Sketcher.

Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 15, 14 July 1894, Page 11

Sketcher.

A DAY ON THK SOLANDER WHALING (GROUND.

“ A bright sunny, morning; the gentle north - easterly breeze j ust keeping the sails full as the lumbering whaling barque Splendid dips jerkily to the old southerly swell. Astern, the blue hills around Preservation Inlet shimmering in the soft sunlight, and on the port beam the mighty pillar of the Solander Rock, lying off the south-western extrerpity of New Zealand, is sharply outlined against the steel-blue sky. Far beyond that «tern sentinel, the converging shores •of Foveaux Strait fire just discernible in dim outline through a low haze. Ahead, the jagged and formidable rocks of Stewart Island, bathed in a mellow golden glow, give us no hint of their terrible appearance what time the Storm-fiend of the south-west ories havoc and urges on his chariot of war.”

So writes a contributor in a recent mimbei’ of Chambers s Journal, and thengoes on to describe the appearance, ten miles away, of a school of sperm whale. A course is shaped which brings the vessel a mile or two to windward of the whales. The boats are got out, chase is given, and ere long one of the monsters is harpooned, brought alongside the ship and secured by the fluke chain. The writer continues : The other two boats have succeeded in killing a large fish also, but are at least four miles off. They may as well try to move the Solander itself as to tow their unwieldy prize to the ship. The shapeless bulk of the cachalot makes it a difficult tow at all times; but, with a rising wind and sea, utterly impossible to whaleboats. The barometer is falling ; great masses of purple-edged cumuli ate piling high on the southern horizon, and no weather prophet is needed to foretell the imminent approach of a heavy gale. The captain looks wistfully to windward at Preservation only twenty-five miles off, and thinks, with fierce discontent, of the prize, worth eight or nine hundred pounds, which lies but four or five miles away, and must be abandoned solely for want of steam power. And that is not all. Around, far as the eye can reach, the bushy spouts are * rising. Hundreds of o-io-antic cetaceans are sporting, apparently not at all ‘ gallied ’ by the conflict which has been going on. Some are near enough to the fast boat to be touched by hand. ‘ Potentialities of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice’ are here; but acquisition is impossible for want of steam. The vessel, bound to that immense body, can only crawl tortoise-like before the wind, lucky, indeed, to have a harbour ahead where the whale may be cut in, even though it be forty miles away. Without that refuge available, she -could not hope to keep -the sea and hold her prize through the wild weather now so near. So, with a heavy heart, the captain orders the fast boat to abandon her whale and return with all possible speed. The breeze is freshening fast, and all sail is made for Port William. So slow is the progress, that it is past midnight before that snug shelter is reached, although for the last four hours the old ship is terribly tried strained by the press of sail carried to such a gale. In four days the work of getting the oil is finished, and three or four Maoris ashore have made a tun and a half of good clear oil from the abandoned carcass. This, fadded to the ship’s quantity, makes twelve and a half tuns of oil and spermaceti mingled from the one fi>h. Hone smaller has been noticed out of the hundreds seen on the same day. It is eighteen days from the time of anchoring before the harbour can again be quitted, owing to adverse winds and gales. Who can estimate the number of opportunities lost in that time ? On the second day after reaching the grounds, another school L seen "with the same result-one

fish, and another fortnight’s enforced idleness.

This is no imaginary sketch, but a faithful record of actual facts, which, with slight variations, has been repeated many times within the writer’s experience. On one occasion there were f rur of us on the ground in company —threei Americans, and one colonial. Each secured a whale before dusk. We kept away at once for Port William, fearing the shifting of the wind, which would bring us on a ragged lee shore. The Americans* being strangers to the coast, hauled off to the westward. Five days afterwards, as we were cleaning ship after trying out, those three ships came creeping in to the harbour through the eastern end of Foveaux Strait, all sadly damaged, and of course whaleless. They had been battered by the furious gale all that time, and barely escaped destruction on the Snares. Two of them left the grounds a few days after, having had their fill of the Solander. Thus, it is obvious that nothing but steam is needed to make this most prolific of whaling-grounds a veritable treasurefield. Cutting in and trying out at sea could be entirely dispensed with. The magnificent land-locked harbour of Preservation Inlet, to say nothing of others easily available, affords complete facilities for a shore station. The water is in many cases forty or fifty fathoms deep alongside the rocks, while sheltered nooks abound ‘where never wind blows loudly.’ Working by the share, no finer or more skilful whalemen exist than the half-breed Maories who people Stewart Island, and they would joyfully welcome such a grand opportunity of making their pile. Long before the Antarctic Expedition left our shores, the m exits of this grand field for whaling operations were discussedat length % the writer in the columns of a Dundee paper, and strongly advocated; but those responsible for the management of that venture were evidently so wedded to Greenland methods that the advice was unheeded. Perhaps the unprofitable issue of the enterprise as far as whales were concerned may dispose the adventurers to take advice, and try sperm-whaling in the temperate zone, in place of right whaling in the far south. Should they do so, there is every reason to hope and believe that the palmy days of the sperm-whale fishery may be renewed. Dundee firms of to-day may then, like Messrs Endei’by of London in 1820-30, gladly welcome home ship after ship, full to the hatches with the valuable spoil of the Southern Seas.