This fishery of the blue-finned whale, or, as he is more technically named, the finner, is an industry of comparatively modern birth, and has its centre in these bleak Northern seas. The right whale and the sperm whale have been hunted for how many centuries I do not know; the mist of ages has closed over the first capture, and not many more years will pass before the last score is nicked in the tally. The right whales have been chased almost entirely from the face of known waters; they are searched for from Davis Straits to the Kara Sea; ships have looked for them amongst the tabular bergs of the Antarctic, but the fishery is on its last legs. Even with bone at £40 a ton, the Nantucket and the Peterhead owners are dropping out of what they consider a dying business. This newer fishery has, however, increased by such leaps and bounds that in 1894 the kill amounted to 1500 head. And all the credit is due to a Norwegian skipper, one Svend Foyn.
[Towing] home Finner Whales.
The finner is no stranger in the North. Whalers of all countries have seen him spout and gambol for three hundred years, and have cursed him with maritime point and fluency. Occasionally some harpooner, disbelieving tradition, made fast to a finner, and experienced that sensation which the vaquero found when he lassoed the Mexican State Express. And as fishing implements developed, they shot at him with harpoon guns and riddled him with explosive lances. But the end was always the same, it was either “cut” or “swamp,” and there was another white-painted whale boat losing way over the swells, with a white-faced crew, no harpoon, and an empty tub of line.
Until 1865 the finner whale defied the fishermen of the world, but in that year Captain Svend Foyn went North with new ideas for conquering the brute’s prodigious vitality; and though he did not succeed at first, though, indeed he was constantly at shoulder-touch with sudden death, he figured out the right scheme at last, and then reaped a harvest well earned. He died, only a year or two back, the richest man in Norway.
Captain Svend Foyn went into this matter in middle life and already rich. He had two objects in view. In the first instance he wished to be successful where all the world had failed, and conquer the only animal remaining which man had not subdued. And in the second place he was desirous of making money. He was a man scientifically ignorant; he was quite uneducated beyond the narrow lines of his own craft; but he was full of wooden-headed pluck, and possessed of a mule’s determination.
He started in the right way. He discarded the slow, clumsy, single-topsail, wooden barque, with auxiliary steam, and her fleet of carvel-built rowing-boats, and set off in a steamer of fifty tons, which would tow in the wake of a harpooned finner without breaking the line. He believed that this would not only tire out the whale with quickness, but would also prevent the carcase from sinking to the bottom when life had gone, after its usual fashion.
Captain Svend Foyn’s first experiences must have been exciting. He was frequently towed by some maddened fish at a twenty-knot rate through a heavy sea, with his fore-deck smothered with water up to the bridge. On these occasions the engines would be rung to “full astern,” and the little steamer would hang on in tow for twelve hours at a stretch, and to the jaded sportsman, in search of a new sensation, this method of hunting may be recommended with confidence. But the conclusion was always the same; either Captain Foyn was forced to cut, or the harpoon drew; or the finner died and sunk: at any rate, he never gathered his game.
Time after time his harpoons made fast, and ninety tons of agonised living flesh plucked the little steamer, like a dragging child, across those desolate plains of ocean. Years came and the years went, each dull with disappointment. But yet he did not give in. He mounted artillery, and bombarded the finner with heavy shot, and still without effect; he tried plot after plan, and plan after plot; he expended £20,000 and human limbs in his experiments, and finally, out of all the failures he evolved success. He mounted on the stem-head of his steamer a stunted heavy-breeched gun, which carried an explosive bomb with a huge harpoon, weighing together over eighty English pounds. The idea of playing the finner like a trout was abandoned once and for all. The explosion of the bomb shot it dead; its huge vitality was snapped in a second, and a three-inch warp made fast to the harpoon kept it from sinking, where a thinner whale line would have been snapped.