Leviathan or The Whale

harpooneers. They returned with 439 tons of oil.
    In 1788, acting on information gathered by James Cook, who had seen sperm whales on his voyage to Australia, Enderby sent out
Amelia
, the first British ship custom-built for ‘sperming’ to sail into the Pacific, thereby stealing a march on the Yankees, whose first ship, the
Beaver
, did not leave Nantucket for the Pacific until 1791. With on-board try-works enabling vessels to hunt far from home, these were ‘by far the longest of all voyages now or ever made by man’, as Ishmael says. They were the starships of their day, boldly going after animals whose own ancestors had colonized remote seas millions of years before. Now humans were creating their own new routes of oceanic colonization.
    It was a new rivalry of the high seas. Through whaling, the British Empire extended its influence into the southern hemisphere in an ‘atonement’ for the loss of its American colonies. Britain intended to be self-sufficient in the matter of whale oil. ‘We are all surprised, Mr Pitt,’ a sardonic John Adams, the first ambassador of the new republic, told the Prime Minister in 1785, ‘that you prefer darkness and consequent robberies, burglaries and murders in the streets to the receiving, as a remittance, our sperm oil.’ Adams, a future president, spoke with the confidence of a former charge who had stolen a march on his master, ‘seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years’, as Ishmael boasts. Whaling was a presentiment of a new world order.
    Whale-ships cleared the way for missions to the South Seas; whalers brought God as well as light to the world. As Hal Whitehead remarks, ‘They left behind diseases, non-native animals (especially rats), technology, and their genes.’ Outgoing British whale-ships–which would otherwise be empty–supplied the convict settlements of Australia.
‘Evidence
inclines us to believe that these colonies would never have existed had it not been for whaling vessels approaching their shores,’ Thomas Beale wrote. ‘It is a fact, that the original settlers at Botany Bay were more than once saved from
starvation
by the timely arrival of some whaling vessels.’ In 1791 the enterprising Samuel Enderby opened an office in Port Jackson, Sydney Harbour, and arranged for his ships to carry convicts there, delivering new slaves to New South Wales. The establishment of these colonies gave Britain a great advantage in the southern whale fisheries; soon those same colonies would be supplying sperm oil in their own right, hunting the animals from their own shores and exporting the products ‘at a much less cost of time and capital’ to Britain. Meanwhile, James Colnett, an officer of the Royal Navy, sailed from Portsmouth on HMS
Rattler to
extend the nation’s whale fisheries in the Pacific, although Ishmael mocks his rendition of a whale: ‘Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!’

    More than ever, whaling was seen as ‘the mine of British strength and glory’, a vital source of maritime experience and mercantile speculation. Later, whale-ships ferried victims of the Great Hunger from Ireland to America, just as my own great grandfather fled Ireland for England and, eventually, Whitby. In a manner more extensive than even Ishmael suspected, whales played their part in world affairs, in the movement of entire populations, and in shifting spheres of influence to come.
    I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling.
    The Advocate,
Moby-Dick

    Each April, when the weather improved, Whitby’s ships set off for Greenland, harpooning the easily caught whales of the Arctic. They brought back chunks of blubber, creating a stench that Ishmael compares to a whale cemetery, and which turned the port into one of the most noisome places in England.
    Whitby whaling captains–many also Quakers–built their elegant houses high on the West Cliff, out of range of the stinking manufactory of their fortunes. Their Georgian terraces still overlook the harbour, a view framed by Whitby’s famous whale bone arch. When I stood under this monument as a boy, I presumed it had been there for centuries. In fact, its mandibles,