I have the dubious distinction of being the great grand daughter of a whaler. Dubious because it is now politically incorrect to even talk about killing whales. Yet at one time there were about ten commercial whaling stations operating in the Caribbean, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in Barbados, Trinidad and Grenada. Today under international agreement, Bequian whalers can harpoon no more than two whales per year. The whale is caught by traditional methods of hand thrown harpoons in small open sailing boats. The catch is not sold and is exclusively used for local consumption. It is given away to family and friends.
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How does something like this end up on my breakfast table? Simple. The men in my family are mostly seamen with strong ties to the sea. I would not say that they are the romantic type -in fact just the opposite but for some reason they romaticize a meal of whale meat. These are taciturn men. Men who can spend all day looking out across the bay with a pair of binoculars without saying a word or it would seem moving an inch. They are men of slow grunts and uhhms for conversation. The ship captains among them have permanent squints from staring for hours on end at vast empty horizons. Apart from an almost a voyeuristic love of listening to VHF channel 16 and its call and distress conversations; silence and monotony are their thing. That is unless there is whale meat on the table. Then they come to life. They become animated. They trade stories about their adventures at sea. To hear them, you'd swear that they battled the beast themselves. And while they don't actually beat their chests and say Arrrg! As cousin A put it, " The way they carry on it's like, hoist the flag fellas we gah(got) whale!" You'd swear they sat in that boat themselves like the lateAthneal Ollivierre risking life and limb to bring it to the table.
I was to have broken that male seafaring tradition when as a teenager, I put to sea on my father's ship. At the time I was full of romantic notions (delusions:-) of being the first female ship captain in the family. Eight days later, somewhere off the coast of Jamaica with my last book read and nothing to do but cast about aimlessly in the 8 X 8 tin quarters of my room - that dream perished from the sheer boredom of life ( all eight days of unbroken monotony) at sea.
I would sit in silence on the bridge with the captain, my uncle V. A taciturn man of slow grunts and uhhms for conversation, But for explanations on how to read charts and plot a course (hopeless gibberish to me since I was flunking mathematics), there was a lot of silence and . I healthy 16 year old has an aversion to silence that and the knowledge that partying their summer away on some beach burned away Ahh yes my toothpick chewing Uncle V embodiment of the solitary sea dog. Lover of silence, vast endless horizons and voyeuerr of channel 16 Vhf call and distress radio conversations. That and the knowledge that my fiends were all partying on a beach somewhere, quick is the word I decided a life at sea was best left to the men and jumped ship in St. Lucia!
T Before you turn up your nose
As to the taste - meh. Nothing to write home about. But don't tell that to the older men for whom it's like har har ppound our chests Raise as one cousin put it it's more a psycological thing for the older men folk, it's like raise the flag we ga whale. It's smelly, oily. the blubber sits in the fridge waiting for someone to fall ill.
