At midnight we turn in with regret from the pink light and calm sea, for Henriksen the master, and the writer, have much to talk of about whales in other seas; but a few hours’ sleep we must have if we are to be steady in the morning.
You turn in “all standing” on a whaler, you have no time to dress when the call comes; so much time is saved out north-east. At three A.M. perhaps you tumble out, there is enough daylight to read by all night, but between eleven and twelve, and three o’clock, you are pretty safe to have a nap, for you cannot then see a whale’s blast beyond a mile or two.
We are now (five A.M.) going N.E.—a lovely smooth sea—nothing more idyllic we think than at five in the morning to be steadily pegging away over the silky swell seventy miles north of the Shetlands into the sunrise on a warm morning, watching the circle of horizon for a blow. One man is in the crow’s nest on our short foremast, another at the wheel, and you lie your length on the bridge, on the long chest used for the side lights, which of course are never used here, with glass in hand, watching. The gun is ready in the bow, and the harpoon and line are all in order. There is no hurry for a blow, you have to-day, and to-morrow, and the next day before you to hunt in, food and fuel for a week, and the wide sea to roam over in what direction you please, towards whichever cloud castle you choose, and if rough weather comes, you are confident your little ninety-five-foot whaler will ride out anything, if she is not pressed.
It is turning out a beast of a morning for whaling. Oily calm but a lumpy swell, making us crash about, and never a blow in sight; I have been handling gun for practice, an excellent opportunity in this swell from the N.W. crossing the swell from N.E., the gun muzzle yaws a bit and our feet are apt to be insecure on the little platform in the bows, and there is nothing to hold on to but the pistol grip of the gun. We pursue our north-easterly course, then go at forty-five degrees, say ten miles N., then say ten miles N.E. again, a simple way of keeping our position on the chart. Of course whenever there is anything like “a blow,” we swing about in that direction; rather a charming feeling after the usual experiences of travelling at sea in one dead straight line. It makes you feel as if the ocean really belonged to you, and you are not merely a ticketed passenger sent off by the time-table.
In the forenoon we fall in with three whalers from Olna Firth, the station of the Salvesens of Leith, and all of his had been scouting in different directions, over hundreds of miles, and not one had seen a spout, and yet where we are, there were numerous whales only a few days ago. Like trout, whales seem to be unaccountably on the rise one day, and utterly disappear the next. So we resort to music and painting. Henriksen plays Grieg on the weather-worn melodeon and the artist paints sea studies.
At twelve comes a meal, usually called middag-mad on a Norse whaler, Henriksen calls it tiffen. It is simple enough—a deep soup plate of hasty pudding (flour and water boiled), on this you spread sugar half-an-inch thick, and then half-a-packet of cinnamon, on your left you have a mug of tinned milk and water, on your right a spoon, and you buckle to and eat perhaps half-way through or till you feel tired; it is awfully good; then you eat smoked raw herrings in oil from a large tin, black bread, margarine and coffee, such good coffee. I’d defy anyone to be hungry afterwards or ill-content. Dolphins pass us and we pick up a drifting rudder. Henriksen sniffs at its workmanship and says: “Made in Shetland,” so I quote the Norse saying: “The family is the worst, as the fox said of the red dog.”
However, I suppose we will stay out till we do find whales or finish coal. It almost looks as if whales could stay below and sleep. One day’s blank waiting seems a long time from three A.M. to eleven or twelve P.M. We growl together on the bridge, skipper, self, man at wheel and the cook. There is no hard-and-fast distinction of rank on a Norwegian whaler’s bridge, and Henriksen counts up our mileage, one hundred and sixty-nine since last night. “We might be having cream and fruit in Bergen,” he remarks; we are about half-way across, and we all wish we were there. Henriksen says, by way of consolation: “Well, I was once six months whaling for Japs off the Korean coast, and I never saw a fin, and fine weather just like this”; and I tell him of our being surrounded in the Antarctic with hundreds of whales up to and over a hundred feet in length without sufficiently strong tackle to catch them; don’t we both long for one of these huge Southern fellows in this empty ocean.
At evening meal, or aften-mad, are potatoes, tinned meat and anchovies, bread, butter and coffee, and we feel vexed that we do not have whale steak and onions as we expected. The cook explains that owing to warm weather his last supply went bad, a grievous disappointment, for whale meat is worth travelling far to eat[4]; it is superior to the best beef, in this way, that after eating it you always feel inclined for more. The evening we wiled away by making an invention to kill mackerel, of course keeping a keen watch all the time for a blow. Mackerel shoals appeared in every direction in patches, rippling the smooth sea for miles. Our plan, inside the three-mile limit may sound infernal; a hundred miles out it didn’t seem so wicked, especially as we had keen appetites for fresh fish. We filled a quart bottle half full of gunpowder, put a cork and foot of fuse into it, slung a piece of iron under it, lit the fuse and dropped it into a shoal of mackerel, and sheered off. The result ought to have been lots of stunned fish. A little thread of smoke came quietly up through the falling sea—and then—nothing happened!—a faulty fuse, we supposed. We tried a dynamite cartridge and fuse later, but the fish had gone, and of course, it went off; and gave our little whaler a knock underneath as if with a hammer, then we hove to, and all went asleep, and the Haldane watched alone in the half light of the Northern night for a few hours.
At three A.M. Sunday, we were under steam again, the day very grey and the wind rising slightly from W. by S. “Like to be vind,” said a young, blue-eyed Viking with long fair hair and a two-weeks’ beard, but I doubted it; youth is apprehensive or too sanguine—age is indifferent. Which is best?
