"The chimney is on fire"

Forest and Bird, Volume 21, Issue 4, 1 November 1990, Page 14

"The chimney is on fire"

On 21 December 1964 the last whale harpooning by a New Zealand boat in New Zealand waters occurred off Kaikoura. In The Perano Whalers of Cook Strait 1911-1964, author Don Grady graphically describes a typical sperm whale hunt of the mid-1960s by the killer vessel Orca, which operated out of Tory Channel. Such a romanticised account is unthinkable in today’s more enlightened times. pod of sperm whales has been sighted by the whale-spotter aircraft or by the lookout man in Orca’s barrel high up on the foremast. The hunt is now in earnest. The steel-hulled Orca is steaming off Kaikoura in a circle on a smooth sea with a SSE swell. The weather is fine and clear. The men on the bridge are purposeful and alert. Master-gunner Trevor Norton lopes down the catwalk in a gunner's gait to the deadly swivel gun pointing ominously out from the bow. Several times Trevor holds off firing the gun at the last minute. He's like a ballet dancer doing shadow exercises before the real thing. For reasons known to himself, Trevor holds his fire again. It might have been that the big bull sperm in his gunsights was too far away; perhaps it turned out to be a dam with a calf,

or an undersize juvenile bull. He's looking for the biggest bull, and he tries to gauge its length by observing the width of its head when it breaks the sea’s surface. By now, half a dozen whales in the pod ahead are regularly breaking surface. The crew themselves are a little nonplussed. Will Trevor Norton ever fire at any of the whales? What, they wonder, can be holding him back now? Again and again the sperm whales break surface in front of the bows, their shiny backs glistening in the moming sun and their spouts occasionally bursting into the air like escaping steam. The final phase of the hunt nears. Only Trevor Norton, crouched businesslike behind the huge harpoon-gun, can assess the whole scene and decide when to press the trigger. Now Trevor Norton is standing on the gun platform. Without turning, he gives hand signals to the bridge. He raises a single finger. This means "dead slow" on the telegraph to the Orca’s engine room. The pulse of the engine quietens. Stealthily, Orca inches ahead. The great mammal zigzags in bewilderment as the iron ship pursues. The end is inevitable. Gunner Norton signals with his hands. The Orca’s engine stops and she glides slowly, almost noiselessly, ahead. Everyone on deck is watching. The bull sperm spouts no more than 10 metres away. Norton swings the harpoon-gun, bracing his legs wide apart on the Orca’s deck. He points his gun downwards. There is dead silence. It seems like an eternity.

Gunner Norton, killer of more than 1,000 whales, looks down the white-tipped sighting device and squeezes the trigger. The gun barks. It is almost deafening, much louder than any layman would expect. The coiled-fore-runner (line) from a box in front of the gun is snaking outwards. The harpoon is embedded deep into the sperm’s back, and there is a muffled thud from the delayed action grenade, exploding inside the whale’s vitals. The rusty steam winch on the Orca’s foredeck now begins to clatter. With the winch as the reel and the foremast as the fishing rod, the whole steel hull of the Orca becomes the fisherman. The whale is fighting for its life, a fight it cannot hope to win. The harpoon line runs back over the bow rails of the Orca, then down inside the internal part of the chaser near the keel. Here there are about 20 to 30 special kinds of springs. The rope attached to the whale runs through a pulley linked to these springs and then up to two big blocks, weighing about 76 kilograms each, on the foremast. By this ingenious system of blocks, springs, and steamwinch, the whale is played like a fish, till it tires, dies or is killed with another harpoon. From the foremast the whale line is fed back to the winch. As the harpooned sperm takes the strain, these weighted blocks on the foremast come down to meet one another. By carefully watching these blocks, the winchman driving the steam-winch can quickly see how much strain is being placed on the rope. When there is a heavy strain he eases the

brakes (tension) on the winch, and that in turn lets more rope go out with the whale. When the strain comes off the rope, the blocks go up the mast, the winchman puts his winch into reeling-in action again and pulls in the line with the harpooned whale on the end. The struggle goes on. The whale, securely harpooned, surfaces 40 metres away. The bull sperm’s great square head breaks the surface in a surge of foam several times in quick succession. His flukes wave madly in the air. A soft groan comes from his open jaws. The sea is crimson with his blood. As he spouts, a crimson mist blows upwards. In old whaling vernacular "the chimney is on fire’. The harpoon gun is quickly reloaded. A mercy-killing harpoon is fired into the stricken sperm bull. A few death flurries, and it is all over. The Orca has added another sperm to her tally. Soon she will be chasing after other whales from the same pod. (Reprinted by permission of Heinemann Reed, a division of Octopus Publishing Group (NZ) Ltd). ¢€