In last month’s
column, I wrote about a 1914 expedition to the high arctic whose people were
rescued by the King and Winge, a
historic fishing vessel known to many in Kodiak as a crab fishing boat, from the
1970s until it sank in the Bering Sea in 1994.
Not quite as
famous, but still well known in Kodiak, and similar in looks to the King and Winge, was the Tom and Al., which had its own colorful
life. Launched as the Ragnhild in
1900, the vessel was renamed after themselves
by Thomas J. King and Albert L. Winge when they
purchased it some time after 1910. The
two men also owned the King and Winge Shipbuilding Company in West
Seattle which built the King and Winge in
1914, making the two vessels shirt tail relatives, if not exactly sister ships.
The Tom and Al in Kodiak, about 1980. Photo: Kodiak Maritime Museum, Roger Page Collection |
Of note regarding
the shipyard is that Albert Winge, originally from Boston and arriving in Puget
Sound around 1880, learned the art of shipbuilding from Donald McKay, who in
the 1850s, designed clipper ships, some of which, including the Lightning and the Flying Cloud, remain the among the fastest sailing ships the world
has ever seen.
The Tom and Al however,
sailed, if not particularly fast, at least gracefully, as a halibut schooner
off the Northwest coast and in Alaska for decades, manned by dory men who rowed
away each morning in their small flat bottomed craft to set and retrieve their
longline skates before returning the ship at the end of the day.
Around 1960 the Tom and Al was acquired by Tom and Eben
Parker, a pair of colorful and
imaginative siblings from the Oregon coast. Looking for a way to make the boat
pay for itself, they contracted to deliver a very special kind of sea creature to
the Bio Products processing plant on the Columbia River in Astoria. To get the
venture going, Bio Products purchased a 90 mm harpoon gun from a Norwegian outfit,
and gave it to Frank and Eben to mount on the Tom and Al’s foredeck. They set to sea looking for sperm whales.
Alva Elliot, ex-Navy Chief Gunner's Mate, and
Richard Carruthers, Jr., Bio Products Sales Manager, with harpoon gun.
Photo: Oregonian April 23, 1961
|
In their later
years the brothers would regale young fishermen in Kodiak’s watering holes with
whaling stories, not all of them suitable for a family newspaper. Their
listeners, products of the 1970s anti-whaling enlightenment, were aghast at the
killing of these sentient creatures, but as fishermen themselves, were also fascinated
at the thought of hunting the Leviathan, the ultimate fishery.
The thing to
remember from where we sit now is that in 1961, when the Parkers went after
whales, it was perfectly legal and socially acceptable to do so in the United
States. In fact, Frank Parker’s son, Frank Jr., recalls seeing school groups touring
the rendering plant after the boat had delivered, gawking at the dead whales
laid out on the dock.
According to Frank
Parker Jr., Bio Products sold the whale meat to Oregon mink farmers to feed
their fur bearing livestock, and the whale oil to NASA, which had just sent the
first American into space. While the notion of NASA buying whale oil seems
bizarre now, in the context of the times, and given the exotic nature of the oil,
it made sense.
Workmen cutting into a whale at Bio Products, Hammond, Oregon Photo: Oregonian, July 13, 1962 |
Once rendered
down, whale oil burns with a clear white light, an extremely valuable property before
electricity, and which made the fortunes of several New England seafaring towns
until cheaper kerosene became widely available after the Civil War. But whale
oil also maintains its viscosity in an extremely wide range of temperatures and
pressures, a characteristic which made it useful for all kinds of earthbound mechanical
applications well into the 20th century. In 1961 that special
viscosity also made it invaluable for machinery headed into near earth orbit, where
things get very hot in direct sunlight and very cold in shadow, and where the
near vacuum of space causes most petroleum and vegetable based lubricants to boil
into vapor.
These days, NASA denies
using whale oil in its spacecraft, and certainly using any part of a whale was
illegal in the United States after the 1971 Marine Mammal Protection Act became
law. However, equally suitable synthetic lubricants didn’t come into use until the
mid-1960s, and like other high technology items of the post war years,
including watches and transmissions, it seems probable that whale oil
lubricated some of the hardware NASA sent up in those early space flight years.
It is likely that the oil was used by subcontractors rather than NASA directly,
and probably without much discussion, given the general lack of empathy for
whales at the time. Still, a lively online debate endures on this topic, easily
accessible to the curious Google searcher.
For the Parker
brothers however, it was economics rather than regard for cetaceans which ended
the Tom and Al’s whaling days. NASA,
or their suppliers, began using synthetic lubricants and stopped buying whale
oil, which made Bio Products drop its ex-vessel price for whales, which made
whaling un-profitable on the Tom and Al.
Frank Jr. says the Parkers were forced to give back the 90 mm harpoon gun and
replace it with a 60 mm weapon. The smaller harpoon bounced off the whales
however, which made the whole venture even more pointless.
Frank and Eben went
on to other fisheries, including Alaskan pink shrimp, which was blessed with an
insatiable consumer market and a huge biomass, at least until the shrimp
disappeared in the early 1980s. The shrimp fishery, like the Kodiak king crab
fishery, was, depending on your viewpoint, the victim of overfishing, an oceanic
regime change, or too many cod fish. The
Tom and Al missed all of that discussion
by a couple of years. It sank off the Barren Islands on February 2, 1980, hauling
a load of Kodiak shrimp to Homer.