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Crew on a prospecting cruise to South Georgia and Antartica, 1913-14. All photos courtesy Edinburgh University Main Library, released under CC-BY licence

Lyndsie Bourgon is a writer, oral

historian, and National Geographic
Explorer. Her writing has appeared in The
Atlantic, the Guardian, and Smithsonian,
W here the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean merge, a small Scottish
archipelago sits barren and bald, hundreds of clumped islands of
grey and green rock. Shetland is a 12-hour ferry ride from the granite port
among others. She lives in British city of Aberdeen, and its population of about 23,000 stretches across one
Columbia.
larger island and a few smaller ones that dot its shores. Even in the dead of
2,800 words summer, it is a cold and reclusive place. e most consistent weather is wind,
which howls day and night. 
Edited by Sam Haselby

While the Shetland economy benefits from North Sea oil and gas exploration
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and commercial fisheries, a certain old-fashioned atmosphere reigns. In
summer, Lerwick, Shetland’s largest town, decorates its streets with bunting.
Save 240 Tweet Recently, I received a piece of mail from a Shetlander whose return address
is only their last name and the town they live in. Shetlandic dialect – no
longer used regularly but still heard in homes and at the pub – leaves
Shetlanders with an accent flecked with Scottish and the now-extinct
language of Norn, which lilts with soft syllables such as ‘da’ and ‘de’. It is a
remarkable place to learn about the edge of the world. 

In the mid-20th century, young men from Shetland would come of age and
travel to Edinburgh. ‘Quite a lot of Shetland boys did that,’ says Gibbie
Fraser, who was that boy some 60 years ago. ‘And I remember goin’ and dere
was a lot of men dere and dey all seemed huge and in dose days dey all wore
… dere dress clothes as almost a uniform.’ For many, this would have been
their first trip to the mainland, their first trip to ‘Scotland’ proper at all, and
the boys would watch the double-decker buses for the first time, or board a
black cab for the neighbourhood of Leith. ere, they would stand in lines
that snaked around city blocks.

In a building on George Street, on the third floor, an employee of the now-

defunct Christian Salvesen company would be holed away, scribbling names
on a ledger. e company, then the largest whaling firm in Britain, began
staffing their whaling operations in Antarctica once a year, in the early fall.
‘ e way I felt myself, because of my lack of education if you can put it that
way, I had to be a soldier of fortune,’ says John Alexander, a former
electrician. ‘Dere wasn’t much work in Shetland,’ echoes Davie Clark weeks
later, at a fish and chip shop in Brae, a town on the edge of a bay in Shetland.
‘I stayed on the island of Yell and I’ve been 37 years here, and in that period
there was nae work.’ So the boys from Shetland went south.

‘Salvesen’s office was kind of along da street dere, and de men would be
queuing up along da street waitin’ on jobs,’ says Alister omason. ‘And
dey’d come oot da office and dey’d shout out a name and, mostly all de
Shetland men, they’d pick dem outta de queue, dey knew dere names
because somebody recommended dem.’

Shetlanders, even the least experienced, came ready for whaling, steeped in
familiarity with the sea, and this, according to surviving whalers, set them
apart. In his house in Lerwick, Norman Jamieson proclaimed: ‘You can get
sea time just standing at the gable of the house in Shetland!’ e interior of
Jamieson’s house has been styled like a fishing boat bunker. A sign on the
door says he’s ‘Out to Sea’.

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S hetlanders are some of the only living people who participated in

Antarctic whaling. Whaling in the Southern Ocean followed the
devastation of whale stocks in the North Sea around Britain, Iceland and
Norway in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Whaling has been a
foundation of Shetland’s economy for more than 300 years. It began with
subsistence whaling, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then developed into
large-scale Arctic and Greenland hunts in the mid-19th century. Salvesen
began whaling in Shetland at Olna in 1904, when the company established a
whaling station. ‘ at’s where [they], I suppose in a way, came to appreciate
the Shetland men,’ said Fraser.

Leith Harbour, South Georgia, 1912

Heading into the 21st century, though, the utility of a whale slowly became
obsolete. Fibre technologies meant plastic and nylon replaced whale bones
in clothing. Advances in chemistry and electricity meant that, by the 1900s,
homes were no longer lit by whale-oil lamps. By the early 20th century,
northern waters became unproductive, stretched to their limits by
overfishing. ‘So when this whaling died off and [Salvesen] moved to the
Antarctic and Southern Hemisphere, then he asked Shetlanders to come
with him,’ Fraser said. In 1909, facing down the prospect of war along with
low whale-catch numbers, the British Colonial Office established a whaling
base on an island in the sub-Antarctic archipelago called South Georgia,
about 1,600 km east of Cape Horn off Chile. In resource extraction from the
sea, so tied to seasonal cycles, the end had always been apparent, a prophecy
visible in ledger books. But Salvesen still went south. In the 1930s,
technology had begun to make it easier to fish in Antarctic waters – and
Shetland’s men had the skills to go.

Cumberland Bay Glacier, South Georgia, 8 June 1917

Both world wars had brought an increased need for whale products.
Margarine, made primarily with whale oil, replaced butter in larders across
Europe, and whale-meat extract was a primary ingredient in stocks such as
Bovril. Lubricants derived from whale oil were also in high demand for use in
explosives and machinery repair. Even animals relied on the whale – meat
and bone meal were eventually used in stock feed and fertilisers. Britain’s
Colonial Office knew that they were well-primed to take the blue, humpback
and sperm whales that lived in the southern seas. More than half of all
whales officially harvested in Antarctica were hunted in the years following
the Second World War.

All whalers landed on South Georgia, a crescent moon-shaped chunk of land

four times as long as it is wide, sliced down the middle by a mountain range
that slopes towards the shoreline. Geographers have described the island as
‘drowned topography’ – its bays rest on a foundation of old mountain valleys
that have been flooded by the ocean. ese submerged summits mean that
undersea currents create a rich feeding ground for the crustaceans on which
whales feed. Salvesen was placed in charge of operating the station named
‘Leith Harbour’, after the Edinburgh neighbourhood, by the Colonial Office.
From Leith Harbour, whalers hunted rorqual whales such as blue, humpback
and sperm whales. At the height of Antarctic whaling, Leith Harbour boasted
a bakery, a hospital and a movie theatre. Britain and Norway dominated the
global whaling industry, and they were able to staff their operations with
experienced men.

Men would scale whale carcasses using ropes,

like ice climbers with pickaxes

Commercial whaling continued at Leith Harbour until 1961; the by-products

born of a whale’s body were necessary, valuable commodities. e industry
ended at a time of intense industrial power that facilitated over-harvesting.
As whales had been caught to the point of extinction surrounding the
whaling station, all whaling eventually became ‘pelagic’ – that is, occurring
entirely out at sea, where whales were chased, shot, butchered and processed
on massive, 10,000-ton ‘floating factory’ ships. e mass adoption of factory
ships in the 1930s changed everything about whaling and, in some cases,
hastened the end of the industry itself.

The SS Saragossa factory ship c1925, later scuttled after a fire in the South Shetland
Isles

Factory ships usurped the need to carry whales to shore for harvest, and
worked in tandem with catcher boats, which were fast and could chase down
whales and harpoon them for factory ships to later collect. ose harpoons
were explosive, catching in the whale’s body before detonating a few seconds
later. Catcher ships used wartime technology such as ASDIC (Anti-
Submarine Detection Investigation Committee) radar, which would track
whale movements underwater to surprise them. Factory ships had onboard
chemistry labs, to ensure that the whale oil being reduced onsite was of a
higher quality. e jawbones of blue whales sat often at the edge of the ship’s
deck. Men would scale whale carcasses using ropes, like ice climbers with
pickaxes.

e process of butchering a whale was bloody – it included hoisting a whale

up onto the ship’s deck by its tail and shoving it along a slipway dubbed
‘Hell’s Gates’. Workers would ‘flense’ the whales, separating blubber from
muscle using long, curved knives. A whale had to be shot, flensed and off the
deck of a ship within five hours. Flensed whale blubber was fed through a
hole into the steamers below, where it was melted into oil and inspected for
quality and purity. e rest of the whale was then methodically chopped up.
Muscle and bone was mulched into meat meal, and packed into barrels to be
sent home. Even the guts were inspected, for ambergris – a valuable,
mysterious chunk of the stomach that’s used in perfume manufacture. Very
little of a whale was left behind.

Soon, the overfishing that depleted whales near the coasts would drastically
reduce the populations of blue and sperm whales in the waters surrounding
Antarctica. By the 1950s, many whaling officials conceded that Antarctic
whaling was operating on borrowed time. Whaling, then, fell squarely into
what the scholar Arthur McEvoy in 1986 dubbed ‘the fisherman’s problem’,
a paradox: overfishing would lead to the end of the industry, but there was
no reward for restraint. By 1963, the British abandoned whaling in
Antarctica entirely, because the combination of overfishing and regulation
via the International Whaling Commission had made it unprofitable.

I n the summer of 2017, I interviewed Clark and 10 other Shetland whalers

for my postgraduate dissertation. eir lives shared some distinct
patterns. Almost all had learned of Antarctic whaling from their families, who
in many instances had anchored themselves first to North Sea whaling with
Salvesen. Almost all of them had headed to Edinburgh at 16 to get their first
job, starting as mess boys on whaling ships, then working their way up.
‘When you think about de whaling, whaling was far more in tune with de
Shetland way of life than going in de merchant navy,’ said Fraser.

‘All dese men was always going away from Shetland,’ said Dan
ompson.

‘Yeah, dey was always goin’ away,’ said Alister omason, sitting
next to him.

‘Always … Men was away for long periods.’

‘ ere weren’t any other options. And I think people thought it

was a very hard life, a lot of hardship, but bein’ brought up in
Shetland I think we were quite capable of dealing with hardships.’

A season spent in Antarctica took place from early fall until April.
Technically, each contract required men to ‘over-winter’ – spend the off-
season in Leith Harbour – every three years. But there was never any need to
enforce this rule. Men would volunteer to over-winter in droves for the extra
cash, spending their time repairing machinery, cleaning and maintaining
buildings. In extreme cases, some men would go close to three years without
coming home at all, stacking contracts back-to-back.

General view towards South Georgia, 1928

Life in Antarctica took place either on shore, on a ‘floating factory’ ship, or

aboard a catcher boat. Clark remembers catching what he believes was the
largest blue whale ever caught, in 1953: ‘Once they got the claw on the tail
and started to heave them up to the chute, he could’nae clear, they had to go
cut some of da blubber off, it tilted the boat, you understand what I’m
saying.’ Clark was on the smaller catcher boat for that whale, and remembers
gunning top speed, shooting harpoons at the whale multiple times before
being successful. ‘Now, I’ll never forget this,’ he says. ‘When I get down and
looked, he’d dropped a killer harpoon, well this to me looking back on life,
I’m not really thrilled on what we done.’

Many of the Shetlanders spoke about whaling as a deep and broad

experience, an identity, a unique landscape, the allure of the whale itself.
‘ ere’s no doubt about that,’ says Jamieson. e close quarters of a whaling
ship, albeit an entire factory floating in the middle of the sea, created a kind
of seclusion that even the edge of Antarctica couldn’t bring. Shetland
whalers who worked on catcher boats or factory ships lived between the
antipodes, commuters to the edge of the world. ey had an understanding
of the ‘seasonal round’ – that is, the shift in natural-resource harvesting that
each season brings. ey knew that there was an end to the abundance of
the sea.

‘I didnae think about it then because it was all

money as far as we was concerned’

e last survivors of the whaling industry remember that the end always
seemed to be near. Older hands had seen the days of huge catches – 100-ton
blue whales hauled up in the back of factory ships, butchered onboard and
gone in a day. en, the catches grew skimpy. Numbers shrank too, and
demand also ebbed. While the Second World War had prolonged need, in
reality the demand for whale oil was in decline. From their first days aboard,
many remember older whalers talking about the industry’s demise.

In 1963, the last floating European whale factory sold to firms in Japan. e
end of the industry did not come from the appearance of an animal rights
movement but rather the speed of harvest and inefficiencies of running a
business between the Southern Ocean and the Shetlands. ‘To me, I didnae
think about it then because it was all money as far as we was concerned,’
says Clark. By the end of the industry, catcher boats were competing with
each other, racing against each other to shoot whales.

Leith Harbour’s whaling station manager Gerald Elliot saw otherwise. In his
1998 memoir, he writes: ‘We all realised we were near the end of our great
whaling venture [by the 1950s].’ For Elliot, though, work for Salvesen would
continue in Edinburgh as Salvesen changed their focus to ground transport
and refrigerated trucks. As Britain’s whaling industry petered out,
Shetlanders would pay a heavy toll.

Resident of South Georgia, 1915

From apparent abundance to seemingly sudden scarcity, the Shetlanders’

relationship with the whale carried obvious significance. Salvesen set up a
financial trust for Shetland men, knowing that the company had made
fortunes on their backs. Men had spent their entire working lives on the
ships owned by Salvesen, or at least servicing them. And yet there was no
official warning of the end: upon arriving home from Antarctica, letters
simply awaited the Shetland whalers telling them there would be no more
whaling. Soon after, Salvesen contracted a lawyer in Shetland to distribute
money allotted for now-unemployed whalers. e trust money was meant to
facilitate more of the same type of work – buying fishing or lobster boats, for
instance, or a tractor for croft land, or a few sheep to herd. ey presumed
the Shetland men would continue making a living from the sea.

In houses and cafés and cabins across the main island today, the last of
Shetland’s whalers made clear that they never intended for their work to
drive an animal nearly to extinction. ose men gather as part of the
Salvesen Ex-Whalers Club, both on the mainland of Scotland and on
Shetland itself, bonded through a job and isolation in ways similar to military
men.

‘I can always remember, when I came back to Shetland I took the taxi
through to Bigton in the mornin’ when de boat come in,’ says Willie Tait.
‘When it came in over de top of de hill dere and I looked out at St Ninian’s
Isle and what dey call de Louse Head … I nearly crying.’

In July 2017, the Natural History Museum in London hung the skeleton of a
blue whale from the rafters, above the grand Hintze Hall. At one time, a
diplodocus named Dippy towered here, introducing visitors to the Earth’s
grand ecological history. Now it is the whale, almost brought to extinction at
the hands of man, peering down from above, her tail nearing the foot of
Charles Darwin’s white statue. e whale’s name is Hope.

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