Leviathan or The Whale

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 of the animals he studies.
    The most impressive display in Malcolm’s museum is a life-size cross-section of a female