Leviathan or The Whale

As Ishmael says, the whole process was a remorseless cycle; a man might not be free of it till nature or the whale’s caprice released him. As surely as those shrouds held the mast to his ship, as surely as the line held the harpoon to the whale, so was the sailor tethered to his prey in an unerring deposition of faith.
    ‘Ah the world! Oh the world!’
    Decks were scrubbed, men sent aloft for two-hour watches to look for whales. Until then, the ship and her crew lay in a kind of limbo. New recruits would practise in the boats, hardening muscles and honing co-ordination in a gymnasium of the sea. They rehearsed their techniques on passing porpoises or pilot whales, whose oil would occasionally be mixed with spermaceti to swell the profits of less honest whalers. For sixty-nine days the
Acushnet
sailed on a course now unknown to us, although it is probable that, like most New England whalers, she called at the Azores, seeking fresh provisions and new hands. Only then, as they sailed over the five-mile-deep chasms of the mid-Atlantic, would the hunt begin in earnest.
    Sperm whales are not bound to seasonal migrations like the humpbacks; even so, they still roam tens of thousands of miles each year, often congregating in certain areas known as ‘grounds’ to the whalers. These were plotted on mariners’ charts, marked with whalish symbols like maps in a military campaign. A favourite ground was the equatorial region, the Line. Here, at the earth’s midriff, the whales seemed to gather as if in a preordained meeting with their fate.
    The men had watched for weeks from the topgallant crosstrees, tiny figures swaying ninety feet in the air, everyone waiting for the magic words–
    There she blows! T-h-e-r-e s-h-e b-l-o-w-s!

    –at which the animals would appear, as if mystically summoned from the deep.
    And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror.

    Sometimes they saw twenty or thirty whales riding the waves like surfers, ‘tumbling about when the big seas would catch them and almost turn them over’, as the teenaged Haley recorded, with not a little admiration. ‘Sometimes one could be seen on the crest of a wave. As it broke he would shoot down its side with such a speed a streak of white could be seen in the wake he made through the water. When reaching the hollow between two seas he would lazily shove his spout holes above the water and blow out his spout, as much as to say, “See how that is done.”’ But even as the young whales were at their sport, the order was given to lower the boats. The Yankee whaleboat was ‘the most perfect water craft that has ever floated’: a sleek, sharp-pointed vessel thirty feet long, yet ‘so slight’, as Melville wrote, ‘that three men might walk off with it’. Double-ended for maximum manœuvrability, enabling it to be rowed in either direction, its cedar clinker-built sides and eighteen-foot oars were made to slip silently and swiftly through the water with its crew of six. ‘Buoyant and graceful in her movements,’ wrote Frederick Bennett, a British whaling surgeon, ‘she leaps from billow to billow, and appears rather to dance over the sea than to plough its bosom with her keel.’ At the rear, the mate gripped a great steering oar as he issued orders to men stripped for action; just as the boat’s rowlocks were muffled, so they went shoeless so as not to scare their prey. A sperm whale was as ready to rear as a startled deer–and a gallied whale was good to no one.
    Their pursuit was impelled by each boat’s commander.
    ‘Do for heaven’s sake spring’, the mate implored in whispered tones, ‘The boat don’t move. You’re all asleep; see, see! There she lies; skote, skote! I love you, my dear fellows, yes, yes, I do; I’ll do anything for you, I’ll give you my heart’s blood to drink; only take me up to this whale only this time, for this once, pull.’

    They were the words of an urgent lover, just as the harpoons were the darts of a deadly Cupid; exhortations alternating between passionate blasphemies and competitive imprecations.
    ‘ Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull my little ones,’ drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew…‘Why don’t you break your backbones, my boys…Why don’t you snap your oars, you rascals?…The