Leviathan or The Whale

of views’ in the expanses of dunes, salt marshes, scrub oaks and stunted pines which earned it ‘the euphonious name of “the Great Desert of Cape Cod.”’ It was certainly a sere landscape. ‘Dreary-looking’ wharves lined the bayside, while the stunted vegetation and absence of grass on the seaward side, ‘and above all and mixed with all, the everlasting glare of the sand, all united to give the shores of the Cape a most desolate appearance’.
    It was as dismal as the deserts Melville wandered in his mind, and Thoreau too found it a barren country, ‘such a surface, perhaps, as the bottom of the sea made dry land day before yesterday’. Yet such bleakness also had its beauty: the high ridges of sand blown by Atlantic winds, over which were revealed the intense blue reaches; a mutability unwrought by man. This desolation–which Ishmael also saw in the limitless-ness of the sea, ‘exceedingly monotonous and forbidding’–appealed to the hermit of Walden; a place where ‘everything told of the sea, even when we did not see its waste or hear its roar’.
    Here the land paid homage to the ocean; became part of it, implicitly. ‘For birds there were gulls, and for carts in the fields, boats turned bottom upwards against the houses, and sometimes the rib of a whale was woven into the fence by the roadside.’ And here blackfish, or pilot whales, were prized for their oil, and had been since before the coming of the Pilgrims: the
Mayflower’s
second encounter with Native Americans had been at Wellfleet, where they watched Indians stripping the blubber from one of the stranded whales which earned it the name Grampus Bay.
    Easily identified by their rounded melon heads and sleek black bodies, and so called because they followed a leader, pilot whales were hunted when other whales were not about. Frank Bullen recorded that ‘a good rich specimen will make between one and two barrels…of medium quality’, while hunks of their meat made a prized alternative to the ship’s salt beef. These lithesome, lacquered cetaceans are, like their sperm whale cousins (with whom they often associate), highly social, and their propensity to gather in great numbers made them all the more attractive to catch. The people of the Faroe Islands still round up pilot whales using techniques learned by their Viking ancestors, driving entire schools into shallow water where, surrounded by small craft and men armed with all manner of weapons, the cornered whales leap and thrash, rising perpendicularly out of the water, as if straining every muscle to evade the deadly blades. Appallingly human in their physical presence, they might as well be men in wet suits, but they are soon reduced to butchered blubber.
    Such scenes were played out on the Cape’s shores, too. In an episode mirroring the striking first chapter of his book–which opens with the aftermath of a shipwreck and bodies being carried away in rough wooden boxes–Thoreau encounters slaughtered blackfish on the beach and is forced by the stench to take the long way round, only to find thirty more whales at Great Hollow, newly speared and turning the water red like the dead of a failed invasion.
    Thoreau marvelled at the shape and texture of the animals, as smooth as India-rubber; with their blunt snouts and stiff flippers, they seemed almost embryonic. The largest was fifteen feet long; others were only five-foot juveniles with unerupted teeth, barely more than suckling babies. As the whales lay there, a fisherman obliged the visitor by slicing into the flesh to display the depth of the blubber, fully three inches thick. Thoreau ran his fingers over the wound, as if to believe. He felt its oily texture. It looked like pork to him; he was told that young boys would come along with slices of bread to make sandwiches of the stuff. The fisherman then dug deeper for the meat which, he told Thoreau, he preferred to any beefsteak.
    As they stood there on the shore, Thoreau heard a cry: ‘Another school.’ In the distance, he could see the whales leaping through the waves like horses. The fishermen pushed off in their boats, boys running to join them. ‘I might have gone too had I chosen,’ said Thoreau; but he did not, nor was inclined to say why. Perhaps he felt the same equivocal fascination as I have when watching pink-coated huntsmen career through New Forest bracken. As Thoreau looked on, thirty boats rowed out either side of the whales, striking the sides of their