Two Whales being Hauled on to a Slip
The nearest whale is a Bull finner. A man is seated on the farthest. The men in the foreground are cutting meat from the spine of a third whale.
Off Norway, several steam-whalers have had sea-water and daylight let into them by careless whales, and a whale here, some years ago, when the industry was new, took offence at being fired at, and flew at the innocent little steamer (seventy tons solid life and energy against a ninety-five-foot boat) with jaws wide open and generally chewed-up rails and superstructures, so the owners hardly knew it when it came back to the station. But whales are not in the habit of behaving like this. I did myself, however, experience a mild charge last year; possibly the charge was unintentional, but certainly the whale came straight at our starboard bow, and had we not been quick enough to swing and depress the gun’s muzzle and shoot at six yards, something might have happened; as it was the whale came on and struck a dead whale we had alongside, and with its impetus it gave our little ship a considerable dunt in the ribs. “If” it had not been hit and “if” it had struck us a little harder, say twice, we would have had to row home a hundred miles in the boats, which would have been rather a come-down from steaming the wide seas o’er, on our up-to-date little whaler, the Haldane of Colla Firth.
“If” another whale a few nights ago had pulled a little harder, when it suddenly changed from towing us forward to towing us astern, we might have been quite upset, whereas we were only half-seas over. But alas, there was a really very sad and dreadful experience here, two years ago. Captain Torp, a fine man and a good gunner, fired at a whale and the harpoon ricochetted, and three hundred and eighty-five grammes driving a one-and-a-half-hundredweight harpoon burst the five-inch cable, and the inside end came back and wound round him and broke him unspeakably from head to foot, and yet he lived two days, and fourteen ounces of chloroform had little effect.
Then, too, one sometimes gets sunk whilst whaling. Casperg, a master in Ronas Voe, our next-door station, had that experience—went down in his cabin with pipe and tobacco pouch in hand, felt himself kicking the rock with his sea-boots under the kelp before he had time to strike a light. He came up all right, but four of his crew stayed down; that was recently. And my friend Sorrensen, engineer of the Haldane, told me comfortingly last year, as we chatted in the warm engine-room one dismal, dark, rough night, when we were trying to find land, that on his last whaling trip to Iceland, in making land in a gale of snow and wind, “on a night like this,” he observed a large rock suddenly protrude itself through his engine-room floor, which finished his trip for that year. “Yes, yes, two tree skip do so,” he said.
The wonder really is that more accidents are not met with. The whale’s head is such a weight of bone; the pointed mass on the upper jaw or beak meeting the huge bent bones of the lower make a most formidable ram.
Another close shave there was the other day. A⸺ tried to lance a whale in its death-struggle from the little steamer’s bows. We have tried this ourselves with and without success. On this occasion the whale raised its huge flipper, swung it across the gun at the bow, which was loaded with the harpoon in it, and its muzzle was thrown round so heavily that the harpoon was shot out on deck and the shell exploded. No one was hurt, but A⸺’s oilskin coat had holes torn in it between his legs—and so on....
By eight P.M. we had eaten our whale steak (meals are at any hour or no hour when you are whaling), discussed the latest type of whaler, Captain Larsen’s three-gun boat, and had given up that wily old dodger of a finner, and now we peg away over the blue sea to the N.E. The sun swings round with us to dip quite near the north, whilst we wait and rest until it comes up again in a few hours to form our gallery. True, we have another companion beside the few petrels. The Busta, our sister ship, is in the offing. She also has a whale alongside; we can make it out with the glasses as she rises over a blue surge; and as I write, far to the west I descry an almost invisible smoke, which I hope is a boat of our Alexandra Company, the Queen, or the Haldane.
At nine-thirty the sun slants below the horizon and the colour display begins toning down to soft, warm light in the north and violet in the south and west. It is very still, the only sound the surge of the water over the white-ribbed flounces of our whale’s underside as it tows alongside. We speak little; there is the skipper, and the man at the wheel, on the bridge, and one above us in the crow’s nest; the rest are sleeping below. It is the romantic, beautiful time at sea, formality goes, we talk a little of home and families we have, or may have, and the night, as it were, just droops her golden eyes, and in a very little while raises them on another day, blue and fresh as ever, and we begin another day’s hunting, to get, if we can, one more whale to tow to our harbour in the south, there to provide work and pay for Shetlanders and Norwegians, food for Danes and ourselves, and fertilisers for farmers’ crops and cattle, each of which subjects could not be treated of in less than a page of these notes for itself. But one word I may be allowed here for readers who are interested in fertilisers for vegetables, and cattle foods. For both these purposes the cooked and ground-down whale meat and bone is invaluable, and it costs about one-sixth the price of ordinary fertilisers—but beware, don’t use it for the latter purpose without digging it into the soil. The gardener of my friend, C. A. Hamilton of Dunmore, Stirlingshire, did so—put it on the top of the soil in a vinery, and was “maist astonished.” “Ma gosh, Maister Hamilton,” he said, “you’d hae thocht I’d plaunted pussey cawts!” it was so mouldy. The same worthy used it properly for turnips, dug it in, and exhibited the result at the local show, and was disqualified! The judge said: “Mon, it’s turnips is the exheebut—yon’s no turnips—wha ever saw neips like that—they’re faur ower big.”