Chapter 4
Then the people together in crowds did run,
Resolved to capture the whale and to have some fun!
So small boats were launched on the silvery Tay,
While the monster of the deep did sport and play.
Oh it was a most fearful and beautiful sight,
To see it lashing the water with its tail all its might,
And making the water ascend like a shower of hail,
With one lash of its ugly and mighty tail.
Then the water did descend on the men in the boats,
Which wet their trousers and also their coats;
But it only made them more determined to catch the whale,
But the whale shook at them its tail.
William McGonagall
‘The Famous Tay Whale’
The whale gave another practical proof of his sagacity today by keeping well out of reach of his pursuers. He was seen in the early morning disporting in the river off Newport for a short time, and no sooner was his presence made known in Dundee than a whaleboat was launched and started off in pursuit. Another whaleboat manned by volunteers eager for sport, with fire-arms, and determined to try the effects of powder and ball upon his carcase, followed suit. It is said that a steam-launch also joined in the chase, when the ‘finner’, evidently thinking discretion was the better part of valour, set his nose eastward, and made for the mouth of the river. Since then up till the afternoon, I can find no one who has seen him. But it naturally occurs to ordinary people to ask the question, Is this whale to be allowed to come up the river day after day in front of the good town of Dundee, and, before the crews and captains of a dozen whalers, flaunt its tail and, figuratively speaking, put its flipper to its nose at them without a determined effort on their part to throw salt on its tail and lay it up on the beach, so that the general public may have a look at him?
I don’t believe it is true, as some people say, that our whaling captains don’t care to tackle a ‘finner’. Wild stories are being told of their dragging whaleboats made fast to them for perhaps fifty miles from the place where they were harpooned, and they are even declared to round on their tormentors and knock a boat to pieces by a flip of their tail. There is no doubt at any rate that the chief difficulty the whalers have to contend with is to get within striking distance of the whale in the river. No harpooner will risk a shot at a greater distance than twenty-five yards and they prefer to be within half that range before they shoot. It will be by an exceptional stroke of luck if our marine winter visitor allows them to come to such close quarters as that, and there can be little doubt that a bad quarter of an hour will follow for those who make themselves fast to such a sturdy, lively and erratic animal.
Dundee Advertiser, December 1883
‘The Eye-Witness to the Chase’
Except for our killing of each other, what other mammal have we killed with greater savagery?
Roger Payne
Among Whales
If only the whale had stayed away when it disappeared after those first two weeks, retraced its journey back up the North Sea and into the Pentland Firth where it would have felt the contrary currents of the Atlantic between Caithness and Orkney and the great oceanic liberation beyond, resumed the ancient routine of its tribal migrations to and from the breeding grounds, 5,000 miles there, 5,000 miles back . . . if only:
It might have lived another 150 years, perhaps longer.
It might have swum another million miles, perhaps further.
It might have increased its overall length by another 10–15 feet to something over 50 feet.
It might have increased its weight by another 8 or 9 tons to around 35 tons.
It might have sired a new dynasty of humpback whales.
McGonagall would have been short of a poem, Dundee’s museum would have been short of its star exhibit, and even in Dundee most of us could have lived with that. My old home town would also have spared me my uneasy inheritance, and I could certainly have lived without that. But the whale returned for reasons best known to itself, and what followed was an inglorious moment in the city’s story, one quite unmitigated by the passage of time.
It seems from this distance that the whalers were reluctant to launch a hunt. The whale swam unmolested in their home waters for two weeks. Perhaps it was simply that they were enjoying not being at sea, a few weeks of well-earned rest from the colossal labours of their trade. It may have been that they were not in their working habitat of the North Atlantic. Perhaps the ship owners saw little merit in rounding up crews in holiday mood to pursue a single whale in front of a crowd of thousands, a circumstance that turned their notoriously dangerous deep-sea trade into a game in the comparative shallows of the firth. And it may be that they judged the humpback not worth the effort commercially, for its layer of fat is thin and yields little of the precious oil, and it was known among whalers that the carcase of a dead humpback usually sinks. (By comparison, the Greenland right whale’s fat layer is thick and therefore valuable, and it floats in death – hence ‘right’ whale, the right one to catch.) That fact alone – the humpback’s poor commercial value to the Dundee whalers – condemned the hunt. There was almost nothing to be gained by it. Even by the ethical standards of the time, there was no reason for that whale to die, no reason to launch the boats other than an opportunity to put on a show. By the time the whalers overcame their reluctance to do just that and finally launched their boats, the whale had become the doomed objective of a blood sport with a watching crowd in an arena the size of the firth. It was as blatant as a bullfight.
Alas, the whalers were off form, their skills blunted by the lay-off perhaps, or hampered by the makeshift and half-hearted nature of the endeavour. Day after day then, their boats put out from Dundee, and some days they got close to the whale and some days they did not, and some days they could not find it at all. And even when they did get close their aim was indifferent, and the suspicion arose and gained currency amid the taunts of the shoreline masses that the whale was having a laugh. The whalers’ discomfort was not helped by dozens of amateurs who took to their own boats and fired all manner of missiles in the general direction of the whale from improbable distances. That anonymous pamphleteer assessed the mood in those last few days of 1883 thus:
Day after day the whale boats rowed over the firth and fired guns and harpoons and blessings and other things at the fish, which, when the tide turned, blandly turned with it, and left the wearied hunters to enjoy their well-earned rest and the blisters which the healthy exercise raised on their hands. Six weeks of this sort of thing disgusted the crews, but appeared to have an elevating effect on the whale, for it frequently treated the spectators on the shore to an exhibition of antics which, while amusing the onlookers, did not accord well with the calm dignity which ought to distinguish an animal weighing twenty-six tons. The immunity from danger which the fish had enjoyed had the effect of blunting its wariness, and its familiarity with the previous bad marksmanship of the Dundee whalers led to its ruin.
The whale ran out of luck on Hogmanay.
The day dawned grey and still. Thick cloud had hauled down in the night across the summits of the low hills of Angus and Fife on either side of the Tay estuary. The promise of worse weather to come hung bleakly on the air. In those conditions, the blowing hiss of a humpback whale and the thin cloud of fine white spray it sends up to 20 feet in the air would have advertised its presence for miles around. Some of the Dundee whalers, now eager for the denouement, were on the river early, searching for the whale. The conditions while they lasted were as good as they could reasonably expect in the short daylight of their northern midwinter. A whaleboat from the whaler Chieftain was out first, though its effectiveness might have been compromised by at least one member of the listed crew: ‘Captain Gellatly; Tennant, his mate; Seamen James Watson, James Allan, Thomas Hutton; and a commercial traveller, Pat Reid from Broughty Ferry’. The whaleboats were open, 28 feet long, and had a crew of six – four rowers, a helmsman and a harpoonist. The Chieftain’s boat was soon joined by a whaleboat from the Thetis and a steam launch from the Polar Star.
Captain Gellatly anchored to the Newcombe buoy. His crew watched the placid water. Then the whale breached and then she blew. And then – another characteristic of humpbacks – it settled down and lay dead still on the surface. And in the minds of the whalers, it said: ‘Come and get me.’ The Thetis whaleboat and the steam launch edged stealthily downstream, closing in on the whale at little more than the speed of the river.
In the bow of the launch, harpoonist James Lyons felt the old familiar dryness in his throat, the old familiar sweating dampness on his palms. But there was a bad and unfamiliar taste in his mouth. He was uneasy about this. The small dorsal fin and a broad black curve of whale back broke the surface slowly, like breathing, and suddenly the situation was grotesque, and somehow absurd with the low Fife shore of the Tay for a backdrop. The sense of an unearthly dream flickered in his mind, the voice of the helmsman and the muted rumble of the engine no more than accessories of the dream. He moved his hands automatically into position on the harpoon gun and the coldness of it snapped him out of the dream, but did not change his mood.
Fifty yards.
He’d fired from further than that on a berserk deck in the Arctic Ocean in a grey and green landscape of iceberg and waves taller than his boat was long, and found his mark, confident of his skill, reading the sea, perfecting his timing over 20 seasons. But this . . . the whale lying as leisurely as the Tay lightship at anchor in slack water, unperturbed by the boats’ creeping advance, and the eeriness of having all the landmarks of home at every compass point . . .
She can’t even dive.
She has eight fathoms of water beneath her if that, and she must be seven fathoms long herself . . . [the whales were all ‘she’ to the crews, a mark of respect otherwise reserved for the ships themselves] . . . she has barely enough water to float her.
One clean hit, lady, and it’s over. Then die quickly.
Know that I don’t like this.
Know that I would rather you sped for the sea now and we meet again in the summer some day in Greenland’s waters, and we match each other fairly, strength for strength, you in your element and I in mine.
[The helmsman’s voice again, distant and indistinct] What’s he saying? Who cares? I’m sorry for this, lady. But it’s out of my hands.
God, let her die quickly.
Thirty yards.
The whale arches its back, a gentle flex, and the fin rises a foot more out of the water, which signals a shallow dive. He fires as far ahead of the arch as he dares and knows he has hit its shoulder and hurt it, and he waits for it to react, and he shouts:
She feels it!
He shouts without looking back over his shoulder, watching the whale, waiting for it to react, willing it to convulse and die. Instead, it begins without fuss to tow the launch forward. He sees the small bow wave ripple out beneath him and groans and mutters a black oath into his beard. He turns to speak to the helmsman and sees that instead of hoisting the flag that would signal a hit, he had hoisted a coalsack.
The bastard didn’t even bring a flag!
He spits.
He hears the crowds cheer on the shore. He looks over his other shoulder to Dundee a mile away.
They saw the sack! They laughed at it! Why wouldn’t they laugh at it?
Aye, but they cheer and throw their caps in the air now that they know she’s hit, now they know she feels it, and they clap and hug each other and dance up and down.
He spits again. He sees the boats pouring out from the shore, all of them crammed with spectators eager for a closer view. He mutters a line of Burns:
Out the hellish legion sallied . . .
She’s rising to blow. This time the spray from her will be red. They’ll see that, the bloodthirsty bastards. She feels it. The line’s holding. At least I’ve done my job. Do your worst lady. It’s in your hands now. And God’s. God let her die quickly.
God did not let the whale die quickly. The launch had run out only seven or eight fathoms of line so she steamed squarely in the reddening wake of the whale. Now that the whale was easy meat, the Chieftain whaleboat re-entered the fray, manoeuvring between the launch and the whale to fire point-blank a second harpoon. Meanwhile the Thetis whaleboat had attached a line to the launch and now the whale towed all three boats. And with the explosion of the second harpoon inside her, ‘the whale shook at them its tail’ as McGonagall put it. That tail, remember, was 17 feet 4 inches wide, rather wider than the whaleboat that had just attached itself to her innards. As the whale brought the physical resources of its 26 tons to bear on the effort of raising then smashing down its tail into the sea, it raised a splash that drenched the boat and its crew from harpoonist to helmsman, drenched them not with what McGonagall called ‘a shower of hail’ but with a cascade of its own blood. In the bow of the launch, James Lyons bit into his own tongue in his anger, and when he spat again the blood of his own mouth mingled in the sea with the blood of the whale. On the shore and in the flotilla of spectators’ boats, the crowds realised that one of the whaleboats was now being towed ahead of the steam launch, and that she must be fast to the whale and they cheered again. Their cries and applause rolled across the still, grey waters of the Tay to where the seamen laboured in a troublesome oasis of reddening turbulence.
For the whale had suddenly changed tactics. It was galvanised by the new pain and the huge deadweight of the three boats. It charged in a series of zig-zags, then in a tight U-turn that took it upstream again, but almost at once it seemed to realise the error of that ploy and turned again for the open sea, and of course the three boats followed its every move, for while the whale’s strength and the harpoon lines held they were as helpless as leaves in a November gale.
And then the whaleboat harpoon drew, and it was suddenly denied the power of the whale’s engine room. Its four oarsmen could make no headway at all against the strongly flowing tide. They fell further and further back from the heat of battle as the whale dragged it eastwards. Captain Gellatly had no choice but to order a return to port, the Chieftain reduced to the rank of the Crestfallen, its crewmen under no illusions about the kind of reception the crowds would afford them back in Dundee. But Pat Reid, commercial traveller of Broughty Ferry, would have a rare story to tell on his rounds among his landlubber clients about the one that got away.
Now the Thetis whaleboat, which was still being towed by the launch, pulled ahead to put another harpoon into the whale. The first effort failed, but a second held. Yet still the whale swam on, out through the widening jaws of the firth, heading for the open sea, constantly twisting and changing direction as it tried to shed its burden. For the whale, life had been reduced to a single overwhelming simplicity. The agonies it now endured were matched only by its brute strength, and while that strength lasted it fuelled the urge to survive, to shake off the lines that held it to the boats, to swim free of its burden, to dive deep, to let time pass, and then to heal.