Forgive me if you've talked about this before, but I'm watching The North Water and I'm wondering how accurate it is re: the process of hunting whales and stabbing whales in the heart (is bloodspray like THAT very typical?) I know very little about whaling in general. Keen to hear your thoughts! Thanks mate :)
It’s pretty accurate, yes!
content warning for animal death ):
Harpoons were never intended to kill whales—they were a way of fastening to them to keep them from escaping and essentially tire them out from dragging an entire boat + six men along with them. How they end up being killed is with a lance, which is a long spear-like tool that’s used to puncture a vital organ or sever major arteries. Poor things. The blood spout was the tell-tale sign that they had punctured said vital and that the hunt was over, so yes that was an accurate and necessary element. There was a colloquialism for it of ‘chimney’s a’fire’.
The thing that’s not accurate is how quickly they were able to kill that whale. People could be out there for hours. It was an exhausting + unrelenting experience which I don’t think was reflected there. But…I get it…the only whaling story that felt utterly comfortable with stretching out its time like that was Moby Dick.
Since the North Water is based in British Arctic whaling the process after was different from Southern in that they’d just put blubber into barrels and process it ashore later because it was so cold one didn’t have to worry about it spoiling. But Southern whaling, i.e. w/ a focus on sperm whales and what the American industry was centered on, had tryworks aboard (big oven with giant pots, basically) to immediately boil it down into oil. Which would also take days depending on how big the whale was. So alas, North Water lacks all of the vibes of turning one’s ship into a smoking hellish inferno…or tossing a celebratory batch of donuts into the boiling oil for reaching 1000 barrels.
