Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Born August 1, 1819

  Died September 28, 1891

  Above the inscription is an extravagantly empty scroll, chosen by the author as his memorial; its blankness seems to mock all the books he did not write. Next to him lies Elizabeth, biding her silence, as ever; and on the other side, smaller memorials to his sons, both dead before their father. It is a sad array, a family reunited on a bare Bronx hill. Kicking at one of the little icebergs of frozen snow, I work up enough powder to shape a white whale on the lifeless grass, an acorn for its eye and a twig for its mouth. It looks childish, a cartoon animal playing over the writer’s whitened bones. I wait to feel something, to commune with the writer’s spirit. But there is nothing here, in this civic facility. The stone and the earth are all as dead as the asphalt over which the traffic hurtles en route for somewhere else.

  VIII

  Very Like a Whale

  Can he who has discovered only the values of whale bone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale?

  Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods

  From October 1849 to July 1855–as Melville researched, wrote and published Moby-Dick–Henry David Thoreau undertook his walking tours of Cape Cod, having only recently emerged from his seclusion at Walden Pond, near Concord, where, in a two-year-long experiment, he sought to test the tenets of Transcendentalism.

  The Transcendentalists, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, sought a return to nature in order to feel God’s true presence. Hawthorne saw them as ‘queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals’–Victorian hippies, all but rehearsing Woodstock; they were satirized by Melville, too, for their romanticism: not least in the person of Ishmael himself. But for Thoreau, born in Concord in 1817, Walden was an escape from personal tragedy: the loss of his brother John, who had cut his finger when shaving and three days later died of lockjaw.

  Walden was then still a wilderness, albeit one newly overshadowed by a railway embankment, built by the navvies from whom Thoreau bought his shack. Its sixty-one-acre pond is deeper in parts than Massachusetts Bay, with sandy shores shelving quickly to glacial black depths. Hawthorne found the water ‘thrillingly cold…like the thrill of a happy death…None but angels should bathe there.’ I saw no celestial beings when I swam there, but at the far end of the shore, in a glade beneath the pines and birches, there was a cairn of stones left by pilgrims to the site of Thoreau’s hut.

  Here, in a room under-tenanted by squirrels and racoons, the philosopher attempted a self-sufficiency of one. Here he recorded the minutiæ of the natural cycle, and his attempts to live with it. It was as if he had stalled his civilized life and re-geared it to natural forces. Like Hawthorne, who visited him there, seclusion charged his imagination. Thoreau revelled in the retreat of the day, and in the hours slowed by the calm surface of the water.

  As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

  He was almost childishly fascinated by the process of nature through which he hoped to examine the essence of existence. Walden, his account of those two years, is an alternative text for an industrial age, a kind of corollary to Moby-Dick. Axiomatic, philosophical, naïve and complex, it sometimes speaks with the voice of angels, sometimes with earthbound science. The writing of it is the true reason why Thoreau carried out his experiment, but that does not diminish its power. In his personal utopia, Thoreau sought to reinvent the way we could live. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.’ He rejected the wisdom of the old–‘Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost’–and felt a sense of hubris in the manner in which he might mark his own immortality.

  What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

  Words came to Thoreau like a prophet of the new age, challenging the divisions wrought by his fellow men in their headlong pursuits. While at Walden, Thoreau protested against slavery and war by refusing to pay his taxes, a civil disobedience that earned him a night in gaol. Now aged thirty-two, and with only twelve years left before consumption took him, this man whom Hawthorne described as ‘ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed’, yet whose character became him ‘much better than beauty’, had returned to Concord–barely two miles distant, yet a universe away.

  With Walden published but, like Moby-Dick, hardly a success, Thoreau still felt the pull of nature, often travelling with his young cousin and intimate companion, Edward Hoar. Like Ishmael, Thoreau was drawn to the ocean. It was an irresistible lure for a loner–an ‘Isolato living on a separate continent of his own’–to seek out something greater and confront it; to seek refuge, too, from one’s own self. The sea drew Thoreau out of the woods and onto the beach; the forest gave way to the ocean, the one opening out from the other. Yet neither was what it seemed, and like all desires, they were dangerous forces.

  The Cape was barely more tamed than when the Pilgrims had made landfall there two hundred years before. Charles Nordhoff, who visited it around that time, bemoaned the ‘not over agreeable diversity of views’ in the expanses of dunes, salt marshes, scrub oaks and stunted pines which earned it ‘the euphonious name of “the Great Desert of Cape Cod.”’ It was certainly a sere landscape. ‘Dreary-looking’ wharves lined the bayside, while the stunted vegetation and absence of grass on the seaward side, ‘and above all and mixed with all, the everlasting glare of the sand, all united to give the shores of the Cape a most desolate appearance’.

  It was as dismal as the deserts Melville wandered in his mind, and Thoreau too found it a barren country, ‘such a surface, perhaps, as the bottom of the sea made dry land day before yesterday’. Yet such bleakness also had its beauty: the high ridges of sand blown by Atlantic winds, over which were revealed the intense blue reaches; a mutability unwrought by man. This desolation–which Ishmael also saw in the limitless-ness of the sea, ‘exceedingly monotonous and forbidding’–appealed to the hermit of Walden; a place where ‘everything told of the sea, even when we did not see its waste or hear its roar’.

  Here the land paid homage to the ocean; became part of it, implicitly. ‘For birds there were gulls, and for carts in the fields, boats turned bottom upwards against the houses, and sometimes the rib of a whale was woven into the fence by the roadside.’ And here blackfish, or pilot whales, were prized for their oil, and had been since before the coming of the Pilgrims: the Mayflower’s second encounter with Native Americans had been at Wellfleet, where they watched Indians stripping the blubber from one of the stranded whales which earned it the name Grampus Bay.

  Easily identified by their rounded melon heads and sleek black bodies, and so called because they followed a leader, pilot whales were hunted when other whales were not about. Frank Bullen recorded that ‘a good rich specimen will make between one and two barrels…of medium quality’, while hunks of their meat made a prized alternative to the ship’s salt beef. These lithesome, lacquered cetaceans are, like their sperm whale cousins (with whom they often associate), highly social, and their propensity to gather in great numbers made them all the more attractive to catch. The people of the Faroe Islands still round up pilot whales using techniques learned by their Viking ancestors, driving entire schools into shallow water where, surrounded by small craft and men armed with all manner of weapons, the cornered whales leap and thrash, rising perpendicularly out of the water, as if straining every muscle to evade the deadly blades. Appallingly human in their physical presence, they might as well be men in wet suits, but they are soon reduced to butchered blubber.

  Such scenes were played out on the Cape’s shores, too. In an episode mirroring the striking first chapter of his book–which opens with the aftermath of a shipwreck and bodies being carried away in rough wooden boxes–Thoreau encounters slaughtered blackfish on the beach and is forced by the stench to take the long way round, only to find thirty more whales at Great Hollow, newly speared and turning the water red like the dead of a failed invasion.


  Thoreau marvelled at the shape and texture of the animals, as smooth as India-rubber; with their blunt snouts and stiff flippers, they seemed almost embryonic. The largest was fifteen feet long; others were only five-foot juveniles with unerupted teeth, barely more than suckling babies. As the whales lay there, a fisherman obliged the visitor by slicing into the flesh to display the depth of the blubber, fully three inches thick. Thoreau ran his fingers over the wound, as if to believe. He felt its oily texture. It looked like pork to him; he was told that young boys would come along with slices of bread to make sandwiches of the stuff. The fisherman then dug deeper for the meat which, he told Thoreau, he preferred to any beefsteak.

  As they stood there on the shore, Thoreau heard a cry: ‘Another school.’ In the distance, he could see the whales leaping through the waves like horses. The fishermen pushed off in their boats, boys running to join them. ‘I might have gone too had I chosen,’ said Thoreau; but he did not, nor was inclined to say why. Perhaps he felt the same equivocal fascination as I have when watching pink-coated huntsmen career through New Forest bracken. As Thoreau looked on, thirty boats rowed out either side of the whales, striking the sides of their craft and blowing horns to drive them onto the beach. He had to admit it was an exciting race, and as the frenetic scene played out before his eyes, he heard an old blind fisherman say, pathetically, ‘Where are they? I can’t see. Have they got them?’

  For a moment it seemed the whales might win, as they headed north-west towards Provincetown and the refuge of the open ocean. Fearing their prey might be lost, the hunters were forced to strike then and there, using short-stemmed lances to take the whales as they leapt in and out of the waves. Thoreau could just make out the men as they jumped from their boats into the shallows, finishing off the animals as they lay on the beach, shuddering and spouting blood. ‘It was just like pictures of whaling which I have seen, and a fisherman told me that it was nearly as dangerous.’

  Those hunted whales haunted Thoreau. Back in Concord, he tried to find out more about them, but he discovered only an absence. Storer’s Report on the Fishes did not include the pilot whale, ‘since it is not a fish’; and Emmons’s Report of the Mammalia omitted all whales, because the author had never seen any. I thought it remarkable that neither the popular nor scientific name…the Social Whale, Globicephalus Melas of De Kay; called also Black Whale-fish, Howling Whale, Bottlehead, etc., was to be found in…a catalogue of the productions of our land and water,’ Thoreau mused.

  It was a lack all the stranger for the part the whales played in the economy and history of the Cape: from the Indians’ modest operations, to the modern ‘early risers’ who could still find one thousand dollars worth of whales stranded on the sand. Pilot whales and dolphins still strand here, in greater numbers than on almost any other shore. Lured by the presence of squid, the bay becomes a literal dead end for them, as they lie hoicked out of water, attacked by gulls which take advantage of the helpless animals to peck out their eyes as they slowly expire.

  As he reached Provincetown, Thoreau marvelled at the part fishing village, part frontier town, with only one road and one pavement. ‘The time must come when this coast will be a resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side,’ he predicted. ‘At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them.’ And as he approached his journey’s end, Thoreau saw what looked like a bleached log on the beach. It proved to be part of the skeleton of a whale–a sign he conflated with a wreck that lay close by, its ‘bones’ still visible: ‘Perchance they lie alongside the timbers of a whale.’ The Cape’s winter storms still throw up eighteenth-century keels, their crossbars grey wooden ribs on the shore; but Thoreau could not know that these same sands also concealed a cetacean graveyard.

  Dr Charles ‘Stormy’ Mayo is a man in his sixties, with a wiry frame, unflinching blue eyes, and a passion for growing dahlias. On his father’s side, his family have lived on the Cape for nearly four hundred years; the Mayos first came to Chatham in 1650. His grandmother, on the other hand, came from the Azorean island of Faial. In his forebears’ day, these waters were alive with animals, says Stormy, looking out of his office window and over to the bay. I can almost see the scene in his eyes, a paradise teeming with whales and fish.

  Stormy’s grandfather was one of the blackfish hunters–until the day he took a mother and heard her calf calling for her under his boat. He hadn’t the heart for whaling after that. But he also told his grandson of a whaling station at the Eastern Harbor, on the outskirts of town, where the Cape is at its narrowest and most tentative. Had the sea broken through here, Provincetown would have become an island; but soon after Thoreau passed this way, a dyke was built across the slender stretch, and the harbour turned into a brackish lake.

  And it was here, out walking, that Mayo and his son Josiah found a concavity in the dunes, a ‘blow-out’ that had temporarily ebbed to reveal a long-lost ossuary. Jaw bones and vertebræ lay jumbled together, sticking up out of the sand. Perhaps, like the elephants’ graveyard, this was where whales went to die; whales once so numerous that the Pilgrims thought they might walk across the bay on their backs.

  Lumbering and low, those whales’ descendants still swim in Cape Cod Bay, labouring under their inauspicious name: the right whale to catch; a ponderous, literal pun, borne with fortitude. With forty per cent of their body as fat, right whales are highly buoyant, spending most of their time at the surface; even more conveniently, they floated when killed. Along with their propensity to hug the shoreline–hence their other epithet, the urban whale–right whales suffered most of all from the centuries of unnatural predation. They were the first whale to be hunted, by Basques in the Bay of Biscay–a dubious honour commemorated by their proprietorial French name, baleine de Biscaye- but fewer than four hundred now remain in the North Atlantic.

  With its baroque, glossy body encrusted with callosities, its paddle-shaped flippers and its bizarre, yawning mouth filled with baleen, Eubalæna glacialis is both grotesque and wondrous, the stuff of ancient engravings. It is the very definition of a whale, as supplied by Ishmael’s sub-sub-librarian, who informs us that the word itself came of Scandinavian roots: hvale, meaning arched or vaulted in reference to its jaws, but also a reflection of the animal’s rolling roundness, its architectural structure.

  Like the sperm whale, the right whale was a victim of its strange physiology. Not only did it boast plentiful blubber, but its particularly long baleen, when heated, could be moulded into shape for umbrellas, corset stays and venetian blinds, or used as bristles for brushes. If whale oil was the petrol of its day, then whalebone was its plastic. Harvested in clumps higher than a man, their pliable blades were once arrayed in quayside plantations like giant sheaves of Jamaican sugar cane.

  What made these the right whales to kill now makes them modern targets. Almost unbelievably, one of the world’s rarest species chooses to frequent its most populous shores and busiest shipping routes. Here they fall victim to the tactics they deploy with their predators, remaining silent and still at the surface. An orca might be fooled into thinking the right whale was an inanimate object; an insensate freighter cares less. Although the right whale became the first cetacean to be protected from hunting in 1935, its numbers in the North Atlantic have remained static, despite legislation moving the shipping lane further north, and strict instructions that vessels should stay five hundred yards away from any whale. The result–so few breeding whales–is that the animal’s gene pool is now so restricted that it is unlikely to survive the century.

  The irony is that the right whale is such a fertile, if not fecund creature. Weighing nearly a ton, the male’s testes are the largest of any animal. These, along with its eight-foot penis, allow it to take part in sperm competition in which males assert their supremacy by multiple matings rather than fighting for favours (although they may use their callosities as a kind of weapon). Females will even permit more than one partner to
enter them at the same time, after sessions of delicate foreplay in which the courting animals use their flippers to stroke each other with inordinate gentleness; like all whales, their skin is incredibly sensitive, and the pressure of a human finger can send their entire body quivering. Despite this vigorous approach to sex, there are only eight matrilineal lines left in the northern species–the visible legacy of centuries of whaling.

  Stormy saw his first right whale when he was a sixteen-year-old boy out fishing on Stellwagen Bank with his father; they were almost legendary animals by then, already close to extinction. ‘People knew there were some left,’ he recalls, ‘but nobody knew where most of them were.’ His youthful interest evolved into an adult passion, and having helped found the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown in 1976, Mayo began collecting data on right whales. He also became the first person to be licensed by the government to rescue entangled whales; more than sixty per cent of right whales have been caught in fishing line. Ship strikes, too, are killing more than hitherto suspected, many of them females of calf-bearing age. At this stage of the species’ history, to save just one fertile female could make a difference between extinction or survival. It is hard not to see Stormy and his colleagues as new heroes of anti-whaling, flown interstate at short notice on operations costing thousands of dollars.

  Indeed, the same techniques that were once used to hunt whales are now used to save them. Alerted to an incident, the Ibis reaches the scene as soon as possible; an entangled whale may eventually die from starvation or infection, but more immediately, it can drown. The rescuers use a rigid inflatable boat to approach the animal and attach sea anchors to slow its progress, just as whalers used wooden kegs, and Native Americans attached inflated sealskins to harpooned whales. Wearing an ice hockey mask and a helmet (on which is fixed a video camera to record the event), Stormy attempts to cut the victim free. His equipment may be twenty-first century, but in silhouette he resembles a Victorian harpooneer, only instead of a barbed spear, he wields a long-handled hook to slice through the cat’s cradle of line.