Perhaps it will be as well for me to hark back here and make some extracts from my last year’s whaling log and sketch-books, for who knows when this St Ebba will fall in with whales; in this way the reader will the sooner be made acquainted with the procedure in “Modern Whaling.”
The extracts that follow have appeared in magazines—in The Nineteenth Century, The Scottish Field, and in Chambers’s Magazine, and Badminton, but possibly the reader may not have seen them; and I am sure that the illustrations have not yet been submitted to the criticism of the general public.
The first begins one evening in June a year or two ago, when we were fishing sea-trout in the Voe at Lochend, beside our whaling station, putting in the time till our whaler came in from the outer sea.
On the evening of the second day of waiting a fair-haired, rosy-cheeked boy with great grey eyes and a ragged red waistcoat came down from the hill bare-footed and breathless, and said: “She is there!” and went off in astonishment at the unfamiliar silver. Then we got our bag down to the shore and waited for the smoke above the headland which would tell us that our little steam-whaler had been into the Colla Firth station and had left the last captured whale there, had taken coal on board, and was coming out again for the high seas.
Henriksen has heard of our arrival and, as she swings into the bay in front of Haldane’s house down comes her pram, and two Norsemen come off in it and take the writer on board.
Ah! it is good to feel again the rolling deck, on “the road to freedom and to peace,” to the open sea and big hunting, and to read in a note from the Works Manager that we have at last to act as harpooneer.
Yell Sound is calm as a mill-pond, with swiftly running tides as we go south and east past the Outer Skerries. We aim at a latitude N.E. of the Shetlands beyond the “forty-mile whaling limit” made against British whalers only.
Even with a glassy calm a steam-whaler has a rolling send. She seems to make her own swell to plunge over, but it’s a silky, quick, silent motion that, once accustomed to, you never notice; though old seamen are prostrated with it when they first experience it. Round about the islands we see many seals and an endless variety of divers and other sea-birds and some herring-hog or springers, a small finner whale (Balænoptera Vaga), and porpoises in great numbers, so we practise swinging and aiming our gun in the bows at them, against the time when we have to fire at the mighty Fin whale (A), Blue whale (B), Seihvale (C), Nord Capper (D), or Sperm (E),[3] for even Sperm and the Nord Capper we have killed in the last two years off the Shetlands, yet the Nord Capper or Atlantic Right whale, Biscayensis, was supposed to be extinct! and the sperm or cachalot is a warm-water whale and only occasionally is found as far north as the Northern Shetlands, or as far south as the South Shetlands south of Cape Horn.
The modern whale gun or swivel cannon is on the steamer’s bow and is swung in any direction by a pistol grip. It weighs about two tons, but it is well balanced when it has the one-and-a-half hundredweight harpoon in it so that a hefty man can swing it fairly easily in any direction. The difficulty for the landsman shooting is, of course, in his sea-legs—you must be absolutely unconscious of them and of the vessel’s movement, or of pitch and roll, and the wet of cold, bursting seas that may come over you at any time in the pursuit; but, given good sea-legs and indifference to a wetting, and there is nothing in ordinary circumstances to prevent, say, a fairly quick pistol shot from killing his whale, a certain amount of strength and nerve is required for the final lancing from the pram or small boat, but that is seldom done nowadays, for a second or third harpoon is usually resorted to, as being more effective and less risky.