Leviathan or The Whale

devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull…’

    So the small, lethal boats sped through the water, fast and fragile, ready if necessary to be turned into matchwood in the affray. As they drew near their prey, the oars were put aside as they waited.
    And waited.
    Sperm whales spend most of their time below the surface, and can sound for ten minutes or an hour. An experienced whaler knew how long an animal would stay down by its size: for every foot of whale they must wait a minute more.
    It was a fearful calculation: the longer they waited, the greater the monster they faced.
    A mile below, the whale might be scooping up squid in the silent depths, unaware of the danger that lurked above, the shapes that sculled over the ceiling of its world. But the time came when it needed to replenish the oxygen in its blood, returning to the light and air. The irony was that the sign of its renewed life–its characteristic angled blow, easily spotted from miles away–was also the signal for its demise.
    Now came the moment for which these men had broken their backs. It too came shrouded in silence. ‘Every breath was held; no one dared move a jot. The dropping of a pin in the boat might almost have been heard…Now we were within dart.’ It was a meditation on what was to come, on the enormous task in hand. In this stillness was invested all the might of the whale versus the ingenuity of man.
    They relied on the animal’s design flaws: its blind spots, fore and aft. To approach a whale ‘on the eye’ was foolhardy; from its side it could see all that they were trying to do. So pulling head-on or behind, the boat crept as close as it dared. Through the surface they could see the fearsome flukes, three times the size of a man.
    How palpitating the hearts of the frightened oarsman at this interesting juncture! My young friends, just turn about and snatch a look at that whale. There he goes, surging through the brine which ripples about his vast head, as if it were the bow of a ship. Believe me, it’s quite as terrible as going into battle, to a raw recruit.

    This was the ultimate test, when each man would be judged; the moment on which their fortunes relied. It was also remarkably, almost stupidly dangerous: to pit a man against an animal so far in excess of him in size and power that even in the twentieth century, when hunting bottle-nosed whales–notorious for their ability to sound abruptly and take down a line with unbelievable speed–Norwegian ships would send out only single men, considering the task too hazardous for husbands with families.
    Fear met fear. A harpooneer expected to spear a living creature one hundred times his size. A gigantic mammal startled by the appearance of an object it had never seen before. Through its very bones, connected to the auditory canal deep within its head, and through its startled eyes, protected by a film of oil, the whale sensed danger in unidentified noise and movement. Panic was its first response.
    Once alerted, the entire school could swim off, at speed, invariably to windward. ‘The slightest noise causes them to disappear with marvellous celerity,’ as Charles Nordhoff observed. Giant whales could vanish into thin air. ‘That’s magic,’ said Nordhoff’s shipmate as one whale sounded with barely a toss of its head, so suddenly that ‘it seemed just as though the vast mass had been suspended in space, and the suspensor had been suddenly cut asunder’. One minute a sixty-foot animal would be alongside them; the next, it had entirely vanished.
    To gally a whale risked the failure of all that had brought the ship thousands of miles, captain and crew, provisions and whale-boats towards this one end. Sometimes the whale won even before battle was joined. Nelson Cole Haley’s failure to harpoon a young, five-barrel calf as it dived after its mother (‘I saw the shape of the little beggar under water’, but his irons missed their target), earned him a volley of abuse and a confrontation with the captain back on board the
Morgan
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    More often than not the hunters were outwitted; proof, if it were needed, of the madness of whaling. Yet ‘going on to a whale’ was an intensely exciting moment; perhaps the most exciting thing these young men had ever done. It was ‘glorious sport’, rowing with their mates as they entered into the spirit of the chase, a rush of testosterone to coincide with a target on which to