Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

managed to avoid the ice floes; had they miscalculated they would have been badly
cut by the jagged underside of the floes. Clearly they had some way of avoiding this -
echolocation or sonar. It seemed to me that the blue whales were the lords of creation
- so large, graceful and so beautiful in their majesty - the largest animals which have
ever lived - up to 32m (l03 ft) long and weighing more than 150 tons. I captured all
this on film.
After the fifth whale of the day, Hem, the gunner, came in to the cabin and as he
so often did, insisted on my having a 'liten drink' - in other words half a tumbler of
neat gin, or ‘yin’ as he called it! Later, when we were on the bridge looking for
whales, he sent down again for the gin and we repeated the dose. It was
appropriately warming. I should mention that when a whale was harpooned and
killed it was winched alongside, and a special harpoon connected to an air hose was
inserted to inflate the body and keep it afloat. Then it was marked by cutting the
catcher number into the blubber of the tail with a flensing knife, and fastened by a
chain to the ship. The tail flukes were cut off to prevent the carcass ‘swimming’
inadvertently in the waves, a flag and radar reflector were attached and the carcass
was cast adrift to be picked up by the ‘buoy boat’ and towed to the factory for
processing.
Next day we had had quite a good day - four fin and two humpbacks; we were
now in the very limited 4-day humpback season. The humpbacks are very tame and
so ugly that they are beautiful. Our expedition caught and processed about [200] in
the four days but as I was on the catcher I had no opportunity to study this new
species. However, since one was dismembered and disappeared into the factory
every half hour any opportunities would have been limited. I had seen some during
my year at South Georgia in 1951. Humpbacks are ungainly compared with the faster
rorquals. They measure up to their name really having a ‘hunched’ looking back,
with a small fin and series of bumps on the spine. They also have longer flippers, are
coloured more starkly white and black, with large bosses of barnacles infested with
the large whale lice. They are slower swimmers, but ‘breach’ more often, leaping out
of the water and subsiding with a great splash. Some gunners claimed that they had
shot humpbacks in the air – one even claiming that he had shot two at once ‘as they
were flying.’ But this was probably an exaggeration put on for the gullible.
Hem shot a penguin - a cruel business; they are so tame, unconcerned and
defenseless that it seemed a particular shame to kill one. "Stopp Fangst" (stop
catching) came at 4 o’clock that day. This meant that I had an hour or two free. More
'yins' as I skinned Hem's penguin for him. He is a very agreeable fellow and despite
his dispatch of the penguin I liked him very much. He showed me pictures of his
home in Norway and his family. At sunset the ‘capital ships’ of our fleet, Balaena,
Bransfield and Thule were silhouetted against an appropriately blood-red sky, with
clouds of steam and smells arising from the factory ship - obviously she was on "full
cook". I talked with the mate about the electric harpoon experiments. Later I had a
radio message from Hugh telling me that the laboratory on Balaena had been flooded
during the storm, with serious consequences. We looked for our flagged whale after
supper and took it in to Balaena.
We went down to the ice again looking for blue whales, but had no luck. It was a
lovely morning, but the weather was unsettled. We caught two fin and took them in
to the factory. Then we caught two more in very bad weather, although Hem was
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