New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, The [S.S. Ant.] by Julia Bishop & Steve Roud

Author:Julia Bishop & Steve Roud [Roud, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthologies (various), Music, Songs, Poetry
ISBN: 9780141964324
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-05-05T03:00:00+00:00

11 The Greenland Whale Fishery

Sung by Richard Gregory, Two Bridges, Devon (January 1890); collected by Sabine Baring Gould (Baring-Gould MSS, SBG/1/2/196).

Roud 347, Laws K21; 21 entries.

This song was popular across England, and also collected often in Scotland and North America. Of several songs about whaling, this was easily the most widely known, and the one which lasted in traditional singers’ repertoires. It was also widely printed on broadsides, with the earliest surviving examples dating from about 1820. We have evidence that it appealed to at least two real whalers, as copies are found in the journals of the ships Bengal from Salem, in 1833, and Euphrasia from New Bedford, in 1849 (Gale Huntington, Songs the Whalemen Sang (1964), pp. 9–13). By the time this song appeared, the Greenland whale fishery was already in decline and the ships were moving elsewhere.

Catching whales from small boats, as described in the song, was an arduous and dangerous business. An Authentick Narration of all the Occurrences in a Voyage to Greenland in the Year 1772 contains the following description:

The manner of killing a whale is as follows. As soon as a whale is perceived, the word is immediately given and every man hastens from the ship into the boat to which he properly belongs: for every ship has seven or eight boats, to each of which six men are appointed. As soon as the boats come sufficiently near the whale, the harpooner strikes him with his harpoon, or barb’d dart, and the fish, feeling himself wounded, shoots, with the swiftness of an arrow, down to the bottom of the sea. Great precaution is therefore necessary that the line, one end of which is fastened to the harpoon, runs freely out, for should it by any accident be stopped there will be a necessity of cutting it immediately to keep the boat from sinking … After the whale has continued some time near the bottom of the sea, which is here some hundred fathoms deep, he is forced to come up to the surface of the water for air … While he continues on the surface, a second harpoon is fixed in him, on which he again plunges into the deep, but cannot continue so long under water as the first time. On his coming up they pierce him with spears …

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