Somewhere to keep the bawbees? *

After a beautiful morning the wind is now howling out of the west and the rain is lashing against the windows. So, today, another indoor photograph from objects found in the attic of a fisherman's cottage in Buchanhaven, Peterhead.

This time it is a fine Inuit purse, made of sealskin with a border of coloured leather, which in all likelihood, was brought back by whalers from Greenland in around 1870.

European whalers have exploited the bowhead whales and seals living in the seas around Greenland for several centuries. Initially the Dutch and Germans dominated the industry but after about 1800, English and Scots whalers from Dundee, Aberdeen and Peterhead were the main players. By the 1890s the Greenland whales were practically extinct and the industry collapsed and died.

The main products from the whales were oil, for lighting, lubrication and soap making, and baleen which was the plastic of its day and used in the manufacture of a wide range of items, particularly corsets. Peterhead sent out her first whaler, the Robert in 1788. In April 1893 Captain David Gray (III) came out of retirement and took the Windward north. In August he returned with the blubber of just one whale; the Peterhead whaling industry was at an end. However, for a few decades in the middle of the 19th century Peterhead had been the premier whaling and sealing port in the British Isles and had enjoyed great prosperity.

* Bawbee; a Scottish coin of base silver equivalent originally to three, and afterwards to six, pennies of Scottish money, about a halfpenny of English coin. Nowadays a dialect word for money.