We all know about hunters and gatherers and how primitive societies tended to be one or the other. You won’t find many gatherers far up above the Arctic Circle where all is ice, snow, and patches of open water. Except for sled dogs, lost birds, and the occasional polar bear, the only animals the local people saw were seals. They ate the seal meat, blubber, and organs and they used the skins and furs as blankets and clothing.
How Would You Like to Take a Nantucket Sleighride?
A harpoon is a spear about as long as the man throwing it is tall and maybe longer
Think of it as what it is – a knife on a stick. The knife for cutting and slashing and stabbing and the stick so you don’t get bitten or clawed while you’re busy stabbing the seal that came up to the air hole where you had been patiently waiting for one to come along. Nothing but ice and snow everywhere around you.*
For a while, hunters clubbed seals when they were out of the water
It was easy because the animals didn’t defend themselves, much like what did in the Dodos in Mauritius. In time, seals learned to get under the ice and stay there when hunters were around. When they needed to come up for air, seals used any of many small breathing holes they kept from freezing over.
The smart hunters chose a popular air hole and sat motionless until a seal popped up to breathe
If they hit the seal over the head with a club, it would sink, so after another while, someone figured out how to put a pointy hook on the end of a spear and tie it to a rope.
The kill was wasted without the capture
Hunters drilled a hole in the middle of the bone hook at the end of the harpoon. When the line was pulled on either by the predator or the prey, the barb/hook would be turned sideways, making it far more difficult to pull free of the seal’s flesh, muscle, and bone.
Meanwhile, a couple of really good seal harpooners decided to take on a small whale that wandered too close to shore
The harpoons got longer and stronger and so did the lines attached to them. Then someone had the bright idea to go out in old wooden sailing ships and look for the big whales out in the ocean, miles from anywhere.
They’d sail around until they found a whale
It’s a big ocean, and one way to spot whales at a distance is to recognize the mist expelled from the holes in the top of their heads. When kids draw pictures of whales, they often have spouts of water coming out of the top of their heads, the whales, not the kids. They’re too young to know that whales do not blow water from their blowholes. They exhale the carbon dioxide from their lungs plus whatever mucus and oily bits are found around whale blowholes.
Thar she blows!
This is the only thing many people remember from when they had to read Moby Dick in school because it’s one of the classics. It’s the cry from the crows’ nest that all whale hunters want to hear. They sail their ship over close to the whale and drop rowboats over the side. The optimum length for whaleboats was about 30 feet, enough to carry a harpooner, a rowing crew of six, and little else. There was nothing in the way of comfort or shelter, nothing to add weight or get in the way on a whaleboat. Strong men pull on wooden oars to keep pace with the swimming whale. Then one guy stands up and throws a harpoon into the whale’s back.
Most whales don’t like being harpooned
Their reactions are often violent thrashing, diving deep to evade the predator, or off to the races, as they try to outrun to the sudden injury. Successful whalers learned the sperm whales fought the longest and hardest and blue whales were likeliest to dive. Those who learned to quickly cut the rope so they weren’t pulled under the water by harpooned whales lived to harpoon other whales.
Hunting got much easier as inventors learned to shoot ever-larger harpoons from guns attached to the mother ship
Whales that found it child’s play to tow a small whaling boat didn’t have the strength required to pull entire ships that weighed hundreds of tons.
When the whale finally tired of dragging the boat, the hunters would reel it in, kill it, and tow it back to the mother ship
Rowing a boat is hard enough work. Imagine the crew having to really put their backs into it to tow a dead whale back to the ship. And once they got there, they’d have to butcher it. They’d strip tons of blubber from the whales, chop it into small pieces and boil it down into liquid oil that they stored in wooden barrels.
They’d also harvest the whale’s baleen, the organic counterpart to celluloid, the bendable plastic
Usually called whalebone, it was used to stiffen women’s corsets and men’s shirt collars. Whalebone was used to make the framework for hoop skirts, buggy whips, riding crops, and – get this – hat brims.
Ambergris, too
It’s the polite word for whale vomit and it’s the Holy Grail of whale bits. Produced in the intestines of sperm whales, it was used as an ingredient in perfumes, added to keep the scent from fading. It was also added to wine to stimulate sexual desire.
I like the image of the just-harpooned whale towing a 30-foot-long whaleboat as if it’s a bathtub toy, sailors hanging onto their hats and everything else
When the whale takes off with the harpoon stuck inside, the small, open whaleboat is pulled along by the whale in what became known as the Nantucket Sleighride. Nantucket for the center of the whaling trade in the U.S. and sleigh ride for easy way a trotting horse pulled a sleigh on runners over the ice and snow.
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*1 Patience was the key to the seal hunter’s success. When I was a mere lad, I was taken along one ice fishing morning. There were two things wrong with it. It was cold and it was boring. Later I found the actual driving force behind ice fishing was to get away from the wife so you could drink all day with your pals.
What can I take a closer look at for you?
My name is David and I wrote this article, along with more than 500 others on this site alone. Ever since I was a kid with an insatiable curiosity and a knack for learning, I’ve observed, analyzed, and made sense of hundreds of different subjects and topics. Today, in addition to writing, I help organizations solve difficult problems requiring imaginative solutions. For more on this, drop by davidallanvan.com
Bonus
In 1971, the hard rock band Mountain recorded an album called Nantucket Sleighride. The hit track was Mississippi Queen. There were no whales, whaling boats, or harpoons on the psychedelic cover art.
