Book review by Chris Doyle
I reviewed Breadfruit by Russell Fielding (Compass November 2025). His lucid — and entertaining writing kept me delighted from beginning to end and made me wonder if he had written anything else. And he has. Wake of the Whale was published in 2018, but I had never heard of it, which I figured might be the case for others in the Caribbean.
Russell Fielding is an academic; his fields are geography and anthropology. This categorization may limit his readership, but he writes so well and engagingly that his books rival the very best of travel writing.
Wake of the Whale describes whale hunting near Barrouallie, in St. Vincent, and grindadráp (whale hunting) in the Faroe Islands. Whaling information from other places, including Bequia, is used as background. Reading this book was a delightful adventure. I read it on my computer, which enabled me to open Google Earth and follow some of the locations.
These are family or community-sized whaling operations, hunting only the smaller whales (dolphins), particularly blackfish (pilot whales). I have often seen open whaleboats off the coast of St. Vincent, with their bow-mounted guns. You may have, too.
Industrial commercial whaling generally ends badly with depleted stocks, and it is conducted without sufficient consideration of the whales’ place in nature or their value to the community. Artisanal whaling is different. (Artisanal is the right word, though in today’s world it tends to bring up images of elegant bakeries, with staff running around in white coats and chef hats.)
In both these places, whaling is limited. In the Faroes, specially selected beaches are used for the grindadráp, and the Faroese wait till a pod is sighted (grindaboô) near enough to one of these beaches before heading out to try to drive them ashore. It is a non-commercial venture, as all the meat and blubber are shared according to local traditions. The Faroes are barren, and whaling greatly adds to their food supply. It has been going on for hundreds of years without damaging the whale population.
In St. Vincent, the range of the whaling boats is mainly limited to the west coast and the Bequia channel. It is commercial, in that the whales are sold to vendors who process and resell them to retailers. But it is small-scale and all the products are used locally.
Fielding throws himself fully into his research. He spent months as middleman on a Barroaullie whaleboat. In this book you will join him.
Eight o’clock in the morning on my first day of Vincentian whaling: in my roll-top drybag I had packed a peanut-butter-and-guava-jelly sandwich (a compromise between the Caribbean and my childhood), two liters of water, lots of sunscreen, a waterproof camera, and a GPS. We set out from the dock at Barrouallie, heading due west. Within half an hour we were surrounded by a pod of dolphins. Marine biologists advise their assistants on sighting surveys that a snapshot of surfacing dolphins usually shows 10 percent of the total pod. That is to say, 90 percent of a pod of dolphins is underwater at any given moment. Given that formula, there were easily five hundred dolphins surrounding the boat. “Skipjack papas,” said Papas, in Creole. “Fraser’s dolphins,” Samuel translated, standing at the bow with a hand on the harpoon gun. He had been to fisheries colleges in Japan and Canada and could have told me the dolphins’ scientific name (Lagenodelphis hosei) too, if I had asked. Samuel would explain to me later that the Fraser’s dolphins we saw are part of a resident pod that stays near the west coast of St. Vincent and will actually lead his boat to other whales or dolphins.
You will travel with him to the Faroes and learn of their history and natural history as well the role of the grindadráp in their society.
When I arrived at Gøta the whales had already been killed — it was a small pod, only twenty-three whales. But you wouldn’t have known it from the scene by the waterside. The quay was abuzz with activity: children tentatively poking the rubbery flesh of the steaming whale carcasses, the sýslumaður’s assistants measuring and numbering the whales, people milling about in this impromptu cause for socializing. For centuries in the Faroe Islands, grindadráp were the most exciting thing going. The monotony of village life could be broken at a moment’s notice with the arrival of a grindaboð. our evening’s plans could suddenly change from watching the peat fire and knitting to meeting a couple hundred friends and neighbors to procure meat for the next four months. It was a chance to fulfill both social and nutritional obligations. On many occasions the grindaboð came just in time, announcing the arrival of food during a period of extreme need.
He finds that if he is to get close to whalers, he will have to eat whale meat.
The first time I was confronted with blubber as a statement of solidarity was aboard a family’s boat tied up in the harbor of Nólsoy in the Faroe Islands in 2005. I wanted to talk with several of the family members about whaling. Soon after I came aboard and explained my intentions, the son — about my age — disappeared into boat’s cabin briefly, only to return with a slab of blubber about the size of a loaf of bread. He pulled a grindaknívur from his belt and cut me a bigger-than-bite-sized portion. I stood on the deck of the boat, watching oil trickle down the knife blade as he extended the point toward my face and said, using the Faroese term for whale blubber, “Here, try some spik.” Conversation halted and all eyes were on me. What else could I do? I plucked the morsel from his knife tip and ripped a piece away with my teeth. I had never tried blubber before and was unprepared for its consistency. I chewed, but the portion in my mouth remained whole. The family members resumed talking as I ground the blubber between my molars, trying to break it into smaller pieces. No luck. Oil was extruded, coating the inside of my mouth, but I couldn’t break the blubber down. I started to panic: I can’t swallow this and I can’t chew it up! Fortunately, we were on a boat, floating on the water. I waited until I thought no one was looking, turned, and spat the blubber into the harbor. “He spit it out!” I heard the mother cry in English. “Give him another piece!” Which is exactly what the son did, this time bigger than the first. Slightly more prepared the second time, I gave up on chewing, ripped a smaller bite, and swallowed it whole. Satisfied that I was not fundamentally opposed to blubber-eating, the family opened up to me about whaling.
Many of us on the waterfront love whales and hate the thought of them being killed. In this book the controversial nature of whaling is omnipresent. The sad conclusion is that these traditions will soon pass for the worst possible reason.
Whale hunting has become highly criticized, especially in the Faroes, where the bay runs red with blood and photos of the scene make excellent material for environmental organizations to use to engender outrage and raise funds. Hunted whales in St. Vincent suffer more, as the buyers want them to be alive on arrival, but their operations are lower key. Whalers there raised a giant stir in 2017 when they happened to harpoon two orcas (killer whales) right in front of two boatloads of whale watchers from a cruise ship.
Slaughter is never pretty, and my preference would be for whales to be left alone. I suspect that Fielding has that preference too. If you are a vegetarian, I salute you. If not, being horrified at killing, while still eating flesh, shows we have become detached from being part of nature and the food chain. When I was a charter skipper, I asked for food preferences from guests, and one asked for fresh fish. We caught a nice tuna and she was horrified and refused to eat it. “What I meant,” she said, “was fish fresh from the supermarket.”
Fielding deals with whaling controversy sympathetically, but with full awareness of the history, culture and the larger picture. But there are different aspects to environmentalism. In terms of sustainability, both the St. Vincent and Faroes whale hunts seem sustainable. The detractors appeal to love of whales and the emotion created by the sight of slaughter. The sad thing is that these whaling practices will end, not from sentiment, but because the industrial world, where most detractors live, has polluted the seas so terribly that the whales themselves are becoming dangerous to eat. Today, whale flesh has very high levels of methyl mercury. This will be a pyrrhic victory because, not surprisingly, the mercury damages the whales themselves, as well as those who eat them. A sad reflection of where we are.
This book is a classic and a treasure and available. I bought my hard copy on Amazon. You can learn more about the author and his work at russellfielding.com.
