Susannes
Folksong-Notizen
- [1967:] Chase of the right whale, East Greenland,
c. 1810.
By 1760, thirty-five whaling vessels, sailing out
of London, Hull, Whitby and Leith, were fishing
in the waters between Spitsbergen and East
Greenland. The right whale was the main quarry,
[...] it was the Arctic grounds that occupied
most of our nineteenth century whalers. As a
result of merciless hunting, the greater number
of whales had migrated westward from Spitsbergen
by the end of the eighteenth century, and were
found off the east coast of Greenland. But by the
1820s, they began to move westward again, into
the Davis Straits. Until 1820, three-fifths of
the northern whalers had been using the East
Greenland grounds. By 1830, only four ships were
still fishing there; the rest were trying their
luck up in Baffin Bay.
In 1820 there had been eight English whaling
ports - London, Hull, Whitby and Newcastle being
the chief ones, with Berwick, Grimsby, Liverpool
and King's Lynn of secondary importance. By 1930,
Liverpool, Grimsby and Lynn had abandoned the
trade, London owned only a couple of whalers, and
Hull owned thirty-three out of a total of
forty-one. In Scotland, however, the trade was
growing. [...]
Early in the nineteenth century, a whale skipper
was charged in King's Lynn with the murder of an
apprentice. A broadside ballad, in the form of a
wordy gallows confession and good night,
appeared, and in course of circulating round the
East Anglian countryside it got pared down to the
bone. The poet George Crabbe was interested in
the case, and took it as a model for his
verse-narrative of 'Peter Grimes', which
subsequently formed the base of Britten's opera.
The opera is in three acts. The same ground is
covered in three verses by a song as bleak and
keen as a harpoon head. (Notes A. L. Lloyd,
'Leviathan!')
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Susannes
Folksong-Notizen English Notes 
