its back.

A large Right whale, or Bowhead, as it is sometimes called, has nearly a ton of whalebone in its mouth, which a few years ago was worth about £1500 per ton; previously it was worth as much as £3000 per ton, so one good whale paid a trip. It was pursued from barques like the one below—sailing-ships with auxiliary steam and screw, fifty men of a crew, and small boats, each manned with five men, with a harpoon gun in its bows, or merely a hand harpoon. When the harpoon was fired and fixed into the whale, it generally dived straight down, and when exhausted from want of air, came up and was dispatched with lances or bombs from shoulder guns; they measured from forty to fifty-five feet.

On another page is a small picture of the sperm or cachalot, valuable for its spermaceti oil, and for ambergris, a product found once in hundreds of whales caught. It is a toothed whale and carries no whalebone.

But during the centuries these Right whales and sperm were being killed there were other larger and much more powerful whales, easily distinguished from the “Right whales” by the fin on their backs. These were to be found in all the oceans and were unattacked by men. They have only a little whalebone in their mouths and were much too powerful to be killed by the old methods.

Once or twice the old whalers by accident harpooned one of these “modern whales” or finners, and the tale of their adventure, as told by one of Mr Bullen’s Yankee harpooneers, bears out exactly what we ourselves experienced down in the Antarctic, off Graham’s Land, in 1892-1893, when one of our men tried to do the same. We had been for months hopelessly looking for Right whale and only saw these big finners in great numbers close alongside of our boats, so one of our harpooneers in desperation fastened to one.

In his book, “The Cruise of the Cachalot,” Mr Bullen describes sighting a finner whilst they were hunting the more pacific sperm or cachalot. Bullen asks his mentor, a coloured harpooneer, why he doesn’t harpoon it, when Goliath the harpooneer turns to him with a pitying look, as he replies:

“Sonny, ef yeu wuz to go and stick iron into dat ar fish yew’d fink de hole bottom fell eout kerblunk. Wen I wiz young’n foolish, a finback ranged ’longside me one day off de Seychelles. I just gone miss’a spam whale, and I was kiender mad—muss ha’ bin. Wall, I let him hab it blam ’tween de ribs. If I lib ten tousan year, ain’t gwine ter fergit dat ar wan’t no time ter spit, tell ye; eberybody hang ober de side ob de boat. Wuz-poof! de line all gone, Clar to glory, I neber see it go. Ef it hab ketch anywhar, nobody ever see us too. Fus, I fought I jump ober de side—neber face de skipper any mo’.”

I have described our similar experience elsewhere—Weddel sea in the Antarctic—with the old-style whaling tackle and a hundred to one hundred and ten foot blue whale or finner. It took out three miles of lines from our small boats—the lines were got hold of from board ship, and the whale towed the procession for thirty hours under and over ice, on to rocks; then the harpoons drew, and it went off “with half Jock Todd’s smithy shop in its tail”—our sailor’s parlance for its going off with most of our shoulder gun explosive bombs in its lower lumbar regions. These big fellows were so numerous in the ice off Graham’s Land that we sometimes thought it advisable to keep them off our small boats with rifle bullets.

Now we can kill these big fellows. Captain Svend Foyn, a Norwegian, mastered them by developing a new harpoon. Svend Foyn and the engineer Verkseier H. Henriksen in Tonsberg worked it out together. A big harpoon fired from a cannon, a heavy cable and a small steamer combined made the finner whales man’s prey. Captain Foyn had made a considerable fortune at Arctic seal-hunting, and thereafter spent five years of hard and unsuccessful labour before he perfected his new method in 1868. Eighteen years later there were thirty-four of such steamers engaged in the industry in the North Atlantic, to-day there are sixty-four hunting from the Falkland Islands and other dependencies. In the neighbourhood of Cape Horn last year their gross return amounted to £1,350,000.

These Balænoptera, averaging fifty to ninety feet, are fast swimmers and when harpooned go off at a great speed and require an immense harpoon to hold them, and when dead they sink, and their weight is sufficient to haul a string of small boats under the sea. To bring them to the surface a very powerful hawser is attached to the harpoon, and is wound up by a powerful steam winch on the ninety-foot steamer, which can be readily towed by the whale, but which is also sufficiently buoyant to pull it to the surface when it is dead and has sunk.

In order that a whale may not break this five-inch hawser (or five and a half inches in circumference) the little vessel or steamer must be fairly light and handy, so as to be easily swung round. If the steamer were heavy and slow, the hawser, however thick, would snap, as it sometimes does even with the small vessel when the whale puts on a sudden strain.

In the old style the Greenland whale which floated when it was dead was pulled alongside the sailing-vessel, when the whalebone was cut out of its mouth and stowed on board, as was also the fat or blubber, and the carcass was left to go adrift. The sperm also floats when dead.

But the “modern whales,” as I call them, when killed are towed ashore and pulled upon a slip at a station or alongside a great magazine ship anchored in some sheltered bay and are there cut up, whilst the little steam-whaleboat killer goes off in search of other whales. All parts of the body, at a fully equipped shore station, even the blood, of these finners are utilised, the big bones and flesh being ground up into guano for the fertilisation of crops of all kinds, and the oil and small amount of whalebone are used for many purposes. The oil is used for lubrication, soap, and by a new “hardening process” is made as firm as wax and is used for cooking, etc. Some of the whalebone fibre is used for stiffening silk in France, but of these uses of the products we may only give the above indication, for every year or two some new use is being found for whale products.

Piping in the Arctic

Modern Whale Gun and Harpoon

Ready for firing.

Though so large, these whales are not nearly so valuable as the Greenland whale; still their numbers make up for their comparatively small value.[1]

In the last five or six years these finner whales, formerly unattacked by man, have been hunted all round the world. In 1911 there were one hundred and twenty modern steam-whalers working north of the Equator, and in the Southern Hemisphere there were eighty-six. The total value of the catch for the year was estimated at two and three quarter million sterling.

These whales are rapidly becoming more shy and wary, still the catches increase and the value of oil goes up. The more unsophisticated whales in unfished oceans will have soon to be hunted. There is not the least fear of whales ever being exterminated, for long before that could happen, owing to reduced numbers and their increased shyness, hunting them will not pay the great cost incurred. So there will some day be a world-wide close season—just as has happened in the case of the Greenland whale, which is now enjoying a close season and is increasing in numbers in the Arctic seas.

NORD CAPPER

BALÆNA AUSTRALIS

Captain T. Robertson of the Scotia in 1911, though he came home with a “clean ship,” saw over forty of the Mysticeti east of Greenland, but could not get near them, for they kept warily far in amongst the ice floes.

The sperm whale is also recovering in numbers. I have seen them in great numbers only last year in warm southern waters, where twenty years ago they had become very scarce.

We must mention here another whale that was actually supposed to be extinct. This is the Biscayensis, commonly called a Nordcapper; it is a small edition of the Greenland Right whale and is practically identical with the Australis of the Southern Seas.

This is the first whale we read of being hunted; in the Bay of Biscay and along the west of Europe it was supposed to have become extinct, but of recent years we have found them in considerable numbers round the coasts of Shetland and Ireland; a few years ago there were, I think, eighty of them captured in the season.