CAMPBELTOWN WHALERS
A. I. B. Stewart

     In his recent and enthralling book on the history of Scotland's fishing and whaling industry, reviewed in this number, Angus Martin mentions that in 1751 two whalers were built for Campbeltown.

     Enquiries elicited the information that the source was a note made by the late Eric R. Cregeen from a paper contained in Box 426 of the Saltoun collection in the National Library of Scotland, sent by him to Father Webb, preserved by Mr Duncan Colville and now in the archives at Lochgilphead and kindly provided to me by our friend Murdo MacDonald, the Archivist. Eric Cregeen's note reads as follows:

Campbeltown fishery whale 1751.

Note by E. R Cregeen:

Without quite following all the accountancy, I would say that the Company was no small business, with £9,000 Capital (and it must be sterling or the fractions would be twelfths, not ¼d, ½d ).

     The only information previously known to me about the Campbeltown whalers is a piece in Colonel Charles Mactaggart's lecture entitled A ramble through the Old Kilkerran Graveyard, delivered to the Society on 25th October 1922. I seem to recollect that my interest in local history was born when I attended this lecture at the age of seven.

Colonel Mactaggart wrote as follows:

Campbeltown Whalers.

     Another important factor in the shipping of old Campbeltown was the Greenland whale ships. Two fine local ships, if not more, were employed in whale fishing, the "Argyll", of 400 tons, commanded by Captain John Munro, and the "Campbeltown", of 300 tons, commanded by Captain Mark M'Callum. These ships sailed from here for the Arctic regions in March every year. and returned in June. In July they started on a second voyage, returning from it at the beginning of winter. They brought the whale blubber here in casks or tanks, and, on their arrival in the harbour, masonry furnaces were built on their decks supporting iron cauldrons, in which the blubber was boiled down into oil. The oil and whalebone were eventually landed and stored in a buuilding at the Trench point, the ruins of which some of us can remember, and the furnaces were then dismantled and their fragments thrown overboard. Campbeltown fishermen tell a strange story of submerged buildings on a shoal off the Trench Point called the "Shoalmeeth", and assert, quite truthfully, that nets dragged over that shoal bring up fragments of masonry; but don't let that story disturb your minds, and don't from it imagine that a former Campbeltown was submerged bya great convulsion of nature, such as an earthquake or a tidal wave. The masonry of the "Shoalmeeth" is simply the fragments of the furnaces of the old whalers which, twice a year over a long series of years, were thrown overboard at the spot where the ships were in the habit of anchoring. The boiling of the blubber and the cleaning of the whalebone must have been very unsavoury processes, and one wonders what those supersensitive persons, who were described at a recent Town Council meeting as being unable to cross the Esplanade without holding their handkerchiefs to their noses, would have done, and what they would have said, had they lived in old Campbeltown; when an east wind was blowing; the tide was out; the Mussel Ebb was exposed from the Lochend Dyke to near the "Quay Neb", and the whalers were busy boiling blubber and cleaning whalebone, Ceylon's fabled "spicey" breezes, and her breezes can be very "spicey", especially in Colombo harbour, could not have been in it for "spiciness" with the breezes of old Campbeltown; but I have failed to notice anything on the old Kilkerran tombstones to show that our ancestors here did not live as long as people in other places, in spite of the whalers and the Mussel Ebb.

     This gives rise to a mystery because many years ago Mrs Bigwood sent me a print of the proposed sale of one of these vessels, the Campbeltown. The notice of this sale is reproduced on the back cover. Was the ship unsold, or as Colonel Mactaggart suggests, did she still continue her annual voyages to Greenland, perhaps under new ownership? 

     The notice for sale contained a long Inventory of the ship's equipment and stores which included the following:

SAILS at Mr. Colwells at Mill stairs Rotherhith (sic)

In a warehouse No 21 at Simon's Wharfe near Battlebridge
1 old Main Top Gallantsail
6 Boats' sails
GUNNERS. stores on board
1 musket
1 cask with Powder
4 Powderhorns
2 Bags with small shot
In a warehouse No 21 at Simon's Wharfe
2 swivel guns
4 muskets and bayonets
1 cag with Musket ball
1 worm

   A cag is apparently a keg. "Sale by the Candle" or more fully sale by wick of candle was an auction sale during which bids were received only so long as the small piece of candle burned.

No 38 Autumn 1995

Wee Drams

Page  3:   Franciscan Converts in Kintyre - Part 1

Page  4:   Mr. Macslimun - Clydeside Cameos

Page  5:   Military Echoes

Page  6:   The Cuckoo is a Bonnie bird  //  Roadside Flowers

Page  7:   James Watt at Campbeltown - Part 1

Page  8:   By Hill and Shore - Part 1

Page  9:  The Screws

The A.I.B. Stewart Page