Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Then, in 1712, a new prey was discovered. According to legend, Christopher Hussey was out hunting when his sloop was blown beyond the normal limits of the Nantucket fisheries. There, in deep waters, he encountered the sperm whale, hitherto considered ‘fabulous or utterly unknown’, says Ishmael. Now it would usurp the right whale ‘upon the throne of the seas’. In assuming that crown, the sperm whale became a more fitting quarry for the lordly islanders, ‘this horrible and indecent Right whaling, I say, compared to a spirited hunt for the gentlemanly Cachalot’. Whaling for such a noble animal was like riding with foxhounds compared to the lowly bear-baiting of right whales. Soon it was a crucial part of the island’s economy, still more so as the right whales became scarcer. By 1730 there were twenty-five vessels in the island’s fleet. By the end of the century, it would lead the world in whaling.

  ‘And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?’ quotes our sub-sub-librarian, from Edmund Burke’s reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale Fishery. Burke went on to inform Britain of ‘the progress of their victorious industry’: ‘No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils.’ Old Europe could not rival ‘this recent people, a people who are still, as it were but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood’. The new nation seemed to prove itself by the whale. For Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex and scion of an old Nantucket family, he and his fellow whalers were crusaders ‘carrying on an exterminating warfare against those leviathans of the deep’. They were knights and squires bound up in a new chivalric order; outriders of an empire, even as the whales were driven ‘like the beasts of the forest, before the march of civilisation into remote and more unfrequented seas’.

  It was a pattern of plunder of the New World’s resources. As their land-borne counterparts drove buffalo from sixty million to extinction, so these oceanic cowboys pursued whales to the brink. It was as if the antediluvian beasts had to die in order to assert the modern world. For America, the common enemy was the wilderness; and just as that wilderness was in fact full of animals–and native peoples–so the American seas were full of whales, ready for the slaughter. Hostilities were declared in 1712; it would be a war of attrition ever after.

  At first Nantucket whaling was a family business, a trade passed down from hand to hand. Any young man of promise could expect, after two whaling trips, to captain his own ship. Crews were ‘composed of the sons and connections of the most respectable families on the island’, Owen Chase wrote; ‘they labor not only for their temporary subsistence, but they have an ambition and pride among them which seeks after distinguishment and promotion.’

  Initially, whales were brought back to port to be rendered, but by 1750 shipboard try-works–a Basque invention of brick ovens with giant cauldrons in which to boil down the blubber–were being used. In a neat flip of cause and effect, these contraptions permitted the rendition of whales on the ever longer voyages required to find them. At the same time, whaling became part of a greater, political game. The Wars of Independence stalled Nantucket’s growth–its fleet declined from one hundred and fifty to thirty-five ships–while the islanders attempted to remain loyal to Britain, their greatest customer. But with the new republic, the ships returned in greater numbers than ever.

  And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits…overrun and conquered the watery world…let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it…There is his home; there lies his business…

  In 1944 Ishmael’s hymn to Nantucket was broadcast to American troops overseas as a means of raising morale, reminding them of an heroic age. ‘Indeed a Nantucket man is on all occasions fully sensible of the honour and merit of his profession,’ Owen Chase had written a century earlier, ‘no doubt because he knows that his laurels, like the soldier’s, are plucked from the brink of danger.’ Here was honour untainted by ‘the luxuries of a foreign trade’. Its reward was God’s bounty for His own country.

  Nantucket was the purest expression of this holy quest. Its houses seem to say it, plain and angled and sharpened against the light, as much ships as they were homes, their shuttered windows and narrow doors facing all fortune and affliction. New England ports sent out more ships a week than old England did in a year, and ‘our sails now almost whiten the distant confines of the Pacific’, boasted Chase. Through whaling, America reached across the world for the first time; whaling exported its culture and ideas. And Nantucket was at its heart. By 1833, seventy thousand souls and seventy million dollars were tied up in whaling and its associated crafts; ten years later that figure had nearly doubled. The United States exported a million gallons of oil to Europe each year. At its peak, no fewer than thirty-eight American ports would pit themselves against the whale, from Wiscasset in Maine to Wilmington in Delaware, although many failed in the attempt.

  The appeal of this filthy business was money: vast sums of it, for some. An owner could expect a threefold return on his investment. The first industrial fortunes in America were built on the whale fishery. In New England it remained an industry controlled by the Quakers, who saw no contradiction between their pacifist beliefs and their daily business. It certainly did not concern Captain Bildad, part owner of the Pequod, who ‘though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns and tuns of leviathan gore…very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.’

  Of all the products that were made from the whale, the pure-burning candles produced on Nantucket were the finest, as if the Quakers’ Inner Light shone from the whale itself. The technique of turning whales into candles was introduced to New England in 1748, by a Sephardic Portuguese Jew, Jacob Rodriques Rivera.

  It was a complex process. Headmatter from sperm whales was brought directly from the ships to large wooden manufactories, where it was heated in great kettles to remove water and impurities. It was stored in casks and, over winter, cooled to a coagulate mass. This was placed in woollen bags, which were then compacted in a wooden press from which spermaceti trickled, like juice from an apple press, or oil from olives. This first pressing, the purest, was known as ‘winter-strained’ sperm.

  The remaining matter was made into ‘black cakes’, and stored until the spring, when in warmer temperatures it began to ooze. Re-pressed, this was ‘spring-strained’ oil. After a third and final pressing, a brownish mess remained; heated with wood shavings and potash, it clarified like butter, and the result made pure white wax. It also made fortunes.

  Kezia Coffin was scion of one of Nantucket’s first families, a ‘she-merchant’ famous for her fine clothes, the forbidden spinet she played, and the opium she was reputed to use. She began selling pins, but her merchandising business expanded into whale products. Loyalist Nantucket continued to trade with Britain, and during the Revolution Kezia made a private deal with a British admiral to ship oil and candles to London, along with smuggled goods sold at inflated prices. Kezia was a paradigm of feminine fortitude and enterprise on an island of women used to the absence of men. ‘Aye and yes, Starbuck,’ as Ahab confesses to his first mate, ‘out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore…leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow.’ Whaling separated sexes; and in this isolated place, as isolated as any ship, and yet bleaker in midwinter, whaling ‘widows’ had recourse to opium to cope with the loneliness. Others used plaster dildos known as ‘he’s-at-homes’.

  The American war with Britain complicated matters for Nantucket whalers. The island was officially neutral–not least because of the pacifism of its inhabitants. They were only allowed to sail from New England if they proclaimed themselves on the side of the rebels; but if they did, the British would claim their whale-ships. Some moved to Newfoundland
or Canada to pursue their trade. Others sailed to the Falkland Islands to exploit its newly discovered whaling grounds on behalf of the British.

  In the aftermath of revolution, Nantucket grew richer than ever on the wealth of whales. It also exported its trade and expertise. Nantucket Quakers had founded a whaling port at Hudson, New York, where, despite being a hundred and twenty miles from the sea, a thirty-five-strong fleet prospered. Other colonies were founded in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, by Timothy Folger and Samuel Starbuck, and in 1785 Starbuck, Folger and William Rotch Senior made approaches to Britain about setting up a whaling port there. Rotch and his son Benjamin travelled to London for talks with the Prime Minister, William Pitt. After lengthy negotiations–Rotch wanted £20,000 removal costs and naturalization for thirty ships and five hundred of his countrymen, but during the talks Rotch set up at Dunkirk, having been offered better conditions by the French–the British finally invited the Nantucketers to create a new station at Milford Haven in 1792, granting them ‘the rights and privileges of natural-born subjects’. Here, in a pre-echo of the Welsh who would settle in Patagonia, an enclave of Nantucketers was founded, complete with New England architecture, a Quaker meeting house, and a Pembrokeshire cemetery populated with Starbucks and Folgers.

  Like other religions, Quakerism owed its power to its restrictions. Forbidden by their beliefs from swearing oaths of office, Quakers were debarred from professions such as the law and medicine. This had the effect of directing their talents into business, at which they succeeded pre-eminently. And while Quaker ethics also precluded the flaunting of wealth, they did allow fine materials to be used in simple designs; hence the unadorned architecture of Nantucket’s ‘Golden Age’, an æsthetic that still shapes the island today.

  Such wealth stood in sharp contrast to the growing black population that serviced it–initially slaves, then, with the Quakers’ early abolition of slavery in 1773, free men and women. Some prospered in their own right: in 1822 Absalom F. Boston sailed on the Industry with an all-black crew, returning as the island’s richest African-American, his success explicit in the thick gold earrings he wore in each ear. None the less, the island’s ruling class remained resolutely white, reiterated in a roll-call of industrious names: Coffin, Chase, Folger, Gardner, Macy, Starbuck, Hussey The street maps show house after house of them, a freemasonry of spermaceti; a territory divided between families and manufactories on an island-whale made out of whales, telled and ledgered and decanted from barrels and beaten into silver, the only precious metal acceptable to a Quaker.

  Nantucket’s skyline announced its own fortune. It was spiky with ship’s masts, studded with lantern towers topped with whale-shaped weathervanes, and animated by windmills with cart-wheel props which gave the appearance of ‘huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg’. This little island was one big machine: processing whales and wind to create candles and flour. Stern, stalwart and blessed, Nantucket was a nation of its own, existing in the hearts of its men at sea and in the work of its women at home.

  For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billow; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

  Nantucket, Moby-Dick

  But in the 1840s a succession of adversities began to turn Nantucket’s fortune into failure. The new, larger whale-ships required to sail further for sperm oil could not negotiate the treacherous sandbar across the island’s harbour, which had begun to silt up. Business began to favour the easier access of New Bedford, as did many islanders, who emigrated there. The new port was the brash newcomer; and while Nantucket’s haughty sailors stubbornly pursued now depleted old hunting grounds, New Bedford’s whippy young whalers profitably exploited the Pacific seas.

  In 1846 a great fire destroyed a third of the town’s businesses–burning all the brighter for warehouses filled with barrels of whale oil. Two years later, the Gold Rush tempted young Nantucketers in search of quicker fortunes. In 1849 the fittingly named Aurora was the first Nantucket ship to sail for San Francisco, where whale-ships lay abandoned as their crews deserted for the gold fields, joining the crowds flocking to the west; many left home with little or nothing, not even underwear, reasoning that they had gone to wash gold, not their own dirty linen.

  The final knell for Nantucket came with other discoveries from the earth. From the 1840s, kerosene and coal gas were already lighting city streets and houses, although initially the use of domestic gas only encouraged the demand for whale oil as the passion for bright light spread. Then, in 1859, Edwin L. Drake drilled for oil on a farm in Titusville, Pennsylvania; the black-gold spurt that gushed from the ground like a whale’s spout signalled the end of the sperm whale fishery–and the beginning of another elemental plunder.

  After fire and oil came war. Four hundred Nantucket men and boys left to fight the cause of the Union, as Confederate ships wreaked havoc on the Yankee whaling fleet. Many ships were captured or burned, causing other owners to keep theirs at home. Some were sacrificed by the Union itself: forty whale-ships–known as the Stone Fleet–were filled with rubble and scuttled to block southern harbours. The industry limped on for a few more years, but in 1869 the last whaling ship left Nantucket.

  Slowly, surely, the island was cut off from time. Sealed from the modern world like land requisitioned by the military, its blasted heaths remained pristine, its cottages hidden in hollows away from fierce Atlantic winds. Cobbled streets fell silent, unclattered by carts carrying barrels of oil. Blank windows of brick mansions built by Quaker captains looked down to an empty quayside, while their owners lay in barren graves.

  VI

  Sealed Orders

  Wm. Bartley. How came you to think of running away? Why sir, to tell you the truth I am afraid of a whale…

  Examination of deserters from the whaling ship, Houqua, 1835

  Down the coast in Connecticut, white clapboard houses rise out of the hoary grass like Christmas cakes. At dawn, every puddle has turned to ice; even the moss cracks beneath my feet. According to my hosts, this road is one of the oldest in New England, an Indian trail turned into a colonial way. Last night, as I walked by moonlight along the deserted lane, I imagined shapes at the dark edges where house lights yielded to the woods and civilization abruptly fell away.

  This morning, the sun climbs over granite rocks, and the highway that crosses the lane is already roaring with trucks. On the other side is the river, widening towards the sea and the site of another whaling port: Mystic. This, too, is a place of memory. Here, in 1637, the Puritans waged war on the Pequots, killing four hundred men, women and children. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Ahab’s ship appropriated the name of this slaughtered tribe. Or that, looming through the leafless trees ahead of me are the masts of the Charles W. Morgan, America’s last remaining whale-ship, built and launched on the Acushnet in the same year that Melville sailed on the voyage that would inspire the story of the Pequod.

  But the Morgan is no fantastical vessel with a whale jar for a tiller or whale teeth for pins. This is a real ship with all its constrictions and discomforts; an instrument stripped to its essential parts. Everything here was designed for the collection, production and storage of the whale, rather than the comfort of those expected to process it. This was a mobile factory, a nineteenth-century oil tanker; but it is also surprisingly sleek, like the clippers that ferried tea to England from Ceylon, and on one of which my own ancestor was a captain until he was lost at sea.

  The Morgan is laden with equipment, almost top-heavy with it. As I duck through shrouds and step over holds, I am aware of how much danger such a ship represented for the unwitting, even before it set sail. Swaying ropes and blocks meant every movement had to be made with care. Here life was lived in public; even the capt
ain shared his stateroom, a semblance of a landlubber’s salon, dining room and study all shrunk into one. The space seems homely, with a faded red sofa built into the side like a bunk in a caravan. In the captain’s cabin itself, an ornate bed is gimballed so as to swing in high seas and rock its occupant to sleep; and in the corner, a cupboard conceals the only private ‘head’ onboard.

  In this miniature world–so small compared to the ocean all around–every inch is used efficiently. Shelves fit into corners, drawers are set above the sofa, chests stowed under bunks. Lamps hang from hooks, pots and pans stand in compartments to stop them rolling around the galley–itself little more than a larder. There is a neatness worthy of a Shaker interior; a cosy arrangement, like a grown-up Wendy house. Sometimes an entire family travelled in these quarters. Through their eyes I see life lived on board, children at their schoolwork on the table built around the mast, their mother sewing as the ship lurched to and fro. One four-year-old, Eugene, playing in a whaleboat, nearly fell overboard, screaming for his Pa as he clung to the side. At bedtime their father told them stories about what the whale said and did.

  The reality of ship life was less comforting. There are cupboardlike cabins for officers and mates, the accommodation growing ever smaller as rank reduces until, beyond the blubber room, double tiers of bunks are built into the narrow forecastle, shelves for human stowage. Here the lowly slept, clustered like cockroaches at the prow, subject to class distinction even in the light they were allowed. Set flush into the deck are solid glass prisms, shaped like upturned hexagonal pyramids–so-called deadlights that could concentrate the sun’s rays, producing a luminescence equivalent to seventy watts. But theirs was an undemocratic illumination: while the staterooms boasted a cluster of these nineteenth-century bulbs, the forecastle had just two, shedding a watery light barely enough for a sailor to read in his bunk; and that was frustrated when obscured by a stray rope on the deck above.