The Maritime History of Dundee - Whaling.

Short History of Dundee Whaling.

Whaling in the Arctic was begun around the Spitzbergen Islands by the Dutch and it’s from the Dutch that we get most of the whaling terms used like harpooner, spectioneer, etc.

But by the mid 18th Century Britain was beginning to challenge the Dutch domination of the whaling industry. In 1749 the British Government introduced the Bounty Act (withdrawn in 1824), this offered 40 shillings per ton on all ships that were 200 tons or more and fitted out in this country. To qualify for the bounty, the whaling ship had to follow strict rules.

The ship had to leave port at a certain time and had to keep a logbook giving details of the voyage. The master had to note their position every time they saw land or caught a whale.
He also had to take soundings, I suppose a way of charting the unknown coasts and waters for Royal Navy charts. Another instruction introduced during the first decades of the 19th century was that the whaling ship had to carry a number of men who had never been to sea before, this again to qualify for the ‘Bounty’. These raw recruits were referred to as ‘Greenmen’.  Another regulation was that the ship had to have a least one apprentice aged between 12 and 20 years of age for every 50 tons of ship weight.The press gangs could force any seaman into the navy, unless he carried a certificate of Protection. The enemy could also attack whaling ships, so many were armed. Even so, there was always more danger from the sea and the ice.

The Act of 1749 gave rise to new developments for the use of the whale oil, utilising it for lighting houses and streets, this before the advent of the production of Coal Gas, by the beginning of the 1800's it was also used for lubricating the new machinery of the Industrial Revolution, and there was a dramatic increase in the number of whaling ports operating in order to support the demand for the whale products.In 1753 a group of Dundee merchants and ship-owners formed the Dundee Whale Fishing Company. A ship named the ‘DUNDEE’ of 345 tons was bought from London and with a crew of 45 it sailed for the Greenland Fishing grounds in April 1753. The ship brought back 143 casks containing blubber from 4 whales for which the Captain William Chiene was awarded a ‘bounty’ of £691. 5s. 

In 1756 another ship, an old English vessel called the ‘Grandtully’, of 249 tons was fitted out in Dundee. In the list of ships by Geoff Dearnly, the Grandtully is recorded as being in Dundee seven times between 1757 and 1762. In the 18th century the whalers were usually converted second hand merchant ships of 200 to 400 tons costing about £2000, although fitting out costs needed in the region of another £8000, this large investment was financed by a large number of local subscribers as shareholders in the vessel.The East coast ports of Scotland and England were the home of many of the Artic whalers, with the exception of Liverpool and Greenock which were on the west coast.England had 15 ports to start with – London, Whitby, Hull, Grimsby, Newcastle, Yarmouth, Sunderland & Shields. Along the east coats of Scotland, Dundee, along with Peterhead and Aberdeen took the lead but other smaller ports like Montrose, Leith, Berwick & Kirkcaldy also had vessels.

By 1857 Hull was the only English port still in the Whaling trade and by 1890 Dundee became the only UK Whaling port.By the time the British became interested in the whaling trade in the mid 18th Century, whales were already becoming scarce in the Spitzbergan area. The ships moved westward to the north-eastern coast of Canada which became the main and most important area for the nineteenth century whalers especially the Davis Straits and Baffin Bay where the migrating whales were to be caught.With the increased demand and a lack of control over whale hunting in the Arctic, the whale population soon went into decline and by the early twentieth century the whaling industry had just about ground to a complete halt. During the early part of the twentieth century whale processing was carried out at a land station at Olna Firth on the Shetland Islands this operated by Christian Salvesen which later became the largest whaling organisation in the world.

The Dundee Directories give us a fair description of the growth of the Dundee Whaling Industry, the 1809 book gives us the names of not only the ships used but also the names of the Shipping Companies – The Dundee Whalefishing Co with the ‘MARY ANN’ and the ‘HORN’. The individual little conglomerates of individual ships run by an agent and committee – the Jane & Co – the ship ‘JANE’, also the ‘RODNEY’ captained by the wonderfully named ‘Cornelius Frogget’.

The ‘ADVICE’ the 'ESTRIDGE' were also two of the Dundee Ships.The 1829/30 directory shows the steady growth with new ships joining the Dundee Fleet, although as the trade ebbed and flowed, companies came and companies folded, the directories tell this story.The sailing ships formed the main part of the fleet until the introduction of steam engines.Ships bought and fitted out for whaling represented a considerable investment to the partnerships of merchants, bankers, shipowners, physicians, lawyers and gentry who usually made up their share­holders. An average whaler was said to cost as much as New Lanark mills in 1786. A second-hand sailing ship cost £3000 in 1810, and almost the same again to convert and equip for whaling.The part played by Alexander Stephen and his son William in their shipyard in Dundee helped with the revival of the Seal and Whaling industry in the second half of the 19th Century.

The part played by Alexander Stephen and his son William in their shipyard in Dundee helped with the revival of the Seal and Whaling industry in the second half of the 19th Century.

“The ‘Tay’ weighed 455 tons and had a 75 horsepower engine. She was the first of a series of the new breed of arctic whaling ships to be launched by the yard. The ships looked much the same as their sailing counterparts (they still had masts and rigging and could often sail faster than they could steam). The only addition was a funnel indicating the presence of an engine. Although the engines were not powerful by modern standards, they were sufficient to give the ships the edge over sailing competitors on the hunting grounds. They were known as auxiliary powered vessels.”

The ship fitted with an auxiliary screw propeller and performed well in the ice flows of the David Straits were impressive. The Stephen’s yard seized on this idea and developed it remarkably well.
William Stephen was always ready to adopt anything that would improve the whaling industry and he also became the owner of whaling vessels. In his yard he could construct and send out two new vessels every year.
After the ‘TAY’ came other sealers and whalers built, not just for the Dundee Whaling industry but for other ports and owners – for the Dundee Whaling industry there were the Ships Arctic I an II, Aurora, Resolute, Thetis, Camperdown, Polynia, Narwhale, Alexander, Eric and Esquimaux, Nimrod and of course the last one – the Terra Nova.

There was also another ship built by them in 1872, the ‘Discovery’, however it was not the famous one, but a predecessor, originally named the Bloodhound II, but renamed the ‘Discovery’ when it was bought by the British Government for their expedition to find the North West Passage When the Greenland seal fishing became unproductive due to over killing, Stephen sent his ships to the Newfoundland coast with a lot of success there. In the 1870’s William Stephen leased ground to the south of the harbour at St John’s, Newfoundland and built a yard for rendering the blubber, there were also large storage tanks, a blubber crushing machine, boiling coppers, and a coal depot to supply the ships. This enabled the ships to do two trips, one to the Newfoundland seal colonies, back to St John’s to unload and then on to the Davis Straits for the Whaling.Stephens also established the Arctic Tannery in Marine Parade in Dundee, this for storing, tanning and curing seal skins, there was also large tanks for the storage of oil, and where salted skins and whalebone were stored, this establishment in the 1870’s held the largest stock of sealskins, oil and whalebone

in the UK.The seamen came under threat from Royal Navy press-gangs and from enemy privateers. Journals report crews fleeing ashore to avoid conscription, and whaling companies applied to Government for protection passes for 'essential' crew, such as harpooners and boat-steerers, but men were seized regardless. Heavily armed privateers viewed whale ships as easy prey and more than one Dundee whaler sailed with her crew armed to the teeth.

When the whaling fleet left for the Davis Straits in April the departure often coincided with a local holiday and the harbour thronged with sightseers watching the fleet put to sea. Emotional farewells were said, the ships’ horns sounded and the crews lined stern rails to give three final cheers as the fleet nosed out of Victoria Dock and masters set their compasses northwards This was a festive occasion, the ships bedecked with flags & bunting the cheers of vast crowds speeding them on their way with good luck tokens of oranges, red herrings and pennies thrown from shore to ship for luck by well-wishers as the passed out the lock gates. With them, inevitably, went boy stowaways hoping to avoid life as 'half-timers' in the city's jute mills. The crew were usually so drunk that the ships had to anchor in the river until the men sobered up enough to put to sea.This was the last time the wives and families would see their menfolk until the fleet returned, it was an uncertain life for both the sailors and their families, from the time the fleet sailed out of the Tay in the spring, nothing was heard of it until they reappeared in the late summer or early autumn. The wives did not know if they would have a husband coming back and some were left destitute with large families to feed and clothe.  

It was a tough and demanding life, it needed rugged hard-muscled men. The ever present danger of the seas, men in flimsy whaleboats, overturned by a harpooned whale, drowning in seconds in the freezing water, being stranded on ice flows as the ship was carried away by pack ice and men frozen to death on ice flows, also those who lost limbs from frostbite or met death from ‘scurvy’.In 1892 James McIntosh of the schooner ‘Chieftain’ watched 4 comrades drinking seawater in their stranded open boat and die, one by one, insane, he, left alone ate his own hat and survived, but had both frostbitten legs removed on his return to Dundee.  

Journals written by the frostbitten fingers of survivors tell of the barely living men, taking off the clothes of those who dropped dead in front of them just to use them to keep warm. After one Newfoundland disaster 25 bodies lay in a frozen mass and had to be cut apart and thawed before being placed in coffins. One Dundee whaler, the Advice, was wrecked and lost 59 men out of 69 in 1837.
But the Advice made another 22 trips to the Arctic before being lost after 74 years’ service. Her story is typical of the depths of courage shown by the seamen of Dundee.When whaling was in decline, sealing became the more economically important activity.

After the mid 1880's Dundee was the only remaining whaling port in the UK. By the 1890's lost ships were not being replaced, the last whaler to be built being the Terra Nova in 1884 and then the Discovery itself.Arctic whaling came to a close in Scotland just before the Great War in 1914. Of the vessels that remained, two the Active and Morning were lost during a storm on the way to Archangel in Russia during the First World War. Another the Balaena was sold as a hulk early in the 1920s. The Eclipse was last seen in the White Sea being used for ice survey work for the Russian Government and the Terra Nova, the last purpose built whaler to be built in Dundee, was the last to be lost, being sunk by a German U-boat in 1943.

Terra Nova	Baleana	Scotia

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