Leviathan or The Whale

work out their rage. They were, in the argot of the time, bully boys, bully for the chase. This was why they forbore all the privations, for this one supreme moment, the adrenalin pumping in their arteries, even as the oxygen-rich blood coursed through the whale’s.
    Now the harpooneer rose to balance precariously at the prow, taking up his long iron from the crotch of the boat–the vessel and its weapons extensions of his power. As he stood, every muscle tensed towards the oncoming whale, the boat itself became a kind of brace, his right thigh set hard into a semicircle cut from the gunwale. This was the so-called clumsy cleat into which the hunter fitted, just as Ahab’s peg-leg slotted into a socket made on the
Pequod’s
deck. Wood versus blubber; man’s frail construction pitted against nature’s formidable creation.
    ‘Give it to him!’
    Whaling was like war, ‘actual warfare’ in one whaler’s eyes. For the young men in the boat, it was equivalent to going over the top; even more so for the man expected to throw the first blow for the first time. Only now did he realize the enormity of what he had to do, as he looked down into the water and the whale that seemed to fill his eyes. Some greenhands fainted at the sight, and had to be replaced by more experienced mates. Some went ‘quite “batchy” with fright, requiring a not too gentle application of the tiller to their heads in order to keep them quiet’. Equally, the whale itself would react ‘with affright, in which state they will often remain for a short period on the surface…lying as it were in a fainting condition’, as if both man and whale were as shell-shocked as each other.
    It was a military manæuvre, requiring superhuman strength. The harpooneer, rowing even harder than his mates, had at the last moment to drop his oar, pick up his weapon, and throw it twenty or thirty feet towards the whale; a man’s straining blood vessels might burst with the effort, says Ishmael. At the crucial instant, the razor-sharp spear was released, hurtling through the air on its wooden stock, umbilically attached by the line as it whistled towards its target. More often than not it drew or failed to find its dreadful home. ‘But what of that?’ wrote Melville. ‘We would have all the sport of chasing the monsters, with none of the detestable work which follows their capture.’
    Time stopped still. Such was the intensity of the experience that, as their descendants would discover when rescuing rather than killing whales, the adrenalin of present danger obliterated all memory of anything else, even of the moment itself.
    Harpooneer braced, power passing through iron to the whale.
    Line curling in lazy loops, tightening to the fish.
    Crew in mid-scull, every muscle tensed.
    Mother ship on the horizon, fast fading into the distance.
    Silence, before the clamour of life over death.
    With a barely audible thud, the successful barb sank deep into blubber. With it all hell broke loose. The entire school of whales, feeling the blow communally, suddenly scattered to windward, causing the sea to erupt like an earthquake. Bucking and rearing, the harpooned whale tried to rid itself of the spear buried ‘socket up’ in its flesh. Sometimes the harpoon was bent double in the struggle. Its shaft was cast from flexible iron, so that it could be beaten back into shape, even if twisted to a corkscrew. As soldiers wore medals, so sailors kept such ‘wildly elbowed’ weapons as mementoes of their heroic encounters.
    Now the whale would sound fast and deep, threatening to take its assailants with it. The line, long enough to run for a mile or more, paid out of its bucket where it lay like a coiled cobra, splashed with sea water to prevent it from burning with the friction and guided by hands covered with protective canvas ‘nippers’. To sit with ‘the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line’, says Ishmael, was like sitting within a dangerous machine, ‘the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you’. The whipping manilla rope could catch a man and yank him out of this world and into the next.
    At one end, a sixty-ton animal. At the other, six men. Through the line they could
feel
the whale; an intimate connection between man and prey. The crew fought to haul the creature out of the depths as an angler tussles with a fish; an effort of resistance and power; a tug of war, or a tug of love.