Leviathan or The Whale

was astounding. Pods of oceanic striped and spotted dolphin raced past, their markings like fine china, followed by a school of short-finned pilot whales, calves swimming so close to their mothers’ sides that they seemed attached by invisible strings. A manta ray swam under our keel, like a great bat. Marco picked up a passing hawks-bill turtle. It eyed us suspiciously before being released back to the sea, where it paddled incongruously like an overgrown tortoise.
    The life leapt out of the ocean: as we sped past the vertical cliffs on which the
vigia
stood, something butterfly-like shot out of the waves, level with my eyes–a flying fish with rainbow wings, an unreal, glittering invention like some fantastical clockwork toy. Even the sea’s surface was decorated with drifting Portuguese men o’ war, their inflated bladders edged with a fluorescent pink frill, trailing colonies of magenta and purple tentacles, each an animal in its own right. I wanted to reach out and right the aimless creatures as they were blown over by the wind like lost balloons, although I knew my reward would be a potentially lethal sting.

    Ahead, there were blows. The whales had returned, drawing deep breaths on long dives in search of food. As they passed us, a red, ragged lump floated to the surface: a giant chunk of leftover squid, its tentacles torn like meat fed to lions in a game park.
    One whale lunged on its side, close to starboard, its pale speckled jaw visible through the water. Another slowly raised its squared-off snout as it spy-hopped, bringing its eyes level to look at us, even as we looked at it; at that moment, the entire animal was hanging vertically in the ocean, perpendicular to the surface.
    These details were lessons in the natural history of sperm whales; I was being given a personal crash-course in practical cetology. Often I saw the animals’ wrinkled flanks, bark-like creases running from head to tail, bodies puckered as though they had spent too long in the water. Coming upon a group of three females, the adults dived in sequence, leaving their calf behind as if we were baby-sitters. When they resurfaced–a grey flotilla with heads rising as prows–to collect their charge, it seemed we had got too close, and the nearest adult slapped the surface sharply with her flukes, warning us to keep our distance.

    These waters were their home: their nursery, their living space, their dining room. One whale raised its flukes and squirted out a cloud of reddish poo, rank with the odour and colour of digested squid. Another left behind a sliver of sloughed skin. João scooped it up out of the water and gave it to me. It had the same colour as the whale, but was gossamer-thin, lying like skein of grey snot in my hand. Later, I laid it on a page of my journal, where it dried to a tissue yet smelled as strong as ever–the ‘peculiar and very strong odour’ which impressed Beale, and which Ishmael could smell from miles away, ‘that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch’. It was also deeply male and musky, strangely sexual and arousing, like the little bottle of sperm oil I found on a shelf at Arrowhead.
    …you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles.
    The Blanket,
Moby-Dick

    I never failed to thrill to the appearance of the whales in those days at sea. Falling in synch with their cycle, with the swell of the sea, I came to know when to expect their arrival, and when they were about to leave. Hour after hour we would wait for them to surface; sometimes I would lie in the prow of the boat, from sheer exhaustion, falling asleep in the sun–only to be roused by the appearance of another animal: the plosive announcement as it arrived, its rounded head breaking the surface; the minutes it spent ‘rafting’, lying like a panting dog catching its breath after a run. Then the head would rise as it took its