The harpooner had missed. He was pulling his harpoons back into the boat, slowly, when the captain in the stern lost his temper and shouted at him. He called him clumsy. He said the man was only fit to spear eels, and that he was afraid of a whale. The harpooner stood up as if a snake had bitten him. His face was burning. He dropped the iron he had just pulled in, turned half round and threw himself head first into the sea. Another man, who was coiling rope at the back of the boat, saw what he meant to do and caught him by the heel just in time. The harpooner did not come back on board without a fight. Later the captain tried kind words, because he was truly sorry. He knew the man had a noble heart, and he knew what his insult had touched.
This story was printed in 1839 in a magazine called The Knickerbocker. It was written by J. N. Reynolds and was called Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific. Mocha is an island off the coast of Chile. Spaniards lived there in the previous century, but by Reynolds’s time nobody had lived there for some years. The climate is mild, winter is hard to tell from summer, and snow is rare even on the highest peaks.
The whale that took the island’s name had a mixed reputation among the men who hunted him. Reynolds is careful about this. The whaleman who told the story did not think the animal was full of hate. Sometimes Mocha Dick swam quietly round a ship, or moved lazily among the boats even when they were fully armed and ready to kill him. This peaceful behaviour did him no good. If the whalers had nothing else to say against him, they swore they could see something evil in the long, careless sweep of his tail. What is certain, Reynolds writes, is that all that calm disappeared with the first touch of the harpoon. After that, cutting the rope and running back to the ship was often the only way for the attackers to escape.
More than a hundred years later, in March 1955, the Dutch newspaper Het Parool printed a long article about whaling in the South Seas. It retold what may have been the whale’s greatest fight. Mocha Dick came up a mile and a half away and blew. He rose so fast that for a moment he seemed to stand on his tail, before he fell on his side with a noise like a house falling into the water. Six whaleboats went out, two from each of three ships. They waited twenty minutes over the place where he had gone down. When he came up again, the crews had understood his method. One man saw the mountain of flesh and bone rising under his boat and shouted in time, and the oarsmen rowed backwards like madmen. The whale missed and came down in a great crash of water. An American boat came in through the waves, and the harpoon flew and stuck in the pale skin. Then the whale turned. The American boat, tied to him by the harpoon, danced along behind him. He twisted again and caught a British boat before it could get away. He rolled onto his side, took the boat in his jaws and shook it with his head in the air, the way a small dog shakes a rat. Three ships and ninety men gave up and went back. The newspaper called it a complete defeat of small men by a mighty animal.
Melville’s Moby Dick seems to come from this real animal.
In Reynolds’s story, the morning after the harpooner went over the side, the men were at breakfast. High on the mast, the lookout sang out happily, “There she breaches!” In a second everyone was on his feet, and the skipper came rushing.