Jim Crumley - The Winter Whale

OTHER TITLES BY JIM CRUMLEY

Nature writing

Brother Nature

Something Out There

A High and Lonely Place

The Company of Swans

Gulfs of Blue Air (A Highland Journey)

Among Mountains

Among Islands

The Heart of Skye

The Heart of Mull

The Heart of the Cairngorms

Badgers on the Highland Edge

Waters of the Wild Swan

The Pentland Hills

Shetland Land of the Ocean

Glencoe Monarch of Glens

West Highland Landscape

St Kilda

Fiction

The Mountain of Light

The Goalie

Autobiography

The Road and the Miles (A Homage to Dundee)

Urban landscape

Portrait of Edinburgh

The Royal Mile

This eBook edition published in 2012 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2008 by Birlinn Ltd

Copyright Jim Crumley 2008

Excerpts from Whale Nation are reproduced with permission of
Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of Heathcote Williams.
Copyright Heathcote Williams.

The moral right of Jim Crumley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84158-732-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-557-4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Remember well

JEAN GARSON

(19282008)

I owe my greatest debt of thanks to the staff of the local history section of Dundees Wellgate Library for unearthing the bones of the story in a small mountain of 125-year-old newspaper cuttings. Their knowledge and patience simply made this book possible, and reaffirmed my belief that libraries are treasures beyond price and it is therefore impossible to over-invest in them.

I should also express my gratitude to the shades of those anonymous hacks who had such fun with the story of the Tay Whale in the columns of the two Dundee newspapers of the day, the Advertiser and the Courier, and to D.C. Thomson, Dundee-based publishers of newspapers of distinction to this very day.

My thanks are also due to a number of publishers for permission to quote from their titles. First among these is Among Whales (Scribner, 1998) by Roger Payne. The world of whale biology has no more eloquent ambassador than Roger Payne. Among Whales is not just a scientists passionate exposition of his chosen field of endeavour. It is, remarkably among the written works of biologists, an accomplished work of literature to stand alongside the best nature writers of the twentieth century. Special mention is also appropriate for Norman Watsons well-crafted and impressively researched book, The Dundee Whalers (Tuckwell, 2003).

Thanks also to the publishers of Heathcote Williamss extraordinary long poem Whale Nation (Cape, 1988), Farley Mowats A Whale for the Killing (McLelland and Stewart, 1972), Barry Lopezs Apologia (University of Georgia Press, 1998) and Of Wolves and Men (Touchstone, 1978) and David Joness Whales (Whitecap, 1998).

The long-established convention of categorising published prose as fiction or non-fiction has never sat comfortably on my shoulders, not least because as one who produces mostly non-fiction nature writing, I am unhappy having my work classified by what it is not rather than what it is. (Even worse is the genre known as literary non-fiction. I cite George Mackay Browns observation that there is no such thing as a good poem or a bad poem, only a poem or a mess of words on the page. Likewise, if the writing isnt literary, it isnt writing, is it?) Besides, as a sometimes novelist and poet myself, and an insinuator of elements of fiction and poetry into my so-called non-fiction books, the instinct to take creative liberties within the framework of known events is often irresistible.

So it is with The Winter Whale. In particular, I have put words into the mouths of real nineteenth-century people and I have read between the lines of old newspaper cuttings and ransacked clues to make assumptions about the character of some of them. There are two reasons for this. One is that (I hope!) it helps to pin down and personalise something of the attitude to the natural world in general and whales in particular that prevailed in Victorian Scotland. The other is simply that any writer likes to write, to ask himself how will it be if I try this? So the liberties taken are all my own.

Jim Crumley

May 2008

The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may it not be on our part as well as theirs? Tis yet to determine where the fault lies that we understand not one another, for we understand them no more than they do us; by the same reason they may think us beasts as we think them.

Michael de Montaigne

Essays, 1693

One hundred and twenty years ago, somewhere in the worlds oceans, an unknown harpoon gunner on a small boat from an unknown whaling ship fired one of the new explosive harpoons into the neck of a bowhead whale. The weapon was basically a bomb on a stick. It was designed to penetrate the whales skin and blubber, then explode deep inside the whale a few seconds later. The theory was that it would die at once, or at least quickly. The whale died all right. It died off the Alaskan coast in May 2007, but only because it had been harpooned again. It was about 130 years old, or, to put it another way, in late middle age. The worlds media gasped at the discovery.

We know all this because the twenty-first-century whalers found the nineteenth-century harpoonists missile still embedded in the whale, in a bone between neck and shoulder. It had lodged in what they called a non-lethal place, and there it remained, and over the decades the initial pain might have dulled to a vague ache or an itch the whale couldnt scratch. Perhaps it swam a million miles with that itch.

The discovery was both fascinating and troubling. The fascination is that the age of whales suddenly catapulted from scientific guesswork to public knowledge, and as is so often the case when whales command our attention our response has been to gasp in a kind of primitive wonder. The troubled nature of the fascination is that we have only acquired the new knowledge because our fingerprints were on the whale, or rather in it, lodged in a non-lethal place between neck and shoulder. All science could date with any accuracy was the missile itself, the head of the bomb lance. Staff at an American whaling museum pinned down its manufacture to New Bedford, Massachusetts. They also know it had been in the hands of an Alaskan, because of the nature of the notches carved into the head, a system by which Alaskan whalers of the time pronounced ownership of the whale.

Science got excited, because, as the man from the whaling museum in New Bedford put it, no other finding has been this precise. I suppose precision is relative when you are dealing with things that live so much longer than we do. Yet evidence this precise has been around for centuries, and ignored by science because it distrusts the source.