BOMBING WHALES

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 71, 25 March 1922, Page 9

BOMBING WHALES

MOTOR BOAT INDUSTRY

WORLD'S BIGGEST GAME AT

CLOSE HAND

HARPOON, GUN, HAND-BOMB,

AIR-SPEAR.

(Contributed.)

A centary of whaling in am) ■ anout Cook Strait, New Zealand, by whalers based on To Awaiti, in Tory Channel, Queen Charlotte Sound, covers^almost the whole history of whaling, from the very primitive to the most up-to-date. A hundred years ago the old whalers of To Awaiti pursued whales in rowboats ■with muffled oars and hand-thrown harpoons, and the kill was made with the lance. To-day the whale-hunters dash out in very fast benzine-engined motor boats, and attack with (1) a gun-fired harpoon and (2) a hand-thrown bomb; following up with a system of inflating the dying whale by means of an air pump, the compressed air from which passes through a hose and through a sharp metal nozzle (called the air-speai) thrust into the carcase. The air-pump is driven by means of a belt attached to the fly-wheel of the engine.

It will be seen that the technique and equipment have advanced from the primitive and simple to the scientific and complicated. And most of this advance has been made in the last ten years. In elaboration of system, and in percentage of successful hunts, Te> Awaiti claims to lead the world. Over ten years ago the average season's catch' of a whaling party (four men) in Tory Channel wa-s four to five whales. Now the Perano party (seven men) catches in a season forty to fifty whales. About a dozen years ago some direct lineal descendants of the old whalers were still whaling in Cook Strait on the old line 3, with muffled oars. One of the Perano- family, in a small steamer, tested the implications of the muffled-oar practice by steering the steamer towards the whale, and the great sea-mammal took no notice' until it. was. bumped. Mr. Perano came to the conclusion that the idea that a whale must be stalked as quietly as one stalks a deer was at least exaggerated. He and his brother decided to try whale-hunting in motor boats. They were laughed at. But they persevered and succeeded. To-day the Perano whaling party includes five of tho descendants of the" old whalers, and the combination of their excellent seamanship and inherent whaling instinct, with modem equipment, has proved to be'productive of much whale oil, MODERN WHALERS* BATTERY.

The attack may be considered from three points—(l) the. harpoon ; gun, a smooth-bore weapon; breech-loading, firing a harpoon weighing 291b, and possessing an effective range o£J 90 feet; (2) the bomb, which is not fired from a, gun, but is hurled by hand, and which is loaded with an exploding charge of about five sticks of gelignite, to be fired from the boat by means of electrical wires attached to the. exploding charge; and (3) the air-pump—although the lastirlentioned is a,, buoying measure rather than an attacking one. The. gun-fireid harpoon provides the tether'rope., The hand-thrown bomb is the killer.

A whaling motor boat is manned by •j, wo —(a) a steersman, who steers, fires the bombs when signalled, to do so by the gunner, helps to coil in slack,rope so as to keep a tight line on a harpooned whale, works the engine, and is in general charge of the boat; arid (b) a gunner who fires the harpoon-gun and hurls the bombs. This two-men complement is claimed to be the smallest whale-killing crew, numerically, in the world. Suppose a single whale is sighted. Act 1 is the firing of the harpoon at its effective range. Of the 250 fathoms of rope attached to the harpoon,: 120 feet is coiled at the foot of the gun, so as to fly through the air with the flight' of the harpoon. That makes an extreme range of 120 feet, and sometimes a gunner is tempted to try a shot at 100 feet or more. Occasionally he-succeeds, bat in practice the reliable range is considered to be not over 90 feet.

The harpooned whale goes down and makes off, and the aim of the boat's crew is to keep a tight line on him, and eventually work him to a rjoint at which the bomb can be hurled into him. But a bomb-hurler has not the range o£ a har-poon-gun. A bomb weighing; 121b cannot be thrown with accuracy at a greater range than ten feet, and cannot be exploded, with safety to the boat, afc a i less range than fifteen feet. So the' harpooned whale lias to be brought up to a distance of ten feet or less; and,' after that, at least fifteen feet has to be put between the monster and the boats before :the gunner can safely .give to the steersman the signal to bring the wires , into contact and explode the bomb. LIMITATION ON USE OF EXPLOSIVES. The bomb-range, ten feet, or three and a-third yards, gives some idea of how near the motor boats must venture to liuge animals, yet uncrippled, and possessed of the power to destroy a boat with one blow of fin or fluke. So ticlit is the melee (a, fact easily"proved by, photographs, or by personal observation) that the. whalers dare not use ii buiub e'xplosible on impact <>>• explosible by time-fuse, for fear that the, explosion will wreck one or more of the boats. "When the gunner has hurled the sharp iron head of a bomb w'i-11 into a whale, •and the whale goes under, the electrical ■wires attached to the i.omb rush thro-.iaii his hands. If the direction, taken by tho wires shows that the whale is travelling under one of the boats, then the firing signal cannot be given. So, in certain circumstances, there may be loss of time between the harpooning and tho driving of the bomb home, and a.i;ain between the latter operation and the exploding of the bomb; "out tho wbaiers have not yefc found any safe way of shortening operations by means of a gunfired' bomb explosiblo by time-fuse. Rubbing shoulders with a harpooned monster is a risk that the whalers accept, but they do not like the idea ( of being "hoist with their own petard.' | i What would the shades of the old Iwhalcrs—the famous Dicky Barrett, Thorns (grandfather of one of the pre-sent-day Perano gunners], or Stubbs—say of the modern whalers' battery? What would they say if they saw one motor boat holding to a 60-ton whale by a gunfired harpoon, and if they saw a second motor boat come alongside the monster, drive in the air-spear and a coup de grace bomb, and back out again with the air-hose paying out on one side of the boat and the bomb-wires on the other? "Pump air into him to float him, and bomb him to end his pain." The gun is a Norwegian invention, but tho Perano party's guns, when imported from Norway, were muzzle-loaders. They have been improved by conversion to breech action. The harpoon fired from the I^-inch bore gur> is on a 2-inch rope; the harpoon fired from the 2-inch gun is on a 3-inch rope. The gun is on a swivel. The most surprising thing about the operations of these whalers in Cook Strait is their closeness to their prey v j which sometimes strike (accidentally), J

and are sometimes struck by, the boats. Hunters o£ the world's biggest animal are frequently closer to the quarry than hunters of big game would be on land.

These whalers have never seen an example of Mr. Bullen's chief thriller— a fight between a whale and the smaller "killer" whales. They ' have seen whales and " killers " in company, never in battle. i