JIM Crumley is describing his first close-up encounter with humpback whales, in Alaska.
"One came right alongside the boat," he tells me, "and you're looking down into the vent, and the smell's not very nice, but a little while after the vent, this eyeball comes along and it's four inches across. It really felt as if it was making eye contact and it was the most extraordinary feeling – as if this thing had sought me out for a reason which I couldn't begin to imagine, then discussing it with the other people in the boat after we got ashore, and everybody else had felt the same.
That was ten years ago when Crumley, a highly regarded Scottish nature writer and broadcaster, was on his first visit to Alaska, while making a programme for Radio 4. "It did change my life," he recalls. "There's no question about it, getting up-close and personal with humpbacks."
His Alaskan experiences returned to possess him a couple of years ago when Crumley, who lives in Balquhidder but grew up in Dundee, discovered that it had been a humpback whale which in November 1883 swam up the Firth of Tay and into his hometown's annals, not to mention a famous poem by Scotland's best-loved bad poet, William McGonagall. Unfortunately, in resolving, "for a few days to sport and play, / And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay", as McGonagall put it, the 40ft whale couldn't have made a worse choice of playground. The Tayside town was at its zenith as a whaling port, it was winter and some 700 whalers were sitting around with time on their hands.
The consequences, as Crumley recounts in his new book, The Winter Whale, were fatal for the huge creature, the celebrated skeleton of which, hanging in a Dundee museum, haunted the young Crumley's dreams. But it also, in his adult view, blighted the city's reputation – even for a whaling town – with the way in which it unnecessarily and ineptly hunted down the visitor that entertained thousands over several weeks, breaching and "waving" with its huge flippers, as humpbacks do. The whale's spectacular displays failed to save it from a community that responded by harpooning it several times over, leaving it to die at sea, then disembowelling and embalming its vast carcase before transporting it ignominiously about the country in a Barnum-style money-making racket.
The Tay Whale skeleton
The whale even had its own Jonah, of whom more later, if some newspaper reports are to be believed – but what really exercises Crumley, now 61, was a report that a humpback whale harpooned off Alaska in 2007 was found to still contain the head of an antique harpoon which must have been fired into it some 120 years before, giving the whale an age of around 130 years. "If the Famous Tay Whale had been left to its own devices," he argues, "rather than hunted to its slow and dishonourable death in early January 1884… it might still be alive today."
Crumley's childhood memory was of the grim spectacle of the unfortunate leviathan looming above him in Dundee's McManus Gallery, which jarred with the otherwise enthusiastic relationship with the natural world which would fuel his later career. "When I discovered that the whale had been a humpback, I got interested and asked the local library if they had anything about the Tay Whale in the archives. The answer was no, apart from this wedge of 125-year-old newspaper cuttings – and they were terrific."
What amazed him, however, was the tenor of the reporting, which regarded the whole incident as a huge wheeze. "Every single one of these newspaper cuttings took the p*** out of the whole thing." Yet, he says the way the sportive whale was hunted down, suffering several harpoon strikes yet towing a steam launch, two open whale boats and at one point a steam tug for some 50 miles, before dying a lingering death somewhere off the Bell Rock lighthouse, "had all the hallmarks of a bullfight".
He doesn't accept the usual response that the killing of a whale was, in late 19th-century Dundee, par for the course. "Huge crowds turned out to watch it, and it was about for weeks before the whalers decided to go and hunt it." The humpback, he adds, wasn't even a particularly viable whale commercially, "and the way in which it was killed was spectacularly inept, for professionals. There really is no redeeming feature, either about the way the whale was hunted and executed, or indeed what happened to it afterwards."
While seeking out humpbacks in Alaska, under more civilised circumstances, Crumley listened to them "sing", using hydrophones. In recent years, the weirdly echoing cadences of humpback calls have become well known, thanks to Judy Collin's widely played rendition of the old whaling song Farewell to Tarwathie, complete with humpback chorus, and subsequently on myriad New Age recordings. As a part-time jazz musician, Crumley was astounded at the sounds he heard, spanning some seven octaves and audible to other whales half an ocean away.
"I'm still enthralled by the idea of this humpback, after the harpoon lines eventually broke, still being alive and sending out distress calls." He smiles ruefully: "You'd wonder just what shade of blues it was sending out."
Succour, however, was not forthcoming and the whale died, but was about to take on a grotesque new lease of life after death. It was found floating on the morning of 7 January 1884 by fishermen out of Gourdon, who towed it to Stonehaven where the massive carcase was auctioned. The only two serious bidders were Professor John Struthers of Aberdeen University and a Dundee whale-oil magnate and small-time theatrical impresario, John Wood. "Greasy Johnny", as he was known, won, bidding £226 – some £12,000 in today's terms – although the professor was allowed to measure and later publicly dissect the dead whale.
Greasy Johnny had the whale disembowelled, flensed, partly filleted and a structure inserted under its skin to replace its skeleton. After thousands had paid to inspect the embalmed carcase (and have their photographs taken sitting in its propped-open jaws), Wood toured this "caricature of a whale", as Crumley calls it, throughout the country on specially fitted rail wagons.
Wood had his redeeming features. It was he who donated the massive skeleton to the city of Dundee, where it has remained enshrined ever since (although currently dismantled during museum refurbishment).
There, it unsettled a young boy who would become a nature writer, who would one day eyeball a humpback whale off Alaska and would one day, as he says, "try and set the record straight. Because I have heard the humpback sing."
• The Winter Whale is published by Birlinn.
AMONG many extraordinary aspects of the whale's story was the fact the leviathan gave up its own "Jonah" – at least according to a report in the Dundee Advertiser on 8 February 1884: "Extraordinary excitement prevails in Glasgow owing to the discovery this forenoon of a live man in the stomach of the Tay whale…"
Professor Struthers of Aberdeen, after dissecting the beast in "Greasy Johnny" Wood's yard, had sent over three tonnes of intestines, plus the stomach, to Glasgow University. Scientific curiosity seems to have changed to utter astonishment when, "on the upper portions of the stomach being carefully drawn back, the obstruction was found to be a human being, lying in an easy position, as in sleep…"
The man was alive but comatose, and attempts to waken him by shouting and electrocution proved fruitless. The Rev John Smith declared "that the man was no other than the prophet Jonah, and that the whale and the unfaithful prophet had both been preserved miraculously, and been directed to these shores as a triumphant refutation of modern scepticism."
However, he was recognised as a tramp known as "the Autocrat of the Tay Ferries" and it was speculated whether he might have fallen into the Tay and been accidentally swallowed or, more likely, been one of the crowd visiting it in Wood's yard and had crawled inside, seeking somewhere warm to sleep.
Frustratingly, Crumley could find no further reports on the matter. It could all have been a hoax, he agrees: "Perhaps the subsequent newspaper silence reflects embarrassment."
The full article contains 1414 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
