Chapter III: Introduction

The story of whaling is really linked up with that of exploration, especially of the northern regions, from the very first. Greenland had been discovered by the Norse in the ninth century, and during the following century two colonies had been founded there, but later on there ensued a long interval. However, towards the end of the sixteenth century there was a wonderful burst of commercial ambition in Northern Europe and a desire to find both new markets as well as new resources. The solution lay in discovering fresh territories and unknown sea routes. Merchants banded themselves together into small companies, fitted out ships and placed their goods aboard.

Now the Dutch were fired with similar motives to the English. During long years of herring fishing they had both become wealthy and built up a fine race of seamen, to say nothing of a splendid fleet of ships. The desire was to reach China and tap Chinese wealth; but instead of going all the way down the Bay of Biscay and round the Cape of Good Hope or the Horn, it was desired to find a route north about. For this reason we find the Dutch fitting out a squadron of four ships which were despatched with William Barentsz, a distinguished Dutch navigator, as pilot, starting off in 1594 to seek for the North-East Passage. This voyage was fruitless and the ships returned home. Another expedition under the same pilotage was attempted, and this also failed. But in 1596 by the munificence of Amsterdam a third expedition was sent out, consisting of two ships, and during this voyage Barentsz discovered Spitzbergen, doubled the north-east cape of Nova Zembla (which had already been discovered by the English navigator Willoughby), but unfortunately one of the two ships became embayed in the drifting ice, and this was Barentsz’s vessel.

It became necessary to leave her, and the crew built a hut ashore, where they suffered much cold, many hardships, and the unwelcome attention of Polar bears. Barentsz died in those winter quarters at Nova Zembla during 1597, and it was not until 1871 that a Norwegian explorer came upon these winter quarters and discovered part of Barentsz’s journal. There arrived in Amsterdam, however, by way of Lapland, some of his crew. Now the value of these expeditions lay in the news which was brought back concerning, among other things, the whales which were to be found in those northern regions, and this information was presently to be made use of by Barentsz’s countrymen.

But in the year 1630 one of the English syndicates, the Russia Company, sent out from London three ships to go whaling off the coast of Greenland. One of these ships was the _Salutation_, and when she had reached her destination, she sent her boat ashore with eight men to get venison, having provided them with a couple of dogs, a firelock, lances and a tinder-box. The _Salutation_ brought up off the shore, but next day the weather came on thick, the wind blew hard from the north, and the ship was compelled to clear out to sea. Left behind, these eight men found themselves in a difficult situation, but they were able to shoot their deer. They came across a rough house which had been built by Dutch whalers who fished off here and had been used to protect the coopers whilst employed making casks for oil. A number of old unserviceable ships’ boats which other whalers had left behind on the shore were used as firewood. By means of their harpoon the crew were able to kill walrus, and they could roast the meat. As the weeks sped by and the cold increased, and their clothes became tattered, they made needles out of whalebone, made thread out of rope-yarn and thus sewed their rags together. For a lamp they found a piece of lead, put in some rope yarn as wick, filled the lead utensil with whale oil left behind by the coopers, and thus were able to have a light and make themselves fairly comfortable.

When the food began to run low, they limited themselves to one flesh meal a day, but on Wednesdays and Fridays ate of such scraps of whale fat as had been thrown aside by the previous whalers after the oil had been pressed out. Finally this also ran short and they killed a bear and ate that for three weeks. But after months of this kind of life there arrived off the coast a Hull whaler. And the latter, realizing that in the previous year eight men had been left behind, sent a boat ashore to inquire. To their mutual joy the Hull whalers and the eight men met, but the latter presented a strange, uncouth sight, black with soot and smoke, and their clothes in tatters. Presently the rescuers took them aboard, and thus the men reached England, where the Russia Company made awards to them for the distress endured during those long nights and days.

During that seventeenth century the Greenland Company of Holland took great pains to continue their peaceful penetration in that northern region, and even left there seven volunteer sailors in order to get definite data concerning the weather and keep a careful journal of their observations. This was in August 1633, and the whaling fleet then went back to Holland, and the journal was kept faithfully until the following April, when it ended on the last day. For when some Dutch whalers arrived in Greenland in June they found each of the seven men lying in his own locker dead, since they had perished of scurvy and cold: so whilst the whaling fleet fired a volley from their guns the men were buried on Midsummer Day. In that same year 1633 the fleet which had landed these seven men in Greenland landed seven other sailors to winter at Spitzbergen. The latter happily survived and were brought home in the year following.

But seven other volunteers now took their place and kept a journal of their observations as long as possible, and these men recorded the fact that there were plenty of whales about. But when once more the whaling fleet came out from Holland in 1635 they found all the seven men dead, some of them having apparently died in agony, for their knees were drawn up to their chin. This seems to have been the last occasion when the Dutch left winter observers behind, but the information obtained was to add to the slender knowledge then possessed. It was in 1646 that a dramatic surprise awaited a Dutch whaling ship that had been sent off to the Spitzbergen district under John Cornelius.

Leaving the Texel in May, the ship was near Spitzbergen a month later, but owing to the presence of ice was prevented from anchoring. On putting out to sea two whales were sighted in the offing, so Cornelius sent his boat with a good crew after the mammals. But whilst the boat was rowing up and down, awaiting an opportunity to attack one of the big creatures, they discovered a large ice shoal floating some distance away, and something thereon which they supposed to be bears. The harpooner, however, insisted that these were no bears and persuaded the rest to row alongside. There was a certain amount of reluctance and argument, but, behold, when the boat approached it was found that there was no bear but a man waving a signal of distress!

Thereupon everyone pulled as hard as he could, and finally, to their utter amazement they discovered four living men and one dead. By the former’s language they realized that here were four Englishmen, so they took them into the boat and rowed them back to the ship. The condition of these men was pitiable, for they had eaten nothing for a long time except a leather belt, which they had divided up amongst themselves. The whaler’s surgeon took charge of these four who had suffered so terribly from cold and hunger, and in spite of his best endeavours, three of them died within a week, but the fourth was brought back safely to Delft and so got a passage home. It was from him that the story was learned, how his vessel had been wrecked on that ice shoal with a crew of forty-two. Seventeen of them with the captain had started off in the ship’s boat to make the land, and it was then to return for the rest: but nothing was ever heard of her, and as a gale of wind sprang up soon after she had started, the boat unquestionably foundered before reaching land. The remaining twenty-four on the ice lived on the provisions as long as they lasted, some of the two dozen separating on to different ice shoals in the hope that at least one might drift ashore and so preserve life. But not one of these other parties was ever seen again, although Cornelius sent his boat to cruise in search of them. It was indeed a real miracle that even one man had been picked up: and it would be difficult to imagine any surprise of the sea more enthralling than when this poor sailor was seen waving to the whaleboat. But still the whale-ships continued to come north to these waters, and if we cannot trace every voyage, at least we know that the rewards were sufficiently tempting and the knowledge sufficiently reasonable to make the risks worth while.

Modern whaling is just sixty years old, for its period is carefully marked by the introduction of the harpoon-gun, which was made successfully in the year 1865. The effect of this was to revolutionize the industry, which has had a most varied and a most romantic life. Originally the harpoon, as used for capturing whales and large fish, was just a flat piece of iron, triangular in shape, with sharp barbs. This was attached to a wooden handle, and to the latter was made fast the long rope. But the toggle-iron came as an improvement with its pointed shaft and pivoted crosspiece, so that after the shaft had pierced well into the fibrous tissue below the blubber, the crosspiece, at the pulling of the rope, instead of lying up and down the shaft was set at right angles and thus prevented the shaft from being withdrawn.

The harpoon-gun, whether fired from the shoulder or from a swivel-gun mounted on a pivot, enabled the harpoon or toggle-iron with line attached to be aimed with accuracy and to strike with such force that the rorquals or finbacks, which had previously been left untouched, could now be hunted. For in that order of mammals which we call cetacea, the larger members of the family are the whale, and these are subdivided into the whalebone whales and the toothed whales. The whalebone whales, again, are further divided into the right whales, the finbacks or rorquals, the humpback, the grey whale of the Pacific, and that rare pigmy whale whose whalebone is so valuable. The right whale has no dorsal fin, and its cervical vertebræ are fused into a solid mass. The Greenland right whale, with its great head and arched mouth, made itself well known in the Arctic, being about 50 ft. long. A smaller species, known as the southern right whale, became known in the waters of the southern seas.

The toothed whale class have no whalebone but they have teeth, whereas the whalebone genus has not. Now in the toothed whale class are included such species as the cachalot, the bottlenose, the grampus and the narwhal. The cachalot, or sperm whale, with its great head itself measuring about one-third of its total length, is sometimes as much as 60 ft. long, and has over a score of teeth on its lower jaw. It is a characteristic of this cachalot that he can remain under water for twenty minutes at a time. The sperm whale goes about in schools, does not frequent either Polar region, but is commonest in tropical and sub-tropical seas. And just because it was hunted with great zest during the earlier part of the nineteenth century it naturally became scarce. The late Frank T. Bullen in his sea classic _The Cruise of the Cachalot_ has left for us a most entertaining description of the methods employed during the old sailing-ship days for hunting this mammal. The impelling motive which sent those old-time whalers to sea after the cachalot was the great commercial reward; for the sperm oil from the blubber, and the spermaceti contained in a cavity of the great head, are valuable as an ingredient of ointments and in the making of candles. The use of gas and electric lighting, however, during the nineteenth century somewhat modified this use. Sperm oil, none the less, is a well-known lubricant in great demand. Ambergris was yet a third of the important entities found in the cachalot, and this, after extraction from the whale’s intestine, was found of great value as a basis for the manufacture of perfumery. The teeth, too, make valuable ivory. Thus, in a word, the hunting of the cachalot was a most important industry.

At the beginning of the twentieth century whaling seemed to be drawing to its close by reason of the cachalot’s scarcity. But in the year 1904 the discovery of a new whaling ground in sub-Antarctic seas gave such a fresh impetus that the industry reached a success hitherto unprecedented. The rorquals have declined alarmingly in numbers, and it was because of this that at the present time the industry in those waters depends almost exclusively on the blue whale, which is the largest animal known, measuring up to 100 ft. There are still a certain number of sperm whales being caught off the South African coasts.

It is, however, to be noted that the zeal with which the industry was carried on in the north led to the reduction in the number of whales, so that no other animals of this class returned to the areas which had once been so plentiful. The Greenland whaling, for instance, has for that reason long since become extinct, yet at one time it was very famous. Spitzbergen, where the whale was once found in great numbers, has been similarly deserted. But at the date of writing it is quite possible that the ancient whaling occupation, which has trained some of the finest of the world’s seamen under sail, may receive a still further development: for by an arrangement between the British Colonial Office and the Government of the Falkland Islands an expedition has been organized for a most detailed study of the whaling problem, and that historic ship _Discovery_, which Scott used for polar work, was specially selected, and then in the spring of 1925 fitted out at Portsmouth. The results of this new expedition, with a mass of scientific facts, may quite conceivably give an entirely new life to whaling hitherto undreamed of.

Certainly English ships had been engaged in this important occupation of whale-hunting ever since the end of the sixteenth century. The port of Hull was especially noted for this trade right away down till about 1868, when, owing to the scarcity of the mammals, the industry died a natural death. The very last whaling voyage from that port was made by the _Truelove_, which had been built in Philadelphia 104 years previously. This vessel was one of the most remarkable craft that ever sailed the seas, and it would be difficult to find many ships in all maritime history which so ably justified the builders. Seventy-two was the number of whaling voyages which the _Truelove_ made, and 500 were the whales which she captured. And besides all this activity she put in a good deal of time in such voyages as the Oporto wine trade, and even as a “Letter of Marque.” During the American War of Independence she was captured by the British and that was how she came to be owned in Hull and in 1784 began her career from the Humber as a whaler. It was in 1806 that at the age of forty-two she made her first trip to the Davis Straits, and went off there again in 1831. Her last voyage as a whaler was in 1868, but five years later she visited Philadelphia, where she was given a hearty welcome and returned across the Atlantic to be broken up.

In these days of steam it is a little difficult to realize how important was this whaling industry when those old ships with their somewhat heavy lines went lumbering along to the northern waters. Whitby, Scarborough and London used to send whalers to the Arctic, and in the year 1821 no fewer than sixty-one whalers sailed out of Hull, thirty-two for that area between Greenland and Spitzbergen, and twenty-nine for the Davis Straits. But it was the English colonists in America who first got the whaling fishery on a systematic basis, when they began the sperm whaling about the end of the seventeenth century owing to the proximity of Greenland and other prolific breeding grounds. The result of this was to build up a whole chapter of history and romance which will ever be regarded as one of the most interesting in the whole maritime development of Northern America. It is only comparatively recently that the great American people in their literature, their pictures, and even in their cinematograph films have awakened to the wonderful importance of that old whaling period, which did so much towards attracting easterners to the sea and shipbuilding.

Formerly England was chiefly content to import from American colonists such products of this whaling fishery as she required. But then arrived the War of Independence, and it became necessary for the old country to obtain those commodities direct which hitherto she had largely left to her colonies to supply. Thus it was that even from the year 1775 ships were sent out from British ports to engage in the sperm whale fishery. They were only ten in number, and owned chiefly by the firm of Messrs. Enderby. But in the following year this trade was encouraged by a Government bounty ranging from £100 to £500, and the number of whaling ships went on progressively increasing until the year 1791.

In one of Edmund Burke’s speeches of the year 1775 on the subject of conciliation with America he addressed the House of Commons on the matter of the New England fisheries, and I cannot resist quoting here his remarks, for they shed a most illuminating light on what was the British attitude at the period. With reference to the remark concerning the Falklands, we must remember that these islands had been discovered in the sixteenth century, but at first were regarded as not worth having; in fact, two years before Burke’s speech was delivered Britain temporarily occupied West Falkland but abandoned it, and eventually the growth of the Falklands’ importance was attained owing to the increase of the whale fishery. It was by the irony of fate that off this territory was to be fought in 1914 the only decisive naval battle of the Great War.

“As to the wealth which the Colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries,” Burke told the House, “you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy. And yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the Whale Fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the Antipodes and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude [i.e. steer due south] and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people, a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”

But so inexperienced were British seamen in sperm fishing that for some years it was necessary to appoint an American commanding officer and harpooner to each ship until competent officers could be trained. At this period whaling was carried on principally off Greenland and Ireland, off the Western Islands of the Azores, the coast of Africa, Brazil and the Falklands. It was not till 1788 that the Enderby whaler _Emilia_ rounded Cape Horn and was the first to inaugurate sperm whale fishery in the Pacific. It was a brief but successful voyage, and thus she was a pioneer in that ocean for future profit. For the cachalot grounds were gradually discovered, and to such an extent that in 1819 the British whaler _Syren_ first revealed that unexplored and valuable tract off the Japanese coast. So prolific with the sperm whale was this locality that even after its yield had been considerably diminished by frequent whaling, it was possible to obtain 40,000 barrels of oil there by the fleets in the early nineteenth century.

The next spheres of whalers to be hunted were in the Indian Ocean. The industry went on prospering, and there were few seas in the world that did not see either British or American whalers cruising. It was these or none other: for the other nations were now making but feeble efforts to engage in this work. But by about the time Queen Victoria came to the throne whaling in the South Seas had already passed its prime. Money was scarce in those days and the return from the heavy investment of capital in South Sea whalers was both slow and already risky, so that not more than thirty or forty whaling ships were cruising the warmer waters by the year 1840. An additional reason for this lay in the fact that the colony of New South Wales was now engaged in obtaining the sperm oil from its fishery at a much less cost of time and capital, and able to export it into England.

Leaving out the great changes which have taken place in the value of money during the last eighty years, it is worth while noticing some of the details of cost. To fit out a whaler in London for the southern seas--“South-Seaman” was the name they were wont to give her--used to require anything from £8,000 to £12,000. She was seldom away less than two and a half years, but this was not infrequently exceeded. And if the result, as latterly had become the case, were unsuccessful, all that capital had been tied up uselessly. On the other hand, a whaler might come back from the South Seas to London with 250 tuns of sperm oil which would realize £80 a tun: £24,000 in return for the capital expended, but with the ship still afloat and some of her stores remaining.

An average cargo in the prosperous times amounted to 160 tuns of oil, and the largest cargo which an early nineteenth-century British whaler ever brought into the country was 330 tuns. This was in the _Rochester_, Captain Smith, the year being 1830; but the largest sperm oil cargo ever taken into the United States up to that date in one whaler was 4,050 barrels, or more than 500 tuns. The British whaler _Tuscan_ was away from 1833 to 1836, and during those three years sighted sperm whales on 90 different days. She was able to kill and secure to the ship no fewer than 78 of them, and arrived home with 1,953 barrels, or 244 tuns of oil, which was a remarkably good cargo. But if we select the period from 1820 till 1832 we find that the amount of sperm oil brought into Britain by British whalers rose from 2,264 tuns to 5,576 tuns.

We have to remember that the use of lamps and machinery was increasing during those early nineteenth-century days, and this gave a greater demand for the sperm oil. One author writing on this subject in the year 1840 remarked: “The very general adoption of gas for the purpose of illumination, and which might reasonably be expected to lessen the demand for oil, has not had that effect--on the contrary, it would appear that the increased light of the shops and streets rather induces persons to add to their domestic illumination in a proportionate degree.”

During those early years of the nineteenth century the American whalers numbered a fleet of about 350, many of which were engaged exclusively in hunting the sperm whale. Such an American ship was owned by a syndicate of small capitalists which included the master and officers. In Britain the custom rather was for one merchant to own several of these craft. The size of whalers at that time varied from 250 to 400 tons burthen. The “South-Seaman” and the Greenlander had to go out light and return with their cargoes already consisting of the produce separated from the non-lucrative parts of the whale. It was a series of long voyages, and unlimited time was essential both for the searching of indefinite areas and for the extraction of the oil when the capture had been made.