Leviathan or The Whale

and Christopher Hussey who had suffered Puritan persecution in New England. For an island that ‘seemed to have been inhabited merely to prove what mankind can do’, whaling came as a kind of destiny, as told in Obed Macy’s
History of Nantucket
, and quoted by
Moby-Dick’s
sub-sub-librarian:
    In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed; there–pointing to the sea–is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.

    For centuries Nattick Indians had foraged for whales in these plentiful waters. The new Nantucketers learned from their techniques. At first, land masts with crude ladders were used to spot right whales on their migration north. Harpooned and towed back to the beach, their two-foot-thick blubber yielded more oil than any other whale, and their baleen was taller and finer–the same ‘limber black bone’ from which Captain Peleg’s wigwam is constructed on the deck of the
Pequod
.
    Then, in 1712, a new prey was discovered. According to legend, Christopher Hussey was out hunting when his sloop was blown beyond the normal limits of the Nantucket fisheries. There, in deep waters, he encountered the sperm whale, hitherto considered ‘fabulous or utterly unknown’, says Ishmael. Now it would usurp the right whale ‘upon the throne of the seas’. In assuming that crown, the sperm whale became a more fitting quarry for the lordly islanders, ‘this horrible and indecent Right whaling, I say, compared to a spirited hunt for the gentlemanly Cachalot’. Whaling for such a noble animal was like riding with foxhounds compared to the lowly bear-baiting of right whales. Soon it was a crucial part of the island’s economy, still more so as the right whales became scarcer. By 1730 there were twenty-five vessels in the island’s fleet. By the end of the century, it would lead the world in whaling.
    ‘And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?’ quotes our sub-sub-librarian, from
Edmund Burke’s reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale Fishery
. Burke went on to inform Britain of ‘the progress of their victorious industry’: ‘No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils.’ Old Europe could not rival ‘this recent people, a people who are still, as it were but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood’. The new nation seemed to prove itself by the whale. For Owen Chase, first mate of the
Essex
and scion of an old Nantucket family, he and his fellow whalers were crusaders ‘carrying on an exterminating warfare against those leviathans of the deep’. They were knights and squires bound up in a new chivalric order; outriders of an empire, even as the whales were driven ‘like the beasts of the forest, before the march of civilisation into remote and more unfrequented seas’.
    It was a pattern of plunder of the New World’s resources. As their land-borne counterparts drove buffalo from sixty million to extinction, so these oceanic cowboys pursued whales to the brink. It was as if the antediluvian beasts had to die in order to assert the modern world. For America, the common enemy was the wilderness; and just as that wilderness was in fact full of animals–and native peoples–so the American seas were full of whales, ready for the slaughter. Hostilities were declared in 1712; it would be a war of attrition ever after.
    At first Nantucket whaling was a family business, a trade passed down from hand to hand. Any young man of promise could expect, after two whaling trips, to captain his own ship. Crews were ‘composed of the sons and connections of the most respectable families on the island’, Owen Chase wrote; ‘they labor not only for their temporary subsistence, but they have an ambition and pride among them which seeks after distinguishment and promotion.’
    Initially, whales were brought back to port to be rendered, but by 1750 shipboard try-works–a Basque invention of brick ovens with giant cauldrons in which to boil down the blubber–were being used. In a neat flip of cause and effect, these contraptions permitted the rendition of whales on the ever longer voyages required to find them. At the same time, whaling became part of a greater, political game. The Wars of Independence stalled Nantucket’s growth–its fleet declined from one hundred and fifty to thirty-five ships–while the islanders