But presently, out of the grayness of the rain squall there came an old familiar scent, and the mate at the wheel pulled lustily at the syren string to advertise our whereabouts. An answering hoot came back, and then through the mist a small green-painted steamer of some thirty tons burden loomed out, slowly bearing down upon us. Her pace was almost imperceptible, but a cumbersome harpoon-shell gun on her stem-head gave us the necessary hint as to her occupation, and presently we could make out two towing hawsers astern of her, and a bloated finner whale made fast, tail foremost, to each.
The fish were blown up like balloons with decomposition, and like balloons they were striped with longitudinal gores. Their jaws were just awash, and oil oozed from them in a slimy fan. The smell of them was almost past endurance. The little green whaler had killed, perhaps, three hundred miles away, and was towing her catch back to the home factory for realisation. And a valuable catch it was too. The big black bull was worth all of £250; and although the cow whale, which showed her ivory-white belly, was smaller, she would probably fetch her £200 with bone at its then enormous price.
This fishery of the blue-finned whale, or, as he is more technically named, the finner, is an industry of comparatively modern birth, and has its centre in these bleak Northern seas. The right whale and the sperm whale have been hunted for how many centuries I do not know; the mist of ages has closed over the first capture, and not many more years will pass before the last score is nicked in the tally. The right whales have been chased almost entirely from the face of known waters; they are searched for from Davis Straits to the Kara Sea; ships have looked for them amongst the tabular bergs of the Antarctic, but the fishery is on its last legs. Even with bone at £40 a ton, the Nantucket and the Peterhead owners are dropping out of what they consider a dying business. This newer fishery has, however, increased by such leaps and bounds that in 1894 the kill amounted to 1500 head. And all the credit is due to a Norwegian skipper, one Svend Foyn.
[Illustration: TOWING HOME FINNER WHALES.]
The finner is no stranger in the North. Whalers of all countries have seen him spout and gambol for three hundred years, and have cursed him with maritime point and fluency. Occasionally some harpooner, disbelieving tradition, made fast to a finner, and experienced that sensation which the _vaquero_ found when he lassoed the Mexican State Express. And as fishing implements developed, they shot at him with harpoon guns and riddled him with explosive lances. But the end was always the same, it was either "cut" or "swamp," and there was another white-painted whale boat losing way over the swells, with a white-faced crew, no harpoon, and an empty tub of line.