In search of moby dick, p.1
In Search of Moby Dick, page 1
IN SEARCH OF MOBY DICK
Tim Severin
© Tim Severin 2000
Tim Severin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1999 by Little, Brown and Company.
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
Cutwater
Part One
Nuku Hiva
Part Two
Pamilacan
Part Three
Tonga
Part Four
Lamalera
Tailpiece
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
Cutwater
‘I have seen Owen Chace [sic] who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.’
herman melville, Moby Dick
With an off-cut of heavy canvas, Owen Chase was hastily nailing a temporary patch over a hole in the bottom of his whaleboat. The hole was fresh, knocked that same hour through the thin cedarwood planks by a swipe from the tail of a whale he had harpooned. It was a measure of Chase’s professionalism that the moment the accident happened, he had taken up a hatchet and chopped through the line to free the whale from the foundering boat. While his crew bailed, Chase stuffed three or four jackets into the hole to plug the leak as best he could. Then he ordered his men to row back to the mother ship, the Essex. The damaged twenty-seven foot boat had been hoisted aboard as smartly as possible, and now lay upturned on the quarter of the Essex. First mate Owen Chase was in a hurry. He wanted to rejoin the other two boats from the Essex, including Captain Pollard’s, which were still out on the water, and now some distance downwind. They were in hot pursuit of a small pod of whales, and it appeared that the captain’s boat had successfully harpooned one of them. Owen Chase judged it would be quicker to put this makeshift patch on his own boat than to unlash and lower one of the spare boats which were snugged down in stowage. Chase was from Nantucket, like his ship, and he regarded the incident as a run-of-the-mill mishap in the fishery. What happened next, however, was anything but ordinary.
As he was driving the tacks, Chase glanced up and saw a sperm whale, a very big one, come to the surface about a hundred yards off the windward bow. The sea was calm, and the animal lay quietly on the water, spouted two or three times, then disappeared. Noting only that it was an unusually large specimen, perhaps eighty feet long, Chase turned back to his work. Two or three seconds later he saw the animal again. Now it was less than a ship’s length away and appeared to be swimming steadily in the direction of the Essex. The animal was moving at no more than three knots, and for a moment Chase did not react. Then he took a second glance, calculated the angle of the whale’s approach, and realised that ship and whale were on a collision course. Instinctively the first mate called to the helmsman, the ship’s boy, to change course. But the manoeuvre was awkward. The whaleship was moving at no more than walking pace. Her main topsail was aback, and she had little steerage way. This was normal practice as it allowed the ship to stay near her boats when they were spread out across the sea. The whaleship had not even begun the turn when the whale suddenly accelerated and rammed the Essex head-on. The animal’s blunt head struck the ship near the forechains. The impact jarred the Essex so severely that it felt as if she had run on to a rock, and she ‘trembled like a leaf’. The crew almost fell flat on their faces.
There was a shocked silence. The men on board exchanged glances of amazement. In the interval they felt the behemoth pass under the vessel, grazing the keel. Then the attacker reappeared on the leeward side. The animal lay on the surface, apparently stunned by the force of the blow. Then the whale seemed to gather itself, and swam off downwind. Collecting his own wits, Chase guessed that the Essex must have been damaged, and he ordered the pumps to be rigged. Within minutes he could tell that the vessel was indeed taking on water and settling down by the head. He ordered a signal to be made, recalling the two boats’ crews.
Scarcely had he sent the signal than Chase caught sight of the whale again. Now it was about a quarter of a mile to leeward, and behaving very bizarrely. The huge animal seemed to be in convulsions. For several minutes it stayed on the same spot, thrashing its tail up and down, whipping up white water, and clashing its jaws together. The first mate turned his attention back to the deck. He urged the crew at the pumps to redouble their efforts and, fearing that the Essex was mortally hurt, began to plan the best way of provisioning and launching the spare boats as lifeboats. While his attention was engaged inboard, he heard a crew man shout out, ‘Here he is again! – he’s making for us again!’
Turning round, Chase was appalled to see the whale charging directly towards his ship. This time there was no mistaking the animal’s intention. Its head was half out of the water and throwing up a bow-wave as it came careering down on the vessel. The tail was churning a broad white wake. The charging whale had ‘tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect’, was how Chase described the apparition. He shouted at the steersman to put the helm hard up, to swing the Essex out of the whale’s path. But again the manoeuvre was too slow. The sperm whale slammed head first into the Essex, right under her bows. The Essex was a 328-ton whaleship, built for endurance, and a sturdy vessel. But the impact from an enraged bull sperm whale was too much. The collision completely collapsed the Essex’s bows, and she was doomed. The whale swam off and was not seen again.
Owen Chase remained calm. He knew that the ship was finished, and he ordered the men to stop pumping. The priority now was to launch a lifeboat, so he cut the lashings of the spare whaleboat on the quarter, and his men carried it on their shoulders to the midships where the rail was lowest. Meanwhile the ship’s steward darted below deck to retrieve the essentials for navigation: two quadrants and two sets of nautical tables. These items were placed in the whaleboat, with the sea chests of the captain and the first mate, and Chase added two steering compasses which he snatched from the binnacle. The ship had now taken on a decided list. The steward made two trips below, but when he tried a third time, he found water was pouring in so rapidly that he was forced back on the sloping deck. The Essex was literally falling over, and the boat crew had scarcely slid their lifeboat into the water, and jumped in themselves, when the Essex toppled. She lay there on her side, half-submerged.
Owen Chase’s crew were in shock. They rowed clear, and gazed at the wreck of their destroyed vessel. None of them could believe what had happened. Nor could the crews of the other two boats who had abandoned their whale hunt, and now rowed up. The harpooner on Captain Pollard’s whaleboat could only croak, ‘Oh, my God, where is the ship?’ The new arrivals rested on their oars, and there was a long, appalled silence as they examined the hulk before them. The Essex lay horizontal, her three masts acting as temporary floats, with the cross trees sticking up out of the water. All were stupefied. Captain Pollard finally summoned up a question: ‘My God, Mr Chase, what is the matter?’ And Chase gave a reply which was to become a classic of whale lore – ‘We have been stove by a whale.’
Owen Chase’s description of the destruction of the Essex was published the following year, 1821. It appeared under the expansive title, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, of Nantucket; Which Was Attacked and Finally Destroyed by a Large Spermaceti-Whale in the Pacific Ocean. One of Owen Chase’s sons took a copy of the book with him when, at the age of about sixteen, he too went on a whaling trip to the Pacific. As luck would have it, he showed the volume to a young shipboard visitor during a ‘gam’. This was the sociable custom when two whaleships, meeting by chance on the high seas, sailed in company so that captains and crews could exchange news and pay visits between the ships. On this occasion the ship-in-company was an American whaleship out of New Bedford, the Acushnet, and the ‘gam’ took place at the same latitude where the Essex had been lost some twenty years before. The young visitor who saw Owen Chase’s little book was the future author of Moby Dick. ‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me,’ wrote Melville, and in due course he sent his fictitious Pequod to the bottom of the sea by a similar mechanism. He made changes for dramatic effect – notably, the Pequod goes down in an instant, sinking vertically so that her mastheads still flying their flags are the last to disappear beneath the waves. But the main elements of the scene – the slow-moving ship, the dispersed whaleboats, the deliberate charge of the whale, the shocking finality of the wreck – were all foreshadowed when, on 20 November 1820, the battered Essex rolled on her side, more than a thousand miles from land.
Herman Melville was not yet twenty-two years old when he ‘gammed’ with Owen Chase’s son. Later he told his London publisher, Richard Bentley, that he had spent ‘two years and more’ on whaleships, as a harpooner, and so knew a great deal about the whale fishery. This was a gross invention. Melville was in debt, and trying to wheedle a large advance out of the publisher for a book about whaling, and he was stretching the truth in the interests of self-promotion. In reality the author of Moby Dick had been working on whaleships for under two years, and only in a very lowly capacity – as a foremast hand. He never had the seagoing experience nor the whale-hunting skills to become one of the hand-picked harpooners, who were treated as petty officers aboard ship. He left the Acushnet prematurely, in the less than glamorous role of a deserter. His second berth, aboard the Sydney barque Lucy Ann, would have taught him even less about whaling. The Lucy Ann was an unlucky ship, no whales were seen, and Melville was merely a substitute crew member taken aboard to make up numbers. His brief voyage ended in Tahiti, when he and most of his colleagues were left ashore as malcontents and mutineers. His final whaling experience was aboard the Charles and Henry of Nantucket, seven months between Tahiti and Hawaii, with scarcely a whale taken. After that, Melville never went whaling again.
So where did Melville get his impressive knowledge of whales and whaling which brought us Moby Dick? His work is packed with information about the different species of whales, how they breed and migrate, how they respond to being hunted, how they behave individually and in groups. Did he quarry these details exclusively from books like the one Owen Chase wrote? Were the details accurate, who had provided them, and where had these informants got their data? Or had Melville met the real-life models – if there were some – for Captain Ahab and Queequeg the tattooed harpooner while he was on his travels? Maybe he had seen a fighting white sperm whale, or heard rumours of one, when he was a Pacific sailor, however briefly.
These questions fascinated me in the light of my own encounters with great whales. These experiences had usually been at close quarters and from a succession of boats which made Melville’s Acushnet seem positively modern. For twenty-five years I had made my living by conducting practical experiments into the truths which lie behind the great legends of our culture, and turning my experience into books. Many of the legends had been connected with the sea. I had built and sailed a leather boat across the North Atlantic to test whether Irish monks could have reached North America a thousand years before Columbus and given rise to the legendary exploits of St Brendan the Navigator. I had also sailed a replica of a ninth-century Arab ship from Muscat on the Arabian Gulf to China to investigate the stories of Sindbad the Sailor; and with a copy of a small Bronze Age galley my crew and I had rowed and sailed the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to look into the geographical realities of the wanderings of Jason and the Argonauts and the places where Ulysses had his escapades during his seaborne odyssey. More recently, with four companions, I had floated on a bamboo raft most of the way from China to North America, to test the theory that sailors from Asia could have crossed the North Pacific, landed on the shores of Central America, and left traces of their visit in the high culture of the Mayans and their forebears.
Every single one of these expeditions had met great whales, either in spirit or – more usually – in the flesh and at very close range. In the legend of St Brendan, for example, the Irish saint beaches his fragile oxhide-covered boat on the back of ‘the great fish, Jasconius’ – thinking it to be an island. The travellers light a fire, the heat wakes the whale, and the animal begins to move. The monks are terrified until St Brendan calms them with a reassurance that God has sent Jasconius as their ally and friend. So it turns out. Again and again during their wanderings, the little leather boat with its dozen monks land on the back of the peaceable whale, a convenient place to celebrate mass. How this tale might have developed became clear to us fourteen centuries after St Brendan’s lifetime. My three companions and I – including Trondur Patursson, a fisherman and artist from the Faeroe Islands – discovered that our thirty-six-foot leather boat, engineless and drifting, was a magnet for curious whales. They came swimming up from the ocean depths, gave a puff of breath, and eased alongside, sometimes only a yard away, to take a closer look. Perhaps the animals thought that our Brendan was another whale, a natural assumption given that our vessel was the same length and approximate shape as a middling-sized whale, and covered in thick skin stretched over an open framework which closely resembled a whale’s ribcage. A skin boat and a whale might give off a similar sonar echo, attracting the attention of those marine mammals which use echo-location to examine their surroundings or find their companions.
This similarity between skin boat and whale produced one tense moment when a passing pod of killer whales or orcas detected our presence as Brendan lay becalmed some 150 miles south of Iceland. We watched the leader of the hunting group break away from the pod and turn towards us. The scimitar of his big dorsal fin cut majestically through the water as he casually swam in our direction to investigate. Three of us aboard Brendan looked on, impressed by the animal’s size and his almost swaggering, self-confident approach, but the fourth member of the crew, Trondur the traditional sailor, reacted very differently. He seized an oar and began to lash a sharp knife to the end of it so as to have a makeshift pike. The big orca slid under the boat, passing only a few inches below us, so only a layer of greased oxhide separated our feet from his black and white blotches. Then, with a relaxed puff of air from his lungs, he casually surfaced on the far side, swung back, and rejoined its companions. I had noted Trondur’s fierce expression, and asked him why he had been ready to defend against the intruder. Trondur must have thought the rest of us utter landlubbers as he explained that Faeroese fishermen had seen orcas swim up to other whales, particularly if they were injured, elderly or sick, and literally rip them to pieces for food. Trondur had feared that might be our immediate fate.
I respected Trondur’s judgement and I believed him. But I also knew that many marine biologists dismissed tales about orcas attacking great whales as being no more than fishermen’s yarns. The scientists demanded clear proof of such dramatic events, and doubted that killer whales were sufficiently aggressive or powerful to tackle a fully grown great whale. Rightly, the scientists pointed out that such stories had been doing the rounds for at least 150 years, passed down from one credulous mariner to the next. One story, often repeated by fishermen, was that the orcas worked together in concert to pull aside the whale’s lips and feed on the living tongue. Several years after the Brendan Voyage, I came across a series of newly-taken photographs which showed an orca pod harrying a grey whale to its death off the coast of California, tearing mouthfuls of flesh from the stricken animal. The caption noted that the orcas feasted on their victim’s tongue. The fishermen, it seemed, were ahead of the scientists in their knowledge of whale behaviour.
During the five months we were at sea in our little skin boat, we saw great whales everywhere: in such large numbers between the Faeroes and Iceland that their presence informed us of our approximate position, because the whale grounds had been used as a locator mark by sailors since Viking times. Off Greenland one morning we filmed a pair of very big sperm whales. Everything was in shades of grey – the overcast sky, the sullen sea, and the two animals, the colour of burnt charcoal, cruising slowly past us on the surface, their big square snouts pushing aside the water like enormous logs. Sixty feet or more in length, they were as big as any sperm whales seen in modern times. They must have been a pair of ageing bulls hunting at the farthest northern limit of their migratory range before rejoining the herds of cow whales in warmer waters. And off Newfoundland, just before Brendan made final landfall, we were treated to the unforgettable spectacle of dozens upon dozens of humpback whales, surfacing, spouting, diving and gambolling around us in the late evening light, as if in a triumphant dance of farewell. Delighted, we stood up on the thwarts of the little leather boat to watch the display, conscious that we had seen perhaps ten times as many whales as ships throughout our journey, and we accepted the presence of whales, rather than other vessels, as our most frequent diversions. In fact we were so accustomed to seeing whales that when we glimpsed a blue whale, a monster at least eighty feet long, off Greenland’s Cape Farewell, I began to wonder whether we were merely lucky in our observations, or there was some other reason for the extraordinary variety of whales we were seeing. Blue whales are said to be very rare. Marine scientists believe that fewer than 10,000 still survive, and they are too widely scattered across the world’s oceans ever to be counted. Fully grown, the blue whale – or sulphur-bottom, as the old whalemen called them – are among the largest animals ever to have lived on our planet. Heavier than the biggest dinosaurs, they are nearly as big as a jumbo jet.
