Lancing a Whale.

An eighteen-foot spear is the lance—half iron half wood. The pram is swung out; and Jensen is handed the lance. We reach the whale and Jensen makes a lunge, and the spear goes in five feet and is twisted out of his hand; the vast body rolls over, the tail rises up and up and comes down in a sea of foam.

MODERN WHALING
&
BEAR-HUNTING

A RECORD OF PRESENT-DAY WHALING WITH
UP-TO-DATE APPLIANCES IN MANY PARTS
OF THE WORLD, AND OF BEAR
AND SEAL HUNTING IN THE
ARCTIC REGIONS

BY
W. G. BURN MURDOCH, F.R.S.G.S.
AUTHOR OF
“FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC”
“AN ILLUSTRATED PROCESSION OF SCOTTISH HISTORY”
“FROM EDINBURGH TO INDIA AND BURMAH”
&c. &c. &c.

With 110 Illustrations
chiefly from Drawings & Photographs
by the Author

LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
38 Great Russell Street
1917

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

The readers of this book will be interested to learn that the expedition from Dundee which set out for the Antarctic regions in 1892 to the Weddell Sea, south and east of Graham’s Land, and in which the author of the present volume took part, was the first of its kind since the famous expedition commanded by Sir James Ross in 1842. Dr W. S. Bruce, the distinguished polar traveller and oceanographer, was the scientific naturalist, and Mr Burn Murdoch, the author of this volume, was the artist and historian of the expedition, which is described by his pen in “From Edinburgh to the Antarctic.” It consisted of three whaling vessels specially built of great strength to withstand ice pressure, barque rigged and fitted with auxiliary steam power. They were accompanied by a Norwegian barque of similar type. The chief object of the expedition was the capture of the Right or Bowhead whale by old methods, from small boats. For three months these vessels were continuously amongst the thick pack ice and enormous bergs on the east side of Graham’s Land.

The publication of the above-mentioned book, and lectures by Dr Bruce and Mr Burn Murdoch, revived both at home and abroad interest in the Antarctic regions, and in 1897 the Belgica expedition followed in their wake, and this again was followed by expeditions of various European nations.

During the expedition of 1892-1893 vast numbers of the largest-sized finner whales were observed in the neighbourhood of Erebus and Terror Gulf, and between South Georgia and the South Shetland Islands. The report brought home of these whales being in such numbers led to the development of the present great whaling industry in the Southern Seas. Companies were formed and modern steam whalers were sent South to hunt these powerful rorquals or finner whales. The extent of this industry and the methods of modern whaling are described in the first part of this volume.

In the second part, which is concerned principally with bear-hunting in the Arctic regions, some description is also given of the old style of harpooning narwhals from small boats.

The publication of this volume has been held over owing to the war. Part of the text was printed off, and it contains references to events, current at the time, which, without this explanation, might puzzle the reader. The prices of the products of the whaling industry are for the same reason more up to date in the Appendix than in the text.

LIST OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ST. EBBA

(click for larger version)

MODERN WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING

CHAPTER I

It blows, it blows, at Balta Sound, a cold, strong wind, and yet we are in June. I think it always blows at this northern end of Shetland, but we on our little steam-whaler, the Haldane, are sheltered from the sea by the low green shore and the low peaty hills half shrouded in mist.

One after another herring steam-drifters come up the loch and collect round the hulk of a retired sailing-ship to sell their catch on board it by auction. The hull of the wooden ship is emerald-green and the small sombre-coloured steamers crowd around it. On their black funnels each shows its registered number in white between belts of vivid scarlet, blue or yellow.

Our Haldane lies at anchor somewhat aloof from these herring-boats, as becomes our dignity and position, for we are whalers!—in from deep-sea soundings—hunters of the mighty leviathan of the deep, the Balænoptera Sibbaldii, the Balænoptera Borealis, the Balænoptera musculus: commonly called Blue, all of which we call Finners, the largest mammals living or extinct. We are smaller than the herring-drifters. They are a hundred to a hundred and twenty feet long and we are only ninety-five, still we consider ourselves superior: are we not distinguished by a crow’s nest at our short foremast, and all the lines of our hull are classic—bow and stern somewhat after the style of the old Viking ships—meant for rapid evolutions, not merely for carrying capacity?

Our colour is light greenish khaki, and if red lead paint and rust show all over our sides, it is an honourable display of wounds from fights with sea and whales—better than herring scales!

We enjoy the enforced rest: all last night we towed a big whale alongside—seventy tons’ weight in a rising gale! The bumps and thumps and jerks and aroma were very tiresome.

We towed it ninety miles from the outer ocean to our station at Colla Firth, on Mr R. C. Haldane’s property of Lochend, in the early morning (it is light all night here), and left it floating at the buoy, went alongside the trestle pier, helped ourselves to more coal, and slipped away again before the station hands had time to rub their eyes or show a foot.

We came up through the islands, ran to the north of Shetland, passed Flugga Light, then turned tail like any common fishing-boat and ran back before a rising gale to this Balta Sound on the east for shelter.

Our little Haldane doesn’t care a straw for heavy weather, but we on board her can’t harpoon well or manage a whale in heavy seas, so “weathering it out” only means waste of coal.

Therefore we spend the morning in shelter, tramping our very narrow bridge (three steps and a spit, as the sailors say), and we talk and sometimes go into our tiny chart-room and draw; and Henriksen plays Grieg on the melodeon! Henriksen is a whaler by profession, an artist under the skin; and the writer is an artist by profession and harpooneer on this journey from choice and after long waiting.

As we draw and chat we notice with admiration Swedish line-boats like the Norwegian pilot-boat in type, sailing-boats with auxiliary motors, coming up the loch with their sails down, pit-put-a-put, dead in the wind’s eyes! We know they have been cod and ling fishing in the North Atlantic for several months, and are now full of fish packed in ice.

“Ah,” sighs Henriksen, “if I had a boat half the size of this Haldane, with a motor and crude oil like them, I’d make a good thing of whaling round the world,” and the artist agrees, for both have seen many whales in far-away seas. Henriksen knows the Japanese seas where there are Right whales—Australis with bone, and Sperm, or Cachalot, with spermaceti; and the writer has seen sperm in other warm seas in numbers, and big Finners or Rorquals in the Antarctic seas by the thousand. So we blow big smokes in the chart-room and draw plans in the sketch-book of a new type of whaler. And she will be a beauty!

The Haldane we are on is second to none of the modern kind of steam-whaler, and we have killed many whales with her up to seventy or eighty tons in weight. But she requires to be frequently fed with coal, and has to tow her catch ashore, possibly one or two whales, or even three at a time, for thirty, forty or even ninety miles to leave them to be cut up at the station.

We plan a vessel that shall be able to keep the sea for a long time without calling for fuel like these Swedish motor-boats, and that will hunt whales and seals round the world, and carry the oil and bone of its catch on board.

Can there be any drawing more fascinating than the designing of a new type of vessel for whaling round the world, for warm seas where the grass and barnacles will grow on her keel, and for high latitudes where cold seas and perhaps ice will polish her plates all clean again?

So after some more whaling and planning, round the Shetlands in fine weather and storm, the writer goes south with rough plans, and in a few days two good men and true have agreed to be directors of a little whaling company; and, the whaling season over, Henriksen goes home to Norway, and with a shipbuilder they draw out our plan in detail, for a new patent Diesel motor-whaler for hunting all kinds of whales and whaling-grounds round the world, a combination of the old style and new, with sails and motor to sail round the world if need be with never a call at any port for food or fuel.

All winter Henriksen the whaler and another Henriksen a shipbuilder toiled at the planning and building of the St Ebba, Henriksen driving every day from his farm five miles into Tonsberg with his sleigh behind slow Swartzen; and the writer pursued his calling in Edinburgh, receiving occasionally fascinating drawings or detail plans of the whaler in white line on blue paper, and then he joined Henriksen in summer in South Norway and both together they drove out and in to Tonsberg, behind slow Swartzen, day after day for weeks, till weeks ran into months, and it seemed as if our ship would never be done.

A coal strike in Britain was the first cause of delay, our Colville plates were kept back by that. Still, we had her launched in little more than a twelvemonth from the time we first planned her, which we thought after all was not half bad.

We called her the St Ebba—why, it is hard to say.

It would take volumes to describe the trouble there is in preparing a boat for such a purpose, especially a new type such as ours. Further on in this book the reader will be able to understand from the drawings and descriptions the different styles of whalers of the past and present.

CHAPTER II

In August I went to Tonsberg, the capital of the old Viking days, and over the wooden housetops saw the two bare pole masts of our ship and a little later saw her entire hull! How infinitely satisfactory, to see our dream of a year ago in Balta Sound realised in hard iron and pine on the slip. She is one hundred and ten feet over all, with twenty-two-foot beam—just a few feet longer than the Viking ship of the Norwegian princes that was found a year or two ago buried within a mile and a half of where our vessel is being built. Tonsberg was the Viking centre, now it is the centre of the modern whaling industry of the world.

Years ago we thought of whaling as connected with the hunting of whales in the Arctic regions, or of cachalot or sperm whaling in sub-tropical seas, carried on by sailing-vessels which had several small boats and large crews: in the eighteenth century 35,000 men and 700 vessels hunted the Greenland Right whale.

This modern whaling, however, that I write about just now is a new kind of whaling of only forty-eight years’ growth. It has grown up as the old styles went more or less out of practice.

Two or three New Bedford sailing-ships still prosecute the old style of sperm whaling south of the line, but the Greenland Right whale hunting has been almost entirely given up within the last two years. The Dundee whalers gave it up in 1912, because this new whaling brought down the price of whale oil, and because the Right whale or whalebone whale, Balæna Mysticetus, had become scarce and so wary that it could not be killed in sufficient numbers to pay expenses.

This Balæna or whalebone whale has no fin on its back.

A large Right whale, or Bowhead, as it is sometimes called, has nearly a ton of whalebone in its mouth, which a few years ago was worth about £1500 per ton; previously it was worth as much as £3000 per ton, so one good whale paid a trip. It was pursued from barques like the one below—sailing-ships with auxiliary steam and screw, fifty men of a crew, and small boats, each manned with five men, with a harpoon gun in its bows, or merely a hand harpoon. When the harpoon was fired and fixed into the whale, it generally dived straight down, and when exhausted from want of air, came up and was dispatched with lances or bombs from shoulder guns; they measured from forty to fifty-five feet.

On another page is a small picture of the sperm or cachalot, valuable for its spermaceti oil, and for ambergris, a product found once in hundreds of whales caught. It is a toothed whale and carries no whalebone.

But during the centuries these Right whales and sperm were being killed there were other larger and much more powerful whales, easily distinguished from the “Right whales” by the fin on their backs. These were to be found in all the oceans and were unattacked by men. They have only a little whalebone in their mouths and were much too powerful to be killed by the old methods.

Once or twice the old whalers by accident harpooned one of these “modern whales” or finners, and the tale of their adventure, as told by one of Mr Bullen’s Yankee harpooneers, bears out exactly what we ourselves experienced down in the Antarctic, off Graham’s Land, in 1892-1893, when one of our men tried to do the same. We had been for months hopelessly looking for Right whale and only saw these big finners in great numbers close alongside of our boats, so one of our harpooneers in desperation fastened to one.

In his book, “The Cruise of the Cachalot,” Mr Bullen describes sighting a finner whilst they were hunting the more pacific sperm or cachalot. Bullen asks his mentor, a coloured harpooneer, why he doesn’t harpoon it, when Goliath the harpooneer turns to him with a pitying look, as he replies:

“Sonny, ef yeu wuz to go and stick iron into dat ar fish yew’d fink de hole bottom fell eout kerblunk. Wen I wiz young’n foolish, a finback ranged ’longside me one day off de Seychelles. I just gone miss’a spam whale, and I was kiender mad—muss ha’ bin. Wall, I let him hab it blam ’tween de ribs. If I lib ten tousan year, ain’t gwine ter fergit dat ar wan’t no time ter spit, tell ye; eberybody hang ober de side ob de boat. Wuz-poof! de line all gone, Clar to glory, I neber see it go. Ef it hab ketch anywhar, nobody ever see us too. Fus, I fought I jump ober de side—neber face de skipper any mo’.”

I have described our similar experience elsewhere—Weddel sea in the Antarctic—with the old-style whaling tackle and a hundred to one hundred and ten foot blue whale or finner. It took out three miles of lines from our small boats—the lines were got hold of from board ship, and the whale towed the procession for thirty hours under and over ice, on to rocks; then the harpoons drew, and it went off “with half Jock Todd’s smithy shop in its tail”—our sailor’s parlance for its going off with most of our shoulder gun explosive bombs in its lower lumbar regions. These big fellows were so numerous in the ice off Graham’s Land that we sometimes thought it advisable to keep them off our small boats with rifle bullets.

Now we can kill these big fellows. Captain Svend Foyn, a Norwegian, mastered them by developing a new harpoon. Svend Foyn and the engineer Verkseier H. Henriksen in Tonsberg worked it out together. A big harpoon fired from a cannon, a heavy cable and a small steamer combined made the finner whales man’s prey. Captain Foyn had made a considerable fortune at Arctic seal-hunting, and thereafter spent five years of hard and unsuccessful labour before he perfected his new method in 1868. Eighteen years later there were thirty-four of such steamers engaged in the industry in the North Atlantic, to-day there are sixty-four hunting from the Falkland Islands and other dependencies. In the neighbourhood of Cape Horn last year their gross return amounted to £1,350,000.

These Balænoptera, averaging fifty to ninety feet, are fast swimmers and when harpooned go off at a great speed and require an immense harpoon to hold them, and when dead they sink, and their weight is sufficient to haul a string of small boats under the sea. To bring them to the surface a very powerful hawser is attached to the harpoon, and is wound up by a powerful steam winch on the ninety-foot steamer, which can be readily towed by the whale, but which is also sufficiently buoyant to pull it to the surface when it is dead and has sunk.

In order that a whale may not break this five-inch hawser (or five and a half inches in circumference) the little vessel or steamer must be fairly light and handy, so as to be easily swung round. If the steamer were heavy and slow, the hawser, however thick, would snap, as it sometimes does even with the small vessel when the whale puts on a sudden strain.

In the old style the Greenland whale which floated when it was dead was pulled alongside the sailing-vessel, when the whalebone was cut out of its mouth and stowed on board, as was also the fat or blubber, and the carcass was left to go adrift. The sperm also floats when dead.

But the “modern whales,” as I call them, when killed are towed ashore and pulled upon a slip at a station or alongside a great magazine ship anchored in some sheltered bay and are there cut up, whilst the little steam-whaleboat killer goes off in search of other whales. All parts of the body, at a fully equipped shore station, even the blood, of these finners are utilised, the big bones and flesh being ground up into guano for the fertilisation of crops of all kinds, and the oil and small amount of whalebone are used for many purposes. The oil is used for lubrication, soap, and by a new “hardening process” is made as firm as wax and is used for cooking, etc. Some of the whalebone fibre is used for stiffening silk in France, but of these uses of the products we may only give the above indication, for every year or two some new use is being found for whale products.

Piping in the Arctic

Modern Whale Gun and Harpoon

Ready for firing.

Though so large, these whales are not nearly so valuable as the Greenland whale; still their numbers make up for their comparatively small value.[1]

In the last five or six years these finner whales, formerly unattacked by man, have been hunted all round the world. In 1911 there were one hundred and twenty modern steam-whalers working north of the Equator, and in the Southern Hemisphere there were eighty-six. The total value of the catch for the year was estimated at two and three quarter million sterling.

These whales are rapidly becoming more shy and wary, still the catches increase and the value of oil goes up. The more unsophisticated whales in unfished oceans will have soon to be hunted. There is not the least fear of whales ever being exterminated, for long before that could happen, owing to reduced numbers and their increased shyness, hunting them will not pay the great cost incurred. So there will some day be a world-wide close season—just as has happened in the case of the Greenland whale, which is now enjoying a close season and is increasing in numbers in the Arctic seas.

NORD CAPPER

BALÆNA AUSTRALIS

Captain T. Robertson of the Scotia in 1911, though he came home with a “clean ship,” saw over forty of the Mysticeti east of Greenland, but could not get near them, for they kept warily far in amongst the ice floes.

The sperm whale is also recovering in numbers. I have seen them in great numbers only last year in warm southern waters, where twenty years ago they had become very scarce.

We must mention here another whale that was actually supposed to be extinct. This is the Biscayensis, commonly called a Nordcapper; it is a small edition of the Greenland Right whale and is practically identical with the Australis of the Southern Seas.

This is the first whale we read of being hunted; in the Bay of Biscay and along the west of Europe it was supposed to have become extinct, but of recent years we have found them in considerable numbers round the coasts of Shetland and Ireland; a few years ago there were, I think, eighty of them captured in the season.

CHAPTER III

It does not surprise me that the Vikings of the olden days used to leave the southern coast of Norway for summer visits to our Highlands and western isles, for the climate in this Southern Norway in August is most relaxing; there is absolutely nothing of that feeling of “atmospheric champagne” that you expect to enjoy in Northern Norway in summer.

We drive into Tonsberg from Henriksen’s farm every morning, and after spending the day in the shipyard, come out again in the evening with our ears deafened with the rattle of steam-hammers on iron bolts, rivets and plates. And at night in the quiet of the country we pore over Admiralty charts of the world, especially those of islands down in the South Atlantic, about which we have special knowledge, where we hope our new whaler will pick up cargoes of whales and of seals.

Our first Sunday off work, 4th August, came as quite a relief, the quiet of the country was so welcome. We wandered through the fields of Henriksen’s farm with his wife and their jolly children, and Rex, the liver-and-white collie, smuggled into Norway from Shetland, then through woods and heather till we came by an ancient road to the summit of a little hill and the remains of a Viking watch-tower, where we lay amongst blaeberries and heather and enjoyed the wide view of sea and islands at the entrance to Christiania Fiord, a pretty place to dream in and plan raids to the Southern Seas. As we rambled homewards through the pine wood that belongs to the farm we selected fir-trees to be cut down later for boat masts, lance shafts and flensing blades.

By the end of August we realise that our small ship is rapidly approaching completion. What a little while ago was only unkindly iron ribs and plates, with the added woodwork of the deck and masts, has now become a little more personal, and more homelike. We have had our engine hoisted from the slipside by a great crane and slowly and tenderly sunk into the engine-room, a very modern six-cylinder Diesel motor made in Stockholm. The fo’c’sle is well aired and lighted, and is fitted up with comfortable bunks and mattresses on wire stretchers. Each man has a long chest beside his bed, for we believe in making the men as comfortable as the after-guard.

The binnacle is now on the bridge, in front of the wheel; its bright new brass looks resplendent; and two hermetically closed boilers we have fixed on deck on either side under the bridge for boiling down whale blubber at sea.

Our hull forward of the engine-room is made up of iron tanks, and in these we hold crude oil for the engine. They will be filled, we hope, by whale oil and whalebone as we use up the crude oil for the engine’s fuel.

Above the most forward tanks is the hold, where we shall stow our whale lines—light lines for sperm or cachalot, or the small Right whale, Australis, of the Southern Seas, and our heavy lines for the great fighting finners will be in two bins to port and starboard. Forward of the hold there is the fo’c’sle and men’s quarters, with more space under their floor in the peak for more spare lines and sailcloth, and many other necessaries for a prolonged whaling cruise.

We have a small cabin aft, below deck, with four little cabins off it—to starboard, the captain’s; the writer’s temporary berth is to port, to be used later for any extra officer or pilot or for stores; the first mate’s and first engineer’s cabin are a little aft on either side of the companionway.

The iron galley with its small cooking-stove is forward, on deck, and attached to it we have a mess-room, into which four or even five of us can squeeze at one time for meals.

Aft of this mess-room and the foremast we have a very important part of our gear, a powerful winch driven by a donkey steam-engine. This is our reel, to wind up or let out our line, the five-inch cable when we play a finner. The line passes five or six times round two grooved barrels of the winch, and with it we haul up to the surface the dead whale. But more about this winch when we tackle a whale.

The 9th of August was a great day for us, for we started our 200 h.p. engines, and drove them at half-speed for an hour and never moved an inch, for the very good reason that our bows were still against the quayside. How quietly and simply they work. We then got our big traveller fixed across our deck for the sheet of our foresail. We are schooner rigged, foresail and mainsail both the same size, and count on doing eight to ten knots with engine, and six or seven with a fine breeze and sails alone.

In the morning we look at our guns in the harpoon factory. The gun or cannon for the bow weighs about two tons. It is already in position; the bollard on which it pivots is part of the iron structure of the bows and goes right down to our forefoot. Its harpoons weigh one and a half hundredweight: we shall take twenty-five of these, and forty smaller harpoons for sperm or cachalot or Right whale. On either side of the bows there is a smaller gun pivoting on a bollard to fire these harpoons. These two small guns and our twenty-five big harpoons and forty of the smaller size we find arranged in order at the works—a charming sight to us. Harold Henriksen, the builder of our ship, takes us to these works, where his brother Ludwig and his father make the harpoons and guns that are now sent all over the world. The father is very greatly respected in Tonsberg; he is called the “Old Man Henriksen,” to distinguish him from the younger member of his family. I have already mentioned him as being co-partner with the famous Svend Foyn, the inventor of the new big harpoon for finner whales.

He has made many inventions for marine work on all kinds of ships, for which he has received many medals, and only lately he received a decoration from the hands of his king, which is shown in the portrait given by him to the writer, a rare and highly appreciated gift.

He is seventy-eight years old and sails his own cutter single-handed. I wish there were space here to tell of his experiences whilst working with Svend Foyn developing the big harpoon. He takes us round the works, where forty years of fire and iron have made their mark; remains of failures are there; of burnt building and scrapped metal, but, besides, there are these fascinating stacks of modern harpoons and piles of their shell points to be used for great hunting in all seas.

The “Old Man” chuckles as we wander from forge to forge and out amongst the geraniums in the yard as he tells me how the first harpoon they tried went over the walls of the works and landed through the umbrella of an old lady in the street, and stood upright between the cobblestones. You may believe they practised out of town after that! Though old—seventy-eight years to-day—he is enthusiastic about our new plan of whaling. He has formed a yacht club; everyone yachts at Tonsberg. It is on a small island of little plots of grass between boulders and small fir-trees. We were invited there to-day for the celebration of his birthday. There were ladies in pretty summer dresses in groups, cakes, teas, fruit and pleasing drinks, coffee and cigars, and wasps by the thousands. Norwegian ladies cultivate coolness, and merely brush these away as they hand us cakes and wine; and they would be greatly offended if a man were to attempt to hand tea cakes. For the carpet knight there is no show. I wish he could be exterminated at home. Do the gods not laugh when they see our menkind in frock coats or shooting kit handing tea and cakes to females?

These pretty groups of summer-clad figures amongst lichen-covered rocks and rowans, fir-trees, oaks and honey-suckle were all reflected in the still water. As the sun sank low and a mosquito or two began to sing, fairy lamps were lit amongst the trees, and softly shone on groups of men and women in light raiment in leafy bowers. The light from the yellow and red lamps contrasted with the last blue of day. There was warm air and moths, cards and smokes, and then came music, and a perfect ballroom floor and blue eyes and light feet—a kindly welcome to the stranger in Gamle Norge.

In the dark before dawn, with lighted Japanese lanterns, ladies and men threaded their way over the flat rocks to motor launches and bade good-bye to the hosts. I shall not soon forget the long walk home across our island, the low mist, the warm, dark night, and wringing wet fields.

There is one place in Tonsberg of which I must make a note before I come back to our shipbuilding. It is the Britannia. Anyone who wishes to learn all there is to know about modern whaling must get an introduction to that cosy, old-world club. It is a low-roofed wooden house, with low-roofed rooms; one big room adjoins a kitchen, in which broad, kindly Mrs Balkan, wife of my friend the engineer on the whaler Haldane, sits behind a long counter and rules supreme. You leave the shipyard and drop in there for middag-mad, or shelter if it rains. It seemed to rain very often in August. The “old man” Henriksen’s portrait and one of the great Svend Foyn are, of course, in evidence, and Svend Foyn’s whaling successors come there for middag-mad or aften-mad, and some of them drink, I dare say, a silent skaal of gratitude to the memory of Svend Foyn, who gave them the lead to success, to become small landholders, each with his home, farm, and family.

Burly fellows are his successors, the pick of Norse sailor captains. One is just home from the South Shetlands. I saw these desolate, unhabitated, snow-clad islands many years ago, and saw there finner whales, thousands of them! and knew they must some day be hunted, but I did not calculate to a penny that there would be over a million pounds sterling invested in whaling stations there to-day; in one bay alone in Clarence Island, and that round these islands in 1911, twenty-two whalers would bag 3500 whales. So whaling here is an assured industry. In Britain the few who hear about it call it a speculation.

Another ruddy-faced, broad-shouldered, fair-haired captain comes from South Georgia and tells me of my friend there, Sorrensen, the bigger of two big brothers, both great harpooneers—they are both quite wealthy men now. They whaled with us from our Shetland station a few years ago, and between hunts we talked of a whaling station we were going to start in South Georgia; two or three years at this station has set them up for life.

Most of the men who come into the Britannia have been over all the world; half-a-life’s experience of any of them would fill a book. But of them all I think I’d sooner have my friend Henriksen’s experiences. Young as he is, he has perhaps had more experience in whaling than any of them. He was whaling for the Japanese when they opened fire on the Russian fleet. At least he had been—he stopped when the guns began to fire, and took his little whaling steamer behind an island, and he and another Norsk whaling skipper climbed to the top of it and viewed the fight from shelter. I believe they were almost the only Europeans besides the Russians who saw that spectacle. Henriksen has a red lacquered cup—a present from the Mikado in recognition of his services for supplying food in shape of whale to Yusako during the war. In time of peace there they eat the whole whale, paying several dollars a kilo for best whale blubber and as much or little less for the meat.

We in the Shetlands turn the fat oil into lubricants, etc., and the meat into guano for the fertilisation of crops. I suppose it comes to the same thing in the end, if “all flesh is grass.”

So the talk, as can be imagined, wanders far afield in the Britannia. I heard a skipper asked by a layman what corners of the world he had been in, and he paused to consider and replied: “Well, I’ve not been in the White Sea.” From Arctic to Antarctic he’d sailed a keel in every salt sea in the world bar the White Sea and the Caspian. The telephone interrupts many a yarn; perhaps Jarman Jensen, our ship’s chandler, calls up someone about provisioning a station, say for three years—food, etc., for one hundred men for that time or longer; or perhaps there is a less important order from Frau Pedersen ringing up her husband from their little farm, telling him to call at the grocer on his way home, and he perhaps tells her he thinks he may not get out in time for dinner, and “Oh, buy a house in town, Olaus” is possibly the jesting answer—a great saying here in Tonsberg, where men sometimes are said by their wives to dawdle away the afternoon in the Britannia, when they are really deep in whaling finance, planning whaling stations for islands known, or almost unknown down south on the edge of the Antarctic, or on the coast of Africa or the Antipodes.

Here is the 12th of August, day of Saint Grouse, and we should be treading the heather at home, but we are still on the island of Nottero, with rain every day; and every morning the same slow drive behind Swartzen into Tonsberg, longing all the time for our ship to be ready for sea. We hoped to have had it ready in June!

We have, however, made almost our last payment, and have her insured. What a lot it all costs!

We tried to console ourselves to-day with the interest of our first trial run of our engine as against loss of pleasant company and grouse at home, also we have the pleasure of seeing the last of our whale lines being made and we get our chronometer on board, stop watch, etc., and spend hours in Jarman Jensen’s little back shop with three skippers giving us advice, as we draw up lists of provisions for the St Ebba for a twelvemonth.

In the rope factory run by Count Isaacksen we watched the last of our great whale lines being spun; three five-inch lines we have to port and three to starboard, one hundred and twenty fathoms each—that is, we can let a whale run out three times one hundred and twenty fathoms on our port lines, three hundred and sixty or two thousand one hundred and sixty feet. I have seen that length run straight out in a few seconds at the rate of sixty miles per hour, with engine going eight knots astern and brakes on, and then it snapped; for some big blue whales five of these lines are attached to give greater weight and elasticity, because, you see, there is no rod used in whale-fishing.

The rope factory and Jarman Jensen’s store are two wonders of Tonsberg. The store is a small front shop, generally pretty full of townspeople making domestic purchases, butter, potatoes, coffee. Jensen, with perfect calm and without haste, weighs out a pound of butter, wraps it in paper and hands it with a bow to some customer, gives a direction to one or two heated assistants, and comes back to us in the den behind the shop and continues to tot up the provisioning for our ship for a year, or the stores for some far bigger whaling concern running to thousands of pounds.

So much business done in so small a space and with such complete absence of fuss! Jensen in his leisure hours is antiquarian and poet. He possesses a valuable library in Norse antiquities and will write a Saga while you wait. He must have burned a good deal of midnight oil over the splendid saga he wrote about our St Ebba which was rich with historical reference to the amenities between Scots and the Norwegians in ancient days.

The slowest part of the outfitting for our whaler was, for me, the customary expressions of hospitality. I hope my Norwegian friends will understand and forgive my criticism. It is the result of my being merely British, with only a limited knowledge of Norse and a comparatively feeble appetite. A quiet little dinner given to us as a visitor and representative of our Whaling Company would begin at three P.M. and wind up at ten—eating most of the time—plus aquavit and the drink of my native land, which seems to be almost as popular in Norway as it is in England.

Think of it—five or six hours’ smiling at a stretch, pretending to understand something of the funny stories in Norsk and joining in the hearty laughter! I could have wept with weariness. They are to be envied, these Norse, with their jolly heartiness, the way they can shake their sides with laughter over a funny story. The world is still young for them. I remember that our fathers laughed and told long stories like these people.

One chestnut I added as new to their repertoire. I believe it has spread north as far as Trömso, about the man with a new motor who, when asked about its horse-power, drawled in reply it was said to be twenty horse-power, but he thought eighteen of the beggars were dead! And as to speed, it had three—slow—damned slow—and stop! It seemed to translate all right—saghte—for-dumna-saghte, and, Stop! fetched the audience every time. At least it did so when Henriksen told the story, but he is a born raconteur, and infuses the yarn with so much of his own humour and jollity that everyone, especially the womenfolk, who are very attentive to him, laugh till they weep.

A perfect wonder to me is the way in which women here can prepare meals and entertain a lot of people single-handed, or with, say, the help of one maid, at a couple of hours’ notice; have a spise-brod ready—a table covered with hors-d’œuvres at which you can ruin the best appetite with all sorts of tasty sandwiches, aquavit, liqueurs and beer till the Real dinner is ready, say, of four substantial courses and many wines, custards and sweets. Between times she will possibly see her own children off to bed, probably alongside some of the visitors’ children; then she will sing and play accompaniments on the piano, and join heartily in the general talk, and later will serve a parting meal and a deoch-an-doris, and walk a Scotch escort of a mile or two with the parting guest as the morning sun begins to show.

They seem very jolly though they are so busy. Everyone on this island knows everyone else: they were all at school together, as were their parents before them. Most of the married people have a little farm. The wife looks after this when the husband is at sea-whaling. The women have the vote too! They voted solid a year or two ago for a neatly dressed, plausible young orator who came round the island, and when their husbands came home after the whaling season was over, found he was a Socialist; and if anyone’s interests are damaged by the Socialist in Norway, it is the whaler’s. So the vote for some time was not a favourite subject of conversation here when ladies were present. I think the wealthiest family in Tonsberg, a millionaire’s household, runs to two maidservants.

But this is dangerous ground; let us upstick and board the St Ebba. “Once on board the lugger” we cast off wire hawsers, let on the compressed air with a clash in the cylinders, then petrol, then crude oil, back her, stop her, then motor ahead easily.

The St Ebba’s first journey! We passed down between Nottero and the mainland, rapidly passing the small motor craft that seemed to be timing us, travelling at nine and three quarter knots. She seems to go as quickly as our steam-whaler the Haldane—less “send” in calm water. The Haldane and her like pitch a little, St Ebba makes no turn up behind to speak of at half speed, which is fast enough for actual whaling. She seems particularly quick in turning, and in a very small circle.

We had charts out all the morning planning our southern route, possibly to the Crozets, possibly the Seychelles or the Antipodes. We have information about whaling in these waters; I wrote our directors about the possibility of running a shore station with St Ebba, and painted the St Ebba flag.

Then we went by our launch, a Berlinda motor-boat fitted with bollard or timber-head at the bow for small harpoon gun for killing sperm or Australis. We found St Ebba’s engineer very busy, and worried. The cooling water inflow was stopped by something from outside. The British engineer was also very busy with our Cochran steam boiler for our winch. This winch seems very satisfactory—a sixty-horse-power salmon reel, with ratchet and noise in proportion.

We continued working at the engines till seven P.M., then motored in the St Ebba launch down the side of the island, and got home in the dark at ten-thirty.

I must cut down these day-to-day notes. “Launching a whaler” sounds interesting enough till you come to read about details. Little troubles and big troubles and worries arose to delay the getting afloat, signing on men took time, signing off an engineer who got drunk, and getting another in his place caused another delay; and delays occurred getting our papers audited. They had all to be sent back to Christiania to get a “t” crossed or an “i” dotted. Rain came and helped to delay getting our lines on board. Then we had to have an official trip, with representatives of Government, etc., etc., on board, a curious crowd all connected with the sea, most of them captains, a Viking crew on a British ship, still with the Norwegian flag astern!

At the next trip, however, given by us, when we had accepted deliverance, we unfolded the Union Jack and had what I’ve heard called a cold collation on our main hatch. There were the captain’s and friends’ relatives, photographers, reporters and skippers all intensely interested in our new type of whaler.

On [page 36] are depicted figures looking into the engine-room, because there was no room inside! There our engineer is discoursing to whaling and mercantile skippers, showing how he can be called from his bunk and have the engine going full speed ahead in less than four minutes; and all the wonders of a modern Diesel motor.

And one by one the carpers climb down, each in his own way—for you see almost all the “men-who-knew” said something or other would happen or wouldn’t work. But once they saw our engine work and the arrangement of harpoons, guns, lines, and oil tanks, all of them prophesied success.

CHAPTER IV

At last! on the 23rd of August, the St Ebba was ready to be taken away from the slip, and the town, and the noise of the builders’ yard, and one morning, with rain blotting out the grey stone hills and threshing the trees, and the country a swamp, Henriksen, Mrs Henriksen and the writer went into town for the last time about St Ebba’s affairs, motoring in our whale-launch nine knots through the spray. It shows how hard some people are to please, for Mrs Henriksen vowed she preferred her recollection of the motion of a Rolls Royce in Berwickshire on a dead smooth road. Fancy comparing metal springs and the hard high road to the silky rush over spuming surge down the fir-clad fiord, the wind right aft, and each wave racing to catch us.

So we took St Ebba from town and the grime of the quayside and cleaned her decks and laid her alongside a wooden pier a few miles from Tonsberg, brought a flexible pipe on board and filled her tanks with sixty tons of solar oil from an oil refinery, enough to take her at one ton a day to Australia without a call! That went on board in eight and a half hours, one man on watch with his hands in his pockets. How different from the work and dirt of coaling!

Then clang goes the bell for stand by—let go, fore, and aft—half-speed astern and we back away from the pier, with Henriksen on the bridge, our crew young and nimble as kittens and our young mate or styrmand forward alert and the picture of smartness. He is twenty-one, is Henriksen’s brother, and has held master’s certificate for three years.

Round we come with the wind out of shelter into rougher sea—half-speed ahead—full speed—and away we go, our first trip with no one but ourselves aboard, no pilot or town ties—ready for a year at sea.

But we have arrangements to make on board yet, arranging lines, and guns, and testing them, and a lot of small work with wood which we will do ourselves down the fiord opposite Henriksen’s home, a sheltered nook with fir-trees round, five miles from Tonsberg. Knarberg they call this little bay or arm at Kjolo, in Nottero, where long ago Viking ships were built, where Henriksen’s father sailed from, and his father before him in the days before steam. Now we revive the past glories with a split-new up-to-date six-cylinder Diesel motor-whaler!

We slide down the fiord before the wind and rain and squalls, smiling with pleasure at our freedom from the wharf-side. With a foremast tackle the port anchor is heaved up and hung over the side—the chain stopped by a patent catch; it is the first time we have gone through the manœuvre in the St Ebba, so even anchoring is full of interest. And in a few minutes more we swing to windward in the narrow Knarberg and drop port anchor and swing to starboard and drop starboard anchor, drop astern and lie where all the winds can blow and never move us.

One anchor might have been enough. But, as Henriksen said to his young brother: “Styrmand, you remember, father always put down two anchors, we will do the same.”

Then we open out the foresail and spread it over the boom above the main hatch, and our little crew gets to work, sheltered from the rain, shifting and arranging our goods and chattels below, laying timber balks over the tanks under our main hold so as to form a flooring to support the weight of casks and spare gear, furnace, anvils, lance shafts, etc., that must lie on top.

A glow comes up from the red-painted ironwork on to the faces of the crew that is almost like the effect of sunlight.

Our whaling lines we have to stow away carefully; it takes eight men with a tackle to lift one hank of line on deck, one hundred and twenty fathoms of five-inch rope. And there are stacks of fascinating harpoons, large and small, to be arranged.

We have adjusted the compass to-day by bearings, a long process requiring a specialist down from Tonsberg. The operation gave us a good chance to test our engines—so much backing and going ahead and turning in small circles, just the manœuvres we will require in pursuit of whales.

More homely work consisted in getting potatoes on board from Larsen’s farm—a retired American naval man—whose farm adjoins Henriksen’s. He has cut the spruce shafts in our wood for lances, light and pliable, carefully chosen for the quality of each stem, and so as to leave room for growth of the younger trees. And we have cut down a venerable oak, for we need a stout hole for our anvil, and other smaller pieces for toggles for whale-flensing. Anvil and forge are of goodly size, for we shall have heavy ironwork making straight the big harpoons (three-and-a-half-inch diameter) after they have been tied into knots by some strong rorqual. A turning lathe we must have, and an infinity of blocks, bolts, chains, and shackles. Veritably our little one-hundred-and-ten-foot motor, sailing, tank, whaling, sealing, cookery ship is multum in parvo, and parva sed apta.

We have got our ammunition on board. We brought it from Tonsberg yesterday ourselves, on our Bolinder launch, so saved freight and fright! for the local boat-owners were a little shy. Henriksen packed the powder in tins on the floor of our launch in the stern sheets, rifles and cartridges on top, and he himself with his pipe going sat on top of all. I think he smoked his pipe to ease my mind, to make me feel quite sure that he thought it was quite safe, now the ammunition is being stowed away under my bunk! Two thousand express rifle cartridges with solid bullets we have, for we will call on the sea-elephants at a seldom-visited island we know of just north of the Antarctic ice. One load we should surely get in a few weeks’ time: their blubber is about eight inches thick, and is worth £28 per ton; a load of one hundred and sixty tons (I think we could carry as much as that at a pinch) at £28 per ton will equal £4480, not a bad nest egg, and why not two or three loads in the season, not to speak of the excitement of landing through surf and the struggle through tussock grass. Man versus beast, with the chances in favour of man, but not always; men I know have been drowned, and others nearly drowned, in the kelp and surf that surrounds these islands in the far South Atlantic. Once I had to swim in it, and do not wish to do so again, and it’s one bite from a sea-elephant or sea-leopard and good-bye to your arm or leg.

Stern View of the “St. Ebba” at Tonsberg

The “St. Ebba” in the Fiord of the Vikings

We now have salted ox on board, oxen grown at Kjolo and salted down last winter by Henriksen; and Larsen, the neighbour, brought us vegetables. He is almost a giant, and as he stood in our flat-bottomed dory with two men rowing he made a picture to be remembered, for he was surrounded by lance shafts, sacks of potatoes, red carrots and white onions, so that the dory was down to the water’s edge! I prayed she might not upset. Larsen himself stood amidships with three enormous green balloons in his arms—such giant cabbages I have never seen before—each seven-and-a-half kilos (fifteen pounds), in weight, the result of whale guano.

The children of the neighbourhood played on our decks; Henriksen’s two boys and daughter soon knew every corner of the ship, just as he learned every part of his father’s vessel when he lay at Kjolo, only in those days there were higher masts to climb, and yards to lie out on, and tops to pause in, to admire the view and get courage to go higher. Our crow’s nest on our pole-foremast is the highest they can attain to on the St Ebba. The aftermast—or mainmast, I suppose I should call it, as we are schooner rigged—is of hollow iron cut short above the top (this is technical, not a bull); this forms the exhaust from the engine. You see only a little vapour, still, it does seem a trifle odd even to see faint smoke coming out of a mast! We will rig up topmasts in the South Seas, and have topsails in fine winds and the Trades, when we do not need the motor, and will then look quite conventional.

Here is a photograph of some of the children that play on our decks and round about the St Ebba in boats. They are of the sea. “It is in the blood,” as Mrs Henriksen replied to me when I asked her how she got accustomed to her husband’s long voyages and absence from home. It is their tradition to go to sea, and Elinor, Henriksen’s daughter, will be surprised if her brothers William and Henrik do not follow their father to sea in a few years. In ancient days it was the same here, womenfolk thought little of the men who had not done four or five years’ Viking cruising, gathering gear from their own coast or from their neighbours’.

We hope that this Monday, the 22nd of September, will be our last day on shore, and it rains and rains, and we long for the shelter of board-ship where there is no soppy ground or puddles, and there will be the fun of going somewhere instead of inhabiting this one spot of earth for days, till days become weeks and weeks months for ever and for ever without getting anywhere farther.

We have now almost everything on board, books, charts, bags of clothes, but we have still to wait for some spare parts for the engine from the makers at Stockholm, which they advise us to get before going on a southern voyage. We intended to have got away in time to do a preliminary canter, as it were, for whales up north to the edge of the ice—not into it—for bottle-nose and finners, so as thoroughly to test our engine and crew before going to the Southern Seas. Now it is too late for that, so we shall only go “north-about” round Shetland, where we may be in time for the last of the whaling season, and then proceed south.

The spare parts of the motor arrived, but it rains and blows a fierce gale from S.W., and we could get out of our fiord but no farther against such a gale, so we cool our heels and Henriksen works at accounts, a serious matter. It is a new departure, a captain acting in so many capacities, manager, navigator, harpooneer, etc.

This is my fifth week of waiting here, the most wearisome time I have ever spent in my life. So much for whale-fishing and its preliminaries! The time actually spent in connection with the ship’s affairs passes pleasantly enough, and curiously the sense of weariness goes, once on board. Perhaps getting off clay soil on to salt water accounts for this.

The sea-water in the fiord here stands abnormally high all these days. It came running in two days ago in calm weather. So outside the North Sea and Skagerak we knew it must be blowing hard. To-day, though finer, the fiord water still remains high, so we know from that and the newspapers that there is strong southerly wind outside.

For two days past a cloud has hung over us. Henriksen found a deficiency in his accounts, found that the outfit for the St Ebba cost 10,000 kroner more than the receipts vouched for, and went over and over accounts, till yesterday we made another pilgrimage to Tonsberg and interviewed a banker and said politely, “How the deuce can this be?” And he cast his eye over his account-book and found his clerk had merely omitted a figure in addition; a trifle of 10,000 kroner = £550! So we came away smiling, but it gave us a bit of a shake, rather an aggravating and superfluous piece of worry added to vexatious delays and bad weather.

We motored back in the launch much relieved, and on reaching the St Ebba practised big harpoon-gun drill. Henriksen and I are the only men on board who are familiar with its workings, but one or two of the crew have used the smaller bottle-nose or Right whale guns. It was interesting watching Henriksen’s demonstration to all hands. Smartly they picked up the drill; quickly, for all of them have served in the naval reserve or army, and anything to do with a tumble about or small craft they are familiar with from childhood to old age. Yesterday you could readily fancy one of these old Viking fights, for a boatload of ten small boys was fighting another boatload, a free fight, legs and arms in the air, a fearful turmoil, and two boatloads of yellow-haired girls smilingly looked on.

“Old Man Henriksen,” the oldest of the Tonsberg inhabitants, came down the fiord from Tonsberg to-night to wish us God-speed. He sailed down in his cutter single-handed, shot into the wind round our port bow, jibbed and swung alongside round our stern; seventy-eight years old and sailing his home-built, prize-winning twenty-footer as well as the best of his juniors. On board we had the tiniest skaal, which finished our last bottle of whisky, the remnant of our hospitality in the trial trip; we are drawing our beer and whisky teeth, as the sailors say, before taking the high seas.

Then he went off in the twilight, as the lights began to show in the gloom of the pines on shore, alone, sailing single-handed, against the wishes of the family, who say he is old enough and rich enough to employ a crew. He will spend the night alone on Faarman Holme, at the club he started there; in the morning he will dip his flag to us as we pass.

We all go for our last night on shore, walking home in the dark. Not all—I forgot. William and Henrik are curled up in their father’s bunk in great glee at being left to look after St Ebba, along with the crew for its last night in the fiord of the Vikings.

CHAPTER V

Then it’s hey! and it’s ho! for Scotland, chilly Lerwick and the Shetlands and kindly English-speaking people. My heart warms at the prospect of seeing our western hills and heather and relatives and a language we know.

It rains again, tropical rain. We stand and bid farewell in the homestead, round the little dining-room table, each with a liqueur glass in hand. Suddenly I see eyes are wet, and the stranger nearly pipes an eye too, for it is a bit harrowing even to cold hearts to see married people with children still lovers. My host has been, for him, at home so long, nearly eleven months now! So the parting from wife, children, homestead, farm, woods, horse and hound, all of which he loves, must be sore for however hardened a seafarer.

Our last cargo from home goes to the ship on a hand-cart towed by the children and Rex the collie in great glee—curious luggage—Japanese wicker-work baskets and parcels of foreign-looking clothes for their father. The writer goes ahead with them, leaving the lovers to follow their lone, past the little home they built after Henriksen’s first success at whaling, on a three months’ spell from sea, down the road and past the school in the birches where they played as children together, down to the brig or rocks where their fathers before them careened their ships and made the same sad partings.

Perhaps the captain is the only sad man to-day. From first mate downwards eyes are sparkling, in spite of the dull day of rain, at the prospect of the rough, bracing, salt seas in front of us. We think nothing just now of cold, wet, dark, dangerous nights; the future is all couleur de rose, whale-hunting, new lands and people, sea-elephants, movement and life for us, death to them and profit for us all!

Was it lucky or unlucky that our anchors held to Norway and the sea-maids’ hair or grass, like grim death? A sailor would be interested, perhaps, in a description of how the two chains were fouled or twisted, how one shackle opened and the starboard chain went slap into the water. I thought, we are in for more delay, trying to pick it up. But Henriksen spotted that it had caught on the port chain, and his young brother, our mate, promptly slid down it—a nice muddy slide down and to his waist in water—got a rope through its links and stopped it on the port chain, and so we got both back. All the sea fairies of Norwegian seas could not have given us more trouble in taking our British ship from the Norse anchorage.

As we motored from sheltered Knarsberg to Christiania fiord we passed Faarman Holme and the yacht club and dipped our Union Jack, and saw the Norse flag dipped in return, no doubt by old Henriksen, who had stopped the night there to flag us adieu in the morning.

There was more heart-string-breaking before we left. Mrs Henriksen and the children, and Hansen the steward’s newly married wife, came part of the way, and we dropped them a few miles down the fiord in a motor-launch we had in tow. There are tender hearts in Norway, tender and brave.

And now we are out of the great Christiania fiord or firth, passing Færder Light that marks its entrance, Norway faint on our right and Sweden over the horizon to our left, the sun shining for the first day this summer. The sea has a silky swell. We have shaken off all things earthy except a little mud on our anchors now being stowed away, and three or four green oak leaves and moss on the hole of the oak-tree brought for the anvil.

Henriksen and I stand for a little on the bow and rejoice in the heave and send, and compare the movement of St Ebba with that of the Haldane and other whalers we know, and we think that she makes good. There is sun, sea, cloud-land, rippling swell and fresh, cold air, with a luxurious roll; and we feel an hour of such a day at sea is reward for all the months of worry and waiting and planning on shore.

A pleasure in store for us will be setting our new sails. But even now, with the motor alone and fully loaded—with sixty tons of fresh water alone—we make nine and a half knots! but with our canvas unloosed and a light breeze behind us might even reel off eleven to twelve.

Not many miles out at sea a Killer (or Orca gladiator) appeared coming from starboard. Our guns were all covered with canvas so we did not clear for action, and the Killer is not of much value. He came towards us and passed forty yards astern, a fact which greatly comforted us, for “those who know” on shore informed us a motor would drive away whales, but how they knew it is hard to say. Then it was said so often, and with such a sense of conviction, that without acknowledging it, we had a slight sense of chill. This Cetacean, a whale of, say, thirty feet, took not the least notice of our crew, and as our fortunes depend on being able to approach the leviathans of the ocean, without frightening them, the incident, though apparently small, gave us considerable encouragement.

Our first day at sea has passed very busily and we go below for a spell to our blankets, early, and tired, but with a joy beyond words at turning in again to a cosy bunk with everything at hand—pipe, books, paints, even music (practice pipe chanter), all within arm’s-reach, an open port and chilly, clean air, and the faintest suggestion of movement; such luxuries you may not have on shore.

The sea did not hide its teeth for long. After sundown skirts of rain appeared from threatening clouds on the distant Norse coast. Gradually they spread across our track, bands of little ripples, like mackerel playing, appeared on the smooth swell, and these spread and joined till all the sea was dark with a breeze, which in a few hours grew to a strong wind against us.

As we passed Ryvingen Light on the south of Norway the night grew dismal and rough; we watched its revolving four-flash light, which seemed to be answered by the three flashes we saw lit up the sky from the light on Hentsholme in Denmark, over forty miles to our south, and the gloomy sky over the Skagerak was lit with occasional angry flashes of lightning.

Unpromising weather for our first night at sea!

By two in the night we were digging into the same hole, making little or no way, with more than half-a-gale from sou’-west.

In the morning we were a very sad lot of whaler sailors. Fore and aft all were sick, or at least very sorry for themselves. All but Henriksen and the mate and the writer and one man were really ill, and we, I believe, only pretended to be well—such is the effect of the motion of a small whaler vessel on even old sailors on their first experience of them. I have known Norsemen who have been at sea all their lives on large craft refuse to go on a modern whaler at any pay.

We aim at getting up the Norse coast as far as Bergen, then going west towards north of Shetlands and, given fine weather, we ought to pick up a whale or two before putting in to Lerwick, where we must re-register our vessel.

But the wind increases to a full gale. All the sea is white and the sky hard, and rain and sun alternate and our nine-and-a-half-knot speed is reduced to about four.

But St Ebba is a dry ship. She proves that at least. Any other vessel I have been in, whaler or other, would ship more water than we do.

There is no use trying to steam or motor against this N.E. gale, so it’s up close-reefed fore and mainsail and staysail; only four men to do it, and that for the first time of this ship at sea, and in a gale. Reef points are made and all got ready; then it’s “Haul away on throat and peak” and up goes the scrap of sail, and what clouds of spray burst over the oilskin-clad figures as they haul away cheerily! The writer, at the wheel on the bridge, even comes in for a bit of the rather too refreshing salt spray.

Now the after or main sail is set like a board, and we are transformed into a sailing-ship.

A ring on the bell and the engine and sick engineer get respite; a point or two off the wind and there is the silence of a sailing-ship—no engine vibrations. True, we make little or no progress and some leeway, but the motion is heavenly compared to the plugging away of an engine into a head sea.

A Dead Seal on the Floe Edge

The decks get dry though the sea is very rough, another proof of the St Ebba quality. We wish, however, we were further on our road to “our ain countrie.”

The mess-room of St Ebba is not extensive, a little iron house built round the foremast. One third of it is the steward’s or cook’s galley. He acts both parts. He is almost like a fair Greek, rather thin, with golden hair and a skin as white as his jacket; poor fellow, he is sick, but sticks to his pans, and tries to forget the young wife he left behind him.

His galley is about three feet by six feet beam, and his stove and pans and coal-box just leave him room to stand in. Our mess-room is what I consider a very cosy room for a whaler; it is fully five feet by six feet beam of iron, grained yellow oak—iron ties and bolts grained like oak. It may not be æsthetic, still in some ways it is the best part of the ship. It seems to be the pivot of our movements. There is a round port-hole or bolley to port, and two looking aft towards our stern and a little round-topped iron door on the starboard. Through the two ports astern comes the sunlight and the iron door keeps out sea and wind, so in this stormy weather our mess-room has its points. There is another round-topped door from it to the galley. So Hansen (cook and steward) has merely to stretch his arm round to us to hand the coffee-pot, or sardines.

Sardines and brown bread are on the table this morning. I notice about two sardines have been eaten by our after-guard, so even if we claim not to be sea-sick we cannot claim any great appetite. Poor cook—he has upset a pail and dishes in the galley. I help him with his stores a bit, but it is no use—he is a bit on edge, so the bridge is the place to sit on and sketch, for one must do something to keep the mind occupied in rough weather. And it is precious cold and comfortless. You have to twist a limb round something to prevent being flung about, steering requires gymnastics.

There is a pale wintry sun, but the air is cold and clammy—all right on shore, I should say, for a September day.

Two masts and a funnel go driving across our track, almost hull down before the gale, a wreath of black smoke dispersing to leeward in wind and spray. I almost regret I am not on board, with steam and the wind aft. I’d be in Leith before many hours, then with Old Crow and the dogs on dry stubble. Just the day this for shore, and partridges, or to look for hares on St Abb’s Head.

One or two of the crew are reviving this afternoon, though it is still very rough, but the first engineer, a Swede, is still very sick.

One of the crew this morning told me as he steered: “Dem mens forward all seek, but me no seek, so I have six eggs to mineself”; but he looked pale, and in a minute or two he gave the wheel to me and went to the side of the bridge and came back wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and took the spokes again, muttering: “Fordumna, now I’se loss dem.” Such details of life at sea you find in the Argonautica; they give colour and conviction; only the Argonauts in their days were laid out on the beach with too much purple wine.

Yesterday morning about four we tried the engine, but the Swede could not start it. Either he had let the compressed-air supply run out or water had collected and blew into first cylinder or—or—anyway, sick or well, all hands had to pump on till late last night, and only raised pressure to over sixty pounds and it requires to come up to one hundred and fifty.

Henriksen has been saying the wind is going to moderate by such and such a time; when I see a sky such as this round the horizon, with haze and cold, I give several days of gale.

It is very wearisome; Henriksen is pretty quiet. At breakfast we have each half-a-cup of coffee! We are simply drifting across this shallow and somewhat dangerous sea, sometimes called the German Ocean, a crablike course to Yorkshire coast, or will it be St Abb’s Head we are to knock against if the wind does not change or the engine go?

It would be an interesting point to get wrecked at, for I’ve a bet on that the lifeboat a lady started there won’t save ten lives in the next ten years. It is only allowed out if the wind is off shore and if the cox first gets her leave. It costs £700 yearly to keep it up, for motor-slip, man’s house and storehouses. Seven hundred pounds per year for a lady’s whim seems an extravagant way of running the Lifeboat Fund.

With a few hours’ lull the engineers would get well, and possibly get the engine air-starting apparatus to work; meantime it is a bit trying having the elements against us, plus engine difficulty, as no engine, no success to our whaling. Thank heaven we have sails; but we must be absolutely sure of our powers of starting the motor, and that at short notice, or St Ebba dare not venture into certain anchorages we hope to visit, such as the east of Crozets and other islands.

Wind always N. by W.; we are drifting close hauled S.W.

There was watery sunlight this forenoon, now in the afternoon the wind is even stronger, and it is dull with spits of rain, and spindrift; everything is quivering, and throbbing, with the strain, and we shall have to take in staysail. I think of my first whaling voyage many years ago, when for twenty days we lay hove to, out west of Ireland about Rockall. Days of gale are totting up for this trip now! And yet our waist is full of water only now and then! On that old Balæna, barque-rigged, and twice as big as this little St Ebba, it was knee-deep on an average, and waist-high at times. This boat is marvellously dry; of course we planned her from a very seaworthy type of boat, the Norsk pilot-boat shape such as those we saw come into Balta Sound last year; after they had been three months north of Shetland, they had never taken a drop of sea-water on board, and we think we have improved on them.

As afternoon wore on the wind grew very heavy indeed, and the sea was very high. It was Henriksen’s worst experience of the North Atlantic. We watched on the bridge all afternoon, and took in the reefed foresail, so we have only the close-reefed mainsail, and we watched it anxiously lest it should burst. But it is of new strongest sailcloth, Greenock make, and it held.

The watch taking in foresail was a pleasant sight to see. The young fellows, all deep-sea sailors, sprang at the boom like kittens and struggled with the billowing hard wet canvas, tooth and nail, till it was brailed up. I was too cold and wet to get my camera, but what a scene, say, for a cinematograph—figures on deck swaying at the halyards and figures clinging pick-a-back to the sail on the boom!

Oh, it was a beast of a day! even though the wave effects were fine; of about five or six I thought each would be our last. But we lay so far over with gunwales under so that we simply shot to leeward with a heavy sea, so there was much “keel water” which, rising from under us to windward, seemed to prevent the waves breaking over our beam.

The crew are all taking turns at air-pumping; they kept at it all day yesterday, and till one o’clock to-day, and we are soon going to see if the pressure will start the engine—it is rather critical.

CHAPTER VI

We drifted about ninety miles S.W. in the three days’ storm, S.W. of Norway, and now are just the same distance from Lerwick as when we started.

Nine watches with the engine going will take us there.

It is blue and sunny to-day, wind N.E., so we have set staysail and mainsail and go along in a real sailing-ship style.

But the old sea still runs high from N.W. and the wind blows little ripples down the long furrows, and the lumpy waves stop our way down to four or five knots.

In smoother water and with all hands free we would get a jib and topsail on; meantime we want the engine to work.

At night the blasts became gradually less furious and the seas less precipitous.

At two-forty as I write, rolling along through lumpy blue sea at four knots, the engineer lets on the air all have been labouring at, clash goes the engine, subsiding into its steady business-like stroke, and away we ramp; cheers from some of us. The St Ebba vindicates itself.

How our feelings are changed! “How is the air pressure?” is a question which will be poked at the engineers for many a fine day to come; and they will take care, sick or not sick, never again to let it run out. We surely do twelve knots with sails drawing and engine running. The log line will soon show....

We run all afternoon finely—sails, wind and motor—till the wind heads us and the foresail comes down, and we roll, roll as I think only a whaler can roll, and the expression on faces changes. But our engineer—mechanicien, we call him—is now no more sick and has the engine going, and is washed and is as spry as usual again.

Evening meal comes (aften-mad) with ship’s provender, which is not bad, and what is called tea in Norway; and the surges come over our bow and we sit in the tiny galley, Henriksen, styrmand, mechanicien and myself, and St Ebba rolls dishes, pots and pans all about. But what care we, reeling off eight to nine knots against wind with little or no water in our waist; an ordinary tramp at three knots against the same tumble of sea would be half under water.

Night falls, the Plough lights up, and our pole mast and crow’s nest and steamer light go swinging against it.

We ought to sight Fair Isle and Sumburgh Light and Bressay Light, Lerwick, to-night about twelve. The breeze is northerly and for these parts the air is clear and chilly and bracing, giving the energy of the northern electrical condition that we cannot explain but which we know does exist.

We overhauled all our charts this morning in the little cabin after marking our position—a pleasing pastime; charts are better pictures than the most valued engravings if you have fancy enough to see coral islands and waving palms where are only copper-plate engraved lines. Our Arctic charts we roll away in the very centre of our other charts, for alas, we are now months too late for Davis Straits: the polar bears and white whales and Arctic poppies and the bees humming in the white heather we must visit some other time. These are the happy regions the old whalers speak of with glistening eyes as they recall the joys, the hauls of salmon in nets, the reindeer flesh, and the Right whale hunting. No, no long sunny nights for us this journey. Possibly there will be room for some such description further on in this book, perhaps of whaling and sealing by the light of the midnight sun in the Antarctic or the Arctic.

We must make the best of this northern latitude and get braced up a little with Shetland, which is astonishingly bracing, before going south again. A dip into its cold, salt, crystalline water as you get out of bed is a better tonic than quinine for fever; and against the grey skies and grey houses of Lerwick and its pale, yellow-haired and kindly people we will picture before us the blue of the south, say the hot side of Madeira with the brown, bare-legged grape-pickers, the sugar cane and the deep blue sea or the hot volcanic dust and fruit at the Azores, the Canaries and Cape Verde, and the hunting and waiting for the cachalot or sperm, small game for our big harpoon, but worth much money.

Perhaps we may have a chance down there of Tunny Bonita Sharks and flying fish to put in our bag, and possibly even a turtle.

Fair Isle flashes N.W. at eight-twelve P.M., then Sumburgh Head.

We have been doing eight knots with the wind against us, consuming two tons of oil, from Tonsberg to Shetland, which would have taken sixteen tons of coal.

Then Bressay Light red and white, the night hazy, wind going to S.W. As we come into lee of the island we slow down to three miles an hour, for Lerwick and its light on Bressay Island are only a few miles off and—well, it is just as good fun going into harbour by daylight—so we go slow and the St Ebba’s engines start a new chant. This music of our engine we hear sometimes, and do not quite understand. And now Henriksen hears the music; we lean over the bridge in heavy coats in “the black dark and feen rain,” as he calls it, and he hears the singing. Yes, at “Slow” we have the full chorus of voices coming up from the engine-room into the silent night, the general theme a chant, of young voices repeating musically the creed, these change to sopranos, and interludes of deeper women’s voices speaking low-toned instructions—then all united! It is just as if we stood at the entrance of some Gothic cathedral at night.

But I leave the fascination of deck and “feen rain and black dark” plus cathedral music to Henriksen and light the midnight oil, and Henriksen hangs on to Mousa green light and dodges fishermen’s nets and boats, and in the grey morning tells me it blew up from sou’-west and got very cold.

I was not the least aware of above, as we slipped into Lerwick at five, but yesterday’s rapid rise of glass promised as much.

Lerwick at five A.M. in the morning in summer is the same as at any other hour in the twenty-four; it is always light and grey. Green fields and low peaty hills lie behind grey stone houses, and the grey clouds hang low on the hills. The sea-water is grey-green. You might call the houses a sort of lilac-grey, to be flattering. One or two of them painted white and a black steamer or two on their sea-front give relief to the greyness, and the white steam from their banked fires gives a slight sense of life and joins the grey below to the grey above. Always Lerwick seems instinct with this sense of coming life; here it always seems to be on the point of dawn or beginning of twilight.

Not all the herring-boats, herring men and herring women that congregate here in summer, not even the most brilliant blue summer day, can do away with this twilight; people and boats come and go but Lerwick preserves the same pleasing grey expression of quiet reserve.

To let you into the secret, Lerwick and the Shetlands are slightly anæmic! The best blood of several countries has been flowing into the islands for ages, yet always intelligence remains in excess of physical vigour, always the Scots and Norse say: “Let us go and make use of these islands.” “Look at the wealth there is there of sea-fish and sea-birds,” says the Norseman, “give me one little island there and I will envy no man.” But they forget their starting-points are lands of assured summer, where trees grow (and, for Norsemen, where wild fruit ripens), and they come, and have come, conquering or peacefully hunting, catching sea-trout, whales or herring, and either go away again, or stay, and become like the islanders anæmic, and slightly socialistic, and lose the sense of industrial enterprise, and other people come and take the herring and whales and sea-trout from their doors.

It is greatly a matter of geographical position and climatic conditions. The one tree that grows on the islands could tell you this if you could hear it speak to you of its struggle for existence.

CHAPTER VII

Whaling is like salmon-fishing, but the waiting part is on an enormous scale, bigger in proportion than even the game or the tackle, however huge that is. Fancy waiting and fishing for nine months for your first fish. That was my first whaling. Henriksen in Japanese seas on his first whaling command was, I think, a year before he saw a whale. Then he had a lot of shots in succession and missed every time, till he discovered the powder was at fault, and then he killed about ninety in three months.

He sometimes gives me thumb-nail jottings of his experiences.

Once he ran into port. Yusako, I believe, and the harpoon-gun on the bows was still loaded, and the Japanese Bos’n fiddled with it and let it off. Two white chickens were resting on the forego (coils of rope under muzzle of gun), and Jap shoemakers, tailors with their goods and chattels, were on foredeck, sitting on the line, and they were all upset by its tautening suddenly. The boom brought Henriksen on deck, he found his bos’n standing pale as china, and a few white feathers floating in the air—a rather Whistleresque picture, is it not? Another time he himself upset all his poultry. He had quite a lot of hens on board, and they rather took to him. He had stood for hours on hours chasing two finners that never gave him a chance of harpooning them, and just at twilight he grew tired waiting and let drive a long shot on chance, never noticing that the fowls had collected round his feet and on the coiled forego. Overboard they went, every hen and chick of them, and great was the retrieving in the pram.[2]

Another curious mistake by a gunner I have heard of. He’d been chasing for a long time and fired at a whale, as he thought, but could not see where the harpoon went for the smoke. “Have I got the beggar?” he said, turning round to the Jap at the wheel. “Yes, captain, veree good shot.” The smoke cleared and a moak or gull lay with its head off, a bight of the forego had chopped it off; the Jap on bridge had seen no whale and thought the captain fired at the gull. The gunner’s expletives followed, and he threw his hat overboard, and stamped and swore accordingly.

And now here we are tied up, waiting again in Lerwick in September, and on the 1st of June we should have started fishing between Iceland and South Greenland, at a place we know there are certain to be the small but valuable Atlantic Right whale, Biscayensis, or Nord-Capper, as the Norse call it, a small edition of the Greenland Bowhead or Mysticetus ([see page 26]).

We waited and waited all that August in Norway, our grouse-shooting has gone, and now partridges are going, and we wait still. This last wait is due to an entanglement in red tape, a difficulty in getting our vessel registered here. We have the British Consul’s form of registration, a temporary affair from Norway, that has to be renewed here.

Soon after dropping anchor those agreeable and necessary officials, the Customs officers, came on board, in oilskins, which they discarded, disclosing blue jumpers and his Majesty’s brass buttons, all showing the effect of the climate, and they set to work overhauling our stores most carefully. If officials are to be maintained work must be found for them and we must all pay; we have assisted the Norwegian and British governments incalculably for weeks and months past. They earn their country’s pay by overhauling poor mariners’ tobacco and provender, only intended to be chewed and eaten far away in the North or the Southern Seas. Their chief, I knew at once, came from our west or north coast, by his soft accent, which was much to my taste; how much there must be in a voice if it makes even a seafarer almost welcome a Customs officer!

As he opened the stores and checked coffee and tobacco, we “tore tartan” a little. I said my heart was in Argyll but my people came from Perthshire, and suggested he might be from Islay. And from Islay he came! the island of Morrisons and whisky. But MacDiarmid was his name. “But that’s a Perthshire name,” I said. “Yes, yes,” said he, “to be sure, from Perthshire my people came.” “And from Glen Lyon, possibly?” I said, “and the Seven Kings?” And “Yes, yes,” he said, “to be sure, and it is Glen Lyon you know? Well, well, and that is the peautiful glen—and that wull be suxty poonds of coot tobacco, and wan hundred and suxty poonds of black twust. And did you see the Maclean was back to Duart Castle? Aich, aich! it was a ferry fine proceeding! You see, his mother’s grandmother’s daughter’s niece she would come from Glen Islay, and so it wass they came to their own again. Noo hoo much tae will you have here—we must mark it a’ doon seeing you may be callin’ at another Brutish port or in the back parts o’ Mull or maybe in Ireland too.”

His junior was Irish, with a Bow Bells accent, and the speech of both was very pleasant to me after months of Norse. The junior leant against the galley door as I had morning coffee, and leisurely interviewed our very busy cook—told him about Lerwick, asked him, “Did yew ’ave a good viyage, stooard?” to which pale Hansen with the golden hair answered, “Yah, yah, goot,” indifferently, but he brightened up when told of the fish to be had in Lerwick. “Wy, yuss, for a shillin’ you can git as much ’ere as will feed all ’ands, woy, for a sixpence or fourpence you can git a cod ’ere of saiy fourteen or sixteen pounds!” “Yah, yah, but vill it be goot?” said incredulous Hansen. “Yuss, you bet y’r loife. Ain’t no Billinsgaite fish ’ere, matey! wot I mean is you git ’em ’ere ’alf aloive! But did ye git any wyles?” he continued, “on yer weigh accrost?” “Wyles?” repeated Hansen. “Wy, yuss, wyles, wyles I say; you’re a wyler, ain’t yer?” and it dawned at last on Hansen—“Vales! nay, nay, ikke vales—no seed none.”

We went ashore with the brass-bounders rowing hard against wind over the fizzling sea amongst hundreds of tame herring gulls, most of them in their young brown plumage, and amongst armies of these sea-robbers, scarts, or cormorants, that are here as tame as chickens and numerous as sparrows. Why they are allowed to exist is what we trout and salmon fishers wonder at; in Norway the Government pays fourpence a head. I wish we were as fond of eating them as the Norwegians are.

On shore we got fairly messed up with red tape at the Customs office. The officials were charmingly polite and really wished to be of assistance, but duty first; and the very young man in authority showed us, with the utmost patience, how essential it was for the interests of everybody that we should be able to prove that the makers of the St Ebba made it really for us, and that the British Consul in Norway should also believe this, and certify that the Norwegian builders had really built it, and also that they had done so to our order, for if they had not done so, it might belong to someone else. Consequently if they, his Majesty’s Customs House officers in Lerwick, were to register it as ours, and it wasn’t ours, many things might happen, and so on and so forth. And we went back and forward to the ship to get papers and more papers, and each helped, but each and all were smilingly explained to be not absolutely the documents necessary to satisfy his Majesty’s Government that—that—we weren’t bloody pirates. So give us School Board education and Socialist officialdom and we see the beginning of lots of trouble. Finally, after much pow-wow, we telegraphed the gist of this to Norway, asking the Consul there, in polite language, why the devil he hadn’t given us the papers needed to prove we were we, and the St Ebba was the St Ebba, and not another ship, and that it belonged to her owners—that is, to a little private British Whaling Company.

And poor Henriksen, who had spent days and more days getting all these formalities arranged with the Consul in Norway (whilst I used to wait outside under the lime-trees flicking flies off Swartzen), seemed to be almost at breaking-point of patience, and I wondered in my soul how ships ever got out and away to sea free from red-tape entanglements.

A pleasing interlude and soothing was the pause we sometimes made between ship and office to watch the fish in the clear green water along the edge of the quiet town. The water was clear as glass above white sand, and against the low stone quay or sea face were driven, by cormorants, shoals of fish, dark, velvety-green compact masses, of saith or coal-fish, actually as thick as fish in a barrel. These ugly dusky divers paid little heed to people on shore, but in regular order circled round the shoals, coming to within eight yards of us, and every now and then one would dive under the mass of fish and fill itself as it went, and an opening through the mass would show its horrid procedure as it straddled across white sand under the fish, till it came up with a bounce at our feet, shaking its bill with satisfaction and then go back to do its turn at rounding up, whilst another of its kind took its turn at eating the piltoch.

No wonder, with this wealth of fish and fowl round the shore, that the Norsemen rather hanker after their old islands; they cure these saith and eat them through winter, and very good they are, and they also eat the cormorants (I give you my word, they are bad; I’ve eaten many kinds of sea-fowl and the cormorant is the worst). The reader may have heard that Norwegians claim the Shetlands, for they say Scotland only holds them in pawn, for the dowry of Margaret Princess of Denmark, wife of King James III., estimated at 50,000 florins, which has not yet been paid. So when Norway offers the equivalent, plus interest, which now amounts to several million pounds sterling, the islands may be returned to Norway. Possibly international law, recognising the amalgamation of the two companies, Scotland & Co. and England & Co., into Great Britain & Co., may not now admit the claim.

A specimen of a really stout Shetlander came on board with the Customs House men, Magnus Andersen, a burly, ruddy type, not so intellectual or finely drawn as the typical Shetlander—a pilot by profession—what seamen call a real old shell-back, with grizzled beard and ruddy cheeks—about a hundred years old and straight as a dart, stark and strong, with a bull’s voice and a child’s blue eyes. I said: “Why don’t you have an oilskin on?” It was raining a little and blowing. “I’ve been at sea all my days,” he said, smiling, “and never wore an oilskin”; one of the old hardy school, with a look of “Fear God, but neither devil, man, nor storm.”

He spoke of all the lines he’d been on—old flyers like the Thermopylae, and others, sailing cracks that we read of, Green & Smith companies, and the old tea traders, and then he told me he had been at the Greenland whaling, and mentioned a Captain Robertson, and I said: “D’ye mean ‘Café Tam’?” and he looked at me with a little surprise, but was so pleased to hear the nickname of his old skipper. “Why,” I said, “I was with him on board his last ship, the Scotia, in Dundee, not a year ago, and, bar a slight limp, he’s as good as a two-year-old.” And from that we started off yarning for as long as there was time, which was not much. Old “Bad-Weather” and B⸺ Davidson I asked about. He knew them from their boyhood: old B.-W. came here to Lerwick on his last voyage and ordered Magnus on board. He was to go whether he did a hand’s turn of work or not. Magnus admired B.-W., even though he had the common failing; but now he has gone——? may peace be with him. Magnus blamed the steward and mate for his end, on that last voyage, blamed them for not having his temptation in greybeards thrown overboard. My opinion is that the ice finished him. Take a boy as a mill hand and let him struggle through the fo’c’sle to be bos’n—second mate—first mate and master, then keep him whaling year after year with ice perils and whaling problems and the intense strain and excitement of Arctic ice navigation, and he must die before seventy! Ice navigation is a severe strain.

I’ve known of a strong man, a Norwegian skipper, who when he saw the ice for the first time, and got his vessel well into it, was so scared that he locked himself into his cabin and was fed through the skylight for a week!

Another old whaler (I mean this time a man of thirty-five) I met in Lerwick. I heard he wanted to see me, for he said he had been a “shipmate” of mine; “shipmate” to one who only plays hide-and-seek with the sea sounded rather pleasant, so we shook hands very heartily for a few seconds, but we had no time for a “gam,” for I had to go about our business with these horrid Custom affairs. He seemed to be doing well; he had some harbour office and was neatly dressed—his name was Tulloch. I must meet him again and have a yarn when there is more leisure.

We have additional worry here besides the registration. We have to have our vessel remeasured to satisfy our Board of Trade. I fear it gave the registrar some trouble to come from Aberdeen in rough weather, and he was very sick; if his eye ever falls on these lines, here are my thanks and sympathy. If we had gone to him at Aberdeen he would have put us into dry dock and kept us for weeks, but here we knew there were no dry docks.

At this point in our proceedings the writer left the St Ebba and took the high road over the island, and left the measurement business to Henriksen, for that is a matter that required tact and patience rather than the English language. I went to see my friend R. C. Haldane, who has the property of Lochend on Colla Firth, also to see our Alexandra whaling station there, of which this writer is a Director. I hardly dare mention this in Lerwick for the herring-fishers are jealous of whalers—whaling, they say, has spoiled their herring-fishing—and yet the herring-fishing is better than it ever was! The fact is, if the Man in the Moon made a half-penny more than they did, at his trade, which I am told is cutting sticks, they would eat their fingers off. Being numerically superior to us whalers they carry the vote—and so our Government has forbidden us to kill whales within forty miles of our Shetland shores during the best of the season, whilst any Dane, Dago or Dutchman may kill them up to the three-mile limit!

CHAPTER VIII

I have just come over the island and on board ship after a week-end trip to the north of this main island to my friend R. C. Haldane, of the distinguished family of that name, associated in historians’ minds with Halfdan the Viking leader, and to newspaper readers with a younger brother—late War Minister and present Lord Chancellor. I came over the island in a single-cylinder motor-car, a splendid new departure for these parts, over the windy, wet moorland track, four hours to do forty miles, but what glorious speed compared with only the other day, when we stiffened for long hours doing the same journey in a slow dog-cart.

The old whaler, Magnus Andersen, took me off to St Ebba in the wind and dark and splashing sea in a leaky cobble.

How jolly and cheery it is to be back in the cosy, lamplit cabin. The first mate is busy at his log, trying to write in English, and soon there is the bump of a boat alongside, and down the companionway comes our burly youth of a captain, and what a hearty handshake he gives, as if we had been away for weeks, or months, instead of only a week-end: and we compare notes. His day has been full to overflowing.

He had prepared the fatted calf—tinned meat and fish balls and beer, and whisky and soda, against the Board of Trade inspector’s visit for measurement and registration; and then he turned out to be a teetotaller and vegetarian! We had telegraphed to Aberdeen for this poor man and he had torn himself from the bosom of his family, faced two days’ gale and arrived white as paper and rather on edge. But he was profoundly clever, all admitted that, and he was impressed with Henriksen’s books in the cabin, three big shelves, all of them scientific sea-books, and directories. And he said: “Where are the novels?” And there were none! At least there were none visible. I have two or three about heroes and heroines of Park Lane and country mansions, into which I sometimes dip a little just to give renewed zest for the wide horizon and the tang of wind and sea out-by. And he measured this and that, and, much to our joy, he practically accepted the Norwegian Lloyd registration, and put us down at sixty-nine tons instead of a larger figure, which we feared; now, registered as under seventy tons we need not have pilots, and we save in many ways on entering port.

Sunday afternoon with Norwegians is a playtime and holiday, so our master and mates and engineers had a Saturnalia of shag or cormorant shooting and rather shocked the natives of Lerwick who heard the shooting. Our men rejoice more heartily at banging down these marauders than you and I, gentle reader, would rejoice at clawing down the highest birds in Britain, and we all eat them. To cook them, we skin them first, then lay breast and limbs, without the back, in vinegar and water for a night, and wash them in milk and water next morning, then they are stewed; there is a good deal of trouble taken with the cooking, and when done they are extremely bad to eat!

My Sunday, however, was passed in unbroken peace and quiet at Lochend on the west of Shetland. There is a silence at Lochend and on the silvery shingle beach, and over the crystalline rippling green bay that is astounding; a bee humming over the patch of yellow oats sounds quite loud, and a collie barking in the distance beside one of the grey thatched cottages sounds quite close. Haldane’s white, thick-walled stone house looks out on to a silvery shingle that makes a perfect crescent between a fresh-water lake of brown peaty water and the sea-loch where the water is green above the white sand, and purple above tangle.

Ah! the purity of the air there, with its scent of peat! How I have longed for it in town, and even in warm South Norway counted on breathing it again, and at every breath thanked heaven for its restorative energy. The morning dive was past expectation—how the Shetland sea makes the blood tingle and the skin glow! And the contrast from the outside keen air, after days buffeting on the North Atlantic or North Sea, to come into the warm stone house, to sit by the glowing peats and coal, surrounded by books of travel, illuminated missals and natural history, to read or to listen to my host telling tales of the times of our fathers, told as they told them, without haste and with exquisite inflection and skill in picturing peoples and places at home or abroad.

One family story he told me should be of national, or even international interest, so I must make it a classic. It was in the first days of trains in this country that my host and his brother were coming back to school in Edinburgh from Cloan in Perthshire with their father. The father was considered a splendid traveller, for he could actually sleep in these Early-Victorian carriages! As he lay asleep with a red rug drawn over him—which Haldane says figures largely in his boyish recollections—he and his brother plugged cattle and engine-drivers and various things as they passed, or at the stations, with their catapults, till at Larbert old Haldane awakened and saw the instruments and asked the boys what they were. “Never had such things when I was a boy,” he said. They explained to him how to fit a stone into the leather, and he did so and held the catapult out of the window and let fly, and with inexpressible joy the boys watched the stone go hurtling into the centre of the stationmaster’s window. Old Haldane promptly pulled the red plaid over his head, and out came the wrathful stationmaster, and the guard, and a boy clerk, who took them to the Haldane carriage. Wrathfully the stationmaster pulled open the door, and met the gaze of the cherubic innocents. Then angrily he pulled the red rug aside and disclosed the stem, judicial features of Haldane senior.

“How dare you, sir, disturb me in this rude manner?” he demanded of the guard he knew so well, and “Och, sir! Save us!—It’s you, Mr Haldane! A’ maist humbly apologise. A’ maun hae made a mistake,” and he bustled away, angrily elbowing the boy clerk and muttering: “Yon’s Mr Haldane, ye fuil, ye gowk, Haldane o’ Cloan, yin o’ the biggest shareholders o’ the Company.” “Ye may ca’ him what ye like,” said the clerk, “but A’ saw him let flee yon stane.”

As the train proceeded, Haldane père emerged from the red rug again and the three laughed long and loud, and the juniors told their father more about catties and what they did with them at school. And this led to talk of fights, and they asked their father if he ever fought at school, and he confessed to having done so and pointed to two metal teeth, mark of an ancient fray or “bicker” between the Edinburgh Academy boys and the boys of the Old Town on the mound. It is at this point that this domestic tale becomes of national interest, for the present Viscount and our Lord Chancellor appears on the scene; he was much the junior of these two elder brothers, and soon after this, when they had all got back to their respective schools, “Campy” and his brother asked Bob, the Benjamin, if he ever had a fight, and jeered at him for being at such a school where they didn’t fight—I forget which it was, possibly Henderson’s, and he replied that they were taught at school that it was very wrong to fight, and they referred to the two metal teeth of their father, and gentle Bobby went away thinking. A few days later he came home from school with two black eyes, and his poor little nose pointing north by south, and Lispeth, the old family nurse, was nearly broken-hearted. “Oh, wae’s me, puir wee lambie, wha’s gaun an’ made sic a sicht o’ ma bonnie wee bairn?” And he explained. He was top of his class, and “I thought I ought to fight, so I looked at the other boys, and there was one long one, at the bottom of the class, and I just gave him one on the eye—and he licked me.” And there were poultices applied to the black eyes—and his nose you have seen—and much pity from Lispeth for her bonnie wee laddie.

So the elder brother, R. C. Haldane, after travelling the wide world o’er, has found the most quiet, most restful spot in Ultima Thule, and the youngest is, we trust, still fighting for universal service, we trust, in London, England.

On this Haldane senior’s property we have the land station of our little whaling company, the Alexandra Company, which by our Government is allowed to run two small whaling steamers only, and incidentally to employ many Shetlanders at 23s. a week. More steamers we may not have. Ask herring-fishers why we may not!

CHAPTER IX

Perhaps it will be as well for me to hark back here and make some extracts from my last year’s whaling log and sketch-books, for who knows when this St Ebba will fall in with whales; in this way the reader will the sooner be made acquainted with the procedure in “Modern Whaling.”

The extracts that follow have appeared in magazines—in The Nineteenth Century, The Scottish Field, and in Chambers’s Magazine, and Badminton, but possibly the reader may not have seen them; and I am sure that the illustrations have not yet been submitted to the criticism of the general public.

The first begins one evening in June a year or two ago, when we were fishing sea-trout in the Voe at Lochend, beside our whaling station, putting in the time till our whaler came in from the outer sea.

On the evening of the second day of waiting a fair-haired, rosy-cheeked boy with great grey eyes and a ragged red waistcoat came down from the hill bare-footed and breathless, and said: “She is there!” and went off in astonishment at the unfamiliar silver. Then we got our bag down to the shore and waited for the smoke above the headland which would tell us that our little steam-whaler had been into the Colla Firth station and had left the last captured whale there, had taken coal on board, and was coming out again for the high seas.

Henriksen has heard of our arrival and, as she swings into the bay in front of Haldane’s house down comes her pram, and two Norsemen come off in it and take the writer on board.

Ah! it is good to feel again the rolling deck, on “the road to freedom and to peace,” to the open sea and big hunting, and to read in a note from the Works Manager that we have at last to act as harpooneer.

Yell Sound is calm as a mill-pond, with swiftly running tides as we go south and east past the Outer Skerries. We aim at a latitude N.E. of the Shetlands beyond the “forty-mile whaling limit” made against British whalers only.

Even with a glassy calm a steam-whaler has a rolling send. She seems to make her own swell to plunge over, but it’s a silky, quick, silent motion that, once accustomed to, you never notice; though old seamen are prostrated with it when they first experience it. Round about the islands we see many seals and an endless variety of divers and other sea-birds and some herring-hog or springers, a small finner whale (Balænoptera Vaga), and porpoises in great numbers, so we practise swinging and aiming our gun in the bows at them, against the time when we have to fire at the mighty Fin whale (A), Blue whale (B), Seihvale (C), Nord Capper (D), or Sperm (E),[3] for even Sperm and the Nord Capper we have killed in the last two years off the Shetlands, yet the Nord Capper or Atlantic Right whale, Biscayensis, was supposed to be extinct! and the sperm or cachalot is a warm-water whale and only occasionally is found as far north as the Northern Shetlands, or as far south as the South Shetlands south of Cape Horn.

The modern whale gun or swivel cannon is on the steamer’s bow and is swung in any direction by a pistol grip. It weighs about two tons, but it is well balanced when it has the one-and-a-half hundredweight harpoon in it so that a hefty man can swing it fairly easily in any direction. The difficulty for the landsman shooting is, of course, in his sea-legs—you must be absolutely unconscious of them and of the vessel’s movement, or of pitch and roll, and the wet of cold, bursting seas that may come over you at any time in the pursuit; but, given good sea-legs and indifference to a wetting, and there is nothing in ordinary circumstances to prevent, say, a fairly quick pistol shot from killing his whale, a certain amount of strength and nerve is required for the final lancing from the pram or small boat, but that is seldom done nowadays, for a second or third harpoon is usually resorted to, as being more effective and less risky.

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?