Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  One day in October 1951 I finished test-flying the Hiller and flew it aboard the Olympic Challenger as it prepared to leave Montevideo. Gunther was on board as a flenser, but there was no sign of Wolfgang. What had happened to him? Gunther shrugged. He was not his brother’s keeper. I never saw Wolfgang again. We ploughed south and west around Cape Horn through the worst seas in the world, the little Hiller firmly anchored to the turntable with the blade supports earning their keep. Andersen wanted to make an early breakthrough into the Ross Sea, where there was krill in abundance and large numbers of blue whales – the most valuable of all – but as is often the case it was protected by a thick barrier of pack ice through which the Olympic Challenger could not find a way. Again and again the ship shuddered to a halt and had to back out of impenetrable ice. I suggested that I reconnoitred in the helicopter; Andersen shrugged but didn’t say no. I took off, and after half an hour’s searching ahead of the factory ship and its straggling catchers I had noted and planned the start of a route that was navigable, with leads of open water invisible from the ship but almost joining up in places. Andersen had little choice but to try it, and two days later, after a hundred miles of forcing through the pack ice with its catchers in its wake, the Olympic Challenger broke out into open water in the Ross Sea. One of the catcher captains told me later we’d broken through three weeks ahead of schedule. Andersen never said a word to me about it, but he started to see the advantages of using the helicopter to search for whales.

  Hunting began immediately. The first flights of the season were tinged with excitement, and I was hoping to prove the value of the helicopter by finding whales close to the catcher boats. Each day would begin with a search briefing at 4 am – it was daylight around the clock between November and January – and the Hiller would be airborne by 5 am. Weather permitting, the helicopter would be on patrol and directing catchers to the whales for five or six hours at a time every day. I would perform a ‘creeping line ahead’ search over a given area, radioing back the positions of pods of whales. Always, our radio communications were coded to prevent the competition, who were listening in, from knowing exactly where the Onassis fleet was. My old logbook shows that on one occasion five hours were flown in the morning and six hours in the afternoon, by which time my backside was numb as a kerbstone from sitting on the one-man life raft that doubled as a seat. On that day I found several hundred whales in two pods, with about 150 whales in each, including females with their young calves, which could not, of course, be caught. It took tremendous concentration. One scanned the horizon intently from 300 feet, flying at forty knots just outside the dead man’s curve looking for a little white puff of a whale ‘blow’ against a blue sky, and there was always the risk of not paying enough attention to the fuel consumption to ensure a safe return to the factory ship. With the HF aerial wound out and trailing under the helicopter, I made position reports to the Olympic Challenger every ten minutes; on the rare occasion I was late with a call, Joe Soloy would call me anxiously: ‘November 78H, over?’

  I kept a meticulous dead-reckoning plot using the Dalton computer strapped to my right knee. I could read drift accurately from the wind lanes on the water, and soon it became routine for me to be ranging 100 miles or more from the ship. It was a lonely place to be – in an empty sky over an empty ocean two thousand miles from the nearest civilisation, dependent for life on a Franklin engine and the integrity of Hiller’s handiwork. I might as well have been in outer space. I would wear sheepskin-lined boots, two pairs of gloves and gauntlets, I had my one-man life raft, my Frankenstein survival suit and my hand-cranked Gibson Girl, but they would have been of little use if I’d been forced to ditch. Even with the ever-alert Joe Soloy at the radio, it would have taken them hours to reach me. Would they have found me at all?

  The weather was the enemy. Some days were impossibly clear, with searing white ice in an impossibly blue sea, then from nowhere a grey mass, whipped on a furious wind, would descend and you’d be thankful you’d kept your dead reckoning plot up to the minute. If you were 100 miles out it could take you an hour and a half to fly back to the ship, and a lot could happen to the weather in that time. You could end up with twenty-five degrees of drift, and when you found the ship she would be rolling and heaving in great Antarctic waves, with the stern rising and falling twenty feet. Handling the pitching of the ship on landing was relatively undramatic if you aimed for the near-neutral point just before the top of the rise, but any more than three or four degrees of roll made landings difficult. Early helicopters had less lateral azimuth control than later types, and a pilot could easily come up against the stops when descending onto a rolling deck. It was impossible for the ship, which often had a string of a dozen or more whales trailing out behind it awaiting processing, to turn into wind just for the benefit of the helicopter. It was important to get the Hiller down firmly, set the anchor cable, have it turned tail to the wind to allow the blades to be slowed down and stopped, and get the rotor head pinned down quickly, and in an Antarctic storm it was nasty work. Some of the storms were so bad that even the factory ship had to take shelter behind an iceberg and there was no chance of flying for days. Men would stagger from handhold to handhold while the ship, with all hatches battened down, rose and smashed into seas that towered all around, and a hurricane wind ripped the surface off the ocean so you couldn’t tell where water ended and air began, and a man who had to go on deck felt he might drown on his feet.

  Bad visibility was a killer. Sometimes you’d get a sudden white-out when snow, cloud and sea blended in a confusing mass that robbed a pilot of any sense of direction, up, down or sideways. The only way out was to descend almost to wave level and concentrate on the darker layer below, heading for the ship at slow speed. The real peril then became icing – fog, sleet and rain could freeze on the rotor blades and destroy their aerodynamic efficiency, forcing the helicopter down into the sea. On one search I was overtaken by a white-out and was groping my way back to the Olympic Challenger at a steady thirty knots when I became aware of a severe build-up of ice on the rotor. I could feel the vibrations increasing, and I needed more and more power just to stay airborne. The ship was a long way off – too far away to pick up a VHF signal when the helicopter was at sea level, and I was too busy trying to stay in the air to trail out the HF aerial. I hoped Joe would have turned the ship towards me as soon as I missed a radio call, but if I had to ditch in the ocean their chances of finding me in time in this weather were nil.

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to death at any other time in my life; I had quite simply run out of options. One always tries to leave an escape route, but this time there seemed to be no way out. My salvation was an enormous tabular iceberg that first manifested itself as a slightly brighter light ahead, then materialised out of the murk as a wall of ice. The only way was up – squeezing the last drop of power out of the Franklin engine I rose shakily and slumped onto the top of the berg. Once I’d stopped the rotor and looked at the blades, it was immediately clear that the helicopter could only have stayed airborne for a few more seconds. I walked a few steps forward from the helicopter to see how big the berg was, and came up against an ice pinnacle about a pitching wedge distance from the Hiller. Retracing my steps, I got back into the helicopter, put the Gibson Girl between my knees, streamed the balloon and cranked the handle to transmit an SOS signal. I knew Joe would take a bearing off it and head in my direction. The fog seemed to be lifting slightly, and while I was cranking there was a crack like a twelve-pound gun going off and the ice pinnacle toppled over. I suspect the vibration from the helicopter landing had weakened it; thankfully it fell away from the helicopter into the sea. I lit another cheroot and switched on the VHF radio. I didn’t want to use it for long because it would drain the helicopter’s battery, then I’d never get the engine started. I called the ship, and Joe answered. She was on her way with all safe speed. All I could do was sit back and wait. Within an hour I heard her engines, then she loomed through the
thinning mist, spotted me and manoeuvred her stern against the berg. Joe stood on the helicopter turntable.

  ‘What took you so long?’ I scolded.

  Joe smiled and heaved a line to me, swinging over a leather hammer and a broom so I could knock the ice off the blades. I coaxed a last start out of the battery and flew off to land on the helideck. The episode proved two things – first, that the Hiller was a damned good little helicopter, and second, that Fanden Andersen thought it was worth rescuing the helicopter, and me with it. I had a stiff drink that night from my private reserve. I hadn’t been scared, but it had required an enormous amount of concentration. Looking back on the event gave me a real sense of accomplishment, but I also knew I had been very lucky.

  The flight schedule remained exhausting, too much for one pilot, I felt. The only rest one got was when the weather made flying impossible, or on the rare occasions when we had too many whales awaiting processing to take any more. Life aboard the whaler was not all hardship – the food was plentiful and good, apart from a Norwegian delicacy called lutefisk, marinated smoked cod dredged from barrels, which was disgusting beyond description. The Norwegians were mad for it. One soon got used to the smell of the ship, which permeated everything including the helicopter. The exception was in mid-season when a tanker came down to replenish supplies and take off the whale oil. It was very welcome – it brought Christmas presents and mail – but it would have to be lashed to the factory ship for several days while the transfer was made, and a couple of whales, usually big fin whales, would be placed between the ships as fenders. As time wore on the fender whales began to get very high, especially when they went gangrenous. If a storm came up and the two ships had to separate the fenders could be left hanging for a week, and the crew would start complaining that old ‘Gangrene Jack’ had gone foul. There was no point bellyaching about it, but it was a great relief when the tanker steamed off and the fenders could be processed.

  Underneath the helideck was ‘hell’s gate,’ the gap in the stern through which the whales were hauled onto the flensing deck for processing. I would frequently walk from my cabin aft to the forward part of the ship where the officers’ mess was, and on some mornings when it was fairly quiet I walked across the flensing deck where the whales were stripped of their blubber. I had to wade through about nine inches of blood swilling around from whales that had just been cut up – I had my Frankenstein suit on – and it didn’t affect me. What I found more difficult was to go down into the boiler room where big cookers rendered the whale meat down to oil, but even there it wasn’t objectionably malodorous. The cookers gave off a peculiar wholemeal-type smell. While we might get used to it, we were never popular in port. You could smell a factory ship five miles away.

  The flensers themselves were almost all German, and were ruled with a rod of iron by a German first officer who had been a U-boat commander. He was very safety-conscious, and woe betide any man whose standards lapsed. A hawser would be passed through the whale’s jaw to haul it up into the ship, and if it parted under strain it could take a man’s leg off. When ‘pull head’ was shouted they had to be off the deck. But they were frozen, soaked through and exhausted, and sometimes they were slow, or went the wrong way. Accidents were rare, but usually serious. After the flensers came the hookmen, who dragged blubber and meat to the cookers, where the firemen and the digester operators were in charge of the rendering. When they got a good piece of meat they’d cut it into nine-inch square chunks and put it straight into tins for sale to the public. A particularly good piece was highly prized, and would be hung up by the funnel to smoke. It would be there for weeks, and in the very cold weather it just went black. Finely cut like parma ham, it tasted gorgeous. There were regular breaks in the programme. The biologist or fisheries inspector would take over, measuring the size and weight of the liver, the only organ they seemed to be interested in, but it was easy to get fed up. Working sixteen hours a day, men got short-tempered, and one had to make allowances. It didn’t pay to anger a chap who was carrying a vicious-looking flensing knife.

  I learned the business fast and was quickly able to differentiate between types of whale at a distance. The sei was a very cheap whale, the fin was bigger and a good whale to catch. The humpback was a mystery to me – sometimes it would run, sometimes it wouldn’t run, and two humpbacks were worth one fin. Two fins were deemed to be worth one blue whale, and quotas were set in blue whale equivalents. Flying at fifty or sixty feet above a pod of whales, at a slow 50 mph to conserve fuel, it became very clear that the whales were totally unaware of the presence of the helicopter. It wasn’t until one hovered about fifteen feet above them that the whales took fright and scattered in all directions. I attributed this to the build-up of air pressure caused by the downwash of the rotor blades. As long as the helicopter remained fifty feet or more above the sea one could approach whales at any speed and from any direction. I conducted a number of semi-scientific experiments to make sure that the whales were not being frightened by other outside elements such as propeller noises from nearby catchers, or the presence of orcas hunting in packs. I made up bright ‘kites’ of foil and coloured silver paper and hung them from the helicopter above whales like glitter-balls in a dance hall, but they were clearly insensitive to anything above them but the pressure build-up. It is my claim to have been the first man in the world to discover that whales are blind and deaf above water. This fundamental feature made me think of the helicopter as a whale catcher, rather than just a spotter, with a sighting-to-killing ratio of one to one compared to that of the conventional catcher boats, where it was on the order of twenty to one. Whales could be killed much more humanely and cleanly from a helicopter; I’d witnessed many kills, and they were often barbaric, with half a dozen explosive harpoons being needed to finish the job. Experiments in Germany before the war had shown that a whale could be killed instantly with an electric shock. A helicopter could administer the coup de grâce with a single electrified harpoon between the lateral fins. But catcher boat gunners were not likely to embrace the idea. They were the aristocrats of whaling, highly paid for their gunnery skills, and they did not welcome anything that would devalue their work. If you’d seen them clinging to the bow of their boats in mountainous seas when it was blowing an Antarctic hooley you’d share my respect for them, but I knew that if their intransigence stopped me earning a living I’d have to go against them.

  There was one exception. Arnie Borgen was relatively young for a catcher boat gunner – his father Johan commanded one of the other boats – but was rapidly following in his father’s footsteps to become a legend in the whaling world. The family lived on Newfoundland, where Johan was known as ‘Captain John’, and his employment with Onassis broke a long run of service for the Scottish firm of Christian Salvesen, then the biggest whaling company in the world. It was almost his last trip, too, because he had an accident that cost him much of his left hand. We had run out of spares for the Hiller in the last two weeks of the season and I had taken to the catchers to learn more about the business. Johan and Arnie were working their boats together to corner an enormous 120-foot blue whale, and I was on Arnie’s boat. Johan had got himself into a position to take a shot at the whale, but there was a big swell running and it wasn’t easy. In his determination to get a shot away, Johan got careless. The big Bofors harpoon gun had two cylinders either side of the barrel, and somehow Johan got his left hand stuck behind one of them when he fired the harpoon. The recoil mashed every bone in his hand. Arnie saw it happen and put his boat bow to bow with his father’s in the swell, and the two of them stood on their foredecks and looked at the damage. Johan produced a whisky bottle from somewhere and threw the whole lot down his throat. It was about an hour’s run to the factory ship, where Johan was hoisted in the derricks to the sick bay. The young English doctor took one look at the damage.

  ‘That hand’s got to come off,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t take it off, doc,’ pleaded Johan. ‘Leave me two fingers,
hey, to hold my playing cards.’

  As instructed, the doctor left Johan the stumps of two fingers, but they were never much use for anything except playing poker. Johan was grateful.

  I became very friendly with Arnie, who told me: ‘What you have to do before you go back, Alan, you have to skin a penis off a whale. You come to my place in St John’s, around my bar, all the stools, the lampshades and all the tops of the stool seats, all whale prick.’

  It was arranged with the flensers that a couple of whale penises should be saved. I skinned them as instructed, and a photograph was taken of me standing with one of them. The photograph was among a batch I sent to my mother, and she wrote back:

  ‘I didn’t know whales had tusks.’

  Arnie was more progressive than most of the gunners, and realised you couldn’t forestall change for ever. He was enthusiastic about the idea of an electric helicopter-borne humane-killer and could see himself as a flying gunner with a much higher success rate. One helicopter could do the job of four corvettes, each of which cost a lot of money to run and had a crew of ten men. The kill would be a far less bloody business, and because from a helicopter you could see much further under water there was less risk of killing a lactating mother – you’d be able to see the calf.

  Arnie’s Mate had been badly injured when a whale’s tail got twisted over the gunwale with his arm underneath it, and it was decided that as the season was virtually over, Arnie would make a run for Cape Town to get him into hospital. With the Hiller hors de combat for want of spares I was able to go with him. The catchers were good sea boats but we had a dreadful passage, one of the worst of my life, in a storm the likes of which I have never seen before or since. Often times we thought the boat was lost. I was thrown out of my bunk, the bunk came away from the wall and I landed on the coffee table in the middle of the captain’s cabin, fully dressed – it was far too rough to change or shower. It was too rough even to make ‘storm stew’, the mess of everything edible that’s thrown into a pot when the weather takes charge. I was convinced the boat was going over and pulled myself up to the bridge, where Arnie was lashed to the wheel. I took over the helm for a spell, and he was grateful. After a day and a half it started to blow out, and as often happens, before you know it you’re in silky water and you wonder if it was all a bad dream. In Cape Town I said goodbye to Arnie and flew home full of plans to use helicopters to revolutionise the whaling industry.