Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  What struck me then, and does so even more as I try to reimagine what I saw, was the surroundness of it all; the fact that we were incidental to this act of ancient choreography; not so much spectators as prisoners, unable to move as we were encircled by the whales and their proprietorial blows. It was as if humans had never happened, as if the ocean had reverted to another Eden. We had to wait while they got on with the business of eating, of laying comprehensive claim to the world on which we merely floated. In their rising breath and dying fall all the power and poignancy of life seemed wrapped, fraught with dramatic suspension; an exchange of exhalation and inhalation which scares me to think of it. Yet that sound, which I can replay in my head even as I write, is also oddly consoling, a reminder of our common ground, a reassurance that everything will be all right, even if it will not. Perhaps whales will teach me how to live, just as my mother taught me how to die.

  The same symmetry that had drawn me out of the city and back to where I was born had drawn the circle to a close: from the then when I needed my mother, to the now when she needed me; although she would never admit that she did, not in public, anyhow. She was fiercely independent, and would never submit. But I heard her on the phone to my sister, bemoaning her situation, and as creeping arthritis, which no amount of whale medicine would mend, added to her long list of ailments and her retreating senses, its crippling lock took hold of her legs and her fingers and her spine–even as I felt it in my own fingers. I overheard her, lying alone in bed, telling herself she would never walk again. She had always told me that at the end, when she was no longer needed, she would go down to Weston Shore, and just keep on walking. Now she couldn’t even do that.

  That September, soon after I had returned from the Cape, I was summoned by an early morning phone call to the hospital. My mother had suffered a severe heart attack. For a week, she lay there, slowly ebbing away on a hospital bed, with her family around her. At one point, I followed her as she was wheeled into intensive care, an air-locked, semi-darkened chamber where the blips and beeps of the other souls caught in limbo lay between life and death, emitting their own forlorn sonar. Only weeks before, I was a patient here, albeit for only an hour, my body sent through the claustrophobic scanner which knocked loudly like a poltergeist as it analysed my brain, trying to find the source of the eternal ringing in my ears, as if I were listening to some distant machinery. Now, in the same building, my mother lay wired up to her own machine, spread-eagled like an animal in an experiment, her long grey hair pulled tight by an elastic band. Her eyes never opened or closed, but she called my name.

  In those days, the details of which only now seem to come back to me, I lived in the hospital, wandered its corridors, sometimes walking in the cemetery set, with shocking efficiency, across the road, where the early autumn sun shone low through the trees, their fading leaves filtering the light. Then, in the dark hours before dawn, as I awoke suddenly on the camp bed made up by her side, I heard her breath slow to an imperceptible halt, from being to not being, leaving me, another orphan. And as I bent over the bed–so quiet as if not to wake her–her mouth let out a final little gasp, just as mine gave its first fifty years ago.

  For now he was awake and knew

  No one is ever spared except in dreams

  W. H. Auden, ‘Herman Melville’

  XIV

  The Ends of the Earth

  The inhabitants are mainly of Portuguese descent, indolent and devoid of enterprise. Principal exports: wine and brandy, oranges, maize, beans, pineapples, cattle. The climate is recommended as suitable for consumptive patients.

  The British Encyclopædia, 1933

  Fifteen hundred miles due east of Cape Cod and a thousand miles from Lisbon, the Azores lie in the middle of the Atlantic, scattered arbitrarily in the ocean. Portugal claimed these islands in the fifteenth century; Columbus called here to hear Mass on his way home from America. Most people would be hard pressed to find them on a map, falling as they do between the gutter of an atlas’s pages. Yet these nine dots represent vast sea mounts greater than the Himalayas, a spine running the length of the earth in an invisible geography.

  There are no friendly beaches of golden sand, only black rocks of bubbling lava arrested by the ocean. This is where the world is coming apart. Three islands lie on the Eurasian plate, three on the African, and the rest on the American plate; an act of perpetual tectonic division in which the westernmost isles inch closer to America and further from Europe each year. The youngest island, Pico, appeared only a quarter of a million years ago; its volcano is still active, and earthquakes occur here with fatal regularity Sharply triangular against the sky, for Melville’s Pierre, mourning the loss of his mother, it was an immemorial sight:

  Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity. Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak, Piko, stands unassaultable in the midst of the waves.

  There is something foreboding about its outline, as though the entire archipelago were one enormous mirage. It was in Azorean waters that the Mary Celeste, Our Lady of the Heavens, was last seen in 1872, before being found abandoned with no trace of her captain or crew.

  Each morning the ferry leaves from Faial, loaded with crates of supplies and passengers’ luggage, borne across the narrow straits by waves that have travelled from the other side of the Atlantic.

  They crash furiously over the rocks, rising in four-storey spouts and creating clouds of their own. But it is not the ocean’s temper that fills me with trepidation; it is the fact that within a hundred yards it drops to a depth of one mile, and then far deeper.

  It is a fear I feel as I walk through the dark streets of Lajes, past plane trees so severely pollarded that they look as though they are growing the wrong way up, stuck stump-down with their roots in the air. In the half light before dawn, the volcano blots out the stars, and somewhere over my shoulder the surf tears at the shore. This biblical little town is the oldest on Pico, perched on the island’s southernmost shore and governed by two irresistible forces: the roaring sea and the restless earth.

  At one end of Lajes is the tiny chapel of São Pedro, founded in 1460 and built into and of the basalt; at the other is a monumental eighteenth-century Franciscan monastery, its angles black-edged in mourning. Lajes is buttressed by belief, constrained by it. Its inhabitants are stocky, dark-eyed, yet also strangely familiar: they are the same handsome faces and the same names I know from Provincetown: Costa, Motta, Silvera. Even the taxi driver speaks English with a New Bedford accent.

  Here too, whales are never far away. You see them in mosaics on the pavement, on souvenirs in shop windows, on the wooden fascias of cafés; one bar even boasts the toothless lower jaw of a sperm whale, suspended over its brandy bottles. Under the twin towers of the Santissima Trinidade, where Sunday-best children recite their catechism as their black-clad grandmothers sing, a glass cabinet holds scrimshaw models of harpoons pointing towards a crucified Christ set beside a little votive whale; a bone plaque dedicates these relics to Our Lady of Lourdes, whose miraculous appearance in a French cave in 1858 coincided with the commencement of whaling in the Azores.

  If whales evolved long before humans then it seems fitting that they should still haunt these protean islands. The whales were here before the islands; and the islanders have lived off whales ever since the Americans came here in the mid-eighteenth century, sailing on the trade winds. Many ships–among them, the Charles W. Morgan–anchored in these waters, taking on fresh food and fresh crews. In turn, Azoreans worked their passage on a ‘bridge of whale-ships’ to the New World, as the same prevailing winds bypassed the islands on the voyage home, stranding Azoreans in America, where many made their homes; it has been calculated than half the population of the Massachusetts seaboard has Portuguese or Azorean blood. The islands themselves became architectural echoes of New Bedford and Nantucket, their narrow cobbled streets overlooked by rooftop lan-terns and clapboard; New England towns, only with palm trees.

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p; Contrary to the claims of the British Encyclopædia, Azoreans are nothing if not resourceful, and in 1850 they began their own whal-ing. Soon one hundred Azorean crews were hunting whales, using techniques learned from their former masters. However, theirs is not a preserved memory of some distant past, for here, on these beautiful, diabolical islands, whaling did not end until 1986.

  In a converted boathouse on the quayside, Serge Viallelle shows me film of Azorean whaling from the 1970s. It is like watching colour footage from the nineteenth century; as though Ishmael had a camcorder. The islanders used the same boats as the Yankee whalers, although latterly their double-prowed canoas, complete with whalebone cleats and trim, were taken out to sea by motor boats; and rather than spotting whales from the lofty crosstrees of a ship, they relied on vigias, towers perched on clifftop promontories where they still stand, just as wartime pillboxes still stud the southern coast of England.

  Every morning the watcher would trudge up the narrow, flower-strewn path, his lunch packed in a neat wicker basket. Sitting on a wooden stool, peering through field glasses strapped to a swivelling stand, he would spend all day scanning the waves through the slit-like window, waiting for the blows that announced the whales.

  At that sign the hunt began. The vigia would send up a rocket–lit by his cigarette–the signal for the crew to stop what they were doing. They might be digging in the fields or fishing at sea, but they were required by law to attend the call and liable to be fined if they did not. Like lifeboat men leaving their day jobs, they ran down to the harbour where their canoas stood ready. Once at sea, the men might spend all day and all night waiting for the whale. When it surfaced, they put up their sails and rowed silently towards the blow. This was the crucial moment. Unable to dive again until it had replenished the oxygen in its blood, the animal was at its most vulnerable in these, the last few minutes of its peaceable life. And all this was happening while I was going to nightclubs in London.

  In the film, the irons find their target. The harpooned animal makes a forlorn dash, but, soon exhausted, it lies at the surface, where the lance is plunged again and again into its side; bent by the whale’s struggles, the shaft is beaten straight on the canoa’s boards before being used again. Blood swirls in the water, gouts of it; the whale shudders, and dies. Interviewed hunters testify to the excitement of the chase–‘Harpooning a whale is like scoring a goal’–a heroism worthy of the matador.

  By the late 1970s each whale was worth £500; little wonder that subsistence farmers and fishermen were so eager to capture them. Yet whaling was truly a dying art. There was only one blacksmith left who could forge the harpoons and lances in their time-honoured shape. Even so, in 1979 one hundred and fifty sperm whales were caught off the Azores, and in the last ten years of whaling, the price of their teeth rose from three to eighty dollars a kilo.

  Soon the islanders found better work elsewhere, and the world lost its taste for the products of the whale. The final blow came when the Azores joined the European Union, within which whaling was illegal. When Serge Viallelle came here from France in the 1980s, a drop-out delivering a yacht who discovered the whales and stayed, he had to persuade the islanders that people would pay just to look at whales. As in Provincetown, whale watching replaced whale hunting; in a neat twist of fate, the Azoreans were taught their new trade by Al Avellar, a Provincetowner of Portuguese descent.

  In the nearby restaurant, the proprietor shows me through a mirrored door behind the bar, and into his sitting room. Its walls are lined with posters and photographs commemorating his years as a whaler. One shows him standing by a sperm whale, pointing to its huge teeth. He tells me that he killed twenty-two whales that year. As if to fill the silence as we stand in front of the picture, he says, ‘People cry for the whales, but they do not cry for Iraq.’

  For some reason, I pat him on the back. He says that whale flour was good for the crops, how they never had any insects when they were thus fertilized; no need for pesticides. Such useful things, whales.

  Outside the restaurant, on the quayside overlooked by the volcano and the setting sun, an engine revs. Serge says it is the original motor boat that once towed the canoas out to sea. Whenever it starts up, he tells me, the sound scares the whales away for miles around.

  On the north side of Pico lies São Roque. It has its own version of New Bedford’s bronze harpooneer, posed with his weapon like an ancient Greek. Behind it a grey concrete ramp rises out of the sea, leading to a white-painted building with art deco lettering advertising its function:

  VITAMINAS OLEOS FARINHAS ADUBOS ARMAÇÕES BALEEIRAS REUNIDAS L.DA

  It might as well be a factory on the outskirts of some Midlands town. But behind this façade lie blackened stone chimneys and abandoned outhouses; and in what appears to be an overgrown playground are the remains of a beached canoa, its splintered wood and fragments of whale bone held together by copper nails.

  The main building is now a museum, although it is unlike any other I have seen. It is almost entirely empty: its exhibits are its fittings themselves. On the wooden walls are roughly chalked measurements and calculations. Under the high roof, vaulted with rusting girders, stand iron autoclaves as tall as a house. Buckets hang on hoists. The clang of metal doors all but echoes through this factory founded in 1942, as other factories were being built across Europe.

  The men who operated these ovens left long ago. For half a century, sperm whales were taken from the seas around the island and towed here, sliding on their own blood and slime as they were winched up out of the water by machinery made in Tyneside.

  At a cistern at the top of the ramp the head was drained of oil; the jaws were torn away and taken to one side. Then, in front of what looks like a garage forecourt with huge double doors ready to admit the beast, the rest of the whale was dissected.

  Forty or fifty men in leather aprons and espadrilles went to work, slicing and sawing. Unlike their ancestors, they had the benefit of twentieth-century machinery. The blubber was wheeled in buckets to the ovens and rendered down in giant, hermetically sealed versions of try-pots. Spermaceti was kept cool in a concrete chamber, chilled by enormous refrigerated pipes.

  ‘Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.’

  In another part of the compound, whale meat was ground into flour for use as animal food. European cattle fed on whales. Nothing was wasted. This was the truly industrial, logical epitome of whaling. The whale’s liver produced vitamin extracts. The teeth were used to create scrimshaw, destined to gather dust on tourists’ shelves at home.

  You could smell São Roque miles away, Serge’s wife, Alexandra, remembers; it was a disgusting memory from her childhood. For the Englishman Malcolm Clarke, it was the stench of blood that hit you first. Then the sight of the severed jaws laid out to rot: ‘The ground was literally alive with maggots.’

  None of this is in the distant past. Men still bear the scars here, the teeth marks of whales on their bodies. Bones still lie on beaches.

  A little way out of Lajes is a newly painted mural and a sign above what looks like the door of a garage: Museu do Cachalotes e Lulas. Inside is an eccentric collection, the product of one man’s passion. Malcolm Clarke was born in Birmingham, grew up by the Thames, and spent his National Service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, driving ambulances from Aldershot to the military hospital at Netley on the shores of Southampton Water. In the 1950s he joined the whaling fleets of the South Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. His memory of that time is still vivid, and the numbers defy the imagination. In one season alone he saw thirty thousand whales taken. ‘We were at full cook the whole time,’ he says. Sometimes they caught twenty-four whales a day.

  Malcolm became fascinated by what the whales ate. As we pass buckets filled with squid beaks, he tells me how the contents of sperm whales’ stomachs would yield dozens of unidentified species; in one he found no fewer than 18,000 beaks. In fact, he now professes to find whales annoying, because they eat so many o
f the animals he studies.

  The most impressive display in Malcolm’s museum is a life-size cross-section of a female sperm whale painted directly onto the plaster, a mural so large that it carries on around the corner and onto the next wall. It is a lurid lesson in cetacean anatomy, but its bright blue and red organs cannot rival what lies on the table below. Swimming in a Tupperware dish is a sample of the spermaceti sac, glistening like tripe. I prod it, gingerly; the oil has crystallized like old honey.

  Next to it is a square chunk of blubber. I am taken aback at how hard it feels, more like wood than fat. I squeeze a piece between my finger and thumb; the intricate mesh that runs through it barely yields. I imagine an armoured animal, tank-like. ‘They were tremendously difficult for the whalers to cut,’ says Malcolm. The blubber is also burrowed and wormed by parasites, a certain source of irritation for their unwilling host.

  Something stranger lies in a third container: what looks like a lump of brownish-grey mud at the bottom of an old coffee jar. As I lift the lid, the smell hits my nostrils: pungent, musky, discernibly animal, its congealed, peaty texture reminds me of nothing so much as cannabis resin. Then Malcolm shows me on his diagram where this stuff came from: the whale’s rectum. I am holding a piece of ambergris the size of a small potato, the most precious product of any animal, a natural creation more elusive than any gold or diamond. But what I had hitherto assumed to be the result of some mysterious process, like grit in an oyster shell forming a pearl, is actually whale shit.