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Read Ebook: 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 Burn Murdoch W G William Gordon
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Ebook has 1305 lines and 113122 words, and 27 pages
Modern Whale Gun and Harpoon 24
Stern View of the St Ebba 40
The St Ebba in the Fiord of the Vikings 40
Dead Seal on the Floe Edge 48
Mouth of a Finner Whale 72
Leaving our Two Whales at the Station 76
A Finner Whale being cut up 76
Towing a Whale 80
Two Whales being hauled on a Slip 88
Flensing Blubber off a Polar Bear's Skin 102
Whale Under Side up 102
The St Ebba Motor Whaler in Oban 112
The Arcades at Ponta Delgada 136
Tunny on the Beach at Madeira 136
Killers attacking a Finner Whale 152
Cutting up a Cachalot Whale 156
Sperm Whale sounding 156
Trying to get rid of the Lasso 157
Cutting up Sperm Blubber 158
Hauling Sperm Whale's Flipper and Blubber on Board 160
A Sleeping Bear and Cubs 168
A Dead Bear 184
Reloading a Gun with a Harpoon 192
Towing a big Bear's Skin 192
The Last Cartridge 200
Arctic Shark 208
A Modern Steam Whaler 208
Fulmar Petrels 216
Starboard being hauled on Board 216
A Polar Bear 224
The End of the Trail 232
Towing Two Bear Cubs 264
The Captain's Polar Bear Cub 264
Bears in the Water 272
Our Last Glimpse of the Ice 288
Our Engineer's Daughter 296
Photo of Starboard 304
Species of Whales 310
MODERN WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING
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 Balaenoptera Sibbaldii, the Balaenoptera Borealis, the Balaenoptera 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 , 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 , 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.
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