Leviathan or The Whale

Nantucket, hoarding food in his attic, still fearing starvation and having lost his mind, clutching his friend’s hand as he sobbed, ‘Oh my head, my head’. Meanwhile, close by, his former captain lived with his own awful memories. Distrusted with any new command, Pollard worked as a nightwatchman and lamplighter, wandering the streets of Nantucket as if to atone for his sins. It was only after he wrote his book, on his first visit to an island that he had only imagined until then, that Melville met ‘Capt. Pollard…and exchanged some words with him. To the islanders he was a nobody–to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble, that I ever encountered.’
    As Melville’s imagination fastened on the story of the
Essex
, it was supplemented by other legendary whales in print. In 1839 Jeremiah Reynolds’s ‘Mocha Dick: or, the White Whale of the Pacific’ was published in the
Knickerbocker Magazine
. A friend of Edgar Allan Poe’s, Reynolds was an eccentric writer and explorer who believed in a hollow earth. He embroidered on tales of a white whale known to haunt the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha, ‘an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature, as exhibited in the case of the Ethiopian Albino, a singular consequence had resulted–
he was as white as wool!’
    This eerie creature was claimed to be one hundred feet long, rugged with barnacles and able to shatter boats with his twenty-eight-foot-wide flukes, or grind them to pieces with his massive jaws. He was said to have killed thirty men, stoven fourteen boats, and had nineteen harpoons planted in him. Reynolds’s story ends with the whalers triumphant: ‘a stream of black, clotted gore rose in a thick spout above the expiring brute, and fell in a shower around, bedewing, or rather drenching us, with a spray of blood…And the monster, under the convulsive influence of his final paroxysm, flung his huge tail into the air…then turned slowly and heavily on his side and lay a dead mass upon the sea.’ In reality, Mocha Dick–or at least a whale like him–continued to roam the oceans from the Falkland Islands to the Sea of Japan, attacking English, American and Russian ships without discrimination before being taken by a Swedish whaler in August 1859.
    It was as if the hunted whale had become aware of its persecution, and was fighting a rearguard action. ‘From the accounts of those who were in the early stages of the fishery,’ wrote Owen Chase, ‘it would appear that the whales have been driven, like the beasts of the forest, before the march of civilisation into remote and more unfrequented seas.’ ‘Sperm whales are now much scarcer than in years past,’ noted Charles Nordhoff in the 1850s, ‘owing to the number of vessels which annually fit out from American and various parts of Europe, partly or entirely in pursuit of them.’
    They may also have been more formidable opponents. Chase claimed that the animal that sank the
Essex
in its ‘mysterious and mortal attack’ was eighty-five feet long; Thomas Beale recorded sperm whales of eighty feet; while a lower jaw preserved in Oxford’s University Museum confidently announces an owner of eighty-eight feet. In
Nimrod of the Sea; or, The American Whaleman
, published in 1879, W.M. Davis registered sperm whales reliably measured at ninety feet; Ishmael heard of others one hundred feet long. Yet no modern sperm whale grows to more than sixty-five feet.
    Some speculate that the hunting of large whales has gradually reduced their genetic likelihood; perhaps the
Essex’s
assailant was the last of a gigantic breed. The larger lone bulls were inevitably the first to be taken, and twentieth-century hunting accelerated this cull, while skewing our knowledge of the whale’s longevity. Assessments of their life spans rely on whaling statistics from the second half of the last century, by which time most of the older animals–being larger and more profitable–were dead.
    By the end of worldwide whaling, nearly three-quarters of all sperm whales had been killed, reducing a population of more than a million in 1712 to 360,000 by the end of the twentieth century. Even in the 1840s the whalers saw a definite decline, and wondered if their efforts would lead to the animal’s demise. In the chapter entitled, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?–Will He Perish?’, the impeccably informed