Modern Whaling & Bear-Hunting / A record of present-day whaling with up-to-date appliances in many parts of the world, and of bear and seal hunting in the Arctic regions

by W. G. Burn Murdoch

Then you toil on, dripping from nose and eyebrows just like the icicles, for on this blessed day of days through these mist wreaths there is hot sun and the ice-floe glitters gloriously. Everyone said that the seal could not be approached. But by dint of much consideration and a crawl here and there, I managed to get within a hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty yards. Then I thought, “Just to show what could be done by old age and experience,” I’d try to get even closer—to a hundred yards—that lost the seal for me; for when I got behind the tiny knob of ice I aimed at the seal had got into its hole in the floe. For the last fifty yards I was following the two or three days’ old track of a bear; I wonder if he and I had both stalked the same seal with the same result.

A day’s stalk, or rather a few hours’ stalk, after a seal suits my taste, and Hamilton agrees. He says, apropos of a big serious old bear-stalk: “Give me a pheasant cover, with nothing on four legs bigger than a spaniel.” You don’t then have that sensation of cold water: you are quite comfortable and can claw down your birds and chat with any fair one who has begged to see you do it.

From above, the careful reader may gather that we have at least in this Greenland sea seen the sun. It is nice! Now, as I write, about twelve o’clock midnight, it may be said to be shining; and in the rays, with double winter clothing, it is really quite warm. But in the shade there are many degrees of frost; that is why the icicles hang so beautifully to-day over the blue ledges on the shaded side of the raised edges on the floes.

It is a poor floe and feeble ice compared to that in the South. We passed a berg this afternoon, an Arctic berg, so we said: “How grand!” But in my mind I saw again the stupendous ice-cliffs of the South and their vast green caves, into which you could pack a dozen such Arctic iceberg chips.

The atmosphere and colouring here remind me of the east coast of Scotland in June, clear, crystalline, unenveloping, quite unlike the velvety feeling of our west, towards the Gulf Stream, say down the Wigtownshire coast, or the west of Spain.

I have often seen this scenery depicted in old whaling pictures, where the ships and whalers look quite large in proportion to the ice-forms. This is the difference between Arctic and Antarctic. In one, man and his vessels dominate the scene, in the other the great forms of nature make man and his works seem very small.

This afternoon with my pistol I shot an old female seal through the brain—this after a futile stalk of hours for a seal in the morning with long-range rifle and telescope sight.

Though we can’t find whales yet, the colour of the water is promising; it is full of plankton: if you draw a muslin net through it you collect in a few yards, in the tail of the bag, an almost transparent jelly—a minute quantity of which, examined under the microscope, reveals marvellous beauty, millions of minute crustaceans and diatoms that fill you with wonder at the life in the seas, which infinitely surpasses in multiplicity the life of the land or the air. These probably form the food of the shrimps and little cuttle-fish, and the narwhals eat the cuttle-fish.

The narwhal we caught the other day was full of small cuttle-fish, only about a few inches across the spread of their tentacles, and it also held red prawns or shrimps. But the cachalot or sperm whale of the warm seas kills very large cuttle-fish. We dare not say up to what size. I myself have only seen the sperm, after it has been harpooned, eject small cuttle-fish, but large circular marks in their backs, something like Burmese writing magnified, look as if they had been caused by the sucker on the tentacles of enormous cuttle-fish, and wandering grooves over their sides suggest that the parrot-like beak of the cuttle-fish has made its mark. I have seen one of these at least thirty-five feet in length. The contents of the stomach of many of the largest whales in the world, Balænoptera Sibaldi (Blue) and Balænoptera Musculus (Finner), which are killed nowadays, consist almost entirely of small shrimps, about one quarter of the size of the common shrimp. On the landing and flensing stage of Alexandra Company in Shetland, after several finner whales have been cut up, I have seen piles of this shrimp food lying on the slip, amounting to several tons in weight, with only, on rare occasions, a few minute fish amongst it all.

The food of the whale that used to be more common up here, the Right whale, Balæna Mysticetus, is about the size of barleycorns and looks rather like sago with a brownish tint. The whale takes a mouthful of these, plus water, and squeezes the water through the blades of whalebone round the edge of its mouth, each of which has a fringe of hairs on the inside. These hairs, interwoven, make a surface to the palate like that of a cocoanut mat, which makes a perfect strainer. Then the whale swallows the mass of minute crustaceans that is left on its tongue and palate. The tongue is an immense floppy plum-coloured thing like a deflated balloon. I would give much to know exactly how its nerves and muscles act so as to work down the minute food from its palate into the throat. Smaller Finner whales we know of, which feed on herring, round the Shetlands and British coast, locally called Herring Hog, or Springer, run to thirty feet or so. They are not hunted as yet by the modern whaler as they are rather too small to be worth towing to the station, but no doubt their day will come when our industries need them, and the large whales become more shy and hard to capture.