Rush Oh!

by Shirley Barrett

‘Fifty feet!’ Louisa and I exclaimed, looking at each other incredulously. The whale now veered off wildly for the northern side of the bay, before sweeping back to the cliffs again, keeping so close to the rocks that the whaleboat seemed in imminent danger of being smashed upon them.

  ‘Where are the Killers?’ cried someone. ‘If only the Killers would come!’

  Yes, yes, where were they? At once I was stricken with a sharp stab of guilt. For at this time, I was still uncertain as to whether I had scared them off or even inadvertently slaughtered one.

  As long as the whale was travelling at this speed, there was little chance of my father gaining proximity enough to lance it. From the shouts of the men below, we gathered that my father was urging the second boat to fasten on as well, in a bid to slow the great beast down. Harry stood up at the bow, harpoon in hand, and seemed about to launch it when a small bent figure rose up behind him and began waving his arms and gesticulating.

  ‘It is Uncle Aleck!’ cried Louisa, clutching her face in horror. ‘What is he doing?’

  Who indeed knew what he was doing? Certainly no one on the Number Two boat seemed to know, for an argument ensued. There was more shouting and waving about of arms, until Dan and John Beck pulled him back into a seated position. (John Beck later informed me that Uncle Aleck had been called in to assist young Dan at the oars. Amidst the excitement, he had risen to his feet to shout advice at Harry, thereby startling him and causing him to miss his chance.) Frantic rowing now ensued in order to catch the whale again. Even from the cliff tops, we could see the spray of Salty’s spittle as he urged his oarsmen on.

  The next sequence of events happened very quickly. Harry landed his harpoon well, and he and Salty immediately did the changeover, a manoeuvre made even more perilous by Uncle Aleck choosing this moment to take his coat off. (‘The old goat! I will kill him!’ cried Louisa.) The sting of this second harpoon seemed only to exacerbate the whale’s desperation, for it set off on a series of precipitous zigzags in a bid to shake loose its extra burden. The final zag of the series was so sharp and so abrupt that it caused the second boat to swing directly across the first boat’s path, its line passing over the men’s heads. They had just time enough to duck and thus avoid being decapitated – my father, however, was knocked clean into the water. Immediately the men cut loose in order to rescue him, leaving only the second boat now attached. Of course, our attention was on our poor father; even from this distance, we could see him urging them to row on as he bobbed in the water. His men pulled him back into the boat, and they at once set to rowing to recapture their fearsome quarry.

  The whale had meanwhile headed directly for the nearest cliffs, for its intention seemed to be to drive its tormentors onto the rocks. The speed and wildness of the boat’s ride as it was towed along behind reminded me of our own experience with the runaway carriage, even to the last-minute swerve executed by the whale. This manoeuvre propelled the hapless second boat headlong onto a rocky outcrop, from which a group of dozing terns rose up in a startled fashion – the boat then slid wildly across the rocks before becoming wedged in a crevice. A strange sight indeed: a landlocked whaleboat with its full crew aboard, its headsman standing at the bow, all looking about in a bewildered fashion. Freed of its burden, the whale headed directly for the open sea, two harpoons rising out of its flesh, fifty fathoms of rope trailing after it. And here at last, just as it all seemed utterly hopeless, the Killers finally made their appearance.

  Where had they been? Why had they not participated in any of the preceding chase, which had been underway for over an hour, and crisscrossed much of the bay? Why had they waited till this last desperate moment, when both boats had been forced to cut loose? It was as if they were a troupe of vainglorious actors, waiting for the moment of greatest dramatic effect in order to make their grand entrance. All along the headlands, cheers rose up as those beloved of all dorsal fins revealed themselves, to which the Killers responded by throwing their bodies jubilantly out of the water like tumblers in a Royal Court. Here was Hooky, with Cooper leering cheerfully alongside; there was Humpy breaching and Charlie Adgery and Jackson and so on. Best of all, though, was to see the determined and portly form of Tom, up to his usual antics, with no sign of any ill-effects from the firing of the bomb lance. Perhaps he had simply been nursing a dull headache, and laid low for a while.

  After announcing their arrival in this fashion and receiving the ovation they considered their due, the Killers immediately set to work. From here on, amidst the flurry of black fins and white water, it became a great deal more difficult to determine exactly what was happening. Clearly their modus operandi was to contain the whale’s progress in order that my father and his men gain sufficient proximity that he might employ the lance, and the gleeful enthusiasm with which they set about the task reminded me of nothing so much as the time that the Bega football team had annihilated Eden in the semi-finals. Bega were the longstanding champions with a reputation for thuggishness; for some reason, possibly owing to being dairy farmers, they were twice the size of our lads and much faster on the field. (Also, their home ground was situated on a hillside, causing visiting teams immense difficulties in having to kick uphill towards the goalposts.) The ease with which they outclassed their opponents was such that they played with a kind of ruthless gaiety, shouting out jokes and pet names for one another, jumping up in the air and spontaneously embracing whenever another goal went through the posts. The delight they took in their play and in one another was not appealing; it was sickening, for it was at the expense of our own boys. The game ended 47–1, with the Eden lads incurring some serious injuries (Harry was amongst them; he had several toes broken when one of his boots came off in the mud and a Bega boy stomped on his foot).

  I felt the same sick feeling now as we watched the Killers at work. Their amiable snub-nosed appearance seemed at stark odds with their viciousness; the poor dumb whale was no match for these warriors. Briefly, the embattled leviathan rose up out of the water, rolling its great girth in a bid to shake them free, only to be pulled back down again by the Killers hanging on to its side fins. If it tried to dive, the Killers would dive beneath it and push it back up; if it tried to surface for air, a Killer would leap atop its blowholes and push it down again. Curlicues of crimson appeared amidst the foam. Worst of all, rising up from the water came the most terrible sound – at first we did not understand what we were hearing: the piteous bellowing of the hounded whale.

  The men of the first boat rowed gamely (the second boat still wedged upon its rocks) and Arthur Ashby wasted no time in fastening on to the whale again. So sustained was the Killers’ attack that the whale had now practically come to a standstill, allowing my father the opportunity to apply his lance. Drawing the weapon up high, he plunged the lance deep into the poor creature; oh, a hideous sight to see. If only once had done it, but again and again he plunged his lance, and each time the heartless crowd cheered as if watching a prize-fighter pummelling his opponent in a boxing tent. The dreadful bellows grew more anguished, its last feeble spouts turned red. ‘Stop it!’ I heard someone cry, and turning around, I realised it was Louisa, tears streaming down her face. ‘Stop it! Make him stop!’ (I will say in my father’s defence that I believe his frenzy of lancing was born of an urge to expedite the whale’s demise and minimise its suffering.)

  Mercifully, the poor creature’s ordeal ended shortly thereafter and the great body lay lifeless on the surface of the bloodstained sea. Mr Winston, the customs officer, offered me his telescope, and somewhat gingerly I peered through it. There I saw the whale men, bloody and triumphant, slapping each other on the back and shaking hands. The crowds on the headlands offered up a rousing three cheers, and the men turned and waved their caps in response; all except my father. He was leaning over the gunwale, and as I watched, he reached out to touch the fin of a Killer whale swimming close by. It was Tom’s fin, I feel sure of that, for I saw that knob on its trailing edge. It wa
s a brief gesture, like a handshake or a pat on the back, a simple moment of acknowledgement between two generals, but done with quiet affection, for my father esteemed Tom above all Killer whales and it would not surprise me if Tom held my father in similar regard. After this brief exchange, my father turned to the men; I could see from his gestures that he was urging them to waste no time in securing the carcass with anchors and marker buoys. They could ill-afford to delay, for the Killers were impatient; it was a matter of barely three minutes before they had pulled the carcass down below.

  A Lonely Killer, He

  Thinking about my father’s deep affection for the Killer whale Tom, I include in this memoir the following obituary which appeared in the Eden Magnet, 20 September 1930, on the sad occasion of Tom’s passing.

  ‘Old Tom: The Last of the Killer Whales is Dead

  For a century or more, there’s been whaling – now there’s wailing – at Twofold Bay. “Old Tom”, the last of the famous pack of Twofold Bay Killer whales, is dead. On Wednesday morning, under the influence of favouring breeze and tide, his body, unheralded, came floating gently in to rest in the bay which had been the killer’s battlefield and the scene of many memorable exploits during the last hundred years or more of Eden’s history. Old Tom had died at sea a day or two previously, and kind Nature had sent his body drifting in to be disposed of as might seem fit to his allies of old.

  It was only last week that Old Tom was disporting off Leonards Island, in the vicinity of which he had caught a grampus, and he was commemorating the event with a display of unusual vivacity. What happened to bring about his demise is a matter of mere conjecture. Master whaler George Davidson does not know and, although he made a post-mortem superficial examination of the body, could form no opinion satisfactory to himself as to the cause of the centenarian’s untimely death.

  Of Old Tom’s sagacity and many deeds of daring there are many yarns extant, but if anyone wants the true version there are few persons to whom one can with confidence apply, and one is master whaler George Davidson, otherwise known as “Fearless George”.

  Of the old “Orca Gladiator”, last of the Twofold Bay killer whales – Old Tom – renowned in war – it may be said that his end was peace, and that he dies regretted by all who knew him.’

  There also appeared – on the front page the following week – this poem entitled ‘Old Tom’, by Eden’s poet laureate, Tom Browne:

  ‘For eighty years or more, Old Tom has whaled off Twofold Bay,

  And many a humpback met its fate when passing down this way.

  There’s “Fearless George” and Aleck Greig who live to tell the tale

  Of how the veteran helped them well with many a vicious whale.

  And now his carcass lies afloat on peaceful Twofold Bay

  Whose waters he so oft has roamed in conflict and in play.

  His mates have long since passed away; a lonely Killer, he

  Has gone at last to well-earned rest – the whaler’s home from sea.’

  I don’t suppose that there are many fish who could reasonably expect an obituary of several hundred words and a poem dedicated to their memory featuring prominently in the local newspaper. But as I think I have already established, Tom was not like any other fish (or cetacean, to be more accurate); for one thing, he was braver and smarter than most men and, for another, he was more loyal than any dog. I know we are all inclined to eulogise the Dead, but looking back at earlier chapters, I see that I have made much of Tom’s undoubtedly more annoying qualities; his impatience at what I suppose he perceived to be petty bureaucracy (the attaching of marker buoys to the whale carcass and so forth), his hooligan antics with the towing of fishing boats and his high jinks with the whale line. But since I am taking this opportunity to mark his passing – and it hit us very heavily at the time, more heavily than even the disbanding of the whaling station and the forced sale of equipment several years earlier – I would prefer to concentrate on his more noble qualities, for there were many of them. He served faithfully as my father’s lieutenant year after year as our fortunes waxed and waned; he respected their unspoken agreement, and could always be relied upon to uphold his end of the bargain. Every winter to the end, even when my father had given up whaling, Tom kept returning to Twofold Bay – such was his sense of duty, perhaps unusual amongst his kin, for certainly the rest of the Killers had long stopped coming. Occasionally, as of old times, he would flop-tail at the bar, in an attempt to entice my father out. My father, of course, would drop everything, scrounge together a crew of whoever happened to be about, and off they would go joyously on a whale chase.

  Searching for a fitting way of commemorating this friendship, my father settled on the idea of preserving Tom’s skeleton, and he towed his body back to the try-works in order to carry out the necessary work himself. How tenderly did he flense Tom of his blubber, and how carefully did he boil his bones. One morning, as I tended to the washing, I heard him calling me down to the try-works; there was something he wished to show me. He had Tom’s skull before him on the workbench, and was engaged in the task of polishing his teeth with a rag and some bicarbonate of soda. The skull was long in snout and startlingly prehistoric in appearance; it looked as if it might have been better suited to a crocodile or a dinosaur. The front teeth on both the upper and lower jaws were worn to stumps or broken off; they spoke of a hard life and a great deal of adventure. Only the teeth on the sides of his jaws were of normal length, and here my father pointed to a particular tooth towards the back on the lower left-hand side. There could be seen distinctly a pronounced groove, as if worn down by the repeated friction of a rope; clearly the legacy of his exploits hanging off the whale line. It was a remarkable sight, for the groove was so deep it had practically worn through the tooth; such was the force with which he had been towed through the water in those whaling days of yore. How his antics had annoyed the whalers; such briny epithets as were hurled at his gleaming head! I reached out to feel the smoothness of the hollow, and looked up at my father; he was smiling at me, his eyes shining. We had only Tom’s skeleton to remember him by, and yet this rope-furrowed tooth spoke of his very essence, of the foolhardy, reckless and mischievous fish he had been.

  Uncle Aleck Takes the Cure

  Extraordinary as it may seem, given that we were the daughters of George Davidson, master whaler, the capture of this southern right was the first whale capture we had ever witnessed, and it is fair to say that we were greatly shaken by the ghastly brutality of it all. The heart-rending bellows of the poor tormented beast seemed to echo around the cliffs and reverberate in our very rib cages. To see this noble creature slaughtered by our own kith and kin was very difficult for us, and we found ourselves unable to respond with any civility to the hearty congratulations that were heaped upon us in the aftermath. Louisa wept openly on the cliff top and would not be consoled by anybody, though many tried, nor even by the thought that we would now be able to pay for the provisions Mr Howard had just refused us; perhaps even, I suggested (feeling it advisable not to mention the ivory crepe de Chine), the pink crinkle marocain that had looked so becoming against her fair complexion. Upon our return home, she would have nothing to do with any of the whalers – even, I noted, Darcy – but most of her fury she reserved for my father.

  For myself, I was not so much angry with my father as stunned that I had formerly been so naive and unquestioning. What had I imagined happened out there? How had I imagined these whales met their deaths? Had I imagined that they passed away delicately of shock like the diamond dove fledgling I had once rescued from the cat? For although I understood in principle the technicalities of whaling – the harpooning, the chase to exhaustion, the necessity of a swift and vigorous lancing – I had never conceived, never understood, never imagined for one moment the horror of it all. Only now did I understand why John Beck had returned from his first whale capture straining to recall that passage from the Bible. I imagine he was t
rying to find some way to live with what he had just witnessed.

  Of course, my father was much too busy to notice – let alone tend to – the more fragile sensibilities of his daughters. The whale proved to be one of the largest black whales ever captured in Twofold Bay. Fortunately the weather remained mild, and when it gassed up a day or so later, it was towed home without incident. It measured fifty-seven feet to the tail tips; its whalebone eight feet in length, and the blubber at its thickest almost sixteen inches deep. It was so large that a channel three feet deep had to be dug at low tide to stop it running aground on the sandy bottom. When finally it was dragged close enough to the try-works, the flensing of blubber commenced, a process that required almost two full days of the most backbreaking labour. Once the flensing was complete, a deep hole was cut into the remaining pile of putrefying flesh and Uncle Aleck duly inserted up to his head, so that the lower part of his body sank down into the whale’s intestines.

  ‘How are you feeling, Uncle?’ asked Dan, whose job it was to watch him and ensure he did not pass out from the tremendous heat of the fermenting whale.

  ‘I feel like I am roasting in the furnace of eternal damnation, lad, so shut your smart mouth. How long have I been in?’

  ‘Forty minutes,’ said Dan, checking Uncle Aleck’s pocket watch.

  ‘Is that all? Christ! I will surely die in here and then you will all be happy!’

  I noticed that John Beck had emerged from the try-works and was observing this spectacle with some bewilderment. After a while, unable to contain his curiosity, he wandered over to where I sat peeling potatoes for the evening meal.

  ‘Would you mind telling me what your uncle is doing buried up to his head in a dead whale?’ he enquired.

  ‘Well, he is what they call “taking the cure”.’