Dear Diary: Today We Saw a Whalefish
A. L. Lloyd identifies The Eclipse as a “Stonehaven steamer” that left for the Arctic during the 1887 whaling season. Gavin Sutherland, in writing for the Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, provides more information:
Launched from Hall’s yard, Aberdeen, on 3rd January 1867 the ‘Eclipse’ cost almost £12,000, carried eight whale boats and a crew of 55 men. After a famous career at Peterhead the ship was sold to Dundee in 1893 and later on to Norway. Renamed ‘Lomonosov’, the old ship ended her ocean going days as a research vessel under the Russian flag based in Murmansk.
The ship is memorialized in The Eclipse, which opens with a line about the twenty-first of June, when the crew spotted a whale and “lowered all hands away.”
The Eclipse’s famous captain David Gray enlisted the help of Australian photographer Walter Livingstone-Learmonth during the 1888 season. The Eclipse can be seen flenching a whale (stripping the blubber) in the photograph here.