Whaling continued to be the basis for the colonies’ success until the gold rushes brought would-be miners from across the world, all needing to be fed.
By that time wool was also bringing Australia wealth. New, faster ships carried vast crops of wheat. Refrigeration meant that meat could be shipped to England too. The income derived from whaling peaked in 1840, but whaling remained a significant although gradually declining part of our economy until the 1960s.
Whaling Procedures
The Britannia’s voyage in this book took place at the time described, and all other details are as accurate as possible.
Whaling was seen as an extraordinary adventure as well as a way to get rich. At a time when other ships’ crews might be ‘pressed’ by kidnapping them while drunk, or just hauling them off, men volunteered to go whaling. They talked of their voyages afterwards with genuine nostalgia, and spun tall tales to impress the ‘landlubbers’.
The men who crewed the ships and whaling boats, the harpooners and those who wielded the lance that plunged to the heart of the whale to kill it, had courage, determination, teamwork and skill. Our modern condemnation of their job shouldn’t make us blind to the qualities they needed to do their job.
Some whaling crews were guilty of horrendous crimes along the Australian and New Zealand coasts. But in other communities whaling ships were welcomed, both for trade and for marriage with the crewmen.
All the procedures on the Britannia have been taken from accounts of the time, but as there appears to be no available diary or log from that ship specifically, I have been unable to tell which methods and traditions her crew followed. There seem to have been many variations, some where American and English whalers followed different practices, but also where individual captains made their own decisions.
The Britannia seems to have been relatively small, with a crew of only twenty-four. The usual crew for a whaling boat was six men, one of whom was the harpooner, and an officer who was the sweep (steersman) and who swapped places with the harpooner to actually kill the whale with a lance. But other references speak of two harpooners in a single boat, and larger boats with up to eighteen men. The running out of the rope as the whale was secured was quite dangerous, as the rope uncoiled rapidly and could easily catch an oarsman unawares if it hadn’t been meticulously coiled.
The whaling ships of the Third Fleet may also have sailed close together, so that their boats might herd the whales more easily, especially as the coast was still relatively unknown and only sketchily mapped, but I have had the Britannia sail alone, to make the story simpler, with fewer characters for the reader to deal with.
The Whalers of the Third Fleet
Five of the eleven ships that arrived with convicts on the Third Fleet to Australia were whalers (I have been unable to find out much about the fourth and fifth ones so they’re not mentioned in the story). After unloading their cargo of convicts they intended to head to the established whaling grounds off Peru and Chile, but Captain Parker of the HMS Gorgon (a Royal Navy ship, not a privately owned vessel) recorded seeing a shoal of fifty whales, and stated in a letter that most of the whalers had changed their plans and decided to fish on the Australian coast, as they had seen more whales on the voyage between ‘South Cape and Port Jackson’ than they had in six years off Brazil.
All five whalers put to sea in October. The Britannia was away for fourteen days, arriving back on 10 November. Captain Melvill stated on 22 November in his letter to the Britannia’s owners, Enderby and Sons, that the Britannia and the William and Ann had killed seven whales and brought in one each, but were prevented by heavy weather from retrieving the others. He also says in that letter that they let down two boats and that Captain Bunker on the William and Ann did the same. He states too that ‘we’ (presumably the ships belonging to the Enderbys) had had the pleasure of killing the first four whales on this coast. But that would have been on a later voyage than the first short one described in this book.
The Mary Ann returned the day after the Britannia returned, 11 November, while the William and Ann stayed out until 22 November, but again, extreme gales prevented them taking any whales. On 3 December the Mary Ann killed nine whales, but only got part of five on board, gathering thirty barrels of oil instead of hundreds. The other ships appear to have headed to South America, believing the winds too strong off the Australian coast for success, but Melvill told Governor Phillip he intended to stay on the New South Wales coast for three months.
By 1799 at least two ships had had successful whaling voyages in that region. Another fleet of whalers set out from England for New South Wales, including the Britannia, believing that they might be more successful if they avoided the summer months and their southerly gales, and instead sailed when the winds were from the west. By then too the Nautilus and possibly other ships had discovered thousands of seals, which men hunted for their oil and fur and skins.
Sydney would prosper as a port for refitting and supplying whaling ships, as would Hobart, once another colony was established there. Whales were not only processed on board ship, but ‘right whales’ — a species that floated once they were dead — were dragged back to land and boiled up on shore.
Many informal whaling camps invaded Indigenous lands, often killing large numbers of people and kidnapping Indigenous women. In other, more disciplined camps, the whalers traded with the local people, Indigenous men joined whaling crews and travelled the world, and Indigenous women married sailors, living in cottages with the luxuries that a whaling income could provide. By 1840, when the Perth (or Carnac) Whaling Company and the Western Australian Whaling Company were formed, whaling ships patrolled most of the southern and mid-Australian coast.
I remember lines of whales migrating up the coast in my childhood in the 1950s. Dad and I walked along the beach, and he pointed them out to me, the different shapes of the different species. I must have been five or six then, no older, because by the time I was old enough to walk the beach by myself there were no whales to be seen, and the nearby Moreton Island Whaling Station had been closed — not because people had protested about killing whales, but because there were not enough left to make the station economically viable. The great whaling grounds of the Southern Ocean had been fished out.
Slowly, however, whale numbers are growing again. Gradually Australians, and people of other nations across the world, decided that whales, with their extraordinary songs, complex intelligence and social life, and their major role in the ocean’s ecology, need to be preserved. Now Australia is a staunch advocate for the end of all commercial whaling.
The week after I wrote this story, I flew across Moreton Bay, near Brisbane, and there below us were whales, dozens of them. Not the sperm whales of this book — those are probably gone forever — but others, and in the numbers I used to see with my father. I wish I could tell him they are back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JACKIE FRENCH is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2014–2015 and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much loved historical fiction. ‘Share a Story’ is the primary philosophy behind Jackie’s two-year term as Laureate.
You can visit Jackie’s website at: www.jackiefrench.com
ALSO BY JACKIE FRENCH
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Somewhere Around the Corner • Dancing with Ben Hall
Daughter of the Regiment • Soldier on the Hill
Tom Appleby, Convict Boy • A Rose for the Anzac Boys
The Night They Stormed Eureka • Nanberry: Black Brother White
Pennies for Hitler
General Historical
Hitler’s Daughter • Lady Dance • How the Finnegans Saved the Ship
The White Ship • Valley of Gold • They Came on Viking Ships
Macbeth and Son • Pharaoh • Ora
cle • I am Juliet
Ophelia: Queen of Denmark
Fiction
Rain Stones • Walking the Boundaries • The Secret Beach
Summerland • A Wombat Named Bosco • Beyond the Boundaries
The Warrior: The Story of a Wombat
The Book of Unicorns • Tajore Arkle
Missing You, Love Sara • Dark Wind Blowing
Ride the Wild Wind: The Golden Pony and Other Stories
Refuge • The Book of Horses and Unicorns
Non-Fiction
Seasons of Content • How the Aliens from Alpha Centauri
Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me into a Writer
How to Guzzle Your Garden • The Book of Challenges
Stamp, Stomp, Whomp • The Fascinating History of Your Lunch
Big Burps, Bare Bums and Other Bad-Mannered Blunders
To the Moon and Back • Rocket Your Child into Reading
The Secret World of Wombats
How High Can a Kangaroo Hop? • A Year in the Valley
Let the Land Speak: How the Land Created Our Nation
I Spy a Great Reader
The Animal Stars Series
The Goat Who Sailed the World • The Dog Who Loved a Queen
The Camel Who Crossed Australia
The Donkey Who Carried the Wounded
The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger
Dingo: The Dog Who Conquered a Continent
The Matilda Saga
1. A Waltz for Matilda • 2. The Girl from Snowy River
3. The Road to Gundagai • 4. To Love a Sunburnt Country
5. The Ghost by the Billabong
The Secret Histories Series
Birrung the Secret Friend
Outlands Trilogy
In the Blood • Blood Moon • Flesh and Blood
School for Heroes Series
Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior • Dance of the Deadly Dinosaurs
Wacky Families Series
1. My Dog the Dinosaur • 2. My Mum the Pirate
3. My Dad the Dragon • 4. My Uncle Gus the Garden Gnome
5. My Uncle Wal the Werewolf • 6. My Gran the Gorilla
7. My Auntie Chook the Vampire Chicken • 8. My Pa the Polar Bear
Phredde Series
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6. Phredde and the Purple Pyramid
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COPYRIGHT
Angus&Robertson
An imprint of HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks, Australia
First published in Australia in 2016
This edition published in 2016
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Text copyright © Jackie French 2016
Illustrations copyright © Mark Wilson 2016
The rights of Jackie French and Mark Wilson to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work have been asserted by them under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
French, Jackie, author.
Barney and the secret of the whales / Jackie French ; Mark Wilson.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9944 6 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0322 9 (ebook)
French, Jackie. Secret histories ; 2.
For primary school age.
Whales—Juvenile fiction.
Whaling—New South Wales—Juvenile fiction.
New South Wales—1788–1851—Juvenile fiction.
Wilson, Mark, illustrator.
A823.3
Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover illustration by Mark Wilson
Cover image: Boy © Per Magnus Persson / Johnér Images / Corbis