The whaling industry in County Mayo

By Tom Gillespie

ONLY once have I seen a live whale. Well, to be honest, the massive tail of a whale as it plunged into the deep waters off Achill Island.

That was in September 1995 while returning from a deep-sea fishing expedition out of Purteen with skipper Tom Honeyman.

Tom alerted us to the monster marine mammal and we gazed with awe as, with a flip of its tail, it disappeared beneath the water.

But whales are no strangers to the west coast of Ireland and in the past the giant beasts were hunted for their blubber.

In the early part of the 20th century there was a commercial whaling station on Inishkea Island off Blacksod.

Some years ago I visited Inishkea South where I waded out to Rusheen, off the south island, where the station was established in March 1908.

In September 2017 an exhibition entitled ‘Early 20th Century Norwegian Whaling in Co. Mayo’ was presented by the National Parks & Wildlife Service, Ballycroy.

In an article on the exhibition by Denis Strong, divisional manager, National Parks & Wildlife Service, he wrote:

At the beginning of the 20th century, whales were prized for both their meat and oils. Norway imposed a 10-year ban on whaling in their waters in 1904 due to their own depleted stocks. As a result, Norwegian whalers wished to expand their operations in other areas.

In 1908, attempts were made by two Norwegian businessmen to set up a station on the Shetland Island off the Scottish coast. When this attempt failed, a second one was made on Arranmore in Co. Donegal. Opposition from local commercial fishing interests scuppered both bids.

However, thanks to a man from Youghal, Co. Cork, a station would be built at Rusheen, on Inishkea South. The Norwegians maintained the Arranmore Whaling Co. trading name.

The station at Rusheen was beset with problems, as the company had to contend with some militant islanders. Around 30 local hands were employed on Rusheen. All the men were from South Inishkea, as the islanders refused to allow strangers from the mainland to work at the station but also the inhabitants of the neighbouring North Island.

The foreman and timekeeper, Johnny O’Donnell, was the ‘king’ of the island and enjoyed the distinction of owning the only dwelling on the island with floorboards.

The station had its best catch of 102 whales in 1909, with blue whales, fin whales and sperm whales among the haul. The whales’ blubber and oils were exported primarily to Scandinavia and an on-site mill ground down the whale bones to be used as meal.

However, by 1912, the number of whales caught dwindled to just 26. By 1914, the company was heavily in debt and on January 4, 1915, the Arranmore Whaling Co. officially ceased to exist.

Another Norwegian, the charming and shrewd businessman Captain Lorentz Bruun, who had a temporary involvement with the Arranmore Whaling Company, had obtained a site for a station as early as 1908 on the east side of the Mullet Peninsula in Blacksod Bay. Whaling got underway in the summer of 1910.

The regular staff at the station comprised about 20 Norwegian and 30 Irishmen from 1911 onward, who took over from the Norwegians as they developed their skills. Local workers were treated to coffee for the first time. The local men, who would not have had extensive wardrobes, were taken aback that the Norwegians would change into fresh clothes for their evening meal.

Like at Inishkea, when a whale was brought in it was moored at a buoy until the men were ready to deal with it. It was then towed to the bottom of the slipway by a rowboat. A steel-wire rope dragged the whale up the incline onto the flensing plane. Once in position, the whale was stripped of its blubber ‘blanket’, a job assigned to two Norwegians, but later given to local workers once they had acquired the necessary skills. Once the blubber was peeled off it was divided into more manageable blocks and then fed into a boiler.

The outbreak of World War One was the death-knell of whaling in north Mayo. All fishing stopped in August 1914, and the Norwegians left for home.

The station was taken over in 1915 by the British Admiralty who used it as a petrol base until 1918.

When the war ended, Bruun sought to recommence whaling at Blacksod. He died on Christmas Day 1924, and, in his absence, the Blacksod Company had no driving force.

The company faltered due to the lack of demand for whale oil and poor management and was dissolved in 1932, bringing to an end Mayo’s short-lived and turbulent association with whaling.

I further discovered that between May and September 1909 the Inishkea whaling station took 102 whales, from which 2,900 barrels of oil, 53 tons of ‘guano’ (artificial manure), 120 tons of bone-meal, 124 tons of cattle food and 14.5 tons of whale bone were obtained.

Once the station was operational, another strange sight greeted the islanders when a film crew arrived and proceeded to capture the whaling activity for posterity in a film entitled Whaling Afloat and Ashore.

The film’s director, Robert Paul (1869-1943), was a pioneer of the British film industry in its formative years.

The 1909 film opens on a whaling ship with a harpoonist successfully shooting a whale which is towed to the Rusheen station and hauled up the slipway. The blubber is stripped away, cut into pieces and fed into large steam boilers for oil extraction. The meat was dried to make ‘guano’.

An intriguing sequence shows the Inishkea and Norwegian whalers relaxing together during their work breaks. They dance, wrestle on their backs with their legs, hold sack races and undergo various trials of strength, occasionally glancing at the camera with self-conscious grins.

In August of that year the islanders went on strike and succeeded in having their wages increased to £1 per week.

Some of the islanders became highly skilled at the whaling work, including a young man named Pat Reilly who was particularly adept in the use of the four-and-a-half foot blubber knife.

But there were also tensions with the South Islanders refusing to allow North Inishkea workers to be employed at the station.