How to read a whaling journal

As with any sub-culture, English-speaking whalers in the Arctic — whether they were from North America or Scotland and England — had words in their vocabulary that were unique to them.

You come across them when reading whaling logbooks, journals and popular whaling literature. This article will tell about some of them, but it is not meant to be comprehensive.

Perhaps the most unique thing about whaling vocabulary is that whalers always referred to whales as “fish.” Of course, they are not; they are mammals. But because they lived in the sea, they were called fish, and the hunt for them was always the whale-fishery.

Whalemen often noted in their journals when they “spoke” another ship, meaning they saw it and had some communication with its master or crew.

Thus, George Tyson, captain of the Florence in Cumberland Sound in 1878, noted in his journal that he spoke another vessel, the Lizzie P. Simmons, when leaving the sound.

On Sept. 7, 1889, George Comer, mate of the New London whaler Era, noted, “Spoke the Steamer Eagle (Capt. Jackman) off at [sic] St. John’s, N.F. Capt. Spicer went on board and sent a despatch home.”

Often when whalers met at sea and there were no whales about, the captains and officers would have a “gam.”

Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick: “What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a ‘Gam,’ a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even.”

He went on to ask: “But what is a gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word.”

And so, he volunteered a definition: “GAM. NOUN – A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews, the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.”

In fact, a gam was a carefully organized meeting.

A greenhand aboard a vessel called the Wave wrote: “The same number of men which come on board one vessel to visit or gam are immediately returned by the same boat in order that in case of a gale separating the ships neither shall be short of men.”

And what is a “greenhand?” You can probably guess its meaning. It (or he) is a man out on his first whaling voyage.

Often, the newspapers of the day and the Whalemens Shipping List, published in New Bedford, Mass., would refer to a ship as coming home “clean.”

This sounds like a desirable situation — a ship that returned nice and tidy. Except that’s not what it meant. No captain wanted to come clean, because it meant he had taken no whales and so was not bringing home any oil or bone. A clean ship meant money lost for the owner.

Whales are of two types, toothed whales and baleen whales. The quarry of the whalemen who came to the Canadian Arctic was usually the bowhead whale, a large baleen whale.

Baleen is a long, thin, flexible slab of material, many of which are attached to both sides of the upper jaw of the whale. It is made of keratin, the same substance human fingernails are made of. Whalers almost always referred to the slabs of baleen as simply “bone,” or occasionally “whalebone.”

Baleen is part of a whale’s feeding system. The whale opens its mouth underwater and takes in water. It then pushes the water out through the baleen slabs; animals such as krill are filtered by the baleen and remain in the mouth behind the baleen, providing the whale’s food source. The largest animal in the northern oceans is fed by the smallest inhabitants of the sea.

For the whaleman, baleen was especially valuable. Before the development of plastics, it was in high demand for use in buggy whips, umbrella ribs, corset stays, or any use requiring light weight and flexibility.

After a successful hunt, journals and logbooks usually recorded the barrels of oil that a whale yielded, as well as the length or weight of bone.

For example, Capt. John Spicer of New London, Conn., returned from Hudson Bay in 1888 with 150 barrels of whale oil and 2,200 pounds of bone. Two years later, on his return to the Arctic, he discovered the men at his Cape Haven station had taken a large whale that spring, yielding 2,500 pounds of bone and close to 150 barrels of oil.

In 1897, bowhead whale oil was worth 34 cents a gallon and bone about $4 a pound.

Capt. Thomas McKenzie said, “Our whales would average seven to nine feet bone; 12 feet 3 inches bone is as good as you get; one was taken in the Welcome seven or eight years ago which made in one head 3,300 pounds.”

This “bone” is not an actual bone. It has nothing to do with the skeletal material of the whale, which is real bone. When one sees an Inuit carving, usually brown in colour that sometimes looks porous like an Aero chocolate bar and purports to be made of whalebone, it is made of real bone, not baleen.

Sometimes the records can be confusing. The New London Day reported in 1886 that Capt. Spicer brought home some curiosities, “among them being two jawbones of a whale, each measuring 18 feet, which the captain will probably set up as gate posts at his place in Groton.”

Those jawbones, of course, were real bone. Scottish captains are also known to have taken large jawbones home and used them as decorative pieces outside their homes.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for more than 50 years. He is the author of “Minik: The New York Eskimo” and “Thou Shalt Do No Murder,” among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.