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HENRY KEYSERLING THE WHALER

PART ONE: 1866-1903

By Robert Keyserlingk

“One of the pioneers of modern whaling off the coasts of East Asia.”

The History of Modern Whaling[1]

INTRODUCTION

Henry [Heinrich] was the father of three Keyserling[k]s who settled in North America after WW I [Robert and Henry] and WW II; [Cecile Popp].

Despite his family’s landowning background, Henry [Heinrich] became and remained a seaman. He served three times in the Imperial Russian navy, and ran whaling and shipping businesses in the Pacific Ocean.

Henry became one of the well-known modern whalers. The Times Literary Supplement had the following to say about him: “Whaling history is populated with sturdy Vikings like Thomas Amlie, who took to sea when he retired from his Oslo business at the age of sixty-eight. He led record-breaking expeditions until his eighty-second year, when he went down with his ship off the Faroes. There are also characters of bathos like the German-Russian count Heinrich Kejzerling [sic]. He was ruined successively by the Russo-Japanese war [1904-05], the Bolshevik revolution [1917-22], the war between China and Japan [1930s], and ended up choosing Germany in [before] the Second World War.”[2]

Family

Henry was born in 1866 on his father Hugo’s estate Staniuny in Lithuania, at that time a part of Imperial Russia. Henry’s grandfather Carl (1809-1895) had married a Ropp, who brought the estate Staniuny into the marriage as her dowry. This area bordered to the north on the Russian Baltic province of Courland that like the other two Baltic provinces, Estonia and Livonia, enjoyed self-government under its noble corporation. Many Courland noble families had estates in this Lithuanian area, while remaining members of the Courland Noble Corporation. Henry’s family had been enrolled in the Courland Noble Corporation for centuries.

Henry’s father Hugo was a good example of a noble estate owner with residency outside Courland, while still remaining an active member of its noble corporation. Hugo was a respected leader among the Courland nobility. His fellow Courland nobles twice elected him Courland’s head of state or Land Marshall (Landesbevollmaechtiger) in 1873-79 and again in 1893 until his death in 1903. As Land Marshal of Courland and chamberlain at the court of St Petersburg, Hugo possessed the elevated fourth rank in the Russian table of fourteen ranks. He enjoyed good personal relations with the Tsar and was called upon frequently to advise the St. Petersburg government on political problems in the Baltic provinces. The Polish nobles in Lithuania also elected him their Marshal for a time.

Normally Hugo would not have inherited the Lithuanian estate Staniuny as his elder brother, Eugen (1832-1889) had the first right to it. However, Eugen wanted to become a scientist and so left the estate Staniuny in the hands of his younger brother Hugo. Eugen became a world-renowned spider expert and a forerunner of Darwin, who recognized him as such in the forward to his The Origin of the Species. He settled in Germany, married, and is the great-grandfather of Michaela and her brother Christoph Keyserlingk. Before he died, he left his papers and spider collection to the British Museum in London.[3]

Therefore, Hugo took over the family estate Staniuny, married his cousin Cecile Keyserlingk-Rautenburg from Prussia, and had eight children with her. Mother Cecile was a powerful, if short and heavy woman. Father Hugo too was of middling height, fairly squat, early balding, untidy in dress, with heavy-lidded eyes and a humorous outlook on life. He is reputed to have been a fine conversationalist. Henry was their third son. Pictures of Henry in later life show him to have inherited his parents’ physical characteristics, except for his naval moustache and pointed beard.

Naval Service, 1882-1902, 1904-05, 1916-1917

As a third son, Henry had no prospects of owning land like his father, unless he too were to accede to land through marriage as his grandfather had earlier done. So Henry choose instead to follow a naval career. In 1882 Henry was sent to the Imperial Russian Naval School in St Petersburg, becoming a commissioned naval officer in 1888.[4]

During this first phase of his naval career, Henry went on several naval cruises. These trips included one in 1892 to the Far East with the young Nicholas, later the last Tsar of Russia, as a fellow junior officer. While in Japan on an official visit with the Russian fleet, Nicholas was to be presented to the Divine Emperor, a notion which scandalized some Japanese. As Nicholas was being driven sightseeing in a rickshaw one day, he was attacked by an ex-samurai policeman who was supposed to be helping control the crowd on the street. The rickshaw driver and the accompanying Russian naval officers, including Henry, rallied to Nicholas’s defence. We still have in our possession a beautiful silver cigarette case embossed with the imperial initials and a large blue sapphire gratefully sent by the Tsar to all the officers who had been involved in the affair. In 1892, he decided to leave the navy in order to return to the Far East and start a whaling business.

But this was not to be the end of his naval involvement. During the 1904-05 Russian-Japanese war he rejoined the navy a second time. That war was began with a sneak Japanese attack on the Russian Pacific fleet in Vladivostok - a tactic the Japanese were later to repeat at Pearl Harbour - thereby sinking most of the Russian fleet. Help was needed from the European-based fleet. So Henry found himself sailing with the Russian Baltic fleet around the Horn of Africa - the British would not let them through the Suez Canal - across the Indian Ocean to the Russian east coast, only to see his tired fleet sunk upon arrival by the Japanese at the famous battle of Tsushima Straits.[5]

Finally, in 1916 during WW I Henry was recalled to the navy a third time to command a ship in the Pacific, leaving the service in 1917 with the rank of captain during the Russian Revolution.

Russian Pacific Whaling 1864-

Modern whaling begins with the invention by the Norwegian Svend Foyn in 1868 of the cannon-propelled harpoon with a grenade that exploded inside a captured whale. Mounted on a steamship, it enabled whaling nations to turn from the almost extinct right and grey whales and concentrate on exterminating the faster rorquals, the blue fin, sei and humpback whales. Norwegian gunners were the best and worked throughout the whaling world. In boom times like the 1920s these gunners could command 5,500 pounds a season. Gradually the whale population sank. By 1977-78 only ninety-five whales were caught in Antarctica compared to 15,000 twenty years earlier.

In the mid-nineteenth century, whaling in the Pacific was carried out by the Japanese in the east and the Americans in the west and partly in the northeast as well. For the Japanese, the main aim of the catch was to provide meat for human consumption, while the blubber was rendered to provide lighting oil. In the 1850s a few American and British boats entered Japanese whaling areas, their crews were attacked by the Japanese and their vessels sunk. In 1854 a treaty was signed with Japan allowing foreign ships to whale and enter Japanese harbours for fuel, water, and food.

Russians began to whale in the Arctic in the 1880s with the help of state subsidies. But profits remained low and catching ended in 1889 – much to the delight of the world’s leading whalers, the Norwegians. In the East, whaling began somewhat earlier and lasted much longer. Russian pioneers had pushed eastward in the eighteenth century to the Pacific Ocean, reaching the seacoast and crossing into Alaska. Vladivostok was founded in 1860, seven years before Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million. The first Pacific Russian whaling was started the next year by Otto Lindholm, a Finnish Russian, who arrived at the Pacific after an 8,000 km trek overland across the huge country. There was as yet no railway across Siberia. His private company operated between 1864 and 1885 with no governmental privileges or support, and still practiced the old ways of whaling. He made good money, despite a high tax of 500 roubles a whale. His market for whale products was primarily Japan. Lindholm also dabbled in shipping and gold mining, becoming a wealthy man.[6]

In 1885 he was forced out of the whaling business, which was taken over by a Russian landowner and naval lieutenant, Dydymov. He hired some Finns acquainted with the new Norwegian catching methods, bought a modern whaler in Norway, which was sailed by Svend Foyn to Vladivostok, and set up a whaling station at Gaidamak (бухте Гайдамак, also spelt Haidamak) 180 km north up the Siberian coast from Vladivostok. Henry Keyserling was later to take over Gaidamak for his whaling company. In 1890 Dydymov lost his ship at sea and closed his business.

The Pacific Whaling Company, 1894-1905

While on his 1892 naval cruise, Henry became acquainted with Russia’s Pacific frontier and its possibilities for development. He noted the presence of many whales and that no Russians were catching them. So he decided to enter the business himself.

Henry’s Pacific Whaling: Quoted from the Norwegian History of Whaling[7]

“A few unsuccessful attempts were made to get whaling going again, [after Dydymov] but not until Count HEINRICH HUGOVITCH KEJZERLING [sic] appeared on the scene did things get going. He was a member of a Baltic, German-Russian noble family and, like Dydymov, had been trained as a naval officer. He prepared the setting up of his whaling company with the greatest thoroughness, realizing that he would have to go to Norway, “the classic land of whaling”, in order to learn the art. But the Norwegians, following the example of the well-known Svend Foyn, kept the technical details a close secret. A Norwegian in St Petersburg, however, helped him to engage [in] the [Norwegian] services, as a sailor [of] Henry Carlsson, serving on a whale catcher with a Norwegian company in Iceland and in this way he managed to ferret out of the Norwegians the secret of the new catching technique. He submitted the plans to the Government, and was granted a loan of 125,000 roubles for his company, the Pacific Whale Fishing Company of H.H. Kejzerling, which received a concession for twenty-one years covering five different stretches along the coast of Siberia. In Oslo, two whale catchers were ordered, somewhat larger than the ordinary type, [the Nicholai and the Georgi] at a price of 5,000 pounds each. In March 1895 they proceeded to Hajdamak, where the abandoned station had been bought.

“Apart from Kejzerling himself the party included two men who were to exercise a decisive influence on the fate of the company; these were the gunner and expedition manager, the Norwegian HENDRICK G. MELSOM, later to play a leading role in establishing pelagic whaling in the Antarctic; the second was an engineer, AUGUST SOMMERMEYER, the son of German parents, born in St Petersburg. He had been chosen as technical manager of the whale oil factory. The boats carried a great deal of new machinery, designed by Sommermeyer, including a plant for turning out large tin containers for whale oil, as it proved difficult to procure wooden barrels, which in any case always suffered from leaks.

“Melsom relates that that summer catching (June-October) was carried on from Hajdamak north as far as Sakhalin, the blubber being reduced to oil. In the winter, catching operations moved south in the Sea of Japan and the whales were sold whole in Nagasaki, where the market for meat for human consumption was inexhaustible. A very large whale would fetch around 165 pounds … The annual catch in 1895-1903 was 110 whales; he [Melsom] could easily have shot more, but the station capacity was limited. “It was extremely badly managed, had some difficult in processing the catch, and the entire way this enterprise was managed was such a parody that this period spent in Russian service was far from encouraging. Absolute chaos reigned.” These observations are in marked contrast to Sommermeyer’s, who describes how excellently his new plant worked. On board the whale catchers, only the gunner was Norwegian; the captain was a Russian and the crew were Koreans and Chinese.

“Conditions at the station may have been bad, but in Melsom’s opinion, the situation was still worse when Kejzerling acquired a floating factory, an epoch-making step in the history of whaling. This had been suggested by Sommermeyer in 1899, in order to avoid dependence on the shore station. Time would be saved if they could avoid having to tow the whale all that long way; the raw material would be fresher and the quality of oil improved. In that year a large second-hand steamer of 3,643 gross tons, was purchased for 156,000 roubles. It was re-christened the Michail, and was the first steamer in the world to be used as a floating factory. As it was difficult to find a yard willing to carry out the comprehensive work of conversion, and as freight rates were highly favourable, the ship spent two years as an ordinary freighter, making good money.

“Conversion and installation of the complicated machinery proceeded entirely according to Sommermeyer’s plans in Danzig in the winter of 1902-03. This proved an expensive business. And when completed the floating factory cost half a million roubles. “The mobile factory Michail”, as the Russians called it, received its first whale on 27 July 1903, and by 21 October ninety-eight whales had been reduced to oil and guano. It was calculated that the process admitted of a 40% higher utilization of the raw material than would be the case on shore. The fact that the floating factory nevertheless proved little short of a fiasco, so Melsom relates, was due not to the use itself to which the boat was put, but to a breakdown in Sommermeyer’s machinery. This had been intended to reduce six whales a day, but was not robustly enough designed to cope with more than one. In his account, Sommermeyer is forced to admit that “the ideal was nothing like achieved”.