A cool, sunny morning, with rolling glassy grey swell and warmer. We are in tow of a large finner; we began to hunt a herd (pod is the old name, it means a family party) at five-thirty. It has taken five hundred yards out with several rapid rushes of forty to fifty miles an hour, and there is a smell of the burning wood of the breaks; it is very quiet, Jensen has come up beside me at the wheel. I noticed after the shot he again rubbed his nose with the red handkerchief, a little nervous, colourful touch. The whale blows occasionally and turns the swell into white and red; it looks as if we must lance it from the small boat, or get another harpoon in. It was a most interesting chase; five monsters blowing half-a-mile apart seemed quite a crowd. We got in between two, feeding, and after an hour’s hunt altogether one rose a few yards to starboard. Jensen refused it, coolly waiting for the bigger one behind to come up in front, to the left, and mercifully it did, slowly; you could see down its blow hole, then its great back came out, and into, I think, its last ribs the harpoon went, and at the wheel we were all in smoke and tow. The smoke cleared and the wads lay in the swelling vortex the monster left, and then the line rushed!
Who can describe the heart-stopping thrill as the monster breaks the surface within shot, only perhaps the dry-fly man, he must experience exactly the same in a minute degree.
But this whale will not die, we must lance it; an eighteen-foot spear is the lance—half iron, half wood. The pram is swung out—we are dropped half on top of our dead whale and slide off somehow. Jensen is handed the lance and away we go, double sculls. Over the glassy rollers we go at a good pace, the whale is six hundred yards away or more and wandering from left to right, and ahead, in the deep swell, it seems as if it would be a long business to get into reach. We back the stern in and Jensen makes a great lunge and the spear goes in five feet and is twisted out of his hand and the vast body rolls over, the tail rises up and up and comes down in a sea of foam. We pull clear back in again at next rise and draw the spear all bent, straighten it, and one more thrust finishes the business and the whale spouts red and dies.
It is a quarter to eight when we finally get the tail up to our port bow and go off easterly; we must be seventy miles N.E. off the Shetland Isles.
Whales seem to be such good beasts, and have such kind brown eyes—nothing of the fish in them, and their colouring is that of all the sea; their backs are grey-black to dove-colour, reflecting the blue of the sky, and the white of their underside is like the white of a kid glove with the faintest pink beneath, so white it makes the sea-foam look grey as it washes across it to and fro, and the white changes to emerald-green in the depths to the blue-green of an iceberg’s foot. It is strange that this skin should be so extremely delicate in such a large animal; it is too thin to be used as leather.
Our first whale was fifty-four feet, say fifty tons, equal to twenty-five to thirty barrels of oil. Second whale, seventy feet, say forty barrels of oil.
The second whale was a bull “fish,” according to S. Johnson of Fleet Street, and the dark colouring came farther over the white corduroy waistcoat than in the female. It is curious how the grey colour blends into the white exactly as if it were drawn with a lead pencil on ivory in perfect imitation of hair; from a few yards you think it is hair, for its formation so resembles the lie of hair on other mammals. I have never heard of this having been observed by naturalists. I am sure a Darwin might make endless deductions from it, coupled with the belief of the old neolithic Indians of Newfoundland that the caribou had gradually changed into whales. The colour of the caribou is quite like the colour of these Seihvale. But we must keep off speculations on the origin of species, and these marks in particular, and the whale’s pedigree, opinions, and domestic life. It is such a large subject, though fascinating. Many authentic and startlingly new facts have been gathered since this modern whaling began. For example, a whale was killed last year “wid six leetle children in it.” This will rather astonish naturalists—it horrified a Shetland lady in whose hearing a polite Norseman made the relation—but that there were six embryos is a fact I vouch for. I hope some naturalist of means will some day charter a vessel and suitable observers to make a few years’ study of the subject round the world. H.S.H. the Prince of Monaco has set the example, particularly in regard to the study of the sperm whale.
It was grey all day, grey sky reflected in lavender-grey water, the surface hardly indicated till an endless shoal of dolphins came out from the shadow of a cloud in the east. They were pretty enough to watch, but we had little time for two finners led us miles here and there over the ocean, but eluded us ever; we had little chance of circumventing them by reason of our two whales in tow. We gave them up and went after spouts like cannon shots against the dark rain-cloud to the east; and this time cleared ourselves of our bag; slipped the heavy chains, fastened a buoy with a tall flag to the two bodies and left them in charge of the Molly Mawks or Fulmar Petrels. But the family of finners we pursued were very wide awake, and though we pursued them for weary hours we never got quite within shot, though dozens of times we whispered to ourselves “A certain shot!” So with more trouble we took our two whales in tow again, and left the gulls lamenting, for already they had begun to pick away the delicate white skin. Then we “up sticked” and steered away south-west to this sunny part of the sea, and dozed comfortably as we went, our best speed about six knots, for home.