The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review

When Arthur Conan Doyle joined ‘the great blubber hunt’

In 1880, while working as a doctor on an Arctic trawler, the Sherlock Holmes author witnessed a killing he’d never forget

-

It is a strange thing to think that there is a body of men in Great Britain, the majority of whom have never, since their boyhood, seen the corn in the fields. It is the case with the whale-fishers of Peterhead. They began their hard life very early as boys or ordinary seamen, and from that time onward they leave home at the end of February, before the first shoots are above the ground, and return in September, when only the stubble remains to show where the harvest has been. I have seen and spoken with many an old whalingman to whom a bearded ear of corn was a thing to be wondered over and preserved.

The trade which these men follow is old and honourable. There was a time when the Greenland seas were harried by the ships of many nations, when the Basques and the Biscayens were the great fishers of whales, and when Dutchmen, men of the Hansa towns, Spaniards, and Britons all joined in the great blubber hunt. Then one by one, as national energy or industrial capital decreased, the various countries tailed off [...]

It is not that the present generation is less persistent and skilful than its predecesso­rs, nor is it that the Greenland whale is in danger of becoming extinct; but the true reason appears to be, that Nature, while depriving this unwieldy mass of blubber of any weapons, has given it in compensati­on a highly intelligen­t brain. That the whale entirely understand­s the mechanism of his own capture is beyond dispute. To swim backward and forward beneath a floe, in the hope of cutting the rope against the sharp edge of the ice, is a common device of the creature after being struck.

By degrees, however, it has realised the fact that there are limits to the powers of its adversarie­s, and that by keeping far in among the icefields it may shake off the most intrepid of pursuers. Gradually the creature has deserted the open sea, and bored deeper and deeper among the ice barriers, until now, at last, it really appears to have reached inaccessib­le feeding grounds; and it is seldom, indeed, that the watcher in the crow’s nest sees the high plume of spray and the broad black tail in the air which sets his heart a-thumping.

But if a man has the good fortune to be present at a “fall”, and, above all, if he be, as I have been, in the harpooning and in the lancing boat, he has a taste of sport which it would be ill to match. To play a salmon is a royal game, but when your fish weighs more than a suburban villa, and is worth a clear £2,000 [...] it dwarfs all other experience­s. [...] A hundred tons of despair are churning the waters up into a red foam; two great black fins are rising and falling like the sails of a windmill, casting the boat into a shadow as they droop over it; but still the harpooner clings to the head, where no harm can come, and with the wooden butt of the 12ft lance against his stomach, he presses it home until the long struggle is finished, and the black back rolls over to expose the livid, whitish surface beneath.

Yet amid all the excitement – and no one who has not held an oar in such a scene can tell how exciting it is – one’s sympathies lie with the poor hunted creature. The whale has a small eye, little larger than that of a bullock; but I cannot easily forget the mute expostulat­ion which I read in one, as it dimmed over in death within hand’s touch of me. What could it guess, poor creature, of laws of supply and demand; or how could it imagine that when Nature placed an elastic filter inside its mouth, and when man discovered that the plates of which it was composed were the most pliable and yet durable things in creation, its death-warrant was signed? [...]

That oil money is the secret of the frantic industry of these seamen, who, when they do find themselves taking grease aboard, will work day and night, though night is but an expression up there,

Extracted from Conan Doyle’s Wide World by Andrew Lycett, published by Tauris Parke at £20 on Thurs

without a thought of fatigue. For the secure pay of officers and men is low indeed, and it is only by their share of the profits that they can hope to draw a good check when they return. Even the new-joined boy gets his shilling in the ton, and so draws an extra £5 when a hundred tons of oil are brought back.

It is practical socialism, and yet a less democratic community than a whaler’s crew could not be imagined. The captain rules the mates, the mates the harpooners, the harpooners the boat-steerers, the boat-steerers the line-coilers, and so on in a graduated scale which descends to the ordinary seaman, who, in his turn, bosses it over the boys. Every one of these has his share of oil money, and it may be imagined what a chill blast of unpopulari­ty blows around the luckless harpooner who, by clumsiness or evil chance, has missed his whale. Public opinion has a terrorisin­g effect even in those little floating communitie­s of 50 souls. I have known a grizzled harpooner burst into tears when he saw by his slack line that he had missed his mark, and Aberdeensh­ire seamen are not a very soft race either. [...]

Though 20 or 30 whales have been taken in a single year in the Greenland seas, it is probable that the great slaughter of last century has diminished their number until there are not more than a few hundreds in existence. I mean, of course, of the right whale; for the others, as I have said, abound. It is difficult to compute the numbers of a species which comes and goes over great tracts of water and among huge icefields; but the fact that the same whale is often pursued by the same whaler upon successive trips shows how limited their number must be. There was one, I remember, which was conspicuou­s through having a huge wart, the size and shape of a beehive, upon one of the flukes of its tail. “I’ve been after that fellow three times,” said the captain, as we dropped our boats. “He got away in ’61. In ’67 we had him fast, but the harpoon drew. In ’76 a fog saved him. It’s odds that we have him now!” I fancied that the betting lay rather the other way myself, and so it proved; for that warty tail is still thrashing the Arctic seas for all that I know to the contrary. [...]

Apart from sport, there is a glamour about those circumpola­r regions which must affect everyone who has penetrated to them. My heart goes out to that old, grey-headed whaling-captain who, having been left for an instant when at death’s door, staggered off in his night gear, and was found by his nurses far from his house, and still, as he mumbled, pushing to the

“norrard”. [...] It is a region of purity, of white ice, and of blue water, with no human dwelling within a thousand miles to sully the freshness of the breeze which blows across the icefields. And then it is a region of romance also. You stand on the very brink of the unknown, and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. [...]

Singular incidents occur in those northern waters, and there are few old whalers who have not their queer yarn, which is sometimes of personal and sometimes of general interest. There is one which always appeared to me to deserve more attention than has ever been given to it. Some years ago, Captain

David Gray of the Eclipse, the doyen of the trade, and the representa­tive, with his brothers John and Alec, of a famous family of whalers, was cruising far to the north, when he saw a large bird flapping over the ice. A boat was dropped, the bird shot, and brought aboard, but no man there could say what manner of fowl it was. Brought home, it was at once identified as being a half-grown albatross, and now stands in the Peterhead Museum, with a neat little label to that effect between its webbed feet. Now the albatross is an Antarctic bird, and it is quite unthinkabl­e that this solitary specimen flapped its way from the other end of the earth. It was young, and possibly giddy, but quite incapable of a wild outburst of that sort. What is the alternativ­e? It must have been a southern straggler from some breed of albatrosse­s farther north. [...]

There is little land to be seen during the seven months of a whaling-cruise. The strange solitary island of Jan Meyen may possibly be sighted, with its great snow-capped ex-volcano jutting up among the clouds. In the palmy days of the whale-fishing the Dutch had a boiling-station there, and now great stones with iron rings let into them and rusted anchors lie littered about in this absolute wilderness as a token of their former presence.

Spitzberge­n, too, with its black crags and its white glaciers, a dreadful looking place, may possibly be seen. I saw it myself, for the first and last time, in a sudden rift in the drifting wrack of a furious gale, and for me it stands as the very emblem of stern grandeur.

And then towards the end of the season the whalers come south to the 72nd degree, and try to bore in towards the coast of Greenland, in the southeaste­rn corner; and if you then, at the distance of 80 miles, catch the least glimpse of the loom of the cliffs, then, if you are anything of a dreamer, you will have plenty of food for dreams, for this is the very spot where one of the most interestin­g questions in the world is awaiting a solution.

Of course, it is a commonplac­e that when Iceland was one of the centres of civilisati­on in Europe, the Icelanders budded off a colony upon Greenland, which throve and flourished, and produced sagas of its own, and

The high plume of spray and the broad black tail in the air sets the heart a-thumping

I’ve known a grizzled harpooner burst into tears when he saw he’d missed his mark

waged war upon the Skraelings or Esquimaux, and generally sang and fought and drank in the bad old, full-blooded fashion. So prosperous did they become, that they built them a cathedral, and sent to Denmark for a bishop, there being no protection for local industries at that time. The bishop, however, was prevented from reaching his sea by some sudden climatic change which brought the ice down between Iceland and Greenland, and from that day (it was in the 14th century) to this no one has penetrated that ice, nor has it ever been ascertaine­d what became of that ancient city, or of its inhabitant­s.

Have they preserved some singular civilisati­on of their own, and are they still singing and drinking and fighting, and waiting for the bishop from over the seas? Or have they been destroyed by the hated Skraelings? Or have they, as is more likely, amalgamate­d with them, and produced a race of tow-headed, largelimbe­d Esquimaux?

We must wait until some Nansen turns his steps in that direction before we can tell. At present it is one of those interestin­g historical questions, like the fate of those Vandals who were driven by Belisarius into the interior of Africa, which are better unsolved.

When we know everything about this earth, the romance and the poetry will all have been wiped away from it.

 ??  ??
 ??  ?? ‘A HUNDRED TONS OF DESPAIR’
Top left, Arthur Conan Doyle (third from left) aged 20 with the whale-fishing crew; above, an 1889 illustrati­on of bowhead and sperm whales
‘A HUNDRED TONS OF DESPAIR’ Top left, Arthur Conan Doyle (third from left) aged 20 with the whale-fishing crew; above, an 1889 illustrati­on of bowhead and sperm whales
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom