Leviathan or The Whale

away by now, perhaps even out of sight. Meanwhile, a sperm whale calf might nudge the whaleboat, searching the cedar sides for its mother’s teats.
    Physeter dolorosa

    Rove through its flukes like a ring through a Moor’s ear, the whale was chained and towed back, a fifty-ton dead weight dragged through the water at a mile an hour. If night had fallen by the time they returned, the whale would be secured to starboard, head astern. There it waited as the crew slept, their prey alongside, barnacle to barnacle, cosily safe until sunrise.
    Then the real work began.
    On the larboard or port side a section of the bulwark was removed, allowing a narrow cutting stage to be lowered, like a window-cleaner’s platform, from which the mates, experts at the task, sliced at the whale with sharp spades. Other men dangled from ropes as whale mountaineers, hacking away to bring lumps of flesh and bone on deck, while their mates clambered over the slippery skin wearing crampon-spiked boots to carry out their delicate, brutal task. A hole was cut in the animal’s side for the purchase of the giant blubber hook which swung from the mast. Thus the ‘blanket’ was unrolled, divesting the whale of what had given it warmth.
    Pared off like the peel from a Christmas clementine, the result was cut into huge chunks and passed down to the blubber room. Here it was cut into manageable portions by half-naked men working in semi-darkness, often maimed by misaimed spades as the sharpened steel sliced off their own toes and fingers. Thick ‘horse pieces’ became ‘bible leaves’, thin slices to melt faster (while invoking images of the whale itself as a holy book). These were then hauled back up top and tipped into cast-iron try-pots set into brick ovens–strangely domestic structures, somewhere between blacksmith’s furnace and kitchen range, as though someone had begun to build a house on deck.
    For two days the work continued. Men laboured six hours on, six hours off, to the slithering, ripping, rippling, snapping sounds of torn tendons and sundered muscles, to the stink of blood and guts as the creature’s severed head was separated into its constituent parts: the
case
, the chamber containing liquid spermaceti; the
junk
, the mass within the head; and the
white horse
, the fibres that held more oil in spongy cells. This was the rendering, a due process on this slavish ship, as the men in turn were enslaved to the whale, paying obeisance to the vast creature dissected on deck: ‘the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.’ Most of the whale went to waste, chucked over the side to be gnawed by sharks and pecked by birds flocking to the scene.
    As the animal came apart, it was in its blunt head that the hidden treasure was to be found: gallons of precious spermaceti. Ishmael takes us into this cavern, filled with a substance described by another as ‘of a slightly rosy tint, looking like soft ice cream or white butter partly churned’. As man became part of the whale, the whale might even now take the life of a man. In a terrifying scene, Ishmael watches as Tashtego the harpooneer is lowered into the tun to bail out its spermaceti, only to fall in head-first, ‘with a horrible oily gurgling’. The severed head bobs in the sea while the Indian struggles inside, about to drown in whale oil.
    At that moment, a naked Queequeg appears, clutching a boarding-sword. Diving to the rescue, he pulls Tashtego out by his hair, delivering him from the fleshy pit like a Cæsearean-born baby, even as it threatens to become his grave. It would have been ‘a very precious perishing’, muses Ishmael, regaining his usual phlegm, ‘smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale’.
    And the L ORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

    Such a deep-seated fear, of being engulfed by the whale, reached back to the Bible and beyond. The Victorian naturalist Francis Buckland described how one scientist had attempted a dissection of a beached sperm whale at Whitstable in 1829, descending into ‘the gigantic mass of anatomical horrors’, only to lose his footing and fall into the animal’s heart, trapping his feet in its aorta. In the 1920s, an Oxford professor named Ambrose John Wilson sought to prove the possibility of