324 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



naturally enough, tows better when travelling head first. If the whaleboats of one company are amidst 

 a school and several whales are being taken, the holes are usually chopped both fore and aft, so that 

 several whales can be taken in tow in line astern behind one powerful motor-boat. A grapnel and a 

 boat-hook are usually included in the boat's equipment to assist in reeving the towing-strap through 

 the hole mortised with the boat-spade. The towing-strap may be a short -warp doubled and knotted, 

 or more commonly a wire-rope strop or short chain supplied from the attendant motor tow-boat. 



In the American fishery up to the 1860's or 1870's the boat-spade was sometimes employed in a 

 perilous operation called ' spading flukes '. This was a method of ' stopping a running whale ' by a single 

 hamstringing blow with the sharp spade, aimed at the tailstock where it receives the insertion of the 

 flukes. Spading flukes was less often employed in Sperm whaling than in northern Bowhead whaling, 

 when the prospect of a fastened Bowhead escaping by a run below the edge of the pack-ice sometimes 

 called for this desperate use of the boat-spade. The introduction of bomb-lances made spading flukes 

 unnecessary so that by the late nineteenth century the practice was obsolete. And I am told that in the 

 Azores today, although the bomb-lance has itself been abandoned in favour of a return to hand- 

 lancing, the use of the boat-spade as fluke-spade has not also been revived and the whalemen no longer 

 deliberately 'fight under the flukes of the whale'. 



Waifing the whale and signalling. An Azores whaleboat carries three hand-signalling flags or waifs. 

 It is common practice to use one of these flags for waifing, that is, marking a dead whale. A dead 

 Sperm whale occasionally sinks, when it becomes a total loss, unless it can be held by lines from one 

 or more whaleboats, or from a motor-boat. However, it usually floats, although low in the water and 

 with its corrugated flank awash, and, at a distance, made only a little more conspicuous by the stiffly 

 upthrust flipper. It is therefore marked with a flag, to be picked up when the whalemen's day ends, 

 for the whaleboats and tow-boats will carry on with their hunting after a kill has been made, unless 

 the day is advanced and there are no prospects of further whales. The Azores waifs retain the tradi- 

 tional pattern of bygone whaling: the wooden staff of each, where it is inserted into a slit cut on top 

 of the whale, is notched to make from one to three projections which hold in the fibrous blubber. 

 The Americans sometimes employed a blackfish poke, painted white and on a stray-line, for marking 

 dead whales, but a waif is invariably employed in the Azores. 



The primary purpose of the waifs is actually for signalling, and the regulations of the Gremio dos 

 Armadores da Pesca da Baleia (1925, p. 9) insist that all whaleboats must carry three flags, one red, 

 one white, and one blue. Senhor Tomas Alberto de Azevedo has explained their significance to me. 

 A red waif set in the boat summons assistance. For instance the boat may require more line, or may 

 need a tow from the motor-boat : or there may be a forthright emergency, as a smashed boat, or a man 

 injured by a foul line. The white flag is an invitation from the boat of one company to that of a rival 

 company to ' mate ', that is, to share the same whale. Companies may only do this in unusual cir- 

 cumstances, for they are vigorously competitive. However, it may happen, for example, that a Pico 

 boat fastens to a whale but is swamped. It is still fast, and by all the rules of whaling owns this whale, 

 although in no position to do much about it. A Fayal boat may fasten at this juncture, and then the 

 showing of a white flag means that each company agrees to go half shares in the whale. A blue flag 

 is a mutual sign of recognition between boats of the same company : it may also signal to a cliff look-out 

 that two or more boats are in company. The American whaleboats carried between one and three 

 waifs. Methods of signalling between the whaleship and her boats differed a good deal: some ships 

 evolved arbitrary codes intended to baffle other vessels which might lower for the same school. But one 

 system commonly used, and described by J. T. Brown in a footnote (1887, p. 257), required three or 

 four coloured waifs and closely resembled the present Azores code. The boats carried flags which were 

 duplicated in the ship, just as the red, white and blue Azores waifs are replicated in the motor-boats. 



