Leviathan or The Whale

of walruses and whales.
    Nantucket,
Moby-Dick

    But in the 1840s a succession of adversities began to turn Nantucket’s fortune into failure. The new, larger whale-ships required to sail further for sperm oil could not negotiate the treacherous sandbar across the island’s harbour, which had begun to silt up. Business began to favour the easier access of New Bedford, as did many islanders, who emigrated there. The new port was the brash newcomer; and while Nantucket’s haughty sailors stubbornly pursued now depleted old hunting grounds, New Bedford’s whippy young whalers profitably exploited the Pacific seas.
    In 1846 a great fire destroyed a third of the town’s businesses–burning all the brighter for warehouses filled with barrels of whale oil. Two years later, the Gold Rush tempted young Nantucketers in search of quicker fortunes. In 1849 the fittingly named
Aurora
was the first Nantucket ship to sail for San Francisco, where whale-ships lay abandoned as their crews deserted for the gold fields, joining the crowds flocking to the west; many left home with little or nothing, not even underwear, reasoning that they had gone to wash gold, not their own dirty linen.
    The final knell for Nantucket came with other discoveries from the earth. From the 1840s, kerosene and coal gas were already lighting city streets and houses, although initially the use of domestic gas only encouraged the demand for whale oil as the passion for bright light spread. Then, in 1859, Edwin L. Drake drilled for oil on a farm in Titusville, Pennsylvania; the black-gold spurt that gushed from the ground like a whale’s spout signalled the end of the sperm whale fishery–and the beginning of another elemental plunder.
    After fire and oil came war. Four hundred Nantucket men and boys left to fight the cause of the Union, as Confederate ships wreaked havoc on the Yankee whaling fleet. Many ships were captured or burned, causing other owners to keep theirs at home. Some were sacrificed by the Union itself: forty whale-ships–known as the Stone Fleet–were filled with rubble and scuttled to block southern harbours. The industry limped on for a few more years, but in 1869 the last whaling ship left Nantucket.
    Slowly, surely, the island was cut off from time. Sealed from the modern world like land requisitioned by the military, its blasted heaths remained pristine, its cottages hidden in hollows away from fierce Atlantic winds. Cobbled streets fell silent, unclattered by carts carrying barrels of oil. Blank windows of brick mansions built by Quaker captains looked down to an empty quayside, while their owners lay in barren graves.

VI
Sealed Orders

    Wm. Bartley
. How came you to think of running away? Why sir, to tell you the truth I am afraid of a whale…
    Examination of deserters from the whaling ship,
Houqua
, 1835

    Down the coast in Connecticut, white clapboard houses rise out of the hoary grass like Christmas cakes. At dawn, every puddle has turned to ice; even the moss cracks beneath my feet. According to my hosts, this road is one of the oldest in New England, an Indian trail turned into a colonial way. Last night, as I walked by moonlight along the deserted lane, I imagined shapes at the dark edges where house lights yielded to the woods and civilization abruptly fell away.
    This morning, the sun climbs over granite rocks, and the highway that crosses the lane is already roaring with trucks. On the other side is the river, widening towards the sea and the site of another whaling port: Mystic. This, too, is a place of memory. Here, in 1637, the Puritans waged war on the Pequots, killing four hundred men, women and children. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Ahab’s ship appropriated the name of this slaughtered tribe. Or that, looming through the leafless trees ahead of me are the masts of the
Charles W. Morgan
, America’s last remaining whale-ship, built and launched on the Acushnet in the same year that Melville sailed on the voyage that would inspire the story of the
Pequod
.
    But the
Morgan
is no fantastical vessel with a whale jar for a tiller or whale teeth for pins. This is a real ship with all its constrictions and discomforts; an instrument stripped to its essential parts. Everything here was designed for the collection, production and storage of the whale, rather than the comfort of those expected to process it. This was a mobile factory, a nineteenth-century oil tanker; but it is also surprisingly sleek, like the