by Philip Hoare
To gally a whale risked the failure of all that had brought the ship thousands of miles, captain and crew, provisions and whale-boats towards this one end. Sometimes the whale won even before battle was joined. Nelson Cole Haley’s failure to harpoon a young, five-barrel calf as it dived after its mother (‘I saw the shape of the little beggar under water’, but his irons missed their target), earned him a volley of abuse and a confrontation with the captain back on board the Morgan.
More often than not the hunters were outwitted; proof, if it were needed, of the madness of whaling. Yet ‘going on to a whale’ was an intensely exciting moment; perhaps the most exciting thing these young men had ever done. It was ‘glorious sport’, rowing with their mates as they entered into the spirit of the chase, a rush of testosterone to coincide with a target on which to work out their rage. They were, in the argot of the time, bully boys, bully for the chase. This was why they forbore all the privations, for this one supreme moment, the adrenalin pumping in their arteries, even as the oxygen-rich blood coursed through the whale’s.
Now the harpooneer rose to balance precariously at the prow, taking up his long iron from the crotch of the boat–the vessel and its weapons extensions of his power. As he stood, every muscle tensed towards the oncoming whale, the boat itself became a kind of brace, his right thigh set hard into a semicircle cut from the gunwale. This was the so-called clumsy cleat into which the hunter fitted, just as Ahab’s peg-leg slotted into a socket made on the Pequod’s deck. Wood versus blubber; man’s frail construction pitted against nature’s formidable creation.
‘Give it to him!’
Whaling was like war, ‘actual warfare’ in one whaler’s eyes. For the young men in the boat, it was equivalent to going over the top; even more so for the man expected to throw the first blow for the first time. Only now did he realize the enormity of what he had to do, as he looked down into the water and the whale that seemed to fill his eyes. Some greenhands fainted at the sight, and had to be replaced by more experienced mates. Some went ‘quite “batchy” with fright, requiring a not too gentle application of the tiller to their heads in order to keep them quiet’. Equally, the whale itself would react ‘with affright, in which state they will often remain for a short period on the surface…lying as it were in a fainting condition’, as if both man and whale were as shell-shocked as each other.
It was a military manæuvre, requiring superhuman strength. The harpooneer, rowing even harder than his mates, had at the last moment to drop his oar, pick up his weapon, and throw it twenty or thirty feet towards the whale; a man’s straining blood vessels might burst with the effort, says Ishmael. At the crucial instant, the razor-sharp spear was released, hurtling through the air on its wooden stock, umbilically attached by the line as it whistled towards its target. More often than not it drew or failed to find its dreadful home. ‘But what of that?’ wrote Melville. ‘We would have all the sport of chasing the monsters, with none of the detestable work which follows their capture.’
Time stopped still. Such was the intensity of the experience that, as their descendants would discover when rescuing rather than killing whales, the adrenalin of present danger obliterated all memory of anything else, even of the moment itself.
Harpooneer braced, power passing through iron to the whale.
Line curling in lazy loops, tightening to the fish.
Crew in mid-scull, every muscle tensed.
Mother ship on the horizon, fast fading into the distance.
Silence, before the clamour of life over death.
With a barely audible thud, the successful barb sank deep into blubber. With it all hell broke loose. The entire school of whales, feeling the blow communally, suddenly scattered to windward, causing the sea to erupt like an earthquake. Bucking and rearing, the harpooned whale tried to rid itself of the spear buried ‘socket up’ in its flesh. Sometimes the harpoon was bent double in the struggle. Its shaft was cast from flexible iron, so that it could be beaten back into shape, even if twisted to a corkscrew. As soldiers wore medals, so sailors kept such ‘wildly elbowed’ weapons as mementoes of their heroic encounters.
Now the whale would sound fast and deep, threatening to take its assailants with it. The line, long enough to run for a mile or more, paid out of its bucket where it lay like a coiled cobra, splashed with sea water to prevent it from burning with the friction and guided by hands covered with protective canvas ‘nippers’. To sit with ‘the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line’, says Ishmael, was like sitting within a dangerous machine, ‘the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you’. The whipping manilla rope could catch a man and yank him out of this world and into the next.
At one end, a sixty-ton animal. At the other, six men. Through the line they could feel the whale; an intimate connection between man and prey. The crew fought to haul the creature out of the depths as an angler tussles with a fish; an effort of resistance and power; a tug of war, or a tug of love. Suddenly, their enraged quarry surfaced with an almighty blow. Its very breath was fearful: sailors believed the spout to be acrid, able to burn skin or even, warns Ishmael, cause blindness, ‘if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes’.
Holding its buoyant, oil-filled head high out of the water, with its narrow jaw cutting the water below, the whale transformed itself ‘from a bluff-bowed sluggish guillot into a sharp-pointed New York pilot-boat’. Now the terrified animal towed its tormentors on a Nantucket sleigh ride; at twenty-six miles an hour, this was the fastest any man had travelled on water: ‘whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way’.
Sooner or later–and it could be hours later–the whale would tire. Only then, alongside or even on top of the animal itself, ‘wood and black skin’, did the scene reach its climax. Those rowing with their backs towards the whale might have been glad of their orders not to turn around. At any moment the whale might raise its tailstock twenty feet in the air, a towering slab of muscle so swift to deal death that it was called ‘the hand of God’. With one flick it could send one of their number into eternity, an act as disdainful as theirs was arrogant. Worse still, the animal might actively turn on their craft, lunging with its toothed jaw held terrifyingly at right-angles to its body like a lethal saw. There was no defence against such an assault. It was man, or whale.
At the command, ‘stern all’, the harpooneer swapped place with the boat-steerer or mate, whose privilege it was, in that absolute hierarchy, to administer the coup de grâce. Drawing his long lance from its sheath, with both hands over the end to place his weight behind it, the mate plunged his iron in and out of the blubber. Blood running in rivulets over its black body, the maddened whale sought to wreak its revenge, impotently snapping its jaws open and shut. Then the blade found the life of the whale: the heart and lungs that lay behind its left flipper.
and they pierced his side with a lance
There it churned about like a poker until the cry went up, ‘There’s fire in the chimney!’, its life-giving spout turned to a red fountain as thick blood pumped from the rapidly expanding and contracting blowhole. Now the whale entered its death flurry, swimming in a spiralling circle, the condemned animal vomiting up its final meal of squid, a pathetic reaction to its mortal internal wounds. With a juddering halt, its torment came to an end. ‘His heart had burst!’ And drawing its last breath, the whale rolled on its side, fin out, with one eye to the sky and–so its killers claimed–its head turned towards the sun.
they will look on the one whom they have pierced
For all the argot that served to distance them from their butchery, these were not men without hearts. They were not immune to the pathos of these scenes, to the death of something that represented life on such a scale. Charles Nordhoff would describe the wanton destruction he saw on his whaling cruise through the Indian Ocean and up the coast of Africa in search of sperm whales, as his crew mates harpooned and lanced any living thing the
y came across, from anaconda and hippopotamus to sea lion, as if anything alive became, by virtue of the fact, automatic targets. Young men like to kill things, sometimes just to see what happens.
And yet, when no sperm whales had appeared for weeks and the ship was driven to hunting humpbacks, even hard-bitten sailors objected to the killing of a mother and calf, the cow trying to protect her offspring by holding it tight to her body with her flipper or nudging it ahead and out of harm’s way, only for the infant to fall prey to a well-directed lance. To one man, ‘it was a useless waste of life…and besides had a tendency to excite the cow whale’. Later they saw one of the calves they had orphaned, now half-starved, desperately trying to suckle at a bull whale’s belly, only to be violently driven off.
Men must eat, as must their families; their children must be shod, captains’ houses must be shingled, their wives corseted; citizens must see by night. Their quarry was claimed with pennants, plaintively named ‘waifs’, planted directly into the whale’s gaping blowhole. It was a final statement of possession: what was the whale’s was now man’s. These waifs also served to reunite the straying boats with their mother ship, perhaps miles away by now, perhaps even out of sight. Meanwhile, a sperm whale calf might nudge the whaleboat, searching the cedar sides for its mother’s teats.
Physeter dolorosa
Rove through its flukes like a ring through a Moor’s ear, the whale was chained and towed back, a fifty-ton dead weight dragged through the water at a mile an hour. If night had fallen by the time they returned, the whale would be secured to starboard, head astern. There it waited as the crew slept, their prey alongside, barnacle to barnacle, cosily safe until sunrise.
Then the real work began.
On the larboard or port side a section of the bulwark was removed, allowing a narrow cutting stage to be lowered, like a window-cleaner’s platform, from which the mates, experts at the task, sliced at the whale with sharp spades. Other men dangled from ropes as whale mountaineers, hacking away to bring lumps of flesh and bone on deck, while their mates clambered over the slippery skin wearing crampon-spiked boots to carry out their delicate, brutal task. A hole was cut in the animal’s side for the purchase of the giant blubber hook which swung from the mast. Thus the ‘blanket’ was unrolled, divesting the whale of what had given it warmth.
Pared off like the peel from a Christmas clementine, the result was cut into huge chunks and passed down to the blubber room. Here it was cut into manageable portions by half-naked men working in semi-darkness, often maimed by misaimed spades as the sharpened steel sliced off their own toes and fingers. Thick ‘horse pieces’ became ‘bible leaves’, thin slices to melt faster (while invoking images of the whale itself as a holy book). These were then hauled back up top and tipped into cast-iron try-pots set into brick ovens–strangely domestic structures, somewhere between blacksmith’s furnace and kitchen range, as though someone had begun to build a house on deck.
For two days the work continued. Men laboured six hours on, six hours off, to the slithering, ripping, rippling, snapping sounds of torn tendons and sundered muscles, to the stink of blood and guts as the creature’s severed head was separated into its constituent parts: the case, the chamber containing liquid spermaceti; the junk, the mass within the head; and the white horse, the fibres that held more oil in spongy cells. This was the rendering, a due process on this slavish ship, as the men in turn were enslaved to the whale, paying obeisance to the vast creature dissected on deck: ‘the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.’ Most of the whale went to waste, chucked over the side to be gnawed by sharks and pecked by birds flocking to the scene.
As the animal came apart, it was in its blunt head that the hidden treasure was to be found: gallons of precious spermaceti. Ishmael takes us into this cavern, filled with a substance described by another as ‘of a slightly rosy tint, looking like soft ice cream or white butter partly churned’. As man became part of the whale, the whale might even now take the life of a man. In a terrifying scene, Ishmael watches as Tashtego the harpooneer is lowered into the tun to bail out its spermaceti, only to fall in head-first, ‘with a horrible oily gurgling’. The severed head bobs in the sea while the Indian struggles inside, about to drown in whale oil.
At that moment, a naked Queequeg appears, clutching a boarding-sword. Diving to the rescue, he pulls Tashtego out by his hair, delivering him from the fleshy pit like a Cæsearean-born baby, even as it threatens to become his grave. It would have been ‘a very precious perishing’, muses Ishmael, regaining his usual phlegm, ‘smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale’.
And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
Such a deep-seated fear, of being engulfed by the whale, reached back to the Bible and beyond. The Victorian naturalist Francis Buckland described how one scientist had attempted a dissection of a beached sperm whale at Whitstable in 1829, descending into ‘the gigantic mass of anatomical horrors’, only to lose his footing and fall into the animal’s heart, trapping his feet in its aorta. In the 1920s, an Oxford professor named Ambrose John Wilson sought to prove the possibility of Jonah’s fate. He reasoned that only a sperm whale could have swallowed the prophet, baleen whales having throats that could admit nothing larger than a grapefruit. As it does not chew its food, the sperm whale uses strongly acidic stomach fluids to digest entire sharks and giant squid. ‘Of course, the gastric juice would be extremely unpleasant but not deadly,’ added the don, noting that the whale would digest only dead matter, lest it consume its own stomach.
In support of his theory, Wilson cited two case histories. In 1771 it was reported that a whaleboat working in the South Seas had been bitten in half by a sperm whale, and one of its crew seized by the assailant and taken down in its mouth as it sounded. Back at the surface, the animal disgorged the man, ‘much bruised but not seriously injured’, onto some wreckage. The historical distance made this story difficult to prove, but Wilson’s second incident was recorded in 1891, when James Bartley of the Star of the East, then whaling off the Falklands, had disappeared into the water when a sperm whale’s flukes lashed his boat. Hours later, the whale was killed and brought alongside the ship.
After working on the carcase all day and part of the night, the crew hauled its stomach onto the deck, and discovered their shipmate curled up inside, unconscious but alive. The man was laid out and given a sea-water bath to revive him; where he had been exposed to the animal’s gastric juices, his skin had been bleached white, like some ghastly full-grown fœtus. For two weeks Bartley was a raving lunatic unhinged by his experience, only to recover his sanity and resume his duties. The captain’s wife would later question the veracity of this story, but it encouraged those who believed a man could survive within a whale–although no one could explain how he could breathe in its belly.
More credible was another report by Egerton Y. Davis, a surgeon on the Toulinguet, sailing from Newfoundland in 1893 in search of harp seals, even if his account, too, is clouded by memory. As an old man, Davis recalled that one of the crew had slipped off an ice floe and into the jaws of an angered whale, which swallowed him before attacking the other sealers. Shot by the ship’s cannon, the whale swam off in its death agony. It was recovered the next day, and when the crew cut into its gas-filled stomach, they found their mate.
It was a fearsome sight, said Davis, who proceeded to deliver a pathological description. The young man’s chest had been crushed by the animal’s jaws, so he was probably already dead by the time his body reached the whale’s stomach. Gastric mucosa covered the victim like the slime of a giant snail; it was particularly thick on those parts of his flesh that were exposed: his face, his hands and part of his leg where his trousers were torn; these areas were macerated and partly digested. Oddly enough, the lice on his h
ead had survived.
The surgeon sought to reassure his shipmates that the man had not suffered. ‘It was my opinion that he had no consciousness of what happened to him.’ The idea that the victim might have been aware as he was swallowed was too terrible to contemplate; although in secret his fellow sailors may have wondered what it was like to be within the belly of the whale, to slither down its gullet like a whiting down a gannet’s neck and into the nameless horror of the leviathan’s maw.
Such stories would persist, from the whale that gulped down Pinocchio, to George Orwell’s Coming up for Air, in which the narrator recalls his Edwardian father reading of ‘the chap…who was swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three days later, alive but bleached white by the whale’s gastric juice’, adding that ‘he turns up in the Sunday papers about once in three years’. Indeed, in a letter to The Times in 1928, a correspondent claimed to have met a missionary to the Southern Whaling Fleet who was swallowed by a sperm whale. For a man of the cloth, he appears to have been rather accident-prone, having often fallen overboard–a regular Jonah–but ‘could hold his breath longer than most men’. More fortuitously, his shipmates had seen him fall, and harpooned the whale which, in its flurry, evacuated its stomach, and the indigestible cleric along with it.
And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.