The Story of the East Riding of YorkshireBrowne, Horace B. (Horace Baker)
History
The Story of the East Riding of Yorkshire
Browne, Horace B. (Horace Baker)
Yorkshire (England) -- History
In the following year a Hull vessel, named the _Swan_, was frozen up
much farther north than the whalers usually went; so that it was the
midsummer of 1837 before she got free. Meanwhile she had been given up
as lost; and on Sunday, July 2nd, a memorial service was held on the
Dock Green, and a collection of £47 taken on behalf of the families of
the crew. In the midst of the service, however, news arrived that the
‘missing’ vessel was entering the mouth of the Humber.
We can imagine the excitement caused by her arrival. Among other things
it meant, of course, a ‘Hextra Speshul’ edition of the News Sheet, as
the photograph on the opposite page shows.
As a rule, however, a voyage resulted in fair profits for both owners
and crews. The thirty-one ships that went to Greenland in 1821 took
between them 204 whales, and the twenty-one that went to Davis Straits
took 294 whales. These 498 ‘fish’ produced whalebone and oil to the
value of £150,000. The average return per ship was here slightly lower
than that for the whole period 1772–1852, which works out to £3,500.
[Illustration:
A NEWS SHEET OF 1837.
(_Presented to the Wilberforce Museum, Hull, by Mr. John Suddaby_).
]
Occasionally a ship would be particularly fortunate. In the Greenland
Sea in one day the _Gibraltar_ killed eleven whales, the _Manchester_
ten, and the _Molly_ six. In 1794, also, the _Egginton_ arrived from
Greenland with the produce of fifteen whales, 3,021 seals, and five
bears. She had been away from home only a hundred days, and created a
record by afterwards making two trading voyages to St. Petersburg the
same season.
Such luck as this was quite exceptional. Usually the capture of a single
whale meant much hard work and many dangers for the boats’ crews. In
1821 the _Baffin_
struck a whale which ran out fifteen lines of 240 yards each, and
dragged two boats and fifteen men for a long time. When the ‘fish’
was killed, it was found to have been also dragging under water six
similar lines and a boat belonging to the _Trafalgar_, of Hull. The
5,040 yards of line weighed a ton and a half.
Most famous of the ships of the Humber that passed to and fro in the
whaling industry was the _Truelove_. This was a three-masted barque with
a length of 96 feet and a width of 27 feet. Built at Philadelphia in
1764, the _Truelove_ was captured by the English in the American war,
and eventually sold to a merchant of High Street, Hull.
The _Truelove’s_ first whaling voyage was to Spitzbergen in 1784. From
that year till 1868 she made seventy-two voyages to Spitzbergen,
Greenland, or the Davis Straits, and accounted for about 500 whales. In
1873 she was taken to her birthplace, where the captain and crew were
fêted; and for several years afterwards she made trading voyages to
Norway until eventually she was broken up as no longer seaworthy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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