'I left Shetland to hunt whales in the Antarctic'

Yahoo

8 hours ago

Gibbie Fraser was a teenager when he decided the best way to afford a motorbike like his friends on the west side of Shetland was to join the crew of a whaling vessel.
Months later, at the age of 16, he was battling rough seas and violent storms in relentless pursuit of the largest animals on earth, 8,000 miles (13,000 km) from home in the South Atlantic ocean.
Gibbie is one of several former Scottish whalers contributing to a new digital time capsule exploring the country's forgotten history in modern whaling.
The Whalers' Memory Bank, launched in Dundee, aims to capture a snapshot of life onboard the whale-catching vessels around South Georgia and Antarctica between 1904 and 1965.
"It was the highlight of my life," said Gibbie, who is chairman of the Shetland ex-Whalers Association.
"I knew boys who had gone before and they came home the following summer with really nice motorcycles and I thought 'that's the way to do it'.
"It was an adventure and when you are young, it is like a bit of a drug."
50 years on: Scots whaling recalled
Now 83, he was among hundreds of Scots who joined boats along with largely Norwegian crew in the post-war years, when work was scarce.
Many, like him, had grown up in small, coastal communities on Shetland, while others came from the Leith, in Edinburgh.
The Edinburgh-based firm, Christian Salvesen, operated whale processing ports at the aptly named Leith Harbour at Stromness Bay in South Georgia, a British overseas territory about 870 miles (1,400 km) from the Falkland Islands.
Gunners would fire harpoons aimed at killing and capturing blue, fin and humpback whales, which were brought aboard and processed at a centre in the island's main settlement, Grytviken.
Gibbie began his career cooking and serving meals for the crew and cleaning the boat as a mess boy in the late 1950s.
As the only non-smoker, he would also be sent above deck to steer at night while shipmates stayed below to play cards for cigarettes.
He remembered the conditions on board being hard, but said there was a sense of "camaraderie" among the crew.
"The catchers were wonderful boats and came through a lot of heavy weather, but you never walked along the aft end along the main deck, you had to go via the lifeboat deck because the main deck was awash most of the time," he said.
"When you were in bed, you were not far from where the gun platform was. You were about a foot-and-a-half from where the sea was. You could hear it rushing by.
"And it was daylight right round the clock. If you were among whales, then you kept going, you never stopped. It was right around the clock until the whales had disappeared."
On one occasion, he recalled pursuing a fin whale in straight line for four hours before it was eventually captured.
He said he "felt sorry" for the whales that were caught, adding he never wanted to see them suffer.
"I realise that it was a warm-blooded animal that could feel pain like I could, and probably fear too," he said.
"You always hoped that when the harpoon went in, that would kill it, it was never nice to see it struggle for a while."
Gibbie completed four seasons aboard the boats and was only prevented from returning for a fifth when he suffered an arm injury in a crash involving his motorbike and a school bus at home in Shetland.
The industry began to crumble in the early-1960s against the backdrop of more stringent government regulation and early environmental campaigns against the killing of the animals.
However, by that point, whale stocks had become so low that the practice was "no longer deemed economically viable".
The Edinburgh-based firm, Christian Salvesen, wound down its whaling operations in 1963.
It is estimated about 176,000 whales were slaughtered and processed in South Georgia between 1904 and 1965.
Historian Dan Snow helped launch the memory bank aboard the RRS Discovery in Dundee.
The boat was built in the city as a research vessel which ferried explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton to the Antarctic in 1901.
Dundee was centre of Scottish whaling throughout the 19th century when whale oil became an essential component for the softening of fabrics during jute production.
Snow says elements of the Discovery's construction were inspired by the whaling vessels arriving in the city during that period.
He told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland: "Discovery was an Antarctic survey vessel built in Dundee because it had that whaling expertise, built with all sorts of features that they learned from whaling ships.
"It had things like rudders that lifted up into the hull and special strong hulls.
"Through the memory bank, we've been able to save these stories, these testimonies about what it was like to go down there for months on end through the eternal summer of the Antarctic and chase whales, using world war two ships and radar equipment, it was like they were waging war on these whales."
The memory bank has been produced by the South Georgia Heritage Trust and the South Georgia Museum.
They worked with former whaling communities across Scotland to collect archive pictures and film, alongside several hundred items and oral histories and create a digital database, which can be viewed online.
Helen Balfour, assistant curator of the museum, whose great-grandfather and grandfather were both whalers in South Georgia, said:
"To understand more about what they saw, what they experienced and how they, their colleagues and families back home must have felt, is incredibly special.
"It is amazing that over 60 years on from the whaling the camaraderie that exists between the whalers is just as strong."
Whalers' Memory Bank