A whale tale (actually, a song)
Fact and fiction in Greenland Whale Fisheries
Maybe it’s because I’ve been writing the section of my 17th century novel that takes place on a sailing ship and have been reading Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander in bed at night. But this morning an old song randomly popped into my head—Greenland Whale Fisheries—which I used to listen to as a teenager.
It’s a folk song that was recorded during the American folk music movement of the late 1950s and early 60s, telling the allegedly-true story of a disastrous whaling expedition to Greenland in which a harpoon boat capsized and men were drowned.
When did this happen? How many men died? What was the captain’s reaction?
Now that’s where it gets interesting. Because almost every recorded version of this song tells a slightly different version of the story.
I didn’t know this until about twenty minutes ago.
Back in my teens or twenties, if I had an urge to listen to this song, I would have had to run around town all afternoon seeking a record store that had it in stock. Now I just opened a music app, put Greenland Whale Fisheries in the search box, and whoosh! up came about a dozen different recordings.
The version I remembered was by the Weavers, recorded in 1959 with the iconic Pete Seeger on banjo. (Dear reader, if you are among my folk-music friends from the ‘70s, you likely remember that version too.)
That version narrates, “it was 18 hundred and fifty-three, on June the 13th day, that our gallant ship her anchor weighed, and for Greenland sailed away, brave boys, for Greenland sailed away.”
But my music app also showed me a version by the Journeymen, another early ‘60s folk-revival group, that pegged the date at June 13, 1863, ten years after the Weavers. It found an a cappella sea shanty group called The Longest Johns with a version that put the voyage on the same day but three years later on June 13, 1856.
Meanwhile the Dubliners, an Irish band, have a version set on March 18, 1844. A version by the punk Pogues—so fast it sounds like the band downed triple espressos—places it at March 18, 1846. A slow a cappella version by the Watersons, with some minor chords that give it a different feel, puts it not in March or June but on August 4, 1864.
The songs also differ on how many men were lost. The Weavers said four, the Dubliners and Pogues five, the Watersons and Longest Johns seven, while the Journeymen weighed in at a whopping ten.
And the captain’s reaction? Most of the versions parallel the Longest Johns, who sang:
“The losing of those seven brave men, it grieved the captain sore, but the losing of that bloody gray whale… it grieved him ten times more, brave boys, it grieved him ten times more.”
While the Weavers, the Journeymen, and a version by Peter Paul & Mary—all part of the ‘50s-‘60s folk music “scene” that brought traditional ballads to the attention of the broad American public—swap the captain’s priorities around:
“To lose the whale, the captain said, it grieves my heart full sore, but to lose four of my gallant men, it grieves me ten times more, brave boys, it grieves me ten times more.”
How quintessentially American — whitewashing that beautifully cynical view of the captain’s ambitions into a treacly “kumbaya” moment of compassion! Did this come from the liberal, idealistic nature of the folk revival? From a commercial effort to sell more records? Maybe both?
Stepping back, it’s not surprising to have so many different versions of an event, especially one that lives in the haze between history and legend. The song would have been passed along orally from one singer to another, one port to another, one generation to another. Of course it changed. What was surprising to me was finding all these different versions preserved for posterity through recording technology—all digital, accessible with a tap, side by side in my app arguing with each other.
Given the competing facts… was this debacle of a whaling trip in fact history? Or was it legend? Did it ever happen?
As a teenager knowing only the Weavers’ version, I assumed there was an actual event and that it took place, as the song stated, on June 13, 1853.
Now I turned to Wikipedia, which suggested that the song originated in the West Indies. (Another surprise, if accurate! Leaning on a different whale tale by Herman Melville, I had imagined a New England port like Nantucket.)
A well-researched source on English folk music notes that a form of the song was published as a ballad before 1725. And that that the Greenland whaling grounds were in fact fished out by 1830:
The Dutch and English had opened up the Greenland grounds (where, by the way, they fished for right whales, not sperm whales) early in the sixteenth century so the song came into being some time between then and the opening years of the eighteenth.
So all the dates in all the recordings are wrong. This trip would have taken place in the early 1700s, not very long after my own fictional sea voyage. There’s no specific 19th century whaling trip that is the basis for the song.
Is the song then a lie? It may not be factual in dates and numbers but it’s true in spirit—in its depiction of the excitement, danger, greed, and fellowship of the whaling industry. That’s true for much of literature: Hamlet and Elizabeth Bennett and Sethe from Beloved never existed but their stories are based on emotional or historical truths.
The novel I’m working on is similar in that it’s set in a real historical moment, the 1660s, with lots of historical detail, but my characters and their story are completely made up. I hope they ring as true to readers as the Greenland whaling captain’s reaction—the un-whitewashed, callous one—did to me.
By the way, in case you‘re wondering… there are no whales in my novel.
My characters’ sea voyage takes place in the Mediterranean, which was not a whaling site.
Besides, that Melville guy did that already.
o
The North Carolina coast is also referred to as the graveyard of the Atlantic. Our maritime museums have chronicled the many wrecks and crews lost on our coastline. Fascinating stuff.