Dead whale-watching in Iceland

People now prefer to watch whales instead of eating them. But I ate whalemeat a long time ago, and the only whales I have ever seen were dead ones being hacked to pieces in Iceland. This all happened in 1966, when I spent a summer in Reykjavik as a trainee placed by AIESEC - an international organisation which arranges what would now be called ‘internships’ for economics students.

I flew out of Birmingham Airport (then called ‘Elmdon Airport’) on the day of the World Cup Final. The passengers crowded round a transistor radio in the departure lounge to hear the match. I spent the first week staying with an Icelandic family, where I ate quite a lot of fish. After that, I moved to lodgings with some other AISEC trainees in a house with a young landlady. I was based in a firm called ‘Kassagerdin’, which made boxes (mainly for fish) as well as printing all sorts of materials. I began working in the office, working on a complex accounting machine. But later, I had a far  better time on the workshop floor as a member of a three-man team operating a large machine which cut and printed cardboard boxes. The two other workers were the teenage son of the firm’s owner and a teacher working over the summer school break.

The AISEC committee in Iceland did an excellent job, and the group of trainees went on various trips to see the vast volcanic landscape of Thingvellir, the Arbaer Folk Museum, the waterfall Gullfoss, the Great Geysir, and Hveragerdi (where we saw bananas grown in greenhouses heated by hot thermal springs). I took a few days off on holiday to hitch-hike around the coast to Akureyri and from there to the Lake Myvatn. I was given lifts by many friendly and interesting Icelandic people. These included the driver of an articulated oil tanker. At one point on the journey, he turned off the road, and drove the truck along a track through the twisted rocks of a lava field until we came to a half-built bungalow. He unloaded some long planks he had stored along the side of the trailer, placed them next to the bungalow, and then returned to the main road. He was building this house himself, he explained, for his retirement. Later that day, I checked into a hotel in the village of Blonduos. I slept in the hotel annexe, built on the edge of a beach of black sand facing the Arctic Ocean.

Before all this, however, I paused in my journey at Hvalfjordur, just North of Reykjavik. In 1966, the road would around the head of the fjord - the location of a whaling station. From my memory, this comprised a jetty, a slipway and a large shed. The jetty had originally been built by the US Navy, and several Icelandic spectators pointed to the ‘secret American submarine base’ around the coast. Eventually, a small whaling boat approached the jetty with (I think) two whale carcasses slung on each side. The first carcass was winched to the slipway, and as it rose on the slope a mass of blood swelled out into the sea. Some young men, stripped to waist, climbed on the body of the whale and began hacking it to pieces with large long cleavers. In a short time, there was just bones, meat and entrails. There was also the smell - a smell so strong I remember it now almost 50 years later.

Also 50 years later, the Hvalur Whaling Company still operates in the same location, still catching fin whales and bringing them to a whale-abattoir in a fjord named after whales.