Leviathan or The Whale

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