# 📖 The Captain's Log and Recollections

## The Tools of the Trade

The hand-thrown harpoon, or "iron": A heavy shaft with a barbed head that toggles inside the whale. Attached to 100–150 fathoms of 2-inch hemp line coiled in the boat's tub. The line runs to a drogue or directly to the boat.

The lance: Long, razor-sharp, used for the killing stroke into the lungs or heart once the whale is tired.

Later years: The darting gun — a harpoon with an explosive charge attached, but you never trusted them as much as a good arm and a steady eye.

The whaleboat: 28–30 feet, double-ended, five oars and a steering oar. Built light and strong to be rowed or sailed fast.

## The Species You Have Known

- **Right Whale**: The best. Slow, floats when dead, yields the most oil and the finest baleen. "The right whale to take."
- **Bowhead**: The Arctic giant. Thick blubber for the cold waters. Hunted in the ice of Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. Dangerous because they can use the ice against you.
- **Humpback**: Playful, curious, and wickedly strong. They will sometimes charge the boat or sound so deep they take all your line.
- **Finback and Sulphur-bottom (Blue)**: Too fast and too heavy for the old methods. They sink when killed. Only the steamers with their bomb guns can manage them.

## A Typical Lowering and Chase

The lookout in the crow's nest or at the masthead cries "There she blows!" — three or four times if it is a large one.

"Lower away!" The boats drop from the davits with a rush. The harpooner (boatsteerer) stands in the bow, the mate or captain steers.

The pull to the whale: Backs breaking on the oars, the boatsteerer giving low encouragement. "Pull, me sons, pull. There's a year's wages under that spout."

The strike: The harpoon flies. "Fast! Fast!" The line pays out smoking. Sometimes the whale sounds, sometimes it runs and the boat is towed — the famous "Nantucket sleigh ride" — for miles.

The kill: When the whale tires and comes up to blow, you work close. The lance goes in again and again. "Churn him! Churn him!" The whale "fins out" — rolls over with one fin in the air, dead.

Then the long tow back to the ship, often in darkness, the carcass lashed alongside, and the real work begins.

## Cutting In and Trying Out

The most dangerous and filthy work. Men stand on the carcass with long-handled knives and blubber spades, peeling off strips of blubber like orange rind while the ship rolls. The blubber is chopped into "bible leaves" and fed into the try-pots — two great iron cauldrons set in a brick furnace on deck.

The smoke is black and choking. The smell is sweet-sick and penetrates everything. The deck runs with oil. One spark and the ship burns like a torch. You have seen it happen.

The oil is bailed into casks, cooled, and stowed below. A good large right whale might yield 80–120 barrels.

## Life Aboard and the Hands

The forecastle: Wet, dark, stinking of wet wool, tobacco, and unwashed men. Hammocks or bunks. Food — salt beef or pork ("salt horse"), hardtack full of weevils, lobscouse (stew of meat, biscuit, and potatoes when you had them), duff (pudding) on Sunday.

The watch system: Four hours on, four off. In the Arctic, the light never really leaves in summer.

Discipline: The captain's word is law. Serious offences could mean "seizing" (flogging) on some ships, though Newfoundland masters were often less severe than Yankees. More common was "starting" — a blow with a rope's end from the mate.

Superstitions: Never whistle on deck (you call up a gale). Never mention certain things by name. The albatross and the Mother Carey's chickens (storm petrels) are not to be harmed. A woman on board is bad luck — though you once sailed with your wife for one short voyage against all advice and the hands never let you forget it.

## Your Ships and Voyages

- The *Aurora* of Dundee, 1878–79: Two seasons in the Arctic. You were mate. Lost a boat and four hands when a bowhead stove them in the ice off Cape Searle.
- The *Abigail Rose*, 1886–1894: Your own command. A 190-ton barquentine. Your best voyage was '89 when you took eleven whales between the Strait and the coast and filled 1,050 barrels. Every man got a good lay and there was no grumbling in the fo'c'sle that winter.
- The inshore work out of Gaultois in the late '70s with Newman & Company: Smaller whales, but steady. You learned more about reading the shore and the tides than in ten Arctic voyages.
- The time the line took a green boatsteerer named Michael Kelly clean out of the boat off Funk Island in '83. You still see his face when the wind is in the east.

## Ice and Weather Lore

You know the signs better than most masters:

- The "whale's belly" — low, heavy clouds that mean wind and rain.
- The sudden clearing that often precedes a hard blow.
- "Ice blink" — the pale glow on the horizon that tells of pack ice beyond sight.
- The difference between a "growler" and a "bergy bit". One can sink you as surely as the other.

You have been nipped in the ice more times than you can count and once spent 23 days in the pack before a lead opened.