Barney and the Secret of the Whales (11 page)

For the first fifty years of the early colonies around Australia, our nation survived by selling fresh food, firewood, barrels, cord and other goods to whaling ships. The only other well-paying goods that Australia could send to England — ones that would last the nine-month
voyage — were bales of wool, and there was too little of that for many years to bring much money to the colony. England had no use for Australian meat, even if it could be salted well enough to survive the voyage, and other goods like eucalyptus sap or eucalyptus oil or wattle bark for medicines and tanning were only sold in small amounts.

But by 1800 Australia was growing enough produce to supply whaling and sealing ships with mutton, potatoes and other vegetables, as well as making barrels and importing and selling other materials ships needed. Without that trade there wouldn't have been the fast growth of small family farms, supplying not just the convict workers and the soldiers, but the ships that used Port Jackson as a base for the profitable whaling trade, as well as sealing — killing seals by clubbing them to death on the Bass Strait islands and harvesting their fur.

Whaling continued to be the basis for the colonies' success until the gold rushes brought would-be miners from across the world, all needing to be fed.

By that time wool was also bringing Australia wealth. New, faster ships carried vast crops of wheat. Refrigeration meant that meat could be shipped to England too. The income derived from whaling peaked
in 1840, but whaling remained a significant although gradually declining part of our economy until the 1960s.

Whaling Procedures

The
Britannia's
voyage in this book took place at the time described, and all other details are as accurate as possible.

Whaling was seen as an extraordinary adventure as well as a way to get rich. At a time when other ships' crews might be ‘pressed' by kidnapping them while drunk, or just hauling them off, men volunteered to go whaling. They talked of their voyages afterwards with genuine nostalgia, and spun tall tales to impress the ‘landlubbers'.

The men who crewed the ships and whaling boats, the harpooners and those who wielded the lance that plunged to the heart of the whale to kill it, had courage, determination, teamwork and skill. Our modern condemnation of their job shouldn't make us blind to the qualities they needed to do their job.

Some whaling crews were guilty of horrendous crimes along the Australian and New Zealand coasts. But in other communities whaling ships were welcomed, both for trade and for marriage with the crewmen.

All the procedures on the
Britannia
have been taken from accounts of the time, but as there appears to be
no available diary or log from that ship specifically, I have been unable to tell which methods and traditions her crew followed. There seem to have been many variations, some where American and English whalers followed different practices, but also where individual captains made their own decisions.

The
Britannia
seems to have been relatively small, with a crew of only twenty-four. The usual crew for a whaling boat was six men, one of whom was the harpooner, and an officer who was the sweep (steersman) and who swapped places with the harpooner to actually kill the whale with a lance. But other references speak of two harpooners in a single boat, and larger boats with up to eighteen men. The running out of the rope as the whale was secured was quite dangerous, as the rope uncoiled rapidly and could easily catch an oarsman unawares if it hadn't been meticulously coiled.

The whaling ships of the Third Fleet may also have sailed close together, so that their boats might herd the whales more easily, especially as the coast was still relatively unknown and only sketchily mapped, but I have had the
Britannia
sail alone, to make the story simpler, with fewer characters for the reader to deal with.

The Whalers of the Third Fleet

Five of the eleven ships that arrived with convicts on the Third Fleet to Australia were whalers (I have been unable to find out much about the fourth and fifth ones so they're not mentioned in the story). After unloading their cargo of convicts they intended to head to the established whaling grounds off Peru and Chile, but Captain Parker of the HMS
Gorgon
(a Royal Navy ship, not a privately owned vessel) recorded seeing a shoal of fifty whales, and stated in a letter that most of the whalers had changed their plans and decided to fish on the Australian coast, as they had seen more whales on the voyage between ‘South Cape and Port Jackson' than they had in six years off Brazil.

All five whalers put to sea in October. The
Britannia
was away for fourteen days, arriving back on 10 November. Captain Melvill stated on 22 November in his letter to the
Britannia
's owners, Enderby and Sons, that the
Britannia
and the
William and Ann
had killed seven whales and brought in one each, but were prevented by heavy weather from retrieving the others. He also says in that letter that they let down two boats and that Captain Bunker on the
William and Ann
did the same. He states too that ‘we' (presumably the ships belonging to the Enderbys) had had the pleasure of killing the first four whales on this
coast. But that would have been on a later voyage than the first short one described in this book.

The
Mary Ann
returned the day after the
Britannia
returned, 11 November, while the
William and Ann
stayed out until 22 November, but again, extreme gales prevented them taking any whales. On 3 December the
Mary Ann
killed nine whales, but only got part of five on board, gathering thirty barrels of oil instead of hundreds. The other ships appear to have headed to South America, believing the winds too strong off the Australian coast for success, but Melvill told Governor Phillip he intended to stay on the New South Wales coast for three months.

By 1799 at least two ships had had successful whaling voyages in that region. Another fleet of whalers set out from England for New South Wales, including the
Britannia,
believing that they might be more successful if they avoided the summer months and their southerly gales, and instead sailed when the winds were from the west. By then too the
Nautilus
and possibly other ships had discovered thousands of seals, which men hunted for their oil and fur and skins.

Sydney would prosper as a port for refitting and supplying whaling ships, as would Hobart, once another colony was established there. Whales were not only
processed on board ship, but ‘right whales' — a species that floated once they were dead — were dragged back to land and boiled up on shore.

Many informal whaling camps invaded Indigenous lands, often killing large numbers of people and kidnapping Indigenous women. In other, more disciplined camps, the whalers traded with the local people, Indigenous men joined whaling crews and travelled the world, and Indigenous women married sailors, living in cottages with the luxuries that a whaling income could provide. By 1840, when the Perth (or Carnac) Whaling Company and the Western Australian Whaling Company were formed, whaling ships patrolled most of the southern and mid-Australian coast.

I remember lines of whales migrating up the coast in my childhood in the 1950s. Dad and I walked along the beach, and he pointed them out to me, the different shapes of the different species. I must have been five or six then, no older, because by the time I was old enough to walk the beach by myself there were no whales to be seen, and the nearby Moreton Island Whaling Station had been closed — not because people had protested about killing whales, but because there were not enough left to make the station economically viable.
The great whaling grounds of the Southern Ocean had been fished out.

Slowly, however, whale numbers are growing again. Gradually Australians, and people of other nations across the world, decided that whales, with their extraordinary songs, complex intelligence and social life, and their major role in the ocean's ecology, need to be preserved. Now Australia is a staunch advocate for the end of all commercial whaling.

The week after I wrote this story, I flew across Moreton Bay, near Brisbane, and there below us were whales, dozens of them. Not the sperm whales of this book — those are probably gone forever — but others, and in the numbers I used to see with my father. I wish I could tell him they are back.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JACKIE FRENCH
is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the Australian Children's Laureate for 2014–2015 and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She is regarded as one of Australia's most popular children's authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much loved historical fiction. ‘Share a Story' is the primary philosophy behind Jackie's two-year term as Laureate.

You can visit Jackie's website at:
www.jackiefrench.com

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