A Voyage to the Arctic in the Whaler Aurora

by David Moore Lindsay

Barron tells of seeing once about one hundred bears around a dead whale. He also tells of men being devoured by these creatures.

In the days of muzzle-loaders there was more risk than there is now, because if one came suddenly upon a bear with cubs and missed his shot, there might not be time to load again.

Late in the evening we were off: Cape Warrender and were steaming amongst loose ice at bedtime. Several narwhals were seen during the afternoon, but we paid no attention to them.

June 30th. Monday. Steaming up the Sound towards a solid floe at breakfast time with many white whales in sight. We steered south along the ice edge, and seeing an Eskimo standing on it, we sailed up to him. He was a very uncouth looking individual after the smartly dressed gentlemen on the Greenland side. His clothes did not fit and he was otherwise careless about his appearance. He had in his hand a narwhal's tusk, and as we came close we heard him singing "Bonny Laddie—Highland Laddie." This he had probably learned from his parents, they having learned it from the whalers in sailing-ship days. In old times it was customary to lower the boats and tow the ship through the leads to the above tune. I was told this, so it may be true. The native came on board. He was much more like an American Indian than a Greenland Eskimo. Before he had been many minutes on board he was taken aft and relieved of his tusk by the second mate, getting in return some trifle: the gentleman belonged to Navy Board Inlet, on the south side, and not far away.

The Captain had had a lot of paddles made for some of the boats. It was possible to approach whales with very little noise when the paddles were used, so we tried them frequently for narwhal hunting. As there were numbers of these creatures in sight, we had a couple of boats out after them. A sharp lookout was kept from the crow's nest for whales coming up the Sound. We hooked on to the ice about two miles from the south shore, and put a boat out on either side of the ship and about a hundred yards away. These boats were hooked on by laying the long steering oar on the ice. Our narwhal hunters had no luck, so they came on board.

July 1st. Tuesday. We were fast to the ice with a boat on each side all day. The Captain had a long interview with the native on the subject of whales. He seemed to understand maps well, and was able to point out where he had seen fish; from what I could make out, a good number had been in the Sound. I spent the afternoon in a boat with the Captain trying to get a narwhal. We saw dozens and came pretty close to several lots, but did not get one good shot, although we fired several times.

The harpoons we used for this work were much smaller than the regular whaling harpoon and were made of the same tough Swedish iron.

Before turning in I spent an hour on deck and heard narwhals and white whales breathing about us all the time. Everything looked propitious.

July 2nd. Wednesday. I had a dream during the night that we had succeeded in killing a narwhal and that our youngest harpooner, Gyles, had killed it. Dreams were often recounted at the breakfast table, so I told this, and, as luck would have it, before dinner Gyles killed our first narwhal. My night visions were subsequently treated with great respect, except by the steward, who felt, no doubt, that I was infringing a little on his rights. A coldness sprang up between us such as only professional jealousy can create, and which evinced itself the following day when he did not ask me to help him to pick the raisins for the duff—Thursday being duff day. The forenoon success gave quite an impetus to the narwhal fishing, but no more were captured, as the elusive beasts always went down just as we were almost within shot.

The narwhal (Monodon Monoceros) is to me the most beautiful of the whale species. The one captured by us was twelve feet long without the tusk. This measured four feet in length and about four inches around the base. It ended in a rather sharp point and had a spiral groove running from right to left. The horn, or rather tooth, protrudes from the upper jaw of the male, generally on the left side. It only protrudes from the female head as a freak. On the right side a small undeveloped horn is found embedded in the skull of the male, but two undeveloped teeth are found in the female. The narwhal is the only vertebrate animal in which bilateral symmetry is not the rule. The body is whitish, marbled with blackish brown, and about four of them yield a ton of oil. With an axe I easily split the cancellous skull and removed the embedded tusk. We saw hundreds of white whales this day (Delphinapterus leucas). These are cousins of the narwhals, but generally a little larger. The Aurora had great luck the previous year up Prince Regent's Inlet in getting a good catch of them. This was managed by driving them ashore. They were skinned and the skin made into leather. Each side counted as one skin.