Leviathan or The Whale

Ishmael cites the buffalo as ‘an irresistible argument…to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction’, although he also declares that sperm whales that once swam as ‘scattered solitaries…are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies’.
    Were these animals collectively enraged by their attackers and determined to fight back, just as modern rogue elephants, their habitat destroyed by man, are now thought to turn on humans? If the scars on bull male sperm whales are any indication, they are ferocious fighters among themselves. Certainly, the Yankee captains thought that the whales had become more wilful. Docile beasts turned on their assailants, using their own weapons–jaws, heads, flukes. Captain Edward Gardner of the
Winslow
, out of New Bedford, was another victim, nearly killed by a sperm whale off Peru in 1816, ‘wounding me on my head’ and ‘breaking my right arm, and left hand badly lacerated, my jaw and five teeth were broken, my wounds bled copiously’.
    It was as if the whales were complicit in the role allotted to them. ‘In times past, when they were not so continually worried and followed, they were much easier to approach, although often giving battle when attacked,’ Charles Nordhoff observed. ‘Now, however, the utmost care is required to “get on”.’ As Ishmael confides, ‘I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.’
    And yet, conversely, the whales’ reactions could be entirely and almost pathetically inactive. Although a sperm whale could easily outdistance its persecutors, diving far and fast out of range, it often did not do so. Sometimes when their enemies approached, or when one of their number was injured–as Frederick Bennett wrote in another of the books that Melville consulted during his researches–the whales would ‘crowd together, stationary and trembling, or make but confused and irresolute attempts to escape’.
    Paradoxically, such suicidal behaviour was in part due to the animal’s ability to live in the depths. At the surface, the sperm whale is slower, less agile and has less time and energy than other whales–and is therefore less able to flee such an unnatural predator as man. It is an inexplicable and potentially fatal evolutionary flaw, and it led the writer John Fowles to wonder why the sperm whale ‘has never acquired–as it easily could in physical terms–an efficient flight behaviour when faced with man. At times, it will almost queue up to be gunned…The poor brutes just never learnt’
    Man, whale, life, death: this was the story Melville had to tell. No writer, before or since, could have had such an epic gift. On one side, the world’s greatest predator, more legendary than real; on the other, young American heroes, men who risked everything in the pursuit of oil. Theirs was a quest that asserted the myth of America, the great new democracy in which anyone might find their fortune; but it also brought them into contact with something more mysterious. Moby Dick was a spectral creature believed to be omnipresent–‘actually…encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time’–and able to escape repeated and bloody attacks, reappearing ‘in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away’. In this incarnation, the whale became ubiquitous, its hugeness as numinous as dark matter; an animal more mystical than muscular; as if the spermatozoid were a universe at the same time.
    At first Melville dismissed such metaphysics. His book was to be as much a commercial venture as any whale-ship setting sail from New Bedford, his lay to be shared with his publishers. ‘Blubber is blubber,’ he told a friend, treating his new work as another
Redburn
, which he knew ‘to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with’. But all that would change. In his magpie imagination, named and nameless terrors gathered strength and power like the ominous white whale seen below the surface, ‘with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose…his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea’. In the process
Moby-Dick
became a legend itself; a story encoded with its own terrible beauty, one that saw into the future even as it looked into the past.
    Monument Mountain stands off Route 7, its lower reaches surrounded by dense woods. A century and a half ago, the trees were not so close-grown. On a summer morning, the aftermath of two days’ rain is