‘Have a good holiday, Camilla. Don’t kill any whales.’ That’s not the normal goodbye I get when leaving the office, but then I’m not normally off to the Faroe Islands. The country isn’t that far from the UK — in fact, we’re the nearest neighbour, with Scotland 200 miles to the south. But it’s not somewhere people know much about. If they have heard of the Faroe Islands, the one thing they know about is the ‘grindadráp’, or pilot whale-hunt, which supplies newspapers with gory photographs every year.
Although I wouldn’t have been surprised to see whale on the menu (as you do in Norway), I hadn’t expected whaling to play much of a part in my trip. But on our second day, driving along a winding -coastal road, we turned a corner to see a large grey ship anchored in the fjord below, flying what looked like a Russian flag. Around the next we spotted a Danish frigate moored in the town of Vestmanna. Ready for the Russians, perhaps? Wrong. It turns out that my flag identification skills aren’t up to much. The flag was a Dutch flag, and the boat, the MV Sam Simon (named after the co-creator of The Simpsons), in fact belonged to Sea Shepherd, a ‘conservation society’. Every summer they sail a couple of boats to the Faroes with the aim of saving whales from the grindadráp. This year their campaigns resulted in the arrest of five campaigners — ‘the Sandavágur 5’ — and the seizure of three Sea Shepherd boats, one by Police Scotland while it refuelled in the Shetlands.
Killing whales is an emotive subject, and most locals are unwilling to talk about it. The antis, on the other hand, love sharing grisly images on social media.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in