The harpooner had missed. He was pulling his irons back in over the side of the boat, slowly, thinking about it, while the captain in the stern lost his temper. “Clumsy lubber!” the captain shouted. “You a whaleman! You are only fit to spear eels!” The man jumped up from his seat as if a snake had bitten him. He stood there for a moment with his cheek burning, dropped the iron he had just pulled in, turned half round and went head first into the sea. Another man, coiling line in the back of the boat, saw what he meant to do just in time and caught him by the heel. He did not come back aboard without a fight. Afterwards the captain tried kind words on him, because he was genuinely sorry: he knew the man was noble-hearted, and he knew what his own insult had touched.
That scene comes from 1839, from an article by J. N. Reynolds in the magazine The Knickerbocker, called Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific, and presented as a page from a manuscript journal. Mocha is an island off the coast of Chile, at latitude 38 degrees 28 minutes south, opposite the Imperial river. Spaniards had lived there in the previous century, but by Reynolds’s time the island had been empty for some years. The climate is mild, the winters are hard to tell apart from the summers, frost is unknown in the lowlands 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, and Reynolds is careful about this. According to the whaleman telling the story, Mocha Dick was not a creature of settled malice. He would sometimes pass quietly round a ship, or swim lazily and harmlessly among the boats, even when those boats were fully armed for the destruction of his kind. This patience earned him nothing. If his enemies had nothing else to accuse him of, they would swear they had seen something devilish in the long, careless sweep of his tail. What is certain, Reynolds writes, is that all that indifference disappeared at the first prick of the harpoon, and that cutting the line and running for the ship were often the only ways his attackers could escape.
In Reynolds, the chase is a race between boats as much as a hunt. Half a mile ahead the whale was heaving his huge bulk about, apparently unaware that anyone was coming. There he blows, an old bull, eighty barrels of oil waiting to be towed alongside the ship. The oar blades bent like willow wands and trembled like tempered steel in the warm sunlight, the water boiled under the bow and closed hissing behind the boat. To become a first-rate oarsman, the narrator explains, you need a natural gift, and every man in his crew pulled as if he had been born with an oar in his hand. The story is told to an audience, and it is interrupted: the mate of the Penguin, a sealing ship, had been listening with excitement, but he took some remark as an insult to his own trade, jumped up and planted himself in front of the speaker. You, he began, you whale-killing. Reynolds says he has forgotten the exact words that set the man off.
More than a century later, in March 1955, the Dutch paper Het Parool published a long feature on South Sea whaling which retold what may have been the whale’s greatest fight. Mocha Dick came up a mile and a half to windward, blowing so hard and rising so fast that for a moment he seemed to stand on his tail before falling on his side with a noise like a house dropping into the water. Six whaleboats went out, two from each of three ships, and rocked over the place where he had gone down, waiting twenty minutes. When he came up again the crews had worked out his method. One man saw the mountain of flesh and bone rising under his boat in time to shout, and the oarsmen backed water like men possessed. The whale missed, struck air and came down in a drenching crash. An American boat slid in through the spray and the harpoon flew across the water and stuck quivering in the pale hide. Then he turned. The American boat, fastened to him by the harpoon, danced along behind him; he twisted again and caught a British boat before it could get clear, rolled onto his side, took it in his jaws and shook it with his head in the air, the way a terrier shakes a rat. Three ships and ninety men gave up and retreated. The paper called it a complete defeat of puny men by a mighty animal.
Melville’s Moby Dick seems to come from this real animal, and Melville knew he was attempting something impossible. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed, he wrote. He piled up authorities to prove it: Captain Scoresby in 1820, saying that no branch of zoology is so much involved as cetology, the study of whales, and Surgeon Beale in 1839, reporting that utter confusion exists among the historians of the sperm whale. Knowledge of the whales, Melville said, lay behind an impenetrable veil, in a field strewn with thorns.
That Beale is not just decoration. Raffaele d’Isa and Charles Abramson have argued that Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale of 1839, Henry Cheever’s book of 1850 and Thomas Southwell’s of 1881 did more than collect facts: they helped awaken the idea that whales might need protecting. Beale and Cheever were among the first naturalists to deal directly with living whales, and they rejected the usual picture of the bloodthirsty monster of the deep. Instead they described animals capable of thought and feeling, which forced readers to face animal suffering and extinction.
Het Parool ended its 1955 piece with the accounting. Modern whalers hunt with cannons and floating factories, and because the oil goes into margarine, one margarine millionaire had been called the Prince of Whales, a title the paper thought suited better to the nameless men who went after these creatures in small ships, with poor weapons and charts full of blank spaces. Fortunes were made that way: the Morgan returned two million dollars to her various owners over thirty-seven voyages and seventy-five years. The handling of the crews was rough, the punishments cruel, the food often bad, and the captain was also the ship’s physician, surgeon and dentist.
In Reynolds, the morning after the harpooner went over the side, the men were at breakfast. The lookout at the masthead sang out merrily, “There she breaches!” In an instant everyone was on his feet.