“By 1760, the hunters of Nantucket had virtually exterminated the entire local population of cetaceans, but they cared little: they built larger whaling sloops and equipped them with brick furnaces capable of rendering blubber into oil on the open ocean. From then on, there was no longer a need to return to port as often to unload the blubber, and their fleet had a much wider range. By the beginning of the American Revolution, the people of Nantucket had reached the limits of the Arctic Circle. They had reached the west coast of Africa, the east coast of South America, and as far as the Falkland Islands.”
Excerpt from
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Nathaniel Philbrick
The Faroe Islands, the grindadráp, and what I hadn’t anticipated
I won’t be neutral. I went to the Faroe Islands with an inner tension that I never really managed to resolve.
I wanted these islands. For their light, or rather for its absence. For their isolation, their almost unreal quality. And because I photograph, and often look to capture that feeling of the raw north.
But there was the grindadráp.
You can try to look away, or to place it in context. You can read that it is an ancient tradition, one that once had a vital purpose. But when you look at what it really is, a collective hunt of long-finned pilot whales driven into a bay, you cannot pretend it is just one cultural detail among others. These are very concrete images, and very hard to forget.
Before leaving, I tried to tame this unease, to give it an acceptable shape. I told myself that other countries, such as Japan or Norway, also hunt cetaceans without many people being put off visiting. I told myself that the practice probably belonged to a world that was fading away, and that time would slowly do its work. I let these ideas settle one by one, the way you stack fragile justifications. Nothing solid, nothing very honest either, but enough to go.
Once there, the beauty is simply undeniable, and hard to describe without falling into clichés. A rugged, unstable beauty, at times almost hostile, that makes no attempt to seduce. The grindadráp, meanwhile, stayed in the background, abstract, invisible.
I went at Christmas. The night was long.
The problem is the return. The images come back: the ones you had seen before leaving, and the ones you stumble on afterwards, sometimes by chance. And by then, nothing filters them any more.
What struck me was the gap. How can something so brutal coexist with an environment so pure, seemingly almost untouched? As if two irreconcilable realities shared the same shore.
You can understand the harshness of centuries past: the cold, the isolation, the necessity. But how has this violence travelled through time, only to settle, intact, in our present?
I thought I could compartmentalise. I was wrong.
