In the following year a Hull vessel, named the Swan, was frozen up much farther north than the whalers usually went; so that it was the midsummer of 1837 before she got free. Meanwhile she had been given up as lost; and on Sunday, July 2nd, a memorial service was held on the Dock Green, and a collection of £47 taken on behalf of the families of the crew. In the midst of the service, however, news arrived that the ‘missing’ vessel was entering the mouth of the Humber.
We can imagine the excitement caused by her arrival. Among other things it meant, of course, a ‘Hextra Speshul’ edition of the News Sheet, as the photograph on the opposite page shows.
As a rule, however, a voyage resulted in fair profits for both owners and crews. The thirty-one ships that went to Greenland in 1821 took between them 204 whales, and the twenty-one that went to Davis Straits took 294 whales. These 498 ‘fish’ produced whalebone and oil to the value of £150,000. The average return per ship was here slightly lower than that for the whole period 1772–1852, which works out to £3,500.
A News Sheet of 1837.
(Presented to the Wilberforce Museum, Hull, by Mr. John Suddaby).
Occasionally a ship would be particularly fortunate. In the Greenland Sea in one day the Gibraltar killed eleven whales, the Manchester ten, and the Molly six. In 1794, also, the Egginton arrived from Greenland with the produce of fifteen whales, 3,021 seals, and five bears. She had been away from home only a hundred days, and created a record by afterwards making two trading voyages to St. Petersburg the same season.
Such luck as this was quite exceptional. Usually the capture of a single whale meant much hard work and many dangers for the boats’ crews. In 1821 the Baffin
struck a whale which ran out fifteen lines of 240 yards each, and dragged two boats and fifteen men for a long time. When the ‘fish’ was killed, it was found to have been also dragging under water six similar lines and a boat belonging to the Trafalgar, of Hull. The 5,040 yards of line weighed a ton and a half.
Most famous of the ships of the Humber that passed to and fro in the whaling industry was the Truelove. This was a three-masted barque with a length of 96 feet and a width of 27 feet. Built at Philadelphia in 1764, the Truelove was captured by the English in the American war, and eventually sold to a merchant of High Street, Hull.
The Truelove’s first whaling voyage was to Spitzbergen in 1784. From that year till 1868 she made seventy-two voyages to Spitzbergen, Greenland, or the Davis Straits, and accounted for about 500 whales. In 1873 she was taken to her birthplace, where the captain and crew were fêted; and for several years afterwards she made trading voyages to Norway until eventually she was broken up as no longer seaworthy.