The Greenland Whale Fisheries
“‘Twas in eighteen hundred and fifty-three, and of June the thirteenth day, that our gallant ship her anchor weighed, and for Greenland bore away.” Joanna Carver Colcord placed The Greenland Whale Fisheries in the latter eighteenth century, during the peak of the British bowhead fishery. The date in the song shifts with each singer: Captain W. B. Whall gives June 2, Masefield March 20, and collected versions range from February to August. The ship changes name, the captain changes name, but the story never does. A crew sails north, spots a whale, launches boats, and loses men when the whale capsizes them. They never catch the whale.
The real season had a logic the singers ignored. Whalers left Hull, Whitby, or Dundee in late February or March, stopped at Orkney or Shetland to fill out their crews, and followed the retreating pack ice north to hunt bowheads along the ice edge from May through July. Masefield’s March 20 departure fits this pattern. A June 13 departure does not: by then a ship would already be among the ice. A.L. Lloyd called the song’s events “not historical but imaginary, a stylisation,” and singers plainly swapped in dates as they pleased. But the arc is right: out in spring, home by autumn, and the closing verse that every version shares. “Oh, Greenland is a dreadful place, a land that’s never green, where there’s ice and snow and the whalefishes blow, and the daylight’s seldom seen.”