The Glamour of the Arctic

Part 1

The Glamour of the Arctic

By A. Conan Doyle

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 begin 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 whaling-man 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 honorable. 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, until, in the earlier part of this century, Hull, Poole, and Liverpool were three leading whaling-ports. But again the trade shifted its centre. Scoresby was the last of the great English captains, and from his time the industry has gone more and more north, until the whaling of Greenland waters came to be monopolized by Peterhead, which shares the sealing, however, with Dundee and with a fleet from Norway. But now, alas! the whaling appears to be upon its last legs; the Peterhead ships are seeking new outlets in the Antarctic seas, and a historical training-school of brave and hardy seamen will soon be a thing of the past.

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 was realized 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 have 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 two thousand pounds; when, too, your line is a thumb’s thickness of manilla rope with fifty strands, every strand tested for thirty-six pounds, it dwarfs all other experiences. And the lancing, too, when the creature is spent, and your boat pulls in to give it the coup de grâce with cold steel, that is also exciting! 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 twelve-foot 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?

Of course, it is only the one species, and the very rarest species, of whale which is the object of the fishery. The common rorqual or finner, largest of creatures upon this planet, whisks its eighty feet of worthless tallow round the whaler without fear of any missile more dangerous than a biscuit.

This, with its good-for-nothing cousin, the hunchback whale, abounds in the Arctic seas, and I have seen their sprays on a clear day shooting up along the horizon like the smoke from a busy factory. A stranger sight still is, when looking over the bulwarks into the clear water, to see, far down, where the green is turning to black, the huge, flickering figure of a whale gliding under the ship. And then the strange grunting, soughing noise which they make as they come up, with something of the contented pig in it, and something of the wind in the chimney! Contented they well may be, for the finner has no enemies, save an occasional sword-fish; and Nature, which in a humorous mood has in the case of the right whale affixed the smallest of gullets to the largest of creatures, has dilated the swallow of its less valuable brother, so that it can have a merry time among the herrings.

The gallant seaman, who in all the books stands in the prow of a boat, waving a harpoon over his head, with the line snaking out into the air behind him, is only to be found now in Paternoster Row. The Greenland seas have not known him for more than a hundred years, since first the obvious proposition was advanced that one could shoot both harder and more accurately than one could throw. Yet one clings to the ideals of one’s infancy, and I hope that another century may have elapsed before the brave fellow disappears from the frontispieces, in which he still throws his outrageous weapon an impossible distance. The swivel gun, like a huge horse-pistol, with its great oakum wad, and twenty-eight drams of powder, is a more reliable, but a far less picturesque object.

But to aim with such a gun is an art in itself, as will be seen when one considers that the rope is fastened to the neck of the harpoon, and that, as the missile flies, the downward drag of this rope must seriously deflect it. So difficult is it to make sure of one’s aim, that it is the etiquette of the trade to pull the boat right on to the creature, the prow shooting up its soft, gently-sloping side, and the harpooner firing straight down into its broad back, into which not only the four-foot harpoon, but ten feet of the rope behind it, will disappear. Then, should the whale cast its tail in the air, after the time-honored fashion of the pictures, that boat would be in evil case; but, fortunately, when frightened or hurt, it does no such thing, but curls its tail up underneath it, like a cowed dog, and sinks like a stone. Then the bows splash back into the water, the harpooner hugs his own soul, the crew light their pipes and keep their legs apart, while the line runs merrily down the middle of the boat and over the bows. There are two miles of it there, and a second boat will lie alongside to splice on if the first should run short, the end being always kept loose for that purpose. And now occurs the one serious danger of whaling. The line has usually been coiled when it was wet, and as it runs out it is very liable to come in loops which whizz down the boat between the men’s legs. A man lassoed in one of these nooses is gone, and fifty fathoms deep, before the harpooner has time to say, “Where’s Jock?” Or if it be the boat itself which is caught, then down it goes like a cork on a trout-line, and the man who can swim with a whaler’s high boots on is a swimmer indeed. Many a whale has had a Parthian revenge in this fashion. Some years ago a man was whisked over with a bight of rope round his thigh. “George, man, Alec’s gone!” shrieked the boat-steerer, heaving up his axe to cut the line. But the harpooner caught his wrist. “Na, na, mun,” he cried, “the oil money’ll be a good thing for the widdie.” And so it was arranged, while Alec shot on upon his terrible journey.

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