Catching Whales

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31125, 30 July 1966, Page 5

Catching Whales

I Ihr People's

(Specially written for "The In eighteen hundred and twenty-four. On March the twenty-third. We hoisted our colours to the masthead. And for Greenland bore au-ag, brave boys. For Greenland bore away. So begins one of the bestknown of the British seafaring ballads, and one of the best dramatic ballads in the language: “The Greenland Whale Fishery.” “There go the ships; there Is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein,” say the Psalms—and no creature of the sea exists as vividly in folk-lore and song as the whale. There Leviathan, Hugest of all living creatures, in the deep Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seem' a moving land; and at his gills Draws in. and at his breath spouts out a sea. Wrote Milton in “Paradise Lost”; and the whale-fisher-men of Nantucket, port of origin for “Moby Dick,” the greatest whale of a tale, echo less elegantly: Oh, the rare old whale, mid storm and gale, In his ocean home will be A giant in might, where might is right. And king of the boundless sea. Whalers from Britain first went to the waters off Greenland centuries ago, putting out each spring from London. King’s Lynn, Hull and Whitby; and an account of such a voyage, in a ship called, appropriately enough, Jonas-in-the-Whale, was published as early aS 1671. The ballad “Greenland Whale Fishery” has been described as coming from a blackletter ballad of the early 1700 s, but it is almost certainly much younger, internal evidence (the structure of the stanzas, the form of the narrative) suggesting it comes from the early 19th century. However, it almost certainly dates from before 1830, for after that year the whaling fleet moved to Baffin Bay, and later to the whaling grounds off Hawaii and Peru. Varients from widely separated parts of Britain are remarkably similar although the date given

Prtst" by DERRICK ROONEY) In the ballad, often 1824, is apt to vary wildly. One version gives the date as 1861— 30 years after the Greenland fishery closed! The ballad tells how 12 sailors, ashore and in debt, choose a whaling ship as the best way of earning the money they need; they ship out for Greenland. A whale is sighted, a boat is launched, the whale is harpooned. But the whale turns on the boat; it capsizes and five men are lost Sadly, the survivors set sail for home, leaving behind their shipmates, the whale and the eternal sea. “There is," wrote Herman Melville, “one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath."