Three ships in three weeks

Three of the most famous ships in the dying days of Arctic whaling were the Active, the Scotia, and the Morning.

All had operated out of Dundee, Scotland. All had been managed by Robert Kinnes, the influential Scotsman whose company controlled whaling in its last days in Baffin Island, Hudson Bay and Davis Strait. And all three ships were lost in the span of less than a month in the mid-1910s.

A crowd of onlookers witnesses the departure of the Active from Dundee, Scotland. It was leaving for a whaling voyage to the Arctic. (Photo from “The Arctic Whalers,” by Basil Lubbock, 1937)

The Active was a whaling ship well known to Inuit in southern Baffin Island. It features prominently in Inuit reminiscences recorded by Dorothy Eber in her wonderful book, When the Whalers were up North. 

Built in 1852 in Peterhead, Scotland, as a sailing vessel, she later had engines installed around 1870.

At 117 feet long, she was smaller than the average whaling ship. Described as a “tough and durable vessel,” the Active was able to sail well through broken ice, but also to act as an icebreaker when necessary.

She was often called “the smartest ship in the fleet.” A square-sterned barque, she was part of the Dundee whaling fleet from 1874 until 1916.   

Inuit remembered the Active as being captained for some time by Alexander Murray. In 1912, while wintering the vessel in the Ottawa Islands, a group of islands in Hudson Bay northwest of Inukjuak, Alexander Murray died. His official cause of death was an “internal tumour” but Inuit said that he died of drink. 

The vessel’s last voyage to the Arctic was in 1914. It was said that “no ship afloat has taken more whales from the Arctic region than the Active.” 

But the 1914 voyage, under Alexander Murray’s brother, John Murray, known to Inuit as Nakungajuq — the cross-eyed one — was not a success. It took no bowhead whales and returned with only 15 polar bear skins and the oil from two beluga whales. This, in the words of a disgruntled sailor, was “not enough to pay for a good breakfast for the lot of us.”  

In 1915, the Active and her sister ship the Morning were taken over by the government and placed under the management of the Hudson’s Bay Co. to assist in the war effort. They were to take munitions to Archangel in northern Russia — Russia being an ally of Great Britain in the fight against Germany.

Both ships were retrofitted in late 1915. But these ships were never meant to carry heavy cargoes. Old whalemen in Dundee warned of the dangers of taking out the blubber tanks to make the ships suitable for their wartime cargo. This increased the cargo capacity but reduced the ships’ stability and the strength of the hulls. Unfortunately, no-one heeded the veteran whalemen’s warnings.

Many of the crew who had initially signed, refused to sail on the Active, feeling her unsafe. For their protests they were tried and sentenced to 90 days in jail. But by doing so they saved their own lives. 

Capt. William Leask and a new crew sailed from Scotland on Dec. 21, 1915. Four days later — on Christmas Day — the Active sank off Orkney, north of Scotland. There were no survivors. 

A message in a bottle, saying — erroneously — that the Active was to the northeast of Lerwick and was sinking, was washed ashore at Stronsay in Orkney. The bottle included a farewell message to his family from second mate James Scott Jamieson.

It was also his will. It read in part, “Dear family, this will be my last letter to you.… God bless you all as he has given me strength to die; my soul is resting on the finished work of Jesus … the water is at my knees in the cabin … don’t mourn  for me; meet me in Heaven.”

He then named a list of relatives and wrote, “I leave everything among you.”

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The Active’s sister ship, the Morning, was built in Norway in 1871 and given the name Morgenen. She was a steamship, 140 feet long. She also made her last Arctic voyage in 1914, travelling to Hudson Bay under Capt. James Fairweather to bring back produce from Robert Kinnes’s shore stations.

In 1915, also bound for Archangel, the Morning got a little farther north than the Active had. But she too was overtaken by a gale and went down off the Faroe Islands on Dec. 29, only four days after the loss of the Active. Only the captain and the second mate survived.

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The Scotia was a steamer of 357 tons and measured 139 feet in length. Built in Norway in 1872 as the Hecla, she came to Dundee in 1902, and was away in the Antarctic for 21 months with the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition. On her return she joined the whaling fleet and served until 1913. 

The Scotia had success as a whaler, taking four bowhead whales in 1907, and six the following year. 1909 was a record year, with eight bowheads. But whaling was an unpredictable business, and the following year only one was taken. The year 1912 was worse; she returned “clean,” the whaling term indicating no whales were taken. 

Then, in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster, Scotia was assigned to ice patrol duty in the North Atlantic. But she was unsuccessful at this because she was too slow and had insufficient engine power. Back in Dundee she too went to the Hudson’s Bay Co. for war duties. 

She sailed from Dundee on Oct. 7, 1915, bound for Cardiff, Wales, to take on a load of coal destined for Bordeaux, France. Her captain, Robert Bannerman, left her on Jan. 14 to return home to Scotland, after receiving the sad news of the death of his father James Bannerman who perished in the sinking of the Morning.

A new captain was in charge a few days later when the ship caught fire in Bristol Channel. He successfully beached the ship, but she burned, becoming a total wreck on Jan. 18, 1916. Fortunately, no lives were lost.

In the short span of a little over three weeks, three of Dundee’s most successful whaling ships had been lost. This spelled the end of any hope, slim though it was, that Scottish bowhead whaling in the Arctic could be revived after the war. 

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for over 50 years. He is the author of Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs: Knud Rasmussen and the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Thou Shalt Do No Murder, among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.