Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

At 2 a.m. a whale was seen, and three boats sent away in pursuit. At four o’clock the ship resounded with the cry, “A fall! a fall!” All hands rushed on deck in their shirts and pants and crowded into the other boats, which were instantly lowered and put off in a state of the greatest excitement. Bill Reynolds was fast to a fish at the floe edge some 200 yards from the stern of the ship. I ran along the floe and stood in the bows of the boat. The line was running out very fast, the fish having gone under the floe. The boat’s jack flag was hoisted at her stern, while the ship’s jack flew triumphantly from the mizzen mast-head. The other six boats lay on their oars at different points along the floe edge, awaiting the reappearance of the whale to strike her again. She soon came up off the ship’s starboard quarter, and was fired into again. At six o’clock she was floating dead alongside the ship, and all hands set to work to flinch her [remove the blubber in huge strips], cut out the whalebone, etc. At nine o’clock another fish was seen and pursued. Suddenly the captain sang out, “A fall! a fall!” and again ensued the same scene of excitement and confusion. Byers was fast to a fish very near the spot where we secured the first one. But something went wrong. Suddenly his boat was dragged nearly under the water, the boat’s crew leaped out on to the ice, the line flew up, the jack was lowered. Alas! the whale was free. The line had got entangled, and had it not broken we would have lost the boat and all its gear, and had it not been close to the floe, might have lost her crew as well. All the boats but two returned to the ship, and we resumed flinching with saddened hearts. Again the cry was raised, “A fall! a fall!” Strange to say, the same fish had risen again, and George Clarke had buried his harpoon in her side. By 11:30 a.m. she was dead, and brought alongside the ship at twelve o’clock, just as we had finished flinching the first one. After dinner we set to work upon whale no. 2, and finished flinching her by six o’clock. We consider we have got 20 tuns of oil from the two fish. The value of the two fish may be reckoned thus: 20 tuns of oil at £50 a tun is £1,000; 1½ tons of whalebone at £700 per ton makes £1,050. Total value of this day’s fishing, £2,050. All hands turned in early, very greasy, wet, and weary. Our decks and everything about the ship were slippery with oil and grease. An immense number of mallies [fulmars] surrounded the ship, feeding greedily upon the oil and scraps of blubber, fighting and chattering and making a prodigious uproar.

Comment

Comment

I think they’re in Melville Bay.

With an even split (didn’t happen), 50 crew, and ignoring costs, that’s £3,800/man. Would you take the risk?

There’s a good summary of the voyages in Shetland Life by James A. Pottinger.

The lie to the banking truism that you can't eat an unrealized capital gain is given by the two whales taken in June 1866 by the Diana of Hull, and where feasible consumed during the subsequent hunger-winter marooned in pack ice https://t.co/YeWGZyZLJ6

— SingingOrganGrinder (@elorganillero) October 16, 2022

Friderich Martens reports (English translation) the cry, “A fall, a fall” from a Hamburg ship with a German name (Jonas im Walfisch, Jonah in the whale!) and a Friesian captain (Pieter Pieterszoon van Friesland) in 1671. Is “fall” a Germanicism, or did the Jonas take on harpooners in Shetland, or what?

I don’t think there’s anything in British literature to compare with Herman Melville:

A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.

Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean (Melville 2001)

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Original

This day ought to be marked on our calendar “with a white stone,” as the Romans phrased it [i.e. a lucky day].

At 2 a.m. a whale was seen, and three boats sent away in pursuit. At four o’clock the ship resounded with the cry, “A fall! a fall!” All hands rushed on deck in their shirts and pants and crowded into the other boats, which were instantly lowered and put off in a state of the greatest excitement. Bill Reynolds was fast to a fish at the floe edge some 200 yards from the stern of the ship.

I ran along the floe and stood in the bows of the boat. The line was running out very fast, the fish having gone under the floe. The boat’s jack [flag] was hoisted at her stern, while the ship’s jack flew triumphantly from the mizzen mast-head. The other six boats lay on their oars at different points along the floe edge, awaiting the reappearance of the whale to strike her again.

She soon came up off the ship’s starboard quarter, and was fired into again. At six o’clock she was floating dead alongside the ship, and all hands set to work to flinch her (i.e., to remove the blubber in immense strips), cut out the whalebone, etc.

At nine o’clock another fish was seen and pursued. Suddenly the captain sang out, “A fall! a fall!” and again ensued the same scene of excitement and confusion. Byers was fast to a fish very near the spot where we secured the first one. But something went wrong. Suddenly his boat was dragged nearly under the water, the boat’s crew leaped out on to the ice, the line flew up, the jack was lowered. Alas! the whale was free. The line had got entangled, and had it not broken we would have lost the boat and all its gear, and had it not been close to the floe, might have lost her crew as well. All the boats but two returned to the ship, and we resumed flinching with saddened hearts.

Again the cry was raised, “A fall! a fall!” Strange to say, the same fish had risen again, and George Clarke had buried his harpoon in her side. By 11.30 a.m. she was dead, and brought alongside the ship at twelve o’clock, just as we had finished flinching the first one.

After dinner we set to work upon whale No. 2, and finished flinching her by six o’clock.

We consider we have got 20 tuns of oil from the two fish. The value of the two fish may be reckoned thus: 20 tuns of oil at £50 a tun is £1,000; 1½ tons of whalebone at £700 per ton makes £1,050. Total value of this day’s fishing, £2,050.

All hands turned in early, very greasy, wet, and weary. Our decks and everything about the ship were slippery with oil and grease. An immense number of mallies [fulmars] surrounded the ship, feeding greedily upon the oil and scraps of blubber, fighting and chattering and making a prodigious uproar.

534 words.

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• Arctic Ocean (9) ·
• Baffin Bay (2) ·
• Baleen (1) ·
• Blubber (2) ·
• Canada (1) ·
• Diana (1840 ship) (8) ·
• Flensing (1) ·
• Fulmar (1) ·
• Germany (25) ·
• Greenland (6) ·
• Hamburg (3) ·
• 📌Kingston upon Hull (65) ·
• Lancaster Sound (1) ·
• Luck (1) ·
• Netherlands (9) ·
• North Atlantic right whale (1) ·
• Nunavut (1) ·
• Whale oil (2) ·
• Whaling in the United Kingdom (11) ·
• Whaling (9) ·

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Similar

• 24 June 1866: Captain Gravill of the Diana of Hull celebrates his crew’s failure to catch a whale on the Sabbath
• 7 August 1611: Jonas Poole’s London whaler sinks in Forlandsundet (Spitsbergen), but Thomas Marmaduke is initially reluctant to take the survivors on board the Hopewell of Hull
• 19 February 1866: The Diana, Hull’s first steam-assisted whaler and its last of any nature, leaves on its fateful voyage to the Arctic
• 30 March 1866: On Good Friday, lost northwest of Jan Mayen in the Arctic Ocean and battered by old sea ice in a terrible gale, the crew of the whaler Diana of Hull stoically awaits death
• 26 April 1867: In a requiem to Hull’s whaling industry, the Diana bears the corpse of Captain Gravill into port at the end of its fateful Arctic voyage
• 5 June 1866: Crew members of the whaler Diana (Hull) climb an Arctic hillside and leave a memento of home
• 25 December 1866: Starving amidst Arctic ice, and with Captain Gravill on his deathbed, the crew of the Diana of Hull celebrate a “horrible mockery of the spirit of an English Christmas”
• 10 January 1867: Short of fresh provisions amid Arctic ice, the surgeon of the Diana of Hull decides to blame (Yorkshire) tea for symptoms of scurvy among the crew
• 30 July 1661: John Ray encounters the effigy of a tragic Inuit in his canoe at Hull Trinity House
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