[Gutenberg 63211] • A Year with a Whaler

". . . The beast plunged into the air, snarling and clawing at the sea, then rushed again for the boat like a white streak. It rammed into the boat bows-on, stuck one mighty paw over the gunwale, and with a snarling roar and a frothing snap of glistening fangs, leaped up and tried to climb aboard. . . ."

Walter Noble Burns (1866-1932) was a writer of Western history and a Western author, notable for his book, The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926). In 1919 he published "A Year with a Whaler" which was hailed by critics for its vivid descriptions of a whaler's life.

Out of sheer desire to see what it was like, Mr. Burns shipped out as a greenhorn on a whaler making the voyage from San Francisco up into the Arctic. They wallowed through hurricanes, traded with natives, bumped the Arctic ice floes, and caught their share of bowheads.

It is a story of personal adventure and observation, perhaps a last first-hand glimpse of a dying industry and of the life it entailed on the men who followed it.

When a group of Eskimos came aboard his whaling ship, a mysterious white man dressed as an Eskimo caught the author's attention:

"Among the Eskimos who came aboard the brig from the large village on shore, was a white man dressed like an Eskimo to the last detail and looking like one except for a heavy beard. He had run away from a whale ship three years before, hoping to make his way to some white settlement to the south and there secure passage on shipboard back to San Francisco. He had escaped, he said, in an Eskimo kyack tied alongside his ship. As soon as he was missed officers and boatsteerers put ashore in a boat and trailed him. . . ."

Burns' own whaling ship experienced the "escape" of one of its crew as he describes in vivid detail:

"One twilight midnight with the sun just skimming below the horizon, Peter wrapped from head to foot in an Eskimo woman’s mackintosh of fish intestine, with the hood over his head and half hiding his chubby face, climbed over the rail into an Eskimo boat with a number of natives, his sweetheart among them, and set out for shore. Nelson and several sailors watched the boat paddle away, but no one but Nelson knew that the person bundled up in the native raincoat was Peter. The boat got half a mile from the brig. Then Nelson could stand it no longer. The strain was too much. He rushed back to the quarter-deck where old Gabriel was walking up and down. “ Peter’s run away,” Nelson blurted out. “ There he goes in that boat. That’s him dressed up like a woman in fish-gut oil-skins.” Without ado Gabriel called aft the watch, manned a boat, and set out in pursuit. . . ."

Burns give a harrowing account of a time when a pack of enraged walruses came after his whaling boat:

"Roaring furiously, the great beasts converged from all sides in the wake of the chase. The animals were swarming menacingly about the boat. Long John, who had been in such ticklish situations before, began to beat a tattoo on the gunwales with his sheath knife, at the same time emitting a series of blood-curdling yells. This was intended to awe the boat’s besiegers and had a momentary effect. The brutes stood in the water apparently puzzled, but still roaring savagely. But they were not long to be held off by mere noise . . . ."

This fascinating story of a greenhorn on an Arctic whaler will never lose its charm. The author answered an advertisement asking for inexperienced seamen for a whaling voyage and spent a year cruising for the big sea mammals. He tells the story amazingly well and gives a picture of an industry almost vanished from the seas; of the life of the men who followed it and their strange elemental characters.