Leviathan or The Whale

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.
    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