Leviathan or The Whale

craft and blowing horns to drive them onto the beach. He had to admit it was an exciting race, and as the frenetic scene played out before his eyes, he heard an old blind fisherman say, pathetically, ‘Where are they? I can’t see. Have they got them?’
    For a moment it seemed the whales might win, as they headed north-west towards Provincetown and the refuge of the open ocean. Fearing their prey might be lost, the hunters were forced to strike then and there, using short-stemmed lances to take the whales as they leapt in and out of the waves. Thoreau could just make out the men as they jumped from their boats into the shallows, finishing off the animals as they lay on the beach, shuddering and spouting blood. ‘It was just like pictures of whaling which I have seen, and a fisherman told me that it was nearly as dangerous.’
    Those hunted whales haunted Thoreau. Back in Concord, he tried to find out more about them, but he discovered only an absence. Storer’s
Report on the Fishes
did not include the pilot whale, ‘since it is not a fish’; and Emmons’s
Report of the Mammalia
omitted all whales, because the author had never seen any. I thought it remarkable that neither the popular nor scientific name…the Social Whale,
Globicephalus Melas
of De Kay; called also Black Whale-fish, Howling Whale, Bottlehead, etc., was to be found in…a
catalogue
of the productions of our land and water,’ Thoreau mused.
    It was a lack all the stranger for the part the whales played in the economy and history of the Cape: from the Indians’ modest operations, to the modern ‘early risers’ who could still find one thousand dollars worth of whales stranded on the sand. Pilot whales and dolphins still strand here, in greater numbers than on almost any other shore. Lured by the presence of squid, the bay becomes a literal dead end for them, as they lie hoicked out of water, attacked by gulls which take advantage of the helpless animals to peck out their eyes as they slowly expire.
    As he reached Provincetown, Thoreau marvelled at the part fishing village, part frontier town, with only one road and one pavement. ‘The time must come when this coast will be a resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side,’ he predicted. ‘At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them.’ And as he approached his journey’s end, Thoreau saw what looked like a bleached log on the beach. It proved to be part of the skeleton of a whale–a sign he conflated with a wreck that lay close by, its
‘bones’
still visible: ‘Perchance they lie alongside the
timbers
of a whale.’ The Cape’s winter storms still throw up eighteenth-century keels, their crossbars grey wooden ribs on the shore; but Thoreau could not know that these same sands also concealed a cetacean graveyard.
    Dr Charles ‘Stormy’ Mayo is a man in his sixties, with a wiry frame, unflinching blue eyes, and a passion for growing dahlias. On his father’s side, his family have lived on the Cape for nearly four hundred years; the Mayos first came to Chatham in 1650. His grandmother, on the other hand, came from the Azorean island of Faial. In his forebears’ day, these waters were alive with animals, says Stormy, looking out of his office window and over to the bay. I can almost see the scene in his eyes, a paradise teeming with whales and fish.
    Stormy’s grandfather was one of the blackfish hunters–until the day he took a mother and heard her calf calling for her under his boat. He hadn’t the heart for whaling after that. But he also told his grandson of a whaling station at the Eastern Harbor, on the outskirts of town, where the Cape is at its narrowest and most tentative. Had the sea broken through here, Provincetown would have become an island; but soon after Thoreau passed this way, a dyke was built across the slender stretch, and the harbour turned into a brackish lake.
    And it was here, out walking, that Mayo and his son Josiah found a concavity in the dunes, a ‘blow-out’ that had temporarily ebbed to reveal a long-lost ossuary. Jaw bones and vertebræ lay jumbled together, sticking up out of the sand. Perhaps, like the elephants’ graveyard, this was where whales went to die; whales once so numerous that the Pilgrims thought they might walk across the bay on their backs.
    Lumbering and low, those whales’ descendants still swim in Cape Cod Bay, labouring under their