To let you into the secret, Lerwick and the Shetlands are slightly anæmic! The best blood of several countries has been flowing into the islands for ages, yet always intelligence remains in excess of physical vigour, always the Scots and Norse say: “Let us go and make use of these islands.” “Look at the wealth there is there of sea-fish and sea-birds,” says the Norseman, “give me one little island there and I will envy no man.” But they forget their starting-points are lands of assured summer, where trees grow (and, for Norsemen, where wild fruit ripens), and they come, and have come, conquering or peacefully hunting, catching sea-trout, whales or herring, and either go away again, or stay, and become like the islanders anæmic, and slightly socialistic, and lose the sense of industrial enterprise, and other people come and take the herring and whales and sea-trout from their doors.
It is greatly a matter of geographical position and climatic conditions. The one tree that grows on the islands could tell you this if you could hear it speak to you of its struggle for existence.
CHAPTER VII
Whaling is like salmon-fishing, but the waiting part is on an enormous scale, bigger in proportion than even the game or the tackle, however huge that is. Fancy waiting and fishing for nine months for your first fish. That was my first whaling. Henriksen in Japanese seas on his first whaling command was, I think, a year before he saw a whale. Then he had a lot of shots in succession and missed every time, till he discovered the powder was at fault, and then he killed about ninety in three months.
He sometimes gives me thumb-nail jottings of his experiences.
Once he ran into port. Yusako, I believe, and the harpoon-gun on the bows was still loaded, and the Japanese Bos’n fiddled with it and let it off. Two white chickens were resting on the forego (coils of rope under muzzle of gun), and Jap shoemakers, tailors with their goods and chattels, were on foredeck, sitting on the line, and they were all upset by its tautening suddenly. The boom brought Henriksen on deck, he found his bos’n standing pale as china, and a few white feathers floating in the air—a rather Whistleresque picture, is it not? Another time he himself upset all his poultry. He had quite a lot of hens on board, and they rather took to him. He had stood for hours on hours chasing two finners that never gave him a chance of harpooning them, and just at twilight he grew tired waiting and let drive a long shot on chance, never noticing that the fowls had collected round his feet and on the coiled forego. Overboard they went, every hen and chick of them, and great was the retrieving in the pram.[2]
Another curious mistake by a gunner I have heard of. He’d been chasing for a long time and fired at a whale, as he thought, but could not see where the harpoon went for the smoke. “Have I got the beggar?” he said, turning round to the Jap at the wheel. “Yes, captain, veree good shot.” The smoke cleared and a moak or gull lay with its head off, a bight of the forego had chopped it off; the Jap on bridge had seen no whale and thought the captain fired at the gull. The gunner’s expletives followed, and he threw his hat overboard, and stamped and swore accordingly.
And now here we are tied up, waiting again in Lerwick in September, and on the 1st of June we should have started fishing between Iceland and South Greenland, at a place we know there are certain to be the small but valuable Atlantic Right whale, Biscayensis, or Nord-Capper, as the Norse call it, a small edition of the Greenland Bowhead or Mysticetus ([see page 26]).
We waited and waited all that August in Norway, our grouse-shooting has gone, and now partridges are going, and we wait still. This last wait is due to an entanglement in red tape, a difficulty in getting our vessel registered here. We have the British Consul’s form of registration, a temporary affair from Norway, that has to be renewed here.