A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

We slipped out of Turtle bay one moonlight night and stood southward. We were now in sperm whale waters and the crews of the whale boats were selected. Captain Winchester was to head the starboard boat; Mr. Landers the larboard boat; and Gabriel the waist boat. Long John was to act as boatsteerer for Mr. Winchester, Little Johnny for Mr. Landers, and Mendez for Gabriel. The whale boats were about twenty-five feet long, rigged with leg-of-mutton sails and jibs. The crew of each consisted of an officer known as a boat-header, who sat in the stern and wielded the tiller; a boatsteerer or harpooner, whose position was in the bow; and four sailors who pulled the stroke, midship, tub, and bow oars. Each boat had a tub in which four hundred fathoms of whale line were coiled and carried two harpoons and a shoulder bomb-gun. I was assigned to the midship oar of Gabriel's boat.

Let me take occasion just here to correct a false impression quite generally held regarding whaling. Many persons—I think, most persons—have an idea that in modern whaling, harpoons are fired at whales from the decks of ships. This is true only of 'long-shore whaling. In this trade, finbacks and the less valuable varieties of whales are chased by small steamers which fire harpoons from guns in the bows and tow the whales they kill to factories along shore, where blubber, flesh, and skeleton are turned into commercial products. Many published articles have familiarized the public with this method of whaling. But whaling on the sperm grounds of the tropics and on the right whale and bowhead grounds of the polar seas is much the same as it has always been. Boats still go on the backs of whales. Harpoons are thrown by hand into the great animals as of yore. Whales still run away with the boats, pulling them with amazing speed through walls of split water. Whales still crush boats with blows of their mighty flukes and spill their crews into the sea.

There is just as much danger and just as much thrill and excitement in the whaling of to-day as there was in that of a century ago. Neither steamers nor sailing vessels that cruise for sperm and bowhead and right whales nowadays have deck guns of any sort, but depend entirely upon the bomb-guns attached to harpoons and upon shoulder bomb-guns wielded from the whale boats.

In the old days, after whales had been harpooned, they were stabbed to death with long, razor-sharp lances. The lance is a thing of the past. The tonite bomb has taken its place as an instrument of destruction. In the use of the tonite bomb lies the chief difference between modern whaling and the whaling of the old school.

The modern harpoon is the same as it has been since the palmy days of the old South Sea sperm fisheries. But fastened on its iron shaft between the wooden handle and the spear point is a brass cylinder an inch in diameter, perhaps, and about a foot long. This cylinder is a tonite bomb-gun. A short piece of metal projects from the flat lower end. This is the trigger. When the harpoon is thrown into the buttery, blubber-wrapped body of the whale, it sinks in until the whale's skin presses the trigger up into the gun and fires it with a tiny sound like the explosion of an old-fashioned shotgun cap. An instant later a tonite bomb explodes with a muffled roar in the whale's vitals.

The Arctic Ocean whaling fleet which sails out of San Francisco and which in the year of my voyage numbered thirty vessels, makes its spring rendezvous in the Hawaiian Islands. Most of the ships leave San Francisco in December and reach Honolulu in March. The two or three months spent in this leisurely voyage are known in whaler parlance as "between seasons." On the way to the islands the ships cruise for sperm whales and sometimes lower for finbacks, sulphur-bottoms, California grays, and even black fish, to practice their green hand crews.

Captain Winchester did not care particularly whether he took any sperm whales or not, though sperm oil is still valuable. The brig was not merely a blubber-hunter. Her hold was filled with oil tanks which it was hoped would be filled before we got back, but the chief purpose of the voyage was the capture of right and bowhead whales—the great baleen whales of the North.

As soon as we left Turtle Bay, a lookout for whales was posted. During the day watches, a boatsteerer and a sailor sat on the topsail yard for two hours at a stretch and scanned the sea for spouts. We stood down the coast of Lower California and in a few days, were in the tide-rip which is always running off Cape St. Lucas, where the waters of the Pacific meet a counter-current from the Gulf of California. We rounded Cape St. Lucas and sailed north into the gulf, having a distant view of La Paz, a little town backed by gray mountains. Soon we turned south again, keeping close to the Mexican coast for several days. I never learned how far south we went, but we must have worked pretty well toward the equator, for when we stood out across the Pacific for the Hawaiian Islands, our course was northwesterly.

I saw my first whales one morning while working in the bows with the watch under Mr. Lander's supervision. A school of finbacks was out ahead moving in leisurely fashion toward the brig. There were about twenty of them and the sea was dotted with their fountains. "Blow!" breathed old man Landers with mild interest as though to himself. "Blow!" boomed Captain Winchester in his big bass voice from the quarter-deck. "Nothin' but finbacks, sir," shouted the boatsteerer from the mast-head. "All right," sang back the captain. "Let 'em blow." It was easy for these old whalers even at this distance to tell they were not sperm whales. Their fountains rose straight into the air. A sperm whale's spout slants up from the water diagonally.