CHAPTER VII
Whaling is like salmon-fishing, but the waiting part is on an enormous scale, bigger in proportion than even the game or the tackle, however huge that is. Fancy waiting and fishing for nine months for your first fish. That was my first whaling. Henriksen in Japanese seas on his first whaling command was, I think, a year before he saw a whale. Then he had a lot of shots in succession and missed every time, till he discovered the powder was at fault, and then he killed about ninety in three months.
He sometimes gives me thumb-nail jottings of his experiences.
Once he ran into port. Yusako, I believe, and the harpoon-gun on the bows was still loaded, and the Japanese Bos’n fiddled with it and let it off. Two white chickens were resting on the forego (coils of rope under muzzle of gun), and Jap shoemakers, tailors with their goods and chattels, were on foredeck, sitting on the line, and they were all upset by its tautening suddenly. The boom brought Henriksen on deck, he found his bos’n standing pale as china, and a few white feathers floating in the air—a rather Whistleresque picture, is it not? Another time he himself upset all his poultry. He had quite a lot of hens on board, and they rather took to him. He had stood for hours on hours chasing two finners that never gave him a chance of harpooning them, and just at twilight he grew tired waiting and let drive a long shot on chance, never noticing that the fowls had collected round his feet and on the coiled forego. Overboard they went, every hen and chick of them, and great was the retrieving in the pram.[2]
Another curious mistake by a gunner I have heard of. He’d been chasing for a long time and fired at a whale, as he thought, but could not see where the harpoon went for the smoke. “Have I got the beggar?” he said, turning round to the Jap at the wheel. “Yes, captain, veree good shot.” The smoke cleared and a moak or gull lay with its head off, a bight of the forego had chopped it off; the Jap on bridge had seen no whale and thought the captain fired at the gull. The gunner’s expletives followed, and he threw his hat overboard, and stamped and swore accordingly.
And now here we are tied up, waiting again in Lerwick in September, and on the 1st of June we should have started fishing between Iceland and South Greenland, at a place we know there are certain to be the small but valuable Atlantic Right whale, Biscayensis, or Nord-Capper, as the Norse call it, a small edition of the Greenland Bowhead or Mysticetus ([see page 26]).
We waited and waited all that August in Norway, our grouse-shooting has gone, and now partridges are going, and we wait still. This last wait is due to an entanglement in red tape, a difficulty in getting our vessel registered here. We have the British Consul’s form of registration, a temporary affair from Norway, that has to be renewed here.
Soon after dropping anchor those agreeable and necessary officials, the Customs officers, came on board, in oilskins, which they discarded, disclosing blue jumpers and his Majesty’s brass buttons, all showing the effect of the climate, and they set to work overhauling our stores most carefully. If officials are to be maintained work must be found for them and we must all pay; we have assisted the Norwegian and British governments incalculably for weeks and months past. They earn their country’s pay by overhauling poor mariners’ tobacco and provender, only intended to be chewed and eaten far away in the North or the Southern Seas. Their chief, I knew at once, came from our west or north coast, by his soft accent, which was much to my taste; how much there must be in a voice if it makes even a seafarer almost welcome a Customs officer!
As he opened the stores and checked coffee and tobacco, we “tore tartan” a little. I said my heart was in Argyll but my people came from Perthshire, and suggested he might be from Islay. And from Islay he came! the island of Morrisons and whisky. But MacDiarmid was his name. “But that’s a Perthshire name,” I said. “Yes, yes,” said he, “to be sure, from Perthshire my people came.” “And from Glen Lyon, possibly?” I said, “and the Seven Kings?” And “Yes, yes,” he said, “to be sure, and it is Glen Lyon you know? Well, well, and that is the peautiful glen—and that wull be suxty poonds of coot tobacco, and wan hundred and suxty poonds of black twust. And did you see the Maclean was back to Duart Castle? Aich, aich! it was a ferry fine proceeding! You see, his mother’s grandmother’s daughter’s niece she would come from Glen Islay, and so it wass they came to their own again. Noo hoo much tae will you have here—we must mark it a’ doon seeing you may be callin’ at another Brutish port or in the back parts o’ Mull or maybe in Ireland too.”
His junior was Irish, with a Bow Bells accent, and the speech of both was very pleasant to me after months of Norse. The junior leant against the galley door as I had morning coffee, and leisurely interviewed our very busy cook—told him about Lerwick, asked him, “Did yew ’ave a good viyage, stooard?” to which pale Hansen with the golden hair answered, “Yah, yah, goot,” indifferently, but he brightened up when told of the fish to be had in Lerwick. “Wy, yuss, for a shillin’ you can git as much ’ere as will feed all ’ands, woy, for a sixpence or fourpence you can git a cod ’ere of saiy fourteen or sixteen pounds!” “Yah, yah, but vill it be goot?” said incredulous Hansen. “Yuss, you bet y’r loife. Ain’t no Billinsgaite fish ’ere, matey! wot I mean is you git ’em ’ere ’alf aloive! But did ye git any wyles?” he continued, “on yer weigh accrost?” “Wyles?” repeated Hansen. “Wy, yuss, wyles, wyles I say; you’re a wyler, ain’t yer?” and it dawned at last on Hansen—“Vales! nay, nay, ikke vales—no seed none.”
We went ashore with the brass-bounders rowing hard against wind over the fizzling sea amongst hundreds of tame herring gulls, most of them in their young brown plumage, and amongst armies of these sea-robbers, scarts, or cormorants, that are here as tame as chickens and numerous as sparrows. Why they are allowed to exist is what we trout and salmon fishers wonder at; in Norway the Government pays fourpence a head. I wish we were as fond of eating them as the Norwegians are.
On shore we got fairly messed up with red tape at the Customs office. The officials were charmingly polite and really wished to be of assistance, but duty first; and the very young man in authority showed us, with the utmost patience, how essential it was for the interests of everybody that we should be able to prove that the makers of the St Ebba made it really for us, and that the British Consul in Norway should also believe this, and certify that the Norwegian builders had really built it, and also that they had done so to our order, for if they had not done so, it might belong to someone else. Consequently if they, his Majesty’s Customs House officers in Lerwick, were to register it as ours, and it wasn’t ours, many things might happen, and so on and so forth. And we went back and forward to the ship to get papers and more papers, and each helped, but each and all were smilingly explained to be not absolutely the documents necessary to satisfy his Majesty’s Government that—that—we weren’t bloody pirates. So give us School Board education and Socialist officialdom and we see the beginning of lots of trouble. Finally, after much pow-wow, we telegraphed the gist of this to Norway, asking the Consul there, in polite language, why the devil he hadn’t given us the papers needed to prove we were we, and the St Ebba was the St Ebba, and not another ship, and that it belonged to her owners—that is, to a little private British Whaling Company.
And poor Henriksen, who had spent days and more days getting all these formalities arranged with the Consul in Norway (whilst I used to wait outside under the lime-trees flicking flies off Swartzen), seemed to be almost at breaking-point of patience, and I wondered in my soul how ships ever got out and away to sea free from red-tape entanglements.
A pleasing interlude and soothing was the pause we sometimes made between ship and office to watch the fish in the clear green water along the edge of the quiet town. The water was clear as glass above white sand, and against the low stone quay or sea face were driven, by cormorants, shoals of fish, dark, velvety-green compact masses, of saith or coal-fish, actually as thick as fish in a barrel. These ugly dusky divers paid little heed to people on shore, but in regular order circled round the shoals, coming to within eight yards of us, and every now and then one would dive under the mass of fish and fill itself as it went, and an opening through the mass would show its horrid procedure as it straddled across white sand under the fish, till it came up with a bounce at our feet, shaking its bill with satisfaction and then go back to do its turn at rounding up, whilst another of its kind took its turn at eating the piltoch.
No wonder, with this wealth of fish and fowl round the shore, that the Norsemen rather hanker after their old islands; they cure these saith and eat them through winter, and very good they are, and they also eat the cormorants (I give you my word, they are bad; I’ve eaten many kinds of sea-fowl and the cormorant is the worst). The reader may have heard that Norwegians claim the Shetlands, for they say Scotland only holds them in pawn, for the dowry of Margaret Princess of Denmark, wife of King James III., estimated at 50,000 florins, which has not yet been paid. So when Norway offers the equivalent, plus interest, which now amounts to several million pounds sterling, the islands may be returned to Norway. Possibly international law, recognising the amalgamation of the two companies, Scotland & Co. and England & Co., into Great Britain & Co., may not now admit the claim.
A specimen of a really stout Shetlander came on board with the Customs House men, Magnus Andersen, a burly, ruddy type, not so intellectual or finely drawn as the typical Shetlander—a pilot by profession—what seamen call a real old shell-back, with grizzled beard and ruddy cheeks—about a hundred years old and straight as a dart, stark and strong, with a bull’s voice and a child’s blue eyes. I said: “Why don’t you have an oilskin on?” It was raining a little and blowing. “I’ve been at sea all my days,” he said, smiling, “and never wore an oilskin”; one of the old hardy school, with a look of “Fear God, but neither devil, man, nor storm.”
He spoke of all the lines he’d been on—old flyers like the Thermopylae, and others, sailing cracks that we read of, Green & Smith companies, and the old tea traders, and then he told me he had been at the Greenland whaling, and mentioned a Captain Robertson, and I said: “D’ye mean ‘Café Tam’?” and he looked at me with a little surprise, but was so pleased to hear the nickname of his old skipper. “Why,” I said, “I was with him on board his last ship, the Scotia, in Dundee, not a year ago, and, bar a slight limp, he’s as good as a two-year-old.” And from that we started off yarning for as long as there was time, which was not much. Old “Bad-Weather” and B⸺ Davidson I asked about. He knew them from their boyhood: old B.-W. came here to Lerwick on his last voyage and ordered Magnus on board. He was to go whether he did a hand’s turn of work or not. Magnus admired B.-W., even though he had the common failing; but now he has gone——? may peace be with him. Magnus blamed the steward and mate for his end, on that last voyage, blamed them for not having his temptation in greybeards thrown overboard. My opinion is that the ice finished him. Take a boy as a mill hand and let him struggle through the fo’c’sle to be bos’n—second mate—first mate and master, then keep him whaling year after year with ice perils and whaling problems and the intense strain and excitement of Arctic ice navigation, and he must die before seventy! Ice navigation is a severe strain.
I’ve known of a strong man, a Norwegian skipper, who when he saw the ice for the first time, and got his vessel well into it, was so scared that he locked himself into his cabin and was fed through the skylight for a week!
Another old whaler (I mean this time a man of thirty-five) I met in Lerwick. I heard he wanted to see me, for he said he had been a “shipmate” of mine; “shipmate” to one who only plays hide-and-seek with the sea sounded rather pleasant, so we shook hands very heartily for a few seconds, but we had no time for a “gam,” for I had to go about our business with these horrid Custom affairs. He seemed to be doing well; he had some harbour office and was neatly dressed—his name was Tulloch. I must meet him again and have a yarn when there is more leisure.
We have additional worry here besides the registration. We have to have our vessel remeasured to satisfy our Board of Trade. I fear it gave the registrar some trouble to come from Aberdeen in rough weather, and he was very sick; if his eye ever falls on these lines, here are my thanks and sympathy. If we had gone to him at Aberdeen he would have put us into dry dock and kept us for weeks, but here we knew there were no dry docks.
At this point in our proceedings the writer left the St Ebba and took the high road over the island, and left the measurement business to Henriksen, for that is a matter that required tact and patience rather than the English language. I went to see my friend R. C. Haldane, who has the property of Lochend on Colla Firth, also to see our Alexandra whaling station there, of which this writer is a Director. I hardly dare mention this in Lerwick for the herring-fishers are jealous of whalers—whaling, they say, has spoiled their herring-fishing—and yet the herring-fishing is better than it ever was! The fact is, if the Man in the Moon made a half-penny more than they did, at his trade, which I am told is cutting sticks, they would eat their fingers off. Being numerically superior to us whalers they carry the vote—and so our Government has forbidden us to kill whales within forty miles of our Shetland shores during the best of the season, whilst any Dane, Dago or Dutchman may kill them up to the three-mile limit!