Chapter 7
And was first seen by the crew of a Gourdon fishing boat,
Which they thought was a big coble upturned afloat;
But when they drew near they saw it was a whale,
So they resolved to tow it ashore without fail.
So they got a rope from each boat tied round his tail,
And landed their burden at Stonehaven without fail;
And when the people saw it their voices they did raise,
Declaring that the brave fishermen deserved great praise.
And my opinion is that God sent the whale in time of need,
No matter what other people may think or what is their creed;
I know fishermen in general are often very poor,
And God in His goodness sent it to drive poverty from their door.
William McGonagall
‘The Famous Tay Whale’
The whale vanished for a week. During the night after it escaped from the boats, it died on the bottom of the North Sea. When it was next seen on the morning of 7 January 1884, it was floating upside-down on the surface and its bloated white belly was being ripped open by hordes of gulls. Before it died it had bled for the better part of two days; no, the worse part. As it weakened, as whale-life became a one-way tide on its final ebb, the muscles around its ribs that facilitated breathing became enfeebled. Air valves collapsed. The sea poured in and flooded its lungs. It suffocated. It rolled over and over, a supreme swimmer of the world’s oceans, both nimble sprinter and long-haul ocean-to-ocean pilgrim, rendered helpless and limp in the utter blackness of the deep; and ultimately, slowly, wearily beyond anything it had ever known, dead. And God had nothing to do with it.
There were no witnesses to the death of the Tay Whale. There is nothing to be seen at such a depth. In exceptional circumstances, none of them in the North Sea but rather in the lyrical tropical waters of the world’s most seductive travel brochures, visibility near the surface is around 100 feet. The longest underwater distance ever recorded by human sight is about 1,000 feet but that was in the utterly still sea-water under shore-fast Antarctic ice. One hundred feet down in the North Sea even on a sunny summer’s day at high noon, a whale would be unable to see its own tail. Indeed, for much of its underwater life, a whale inhabits a realm too murky to see its own tail. At the bottom of the North Sea, and for that matter, anywhere below a depth of about 50 feet on a grey January morning, the Tay Whale saw nothing at all, but rather used its voice and the underwater landscape to navigate by sonar. Such a whale sings its way round the world. By the time it was seen again it had sung its last, and in seven days it had barely travelled 20 miles north of what it had come to know as the lowest star in its sky.
Currents and tides had drifted it along the sea bottom, but as it bloated with water it began inexorably to lift. The sea, having reclaimed it and nurtured its last hours, then deposited it upside-down on the surface where the sun shone on its upturned white belly, an invitation for every seabird within 50 square miles to home in on a magnificent feast. So it was that when the crew of a fishing boat from the tiny Kincardineshire village of Gourdon first sighted a horde of gulls hovering and diving down on what appeared to be the overturned hull of a boat, they gave the thing a long, hard look. The boat was ten miles south-east of Gourdon, and the birds a further five miles out. The crew buoyed their lines and made what speed they could with sail and oars. They found not a wreck but the wreckage of the whale, deduced that this was the Tay Whale, or the Dundee Whale as that coast had come to know it as its fame spread. Whatever they called it, they recognised a windfall when they saw one, and decided to try and cash in. Their share in a dead whale, if they could land it, would amount to rather more than a day’s herring fishing. From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, you might think the indignity that the whale had already suffered was quite enough. You might think some spasm of conscience would afflict the collective seafaring mind of that coast. After all, it had died hideously, and now, if it was left to nature to dispose of one of its own, it was about to be shredded by the creatures of the sea. But McGonagall’s God had other ideas. The crew put about and headed back to port, where one of their number was despatched with all haste to Montrose to secure the services of a tug. Why they chose to make for Gourdon rather than directly for Montrose is not explained, for the distance was almost identical, but it proved to be both a costly and an embarrassing mistake. In everything that followed, the name of that particular boat is the only one that has not survived, as though some benevolent conspiracy of silence had been agreed to mask the crew’s distress. The whale, meanwhile, was about to embark on its long, long afterlife.
The crewman who had been despatched to cover the ten landward miles to Montrose with what haste he could muster (presumably a fast horse, or at least the fastest one that was at the disposal of a small-time fisherman), would have done well to swear his fellow crewmen to silence for the duration of his mission. As it was, they succumbed to the temptation to brag about their good fortune, and how they planned to cash in on it. They blabbed. And before you could say Moby Dick, three more Gourdon fishing boats, the Esquimaux, the Esk and the Guiding Star, were mobilised, fully crewed and making line-astern for the whale’s last known position, while the crew of the unsung boat that found it in the first place were a man short and waiting for a tug from Montrose.
By noon the three fishing boats had the carcase surrounded, and their skippers were stroking their chins. Less than half the whale was visible above the water, and they must have wondered briefly at least whether signing up to the services of the Montrose tug might have been a better option. The two problems: how to get a line, or rather three lines, round the whale to make it fast to the three boats; and having secured its brute mass, how to get it home. The difficulty with the first problem was that it couldn’t be solved without putting men onto the whale, which was not without obvious risks. The difficulty with the second was co-ordinating the progress of three fishing boats powered by sail and oars, given that communication among the ships would be by shouting and that most of the journey with the whale in tow would be undertaken in darkness. At least the Gourdon boats had lights.
So each boat put a man on the whale, and each got a line round the tail, then reinforced the connection with a long chain from one of the boats, which was kept slack in case any of the lines broke. Enter the Storm King, the Montrose steam tug, ever so slightly late, complete with the crewman from the Gourdon boat that had found the whale. You can imagine how he was feeling at the sight that greeted his eyes as the tug closed in on the whale. The skipper of the tug offered his assistance, more in hope than in expectation, but the Gourdon boats were in a position of strength and politely declined. As the anonymous pamphleteer put it (with a hefty dose of the sardonic that characterised almost every single report of the event, whatever the journal): ‘the captors, with a view to the conservation of possible profits, determined to make an effort to land their fish unassisted, arranging with the captain of the Storm King that, if through stress of weather they had to part with their prize, they would telegraph him from whatever port they might land at as to where they had had “to let go their painter”.’
So with the Esquimaux leading and towing dead ahead of the whale, and the Esk and the Guiding Star either side and slightly ahead of the whale (and with a rope between them which was also passed over the whale), the unwieldy convoy set off for distant Gourdon, assisted by a wind from the west-south-west. Even with four or five oars on each boat, the labour was colossal. If the wind had held, they might have made Gourdon by midnight, had a dram or two to celebrate their adventure and slept gloriously in their own beds. But remember McGonagall’s God was orchestrating the deal, and had mischief on his mind. The wind backed into the north. The fishermen conferred and changed course for Montrose, although doubtless they were less than confident of the reception they would receive there, given that they had snubbed the skipper of the Storm King. Whether that was what was preying on their minds, or whether the wind changed again, they were still seven or eight miles out from Montrose when they decided that their best bet (which presumably meant the best ‘conservation of possible profits’) was to run for Stonehaven instead.
They no more ‘ran’ for Stonehaven than the Tay Whale ‘sped on to Stonehaven with all his might’ in McGonagall’s phrase. Their progress was more akin to crawling on all fours than running. One of the oarsmen summed up the journey in the cold light of day: ‘It was an awfu’ job.’
They were still rowing at daybreak, which would be about 8 a.m., and 20 hours after they had secured the whale, and they must have covered 30 miles with the whale in tow, but they were hugely encouraged by the sight of Stonehaven’s near neighbour Dunnottar Castle on its clifftop, which meant they were almost high and dry and with their prize intact. The tide was high, and the boats landed the whale without difficulty, and in keeping with what had already become a tradition whenever the Tay Whale was centre stage, the town had come out to stand and stare. The town bellman had been despatched to spread the word, and the crowd grew as the tide ebbed, and the full impact of what it was the Gourdon boats had landed was slowly revealed. It also changed shape, from its bloated condition to something more whale-shaped as the sea-water began to pour out of it. And, as it had been landed upside-down, there was the further transformation and a great ‘Ooooooohhhhh!’ from the crowd once the whale had been righted and they saw the one remaining harpoon still embedded there with a few feet of frayed line.
There was something about that potent image – the massive death of the ocean-dweller, the flimsy symbol of the land-dweller that pursues the whale to the ends of the earth. A philosopher among the crowd might have paused to weigh the immensity of that ancient conflict of species, the pacifist whale against the warrior whaler, and wonder if it was all worth it. To land this whale, a youngster, little more than a child-whale, on the Stonehaven shingle had taken eight days, the whale had towed first four boats then three for 50 miles, and having escaped and vanished and died and resurfaced a week later, the whale itself had been hauled in death for 30 miles. In Dundee, the hunt for the living whale had involved a steam launch, two open whalers, the harbour tug and a supply boat that never supplied anything, and upwards of twenty crewmen. In Gourdon, the attempt to secure the dead whale had involved four different fishing boats and the Montrose tug, upwards of twenty more crewmen, so almost fifty in total. The end result was this huge ugliness on the shore at Stonehaven, and a deal with an entrepreneur whose identity is lost now which netted the crews of the Esquimaux, the Esk and the Guiding Star £10 a head. In 1884, it would have taken them weeks to put £10 in their pockets. McGonagall was right in their eyes, a God-given pay day, but it is a strange species of God that permits such a wondrous creation as a humpback whale to die in such a fashion so that the creature He made in His own image can enjoy the mother and father of all hangovers. You can be sure Gourdon was drunk for a week.
Gourdon, January 2008, 125 years after the event, was shivering. A wind blew in from Norway and it smelled of snow, but an east coast sun flayed the waves and bounced viciously off the water into the eyes of the village. The places crouches in level tiers along its low hillside, crouches round its double harbour. The burial ground is on its highest edge. Land down by the harbour is much too valuable to squander on the dead. Even the last journey of the villagers is an uphill struggle: funerals climb Brae Road. No one wasted much time or imagination on choosing a name for Gourdon’s main thoroughfare. After the graveyard, the school, then the steepening downhill and the inevitable hairpin at the foot, the unfailing pattern of east-coast fishing villages from Caithness to the Border; there was always a cliff to negotiate. I parked by the harbour, feeling very conspicuous. I watched out for blown tumbleweed.
The village looked empty. The feeling was quite different from a village where the net curtains twitch and you know you are being watched. Here, it felt like there was no one behind the curtains to twitch them. The air smelled agreeably of salt air and fish.
A man in a long coat and a warm hat passed by on the other side of the road without looking my way. I walked out along one side of the harbour making a mental note of boat names, a game I have played since childhood, though I have never owned a boat. I just like to read boat names. I liked Vivid and Sine Bhan (an odd Gaelic note in such an un-Gaelic part of Scotland; it means Fair Sheena (or Jean), and it is also the title of the kind of pipe tune that in the hands of the right kind of piper melts the coldest heart and makes strong men weep). The Harvester was in from Aberdeen. The Ellen-something or other (I forget, I was making mental notes, it was too cold for writing anything down) lay across the harbour and looked like the most serious trawler in port. I walked round to have a look her, ran the eye of a maritime incompetent over her, liked the cut of her jib (not that she had a jib, but if she had, I would have liked its cut). All the way round, the quayside was paved with broken bits of lobster that crunched beneath my feet, and every yard of harbour wall had its gull, waiting, waiting, making belligerent eye contact, each opened throat crying: ‘Gimme!’
I turned back after my inspection of the Ellen-something-or-other, to find the man in the long coat and the warm hat bearing down. I suspected that he was looking for conversation and that he thought he had found a soft target.
‘It’s a bonnie morning,’ I offered.
‘Bitter, bitter wind,’ he said. It was bitter, bitter.
‘Aye, but you’ve got sunshine. It’s snowing all the way west of Brechin to the Atlantic.’ It was. I’d just driven that bit to get here. He seemed not to hear.
‘The fishing’s in a terrible state.’ It seems he had seen me inspecting the trawler. ‘No money in it. And the people won’t buy fresh fish. Too expensive.’
‘How many boats left in Gourdon?’
‘Fishing boats? Three or four. It’s the worst it’s ever been in my lifetime. I’ve never known it so bad.’
‘Is this your place?’
‘Oh yes. I go back 400 years here.’
So I told him he was the man I wanted to talk to. I was writing about the Tay Whale and wondered about the Gourdon lads who plucked its carcase from the sea.
‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, vaguely annoyed with himself that he had failed to answer a visitor’s question. He struck me as one who was accustomed to countering visitors’ questions with satisfactory answers.
‘Was that near here?’
‘About 15 miles out, south-east,’ I said. ‘They were Gourdon boats.’
He searched his memory, shook his head.
‘I didn’t know that. They boiled a whale in that building over there, early in the twentieth century. It was very controversial. And there was the stench of it, and that area was so crowded then.’
But he had provided illumination, unwitting illumination, but illumination for all that. He had made me aware in that instant of the Gourdon fishermen’s take on the Tay Whale. It was just another fish. It was just another bloody fish in . . . (‘The village was founded in 1350 . . .’) . . . thank you, in 750 years of catching fish.
‘You see the white tower up the hill?’
White tower? He pointed. Ah, the faded white tower, the height of a house, round and conically capped, hardly visible in the press of houses if you didn’t know where to look. It was not always thus.
‘And do you see the white patch on the wall with the red thing?’
It was the back wall of the harbour, a tall, whitewashed oblong with a red lifebelt housing halfway up. It looked nothing like the white tower, but it used to.
‘Navigation lights. That was where the lower one stood. They demolished it.’ I guessed he did not approve of ‘they’ who demolished it. ‘I don’t know if you are aware of this but there is a very treacherous reef out there.’ He gestured vaguely beyond the harbour wall. ‘You lined up the two towers, the one above the other, and that was your line in.’ And at night, of course, the towers would have been lit. But the lights have gone out in Gourdon.
I wasn’t sure what I would find in Gourdon in the midwinter of 2008, but the last thing I expected to feel was a pang of sympathy. The reason for the village’s very existence is pretty well extinct. Oh, there are still fish in the North Sea, but the advent of factory ships, EU quotas and the remoteness of the lawmakers inevitably legislates against the little guys. A fishing fleet of three or four boats is only going one way, and sooner or later it will sink without trace to become a footnote in a fisheries museum.
Its story is all too commonplace along the fishing coasts of the northern hemisphere: a small community is founded on a single idea – catching fish (and servicing the needs of the men who catch fish – building and repairing boats, building up the natural harbour that had turned the heads of the original villagers in the first place) and catching more fish. At Gourdon, it went well enough for the first 600 years or so, gloriously through the nineteenth-century herring boom, but it has dwindled down these last few decades to this last low ebb. It would be cold comfort to the man in the long coat and the warm hat to argue that it is a good idea that endures for 600 years, for his father had been a fisherman and I am compelled to imagine that the previous 300 years of his family’s tenure before his father were spent fishing too. He was the notable exception to his own rule, and had become a teacher, but that conspicuous exception apart, what else are you going to do in Gourdon that keeps you there for 400 years?
I got the impression, standing listening to him, that community life in Gourdon had gone the way of the Tay Whale, and was now floating belly up, still afloat, but more or less dead, with an unappetising future as a museum piece. The community, he said, had been inundated by ‘strangers’, which proved to be a euphemism for the English. They are your neighbours, he said, but you never see them. They leave early in the morning to work in Aberdeen and they come home late and lock the doors. They play no part in the community. In the days when three boats from Gourdon’s teeming fleet usurped their comrades’ find and ‘captured’ the dead whale, you worked where you lived, and you would no more lock your door than give up fishing and try planting barley on the beach.
And there were five pubs and ‘dram houses’. ‘Do you know what dram houses were?’ he asked. I nodded and smiled. He did not return my smile. ‘Oh, it was an awful drunken trade,’ he said, and I wondered, without daring to ask, if that was what had stopped him going to the fishing himself.
Incredibly, it seems now, the railway came here too, burrowing in under the cliffs in the late nineteenth century, until Dr Beeching swung his infamous axe in the late 1960s. The railways were a good idea too, but their heyday was a little shorter-lived than Gourdon’s. The big walls on the seaward side of the brae mark the uppermost extent of the railway company’s empire. It might only have been Gourdon, but they still felt it necessary to proclaim themselves in high stone walls.
It’s all gone. What has replaced it looks well enough to a casual by-passer’s eye, the sea-facing buildings are mostly well-wrought, traditionally styled and clad in east-coast harling, the allure of the harbour, a view that encompasses 50 square miles of sun-smitten sea, and a sky that reaches all the way to Norway in the north, to Holland in the east, at least to Dundee in the south, and that way (the cramped, landward side) . . . who cares? But it’s too clean, too orderly, for a working fishing village, and yes, it’s too empty.
We had walked back along the pier, and paused as our ways parted. I said I had enjoyed talking to the man in the long coat and the warm hat. He said thank you so much, and walked off without a backward glance. I drove back up out of the village and onto the main road, and stopped again at once in a lay-by high above the harbour.
You can see the whole village from there, see how it funnels towards the harbour, and beyond the harbour you can see the whole of the Tay Whale’s last living journey. That far hint of blue headland is north Fife, that skyline smudge is the Bell Rock lighthouse, and somewhere out there to the south-east, in the midst of that tract of sea, the unnamed Gourdon boat found the whale, determined to profit by it, and sent for a tug and had the whale stolen from under her nose by her own kind.
And surely they were all-but-blameless opportunists in the matter of the Tay Whale? (I imagine the great-grandfather of the man in the long coat and the warm hat standing on the carcase in the sea, cheerfully in his element as he wrestled with the rope and the whale’s tail.) They probably agreed with McGonagall – it was God’s gift. What they made of it – £10 a man – was an exceptional windfall for a day’s work. And whether each scattered it around the community’s needy as hard cash or in largesse distributed in the dram houses and inns, it would permeate Gourdon’s lifeblood one way or the other.
And it was just one more fish, wasn’t it?
And they were all-but-blameless, weren’t they?
And it was already dead and done-for, the dirty work of their big-city comrades down the coast, wasn’t it?
Yes, and yes, and yes.
And yet, and yet . . .
. . . By their actions, the Gourdon fishermen made it possible for the Tay Whale to be exploited for the next 125 years, a process that goes on unabated. As I write this, the McManus Galleries and Museum in Dundee is undergoing a major refurbishment. When it re-opens, the skeleton of the Tay Whale will be the centrepiece of a new whaling exhibit. For the moment, it is being stored in several pieces in various buildings in the city. If they have trouble reassembling the skeleton when the time comes, it won’t be the first time. You can be sure, too, that McGonagall’s poem will feature in the display and that will diminish in many people’s eyes the hideous nature of what befell the whale, first at the hands of the Dundee whalers, then at the hands of the Gourdon fishermen. You cannot blame them for McGonagall (no one can satisfactorily account for McGonagall’s status in his adopted city and far beyond for that matter), but they harnessed the whale to their boats and, by their own Herculean labours, landed it at Stonehaven, then they made a transaction that made an auction possible, that made a freak show possible, that made a public humiliation of the whale possible and eventually a museum exhibit for 125 years, and all that time, the same whale could have been swimming the world’s oceans, singing.
The Dundee whalers killed it. The Gourdon fishermen ensured, albeit unwittingly, that it would be disembowelled, stuffed, stitched up and paraded, that its tongue would fall out into the docks at Dundee, that its heart would fill a large barrel . . . and that a Dundee-born child would have his dreams tormented by the skeleton, and that the same child, having grown and become a journalist and then a nature writer who once eye-balled a humpback whale in Alaska and looked down into its blowhole from a few feet above and heard it sing, would take the death and subsequent diminution of the Tay Whale’s life very, very personally. And so I do.
I feel for what the Gourdons of my country have become, for the demise of local traditions and local character and community individuality. These are all regrettable wherever in the world they occur. And Gourdon sticks in my craw too. But Dundee is my place on the map, and if Dundee had not inflicted its pointless viciousness on the whale, and just let it come and go and delighted in its presence, Gourdon would never have been part of the story.
An ambassador of the tribe of whales (a tribe millions of years old, a tribe alongside whom the dinosaurs were a race of sticklebacks) paid a call in my home river. My home town responded with exploding harpoons. To them it was a whale all right, and they had a great awareness of the character and nobility and beauty of the animal as well as its commercial worth, but to the Gourdon crews, it was just one more bloody fish.
But back in the city of my birth, the progress-in-death of the Tay Whale was being stalked every inch of the way by the kind of maverick industrialist with a taste for show business that no fiction writer would dare to invent. The show was far from over. It was about to go on and on and on.