In the north the largest whale we have killed was seventy-five feet in length. But in the south, in the Antarctic regions, we have fired into whales well over one hundred feet in length, and have heard from reliable observers of whales killed and measured up to one hundred and twenty feet.
To get the full value out of a whale it must be taken to a station on shore or to a floating factory. After the blubber is removed thirty per cent. more oil is obtained from the carcass by cooking the meat and bone in huge tanks. This meat oil is twenty per cent. less in value than the blubber oil.
The residue of bone and meat is ground into guano, which fetches about £7 per ton. This meat oil and guano together give an addition of more than fifty per cent. to the value of the blubber alone. This guano is much used in America for exhausted cotton soils, and I have been told that it is beginning to be used for rubber estates.
Before writing more about the cruise of the St Ebba, I may be allowed to insert here another chapter of notes on modern whaling made on board another whaler in these same seas—that is, to the north, east and west of the Shetlands.
CHAPTER XI
Whaling has its seamy side. We met it outside the loch going up west of Shetland—the wind had almost dropped, but the cross sea it left was as if several Mulls of Cantire had been rolled together, and neither our little whaler nor its crew liked it a bit. Rocky capes and islands were blurred in mist and spouting foam, and sometimes obscured by passing rain and hail showers. About eight or nine, morning, we were off Flugga, the most northerly point of Britain’s possessions, and the weather was simply beastly; by two in the afternoon, we were about sixty miles north-east, in an intensely blue sea, with immense silky rollers, it might have been in the N.E. Trades. It was just what I expected; thirty to forty miles north of the islands you strike sun and clear sky—we always do, then go west fifty miles and you come up against a curtain of rain.
At three-five we are sloping along half-speed north-easterly over a splendid silky swell, all our eyes sweeping the horizon. The boy beside me at the wheel is the first to spot a blow, to which we promptly swing our whaler, and immediately after, on the horizon, we discover the faintest possible suggestion of a blow, a minute cloud hardly enough to swear by, as big as the tip of a child’s little finger. It fades away and we are sure it is the blow of some kind of whale, and the boy rings up the engine-room and, grinning, shouts down the tube: “Megat Stor Nord Capper, full speed!” This to make the stokers lay on, for a Nord Capper means £1 apiece bounty money to each of our crew of ten men.
At three-ten we begin the hunt; we go seven miles towards the first blow, when there is a shout from the look-out in the crow’s nest, and we find big spouts within a mile from our left. So the skipper goes forward to his beloved rusted swivel gun or cannon, in his weathered green jacket, a picturesque figure against the immense blue silky sunny swell.