The Hemisphere: Pothead!11

As the sun rose over the spruce-covered Newfoundland hills one morning last week, the tiny (34-ton) whaler Arctic Skipper put out from the weathered jetty at Dildo and chuffed at a steady six knots down Trinity Bay. Deck hands were just finishing their breakfast of fried eggs, sausage and coffee in the tiny galley when a lookout cried: “Pothead!”† Captain Iver Iversen rang the engine signal. As the Skipper picked up speed, the whales sounded. When they came up again, they were heading out to sea, and a deck hand fired a rifle shot to turn them. A red signal flag went up the mast as the whales changed course. Out from the shore came a fleet of motor skiffs and rowboats, ready for work.

Meat for the Mink. For generations, Newfoundlanders have gone out in their frail boats to hunt the potheads, which pursue squid into Trinity Bay. It was a haphazard venture until Norwegian Captain Iversen settled near Dildo in 1946 and opened a factory to render blubber and process the greasy meat prized by mink ranchers for the gloss it gives to the animal fur. To increase the whale catch, he raised money for the Arctic Skipper and a sister ship, Arctic Venture, to go farther out into the bay and herd more potheads shoreward.

Last week, as the Skipper drove toward Chapel Beach, the Venture swept in its herd, and the small boats closed around more than 150 thrashing whales. Young men and old—like Isaac Higdon, 75, and Bob Newhook, a pothead killer since 1918 —beat empty oil drums and shouted at the top of their voices. The best boatmen in Newfoundland danced their craft among the whales and the long spiked lances stabbed out, turning the frothy water crimson with blood. In its death throes, a whale rammed the boat containing three generations of Higdons. It smashed three planks below the water line, but the skiff stayed in the drive. Ashore, 12-year-old Charlie Williams thrust a lance into a beached whale. The din was terrible: clanking tin cans, shouts from fishermen, screams from women on the beach and a frantic pounding of whale tails on water. Blubber for the Plant. Examining the carcasses, the fishermen found that they had set a season’s record: 3,200 with three weeks still to go. Best previous year was 1951 with 3,047. Hauled up on the beach, the whales were sculped (stripped) of the blubber and meat, which was carted to Captain Iversen’s factory. This year the plant had processed 300 tons of whale oil, to be used for fine lubricants and margarine, and almost 600,000 pounds of meat. It gave each fisherman a chance to pick up as much as $75 a week during the 14-week season, a welcome addition to the hard-earned $600 to $1,000 most of them make from codfishing in late spring and early summer.

†A pilot whale, sometimes called blackfish, which averages eight to ten feet in length (some have measured 24 feet and weighed as much as five tons).