Abstract
Adrian Duncan’s Shetland and the Greenland Whaling is a major new contribution to the whaling history of the British Isles and a valuable addition to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maritime history of Northern Europe. Much that has long been unsatisfying in historical writing, particularly about the manner of the prosecution of voyages of British and Scottish Arctic whaling, is covered in a minutiae bordering on extravagance in this book. The well-known and reliable texts of British whaling history, Basil Lubbock, The Arctic Whalers (Glasgow, 1937), Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade (London, 1978), Tony Barrow, The Whaling Trade of North-east England (Sunderland, 2001), even Chesley W. Sanger’s relatively new Scottish Arctic Whaling (Edinburgh, 2016) cover the industry with a broad scholarly brush. These works have served for decades as sources for vessel names, ownership patterns, geographic locales where whaling took place and when, and the overall political and economic climate in which British and Scottish Arctic whaling functioned. These works are important. What Duncan has done that is new and immensely satisfying, however, is to thoroughly plunder the Shetland Museum and Archive holdings relating to whaling, particularly the Hay & Co. of Lerwick papers, and extract, analyse, and develop through parallel sources the references found therein.
The place of the Shetland Islands in this history has long been mentioned but never thoroughly explored or explained in most books on the subject. For instance, to select one typical example, Tony Barrow writes: ‘The habit of calling at Orkney or Shetland to make up the crew and take on fresh water and provisions was well established by the end of the eighteenth century.’ (Barrow, p. 79) Duncan takes a single statement like that and develops it over 50 pages with great enthusiasm including primary source quotations such as personal diaries, newspaper accounts, and Custom House records. Likewise, where Lubbock makes a brief mention of certain vessels sailing from Hull and Lynn escorted by H.M.S. Iris during the War of the French Revolution in 1801, Duncan expands this to six pages. Sometimes his explanations seem irrelevant to the primary subject of the book, but his inclusion of the larger background history effectively contextualizes the role of Shetland Islanders in maritime Britain’s complex naval and commercial endeavours. The British are not alone in this analysis. He covers Dutch, French, Danish, German and American involvement too.
The book has 25 chapters numbering 533 pages total arranged chronologically from 1590 to 1912. In this arrangement Duncan mirrors Lubbock, who also arranged his chapters chronologically. This seems hardly accidental on Duncan’s part as Shetland and the Greenland Whaling serves almost as a Volume II expansion of Lubbock’s Arctic Whalers. The major difference between the two books, however, can be glimpsed when Duncan takes great pains to ameliorate the notion that the Shetland Islands were ‘poverty-stricken, miserable, and ill-fashioned, which visiting sailors kept in a state of fermentation’ calling such descriptions an ‘urban myth’, suggesting instead that an ‘air of general tranquility’ pervaded the island’s seaports even at the height of the whaling trade. (Lubbock, p. 10; Duncan, p. XVIII) This example clearly illuminates Duncan’s perspective overall. He is out to re-write this history and he does it.
The book covers 300 years of history, including everything from the earliest days of London’s Muscovy Company to the final days of Dundee’s whale fishery, and later, even the islander’s joining Christian Salvesen’s Antarctic fleet. As the bowhead fishery of Greenland was played out, Shetland men sailed south to the modern whaling grounds around Antarctica. Throughout these long periods, but essentially starting in 1756, the men of the Shetland Islands served as crew members on board the northbound whalers. Duncan calls Bressay Sound ‘the rendezvous of choice’, for shipping in the North Sea. It definitely was that being ‘the most northerly British possession before the vastness of the Arctic Ocean’, with obvious geographical advantages (Duncan, p. 17). Ships from Hull, London, Whitby, and later Aberdeen, Dundee and Peterhead depended upon the islands’ resources and people. As crew members, these were men for whom whaling was a means to augment their income, generally as fishermen or indentured farmers, who ‘went whaling when it suited them’ (Duncan, p. XVIII). They were largely seasonal laborers, although local merchants like James Hay of Lerwick and his son William figured significantly in the entire structure of whaling from the British Isles. Not only were the Hays merchants, they were pilots and shipping agents as well, guiding the ships into Bressay Sound for the port services of Lerwick, hence the great insights into the trade that Duncan reaches from examining their papers.
Duncan is not merely content with explaining the reasons for Shetland men to go to the Greenland whaling, however. No, he squeezes all of the juice from his examinations, including this charming quotation from a Dundee housewife after hearing of the potential disaster populating the tail of Halley’s Comet, which was visible in May, 1910: ‘Eh, the warld’s going to end, and there’s a’ oor lads up at the Greenland fishin’. Whit on earth will they do when they come back an’ fin’ that there’s nae warld left tae come back to.’
On a more practical note, every conceivable whaling vessel that Lubbock, Sanger and Barrow mention Duncan dissects through any pertinent reference that he could find relating to the actual voyages, not in the cold manner of reference, but rather in the expansive personal fashion that he arranges from his carefully organized research. For every chapter there is a sub-chapter wherein he breaks down his main themes. For instance, ‘Chapter 7, 1807–1812’ has seven sub-chapters, arranged by date, where he explores the impressment of sailors by the Royal Navy in those years; the primary feature of whaling from the perspective of the Shetland Islanders.
An awkward component to the arrangement of the book comes with vessel reference. Instead of including the vessel names in the index, Duncan has the whale ships listed by port, alphabetically, and then by the date where they appear in a chapter. Given time, and use, this arrangement will become second-nature to the users of this book. At first, however, it’s a bit confusing. Likewise, in the index, vessel names only appear after the name of the master, and there were some vessels referenced in the text which were not in the index. The photograph on page 13 showing ‘Arctic whaling tools from Scalloway Museum’ is a strange amalgam of tools, some of which are American, some Norwegian, some modern, and some antique but none of real significance to the subject at hand. It’s a highly misleading photograph. Other valuable primary source elements to the back-matter include a number of crew lists and a verbatim transcript of the Notice of 1868: To the owners, masters, and agents, etc., of ships employed in the Northern Whale and Seal Fisheries/Engagement and discharge of Shetland and Orkney Men.
This book is a major contribution to whaling history. It provides great insight into the place of the Shetland Islands in maritime history, and fills in many gaps never fully explored in previous studies of the subject.