Leviathan or The Whale

Suddenly, their enraged quarry surfaced with an almighty blow. Its very breath was fearful: sailors believed the spout to be acrid, able to burn skin or even, warns Ishmael, cause blindness, ‘if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes’.
    Holding its buoyant, oil-filled head high out of the water, with its narrow jaw cutting the water below, the whale transformed itself ‘from a bluff-bowed sluggish guillot into a sharp-pointed New York pilot-boat’. Now the terrified animal towed its tormentors on a Nantucket sleigh ride; at twenty-six miles an hour, this was the fastest any man had travelled on water: ‘whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way’.
    Sooner or later–and it could be hours later–the whale would tire. Only then, alongside or even on top of the animal itself, ‘wood and black skin’, did the scene reach its climax. Those rowing with their backs towards the whale might have been glad of their orders not to turn around. At any moment the whale might raise its tailstock twenty feet in the air, a towering slab of muscle so swift to deal death that it was called ‘the hand of God’. With one flick it could send one of their number into eternity, an act as disdainful as theirs was arrogant. Worse still, the animal might actively turn on their craft, lunging with its toothed jaw held terrifyingly at right-angles to its body like a lethal saw. There was no defence against such an assault. It was man, or whale.
    At the command, ‘stern all’, the harpooneer swapped place with the boat-steerer or mate, whose privilege it was, in that absolute hierarchy, to administer the
coup de grâce
. Drawing his long lance from its sheath, with both hands over the end to place his weight behind it, the mate plunged his iron in and out of the blubber. Blood running in rivulets over its black body, the maddened whale sought to wreak its revenge, impotently snapping its jaws open and shut. Then the blade found the life of the whale: the heart and lungs that lay behind its left flipper.
    and they pierced his side with a lance

    There it churned about like a poker until the cry went up, ‘There’s fire in the chimney!’, its life-giving spout turned to a red fountain as thick blood pumped from the rapidly expanding and contracting blowhole. Now the whale entered its death flurry, swimming in a spiralling circle, the condemned animal vomiting up its final meal of squid, a pathetic reaction to its mortal internal wounds. With a juddering halt, its torment came to an end. ‘His heart had burst!’ And drawing its last breath, the whale rolled on its side, fin out, with one eye to the sky and–so its killers claimed–its head turned towards the sun.
    they will look on the one whom they have pierced

    For all the argot that served to distance them from their butchery, these were not men without hearts. They were not immune to the pathos of these scenes, to the death of something that represented life on such a scale. Charles Nordhoff would describe the wanton destruction he saw on his whaling cruise through the Indian Ocean and up the coast of Africa in search of sperm whales, as his crew mates harpooned and lanced any living thing they came across, from anaconda and hippopotamus to sea lion, as if anything alive became, by virtue of the fact, automatic targets. Young men like to kill things, sometimes just to see what happens.
    And yet, when no sperm whales had appeared for weeks and the ship was driven to hunting humpbacks, even hard-bitten sailors objected to the killing of a mother and calf, the cow trying to protect her offspring by holding it tight to her body with her flipper or nudging it ahead and out of harm’s way, only for the infant to fall prey to a well-directed lance. To one man, ‘it was a useless waste of life…and besides had a tendency to excite the cow whale’. Later they saw one of the calves they had orphaned, now half-starved, desperately trying to suckle at a bull whale’s belly, only to be violently driven off.
    Men must eat, as must their families; their children must be shod, captains’ houses must be shingled, their wives corseted; citizens must see by night. Their quarry was claimed with pennants, plaintively named ‘waifs’, planted directly into the whale’s gaping blowhole. It was a final statement of possession: what was the whale’s was now man’s. These waifs also served to reunite the straying boats with their mother ship, perhaps miles