A bright sunny morning; the gentle north-easterly breeze just keeping the sails full as the lumbering whaling-barque Splendid dips jerkily to the old southerly swell. Astern, the blue hills around Preservation Inlet lie shimmering in the soft spring sunlight, and on the port beam the mighty pillar of the Solander Rock, lying off the south-western extremity of New Zealand, is sharply outlined against the steel-blue sky. Far beyond that stern sentinel, the converging shores of Foveaux Strait are just discernible in dim outline through a low haze. Ahead, the jagged and formidable rocks of Stewart Island, bathed in a mellow golden glow, give no hint of their terrible appearance what time the Storm-fiend of the south-west cries havoc and urges on his chariot of war.
The keen-eyed Kanaka in the fore crow’s nest shades his eyes with his hand, peering earnestly out on the weather bow at something which has attracted his attention. A tiny plume of vapour rises from the blue hollows about ten miles away, but so faint and indefinable that it may be only a breaking wavelet’s crest caught by the cross wind. Again that little bushy jet breaks the monotony of the sea; but this time there is no mistaking it. Emerging diagonally from the water, not high and thin, but low and spreading, it is an infallible indication to those piercing eyes of the presence of a sperm-whale. The watcher utters a long, low musical cry, “Blo-o-o-o-w,” which penetrates the gloomy recesses of fo’ksle and cuddy, where the slumberers immediately engage in fierce conflict with whales of a size never seen by waking eyes. The officer and white seamen at the main now take up the cry, and in a few seconds all hands are swiftly yet silently preparing to leave the ship. She is put about, making a course which shortly brings her a mile or two to windward of the slowly-moving cachalot. Now it is evident that no solitary whale is in sight, but a great school, gambolling in the bright spray. One occasionally, in pure exuberance of its tremendous vitality, springs twenty feet into the clear air, and falls, a hundred tons of massive flesh, with earthquake-like commotion, back into the sea.
Having got the weather-gage, the boats are lowered; sail is immediately set, and, like swift huge-winged birds, they swoop down upon the prey. Driving right upon the back of the nearest monster, two harpoons are plunged into his body up to the “hitches.” The sheet is at once hauled aft, and the boat flies up into the wind; while the terrified cetacean vainly tries, by tremendous writhing and plunging, to rid himself of the barbed weapon. The mast is unshipped, and snugly stowed away; oars are handled, and preparation made to deliver the coup de grâce. But finding his efforts futile, the whale has sounded, and his reappearance must be awaited. Two boats’ lines are taken out before the slackening comes, and he slowly rises again. Faster and faster the line comes in; the blue depths turn a creamy white, and it is “Stern all,” for dear life. Up he comes, with jaws gaping twenty feet wide, gleaming teeth and livid, cavernous throat glittering in the brilliant light. But the boat’s crew are seasoned hands, to whom this dread sight is familiar, and orders are quietly obeyed, the boat backing, circling and darting ahead like a sentient thing under their united efforts. So the infuriated mammal is baffled and dodged, while thrust after thrust of the long lances are got home, and streamlets of blood trickling over the edges of his spout-hole give warning that the end is near. A few wild circlings at tremendous speed, jaws clashing and blood foaming in torrents from the spiracle, one mighty leap into the air, and the ocean monarch is dead. He lies just awash, gently undulated by the long, low swell, one pectoral fin slowly waving like some great stray leaf of Fucus gigantea. A hole is cut through the fluke and the line secured to it. The ship, which has been working to windward during the conflict, runs down and receives the line; and in a short time the great inert mass is hauled alongside and secured by the fluke chain.
The other two boats have succeeded in killing a large fish also, but are at least four miles off. They may as well try to move the Solander itself as tow their unwieldy prize to the ship. The shapeless bulk of the cachalot makes it a difficult tow at all times, but, with a rising wind and sea, utterly impossible to whale-boats. The barometer is falling; great masses of purple-edged cumuli are piling high on the southern horizon, and no weather prophet is needed to foretell the imminent approach of a heavy gale. The captain looks wistfully to windward at Preservation Inlet, only twenty-five miles off, and thinks, with fierce discontent, of the prize, worth eight or nine hundred pounds, which lies but four or five miles away, and must be abandoned solely for want of steam-power. And that is not all. Around, far as the eye can reach, the bushy spouts are rising. Hundreds of gigantic cetaceans are disporting, apparently not at all “gallied” by the conflict which has been going on. Some are near enough to the fast boat to be touched by hand. “Potentialities of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice” are here; but acquisition is impossible for want of steam. The vessel, bound to that immense body, can only crawl tortoise-like before the wind—lucky, indeed, to have a harbour ahead where the whale may be cut in, even though it be forty miles away. Without that refuge available, she could not hope to keep the sea and hold her prize through the wild weather, now so near. So, with a heavy heart, the captain orders the fast boat to abandon her whale and return with all possible speed. The breeze is freshening fast, and all sail is made for Port William. So slow is the progress, that it is past midnight before that snug shelter is reached, although for the last four hours the old ship is terribly tried and strained by the press of sail carried to such a gale.
In four days the work of getting the oil is finished, and three or four Maoris ashore have made a tun and a half of good clear oil from the abandoned carcass. This, added to the ship’s quantity, makes twelve and a half tuns of oil and spermaceti mingled from the one fish. None smaller has been noticed out of the hundreds seen on the same day. It is eighteen days from the time of anchoring before the harbour can again be quitted, owing to adverse winds and gales. Who can estimate the number of opportunities lost in that time? On the second day after reaching the grounds, another school is seen with the same result—one fish, and another fortnight’s enforced idleness.
This is no imaginary sketch, but a faithful record of actual facts, which, with slight variations, has been repeated many times within the writer’s experience. On one occasion there were four of us on the ground in company—three Americans, and one colonial. Each secured a whale before dusk. We kept away at once for Port William, fearing the shifting of the wind, which would bring us on a ragged, lee shore. The Americans, being strangers to the coast, hauled off to the westward. Five days afterwards, as we were cleaning ship after trying out, those three ships came creeping in to the harbour through the eastern end of Foveaux Strait, all sadly damaged, and of course whaleless. They had been battered by the furious gale all that time, and barely escaped destruction on the Snares. Two of them left the grounds a few days after, having had their fill of the Solander. Thus, it is obvious that nothing but steam is needed to make this most prolific of whaling-grounds a veritable treasure-field. Cutting in and trying out at sea could be entirely dispensed with. The magnificent land-locked harbour of Preservation Inlet, to say nothing of others easily available, affords complete facilities for a shore station. The water is in many cases forty or fifty fathoms deep alongside the rocks, while sheltered nooks abound, “where never wind blows loudly.”
Working by the share, no finer or more skilful whalemen exist than the half-breed Maoris who people Stewart Island, and they would joyfully welcome such a grand opportunity of making their pile.
Long before the Antarctic Expedition from Dundee left our shores, the merits of this grand field for whaling operations were discussed at length by the writer in the columns of a Dundee paper, and strongly advocated; but those responsible for the management of that venture were evidently so wedded to Greenland methods that the advice was unheeded. Perhaps the unprofitable issue of the enterprise as far as whales were concerned may dispose the adventurers to take advice, and try sperm-whaling in the temperate zone, in place of right-whaling in the far south. Should they do so, there is every reason to hope and believe that the palmy days of the sperm-whale fishery may be renewed. Dundee firms of to-day may then, like Messrs. Enderby of London in 1820–30, gladly welcome home ship after ship, full to the hatches with the valuable spoil of the Southern Seas.
Note.—Since the above was written it has been the writer’s melancholy duty to chronicle the final disappearance of the British Whale Fishery.