CHAPTER XI
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.
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.
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!
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.