Taissumani: April 2, 1867 – The End Of An Ordeal

KENN HARPER

Disasters were common in Davis Strait in the whaling days of the 1800s. Many ships were beset in the ice, and unprepared crews forced to spend long winters of privation in the Arctic. Those iced in near land could occasionally rely on help from the Inuit, but most winterings were far from shore. In many seasons, the loss of life was huge.

One of the greatest tragedies in Arctic whaling occurred on a whaling ship sent out from Hull, England in 1866. She was the Diana, a steam whaler, and her captain, John Gravill, was a veteran of fifty years in the whaling business. But his years of experience were of little help in this desperate year.

In May, Captain Gravill put in at Lerwick in Shetland to hire the rest of his crew. With 50 men, 30 of them Shetlanders, he made for Davis Strait and to its farthest northern reaches, Baffin Bay. In company with other whalers, Narwhal, Esquimaux, Intrepid and Truelove, the Diana made her way through the pack ice of the bay to the North Water, where she took two whales valued at 2,050 British pounds.

Later the Diana and 10 other ships were trapped by heavy ice near Pond Inlet. Eventually she was able to struggle southwards. With little fuel left, the crew burned everything that would burn, including many of the ship’s spars. But on September 21, the ship was firmly beset off Clyde River, imprisoned in the ice there, and with only two months provisions remaining.

For the next six months, the ship zigzagged southwards in the grip of the ice. On the day after Christmas, Captain Gravill died. His body was not consigned to the sea, but rather was sewn in canvas and placed on the quarter deck. Half the crew was ravaged by scurvy. The living quarters were encased in ice.

A survivor recalled: “Our beef got done in January; coffee and sugar about that time also; and our last tea was served out in the beginning of February. Tobacco was likewise all gone, and some of us tried to smoke tea leaves and coffee grounds. The tea leaves burned the mouth bad, but the coffee grounds were not so disagreeable. I do assure you it was precious cold – especially at night, when your breath froze in the top of your berth, till the ice came to be three or four inches thick, and we had a day every week to break it off and scrape it down with the ship’s scrapers… The men began to get down-hearted, and some of them were so weak that they dropped at the pumps.”

In mid-March in southern Davis Strait, the ship was finally released from the ice and began a race against death across the Atlantic, leaking badly all the while.

On April 2, she limped into Ronas Voe, an inlet on the west side of Shetland. The captain and eight other seamen lay dead on deck, and four more men were breathing their last. The remaining men were so weak that only three could go aloft to stow the sails when she anchored. One man is said to have dropped dead in shock at the sight of land. One report described the Diana while anchored in Ronas Voe, as “a charnel-house of scurvy-stricken, dysentery-worn, dead and dying men.”

The Diana took on a new crew in Shetland and continued on to Hull, reaching her home port on April 26 after an absence of 14 months. She was repaired and returned to whaling. In 1869, the last whaler to sail from the port of Hull, she sank.

The vessels’s surgeon, 29-year-old Charles E. Smith, survived and wrote an account of the tragedy. He returned to the Arctic on a voyage of exploration to Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya, then emigrated to New Zealand. But his health broke down, and he returned to England, where he died, only 42 years of age.

Many of the dead were Shetlanders, and in 1890, the surgeon’s brother had a large memorial fountain erected near the harbour in Lerwick. It bears the words: “In Memory of the Providential Return of the S. Whaler Diana of Hull.”

It’s hard to miss. At the edge of a parking lot at the dock, a few steps from the town centre, it keeps the tragedy of the Diana alive in the minds of Shetlanders. It is still spoken about, an integral part of Shetland’s history, and a symbol of the fate of many island men who went to the Arctic whaling.

Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.