Chapter 3
So the monster whale did sport and play
Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay,
Until he was seen by some men one day
And they resolved to catch him without delay.
William McGonagall
‘The Famous Tay Whale’, 1884
The fields of Angus and Fife that late autumn and early winter of 1883 smelled insufferably of dead fish. The North Sea seethed with shoals of young herring. East-coast fishing boats hauled them out by the ton. When their markets had bought all they could buy and the people had eaten all they could eat, and still the herrings came and came, thick as waves on a flowing tide, they sold them to the local farmers, who spread them on their fields as manure. The sheer volume of fish doubtless explained why so many wandered into the wide estuaries of the Tay and the Forth rather than pursuing a southward migration down the North Sea. And in their wake they lured a flotilla of predators, notably small whales and porpoises, and these in turn brought shoals of people to the outlying shores of the firths to watch the spectacle. It went on for weeks. But then, some time in the second half of November, there among the predators was one of the great whales, a humpback, and from the moment fate aligned it with the Firth of Tay it was destined for a short life, a long and brutal death, and 125 years of undying fame.
The herring shoals were why it lingered, and the shallower waters of the estuary would make them easier to catch than the depths of the open sea, and that would explain why it travelled as far upstream as Dundee, but why it was in the North Sea at all is a mystery, one of those inexplicable occurrences that constantly punctuate – and help to underpin – our fascination with whales. Humpbacks prefer the oceanic breadths of the Atlantic and the Pacific for their more or less endless migrations up and down and across the globe to and from their breeding grounds, and by the autumn of 1883, no humpback had been seen in the Tay estuary for more than 60 years.
Roger Payne, a whale biologist with an admirable and untypical sense of wonder towards his life’s work, wrote in his enlightened and enlightening book, Among Whales:
One reason whales maintain such a hold on our imaginations seems to be their omnipossibility – their unexpected and unpredictable appearances off all coasts, invariably arriving on their own schedules, showing up for reasons we do not understand.
Though we distinguish between the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, etc., there is really only one ocean, and it holds all the whales that exist . . . Whales can pass along your coast, or come into any harbour or bay that is deep enough to float them, no matter where you live . . . and sometimes they do. When it happens, it always sends a message that speaks directly – one capable of setting up waves that propagate right into the core of your very being.
Ah, but that’s now, now that we have invented Greenpeace and embraced the concept of conservation, and learned to admire whales and let them into our hearts. In November 1883, the humpback whale that bore hard to starboard into the Tay estuary set up waves that propagated right into the core of the whaling industry. Whaling had begun to decline throughout Britain, and the days when every part of the whale found a market were gone: oil from blubber had been used for margarine and soap and lighting, more oil was extracted from flesh and bones, liver oil had medicinal uses, and what was left was processed for cattle feed. The baleen plates, the long strainers in the jaws of the so-called baleen whales (as opposed to toothed whales), were what you might call the mainstay of the corset industry. Whalebone was used to make piano keys, among many other things. World traveller and nature writer Peter Matthiessen voiced the distaste of millions: ‘Nothing is wasted but the whale itself.’
But in Dundee in 1883 whaling was still booming, because the city had its own colossal market. Dundee was the global epicentre of the jute industry then, and that industry needed a particular lubricant that softened the jute fibres and made them supple before they were spun – whale oil, and it was worth more than £50 a ton to the whalers. So the city had its own whaling fleet, the biggest in Britain by then, the ship owners were Dundee merchants, the captains and the crews were almost all Dundee seamen. Their reputation travelled the whaling world – they were the best in the business. What sealed the fate of the Famous Tay Whale was that when it arrived off Dundee, the city’s whaling fleet was laid up for the winter. Dundee was host to 700 whalers with nothing to do. An anonymous 1884 pamphlet, titled ‘The History of the Whale’, put it thus: ‘The Tay was scarcely the place for whales to select as a playground.’
That perception, that the humpback was ‘playing’ under the noses of its sworn enemy, set it apart from other whales in Dundee’s story, and gave an edge to all that followed. It was an instant celebrity with the crowds that gathered on beaches and other shoreline vantage points, and a slowly smouldering source of resentment and then frustration to the idle seamen. The city was familiar enough with whales, or at least with dead and butchered ones being unloaded on the dockside, and many a Dundee family watched the breadwinner disappear over the horizon every spring, bound for the Arctic whaling grounds. And like every whaling community the world over, those same families weighed the grim balance sheet that set financial profit against human loss of life. The blackest hour had come in 1836: that whaling season over 70 men were lost from two ships and 100 Dundee children lost their fathers. But the loss of whale life troubled no-one.
Then suddenly, here was what it was all about, a monster of the northern deep (and the word ‘monster’ is everywhere in contemporary written accounts) coughed up on their own doorstep by that same sea that routinely claimed the lives of their loved ones. Among the cheers and the jeers, and the relentless taunts to those hauled-out seamen they knew and loved, there were also silent, head-shaking moments of bewilderment and wonder. Why here, of all places? And oh, the raw and fearless beauty of the beast! But then the whalers knew such moments themselves, even in the killing fields of the northern ocean, even as they closed on a whale and readied the harpoons, they could find themselves moved by the sheer presence of their quarry, by those ‘waves that propagated right into the heart of their very being’. Not that it ever stopped them launching the harpoon.
And the humpback is perhaps the most spectacular of all whales. Its habit of breaching (leaping almost vertically from the water, turning onto its back or side in the air, waving its long pectoral fins like handless arms as though in greeting, then the colossal splashdown), allied to the almost unbearable grace of the hugely flourished tail as it submerges, has made the humpback the modern whale-watcher’s favourite whale. And lest you don’t have the dimensions of a humpback whale at your fingertips, this is – precisely (there would be a great deal of measuring of this particular whale in the weeks ahead) – what turned up in the Tay: length, 40 feet (so not fully grown); maximum girth, 24 feet; minimum girth next to the tail, 4 feet 9 inches; distance from point of snout to eye, 8 feet 10 inches; from eye to eye across the top of the head, 7 feet 9 inches; eyeball diameter, 4 inches; distance from centre of eye to ear, 1 foot 8 inches; distance from snout to blowholes, 6 feet 7 inches (there were two blowholes, each 12 inches long, ‘arranged in the form of a spearhead’); jaw at widest point, 10 feet 2 inches; length of lower jaw, 11 feet 6 inches; length of pectoral fin, 12 feet; greatest breadth of pectoral fin, 2 feet 8 inches; distance from snout to dorsal fin, 25 feet 7 inches; dorsal fin, 18 inches long, 8 inches high; width of tail, 17 feet 4 inches; weight, 26 tons 8 cwts. And let’s not corrupt any of that by metricating its splendidly imperial bulk.
At first, the mood was one of carnival, albeit one happed in coats and scarves and bunnets and gloves. Each day the whale turned up, put on a show of breaching, blowing (and at each breaching and blowing the crowds roared and ooh-ed and aah-ed their delight), and then the lingering gesture of the huge poised tail before the whale submerged would silence them, and they would feel something else they could not name.
Then the long pause – where did it go?
How can something that size disappear?
Then it would burst up through the surface of the river again like a clown bursting through a paper hoop, but a clown the size of a house and a hoop more than a mile wide, and the cheers could be heard from Broughty Ferry on the Dundee side of the river to Tayport on the Fife side, where there was another smaller crowd, and more cheers. If you had heard but not seen from an inland part of the city, you might have thought you were listening to the crowd at a great football match.
And it was sport for them all, it was different, spectacular, astonishing and free. And then the tide would turn and the whale would turn with it and retreat to its mysterious deep-sea sanctuary, and that only intensified its allure in the minds of the crowds that waved it out beyond Broughty Ferry’s wave-butting castle, then thrust their hands deep into their coat pockets and turned for home, and the talk at the kitchen tables and coal fires of Dundee was full of the whale.
Where had it come from?
How big was it?
How much did it weigh?
And how long would it live with the whaler lads in town, muttering darkly into their whisky glasses?
Their best guesses in answer to that particular question were measured in hours and days, certainly not weeks and months, but while they knew, most of them, about how whales were killed and what happened to them after that (for it had been a part of their city’s story for 130 years by then), they knew little enough about how a whale lived, what resources it could call on. And two weeks later it was still there, still turning up for its feed, still putting on a show, and the crowds goaded the whalers to take a hand in the whale’s game, to do something about it if they dared. And then it disappeared as if it had never been, and after a week of dwindling, hopeful crowds, then no crowds at all, it was suddenly the stuff of memory and they set about polishing its legend, and the whaler lads were left to kick their heels, and to console each other that maybe they should have launched a boat or two and they might have written their own legend. But for ten days, the Firth of Tay was a blank page. And then it came back.
The crowds redoubled. Everyone had a theory about where it had gone. Some said Arbroath, some said Holland, some said it had gone to cheer up the keepers at the Bell Rock lighthouse that stands 20 miles out to sea from Dundee on its rock plinth and appears on the clearest days as a horizon smudge, and on the clearest nights as the lowest star in the sky, a star that blinks to a known rhythmic pattern. Did the whale know it for what it was, or just as the lowest star in the sky?
‘As a consequence of their great size, whales escape much turmoil,’ wrote Roger Payne. ‘With increasing size comes increasing serenity. With size comes tranquillity. For a whale, a passing thunderstorm is but the footfall of an ant, and a full gale an annoying jiggling of his pleasant bed. If you were a whale, all but the grandest of things would pass beneath your notice.’
The Famous Tay Whale could not know, of course, that it was playing with that grandest of things, fire.