Melville did not claim himself to have seen a man leap, harpoon in hand, on the back of a sperm whale. It was another ‘wild yarn’ of the whale fishery, and it seemed a tall story. Later I was to learn differently.

  For the moment I was interested that Bembo joined the ‘Julia’ when she called by the Bay of Islands in New Zealand at the start of her whaling voyage. This was the place where many of the Maori harpooners signed on, and then spread among the islands of Polynesia during the mid- to late nineteenth century It was precisely by this route that a young part-Maori harpooner named Albert Edward Cook had come to Tonga in 1890, and established the Tongan whale fishery which lasted almost a century, until it was banned by Finow’s descendant, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, the current King of Tonga. And it was Albert Edward Cook’s grandson that I wanted to meet. He was Tonga’s ‘last harpooner’.

  The first thing I noticed about Samson Cook was his almost stone-faced expression. He had lean, regular features, a strong nose, and pronounced cheekbones. Two deep furrows ran from the side of his nose down to the corners of a wide, straight and close mouth, giving him a slightly patrician expression. His skin was the colour of milky coffee, the product of his mixed descent, part Maori, part Tongan, part European. At sixty-seven years of age, his grizzled hair was almost all gone, and when he tilted his head back slightly and looked at you through his narrowed brown eyes, he seemed almost stern. He had what in the theatre is called ‘presence’. He also had large, square hands with strong fingers, and although only about five feet seven inches tall, he gave the impression of being a much bigger, more dominant man. He was barrel-chested; he had not an ounce of surplus flesh on him, and he walked on thick strong legs with a slight limp. He had the quick, active paces of a man who seems to have no doubts in his mind and is in a hurry to get on with the next job. He was also, when I first saw him, dressed in a very old-fashioned long black frock-coat, black shoes, and black trousers. And carrying a black bible in his hand. Samson Cook, retired harpooner, had become a lay preacher in the Tongan Wesleyan church.

  Father Mapple of the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford immediately sprang to mind. Father Mapple is Melville’s wonderful creation, the nautical priest who preaches to the whalemen and their families in a chapel decorated with wall tablets commemorating whalemen lost at sea. He delivers his sermons from a pulpit shaped like a boat’s prow, and he climbs up into it by a ship’s rope ladder, which he hauls up after him. Father Mapple’s language is larded with sea-going expression and similes, and he is probably modelled on a real cleric, Father Edward Taylor, who was a famous preacher in Boston at the time. Samson Cook dressed in a manner reminiscent of Father Mapple, but there the resemblance ended. Instead of a fire-and-brimstone delivery, Samson Cook spoke in a gentle, alert voice, and in a rich Tongan accent where ‘Jesus’ was pronounced ‘Zizuss’.

  Samson lived in a tiny house, little more than a shack, on the seafront in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga. The house was midway between the new commercial harbour and the splendid Victorian confection of an edifice which is the royal palace, originally imported piece by piece, pre-fabricated, from New Zealand. On the pavement outside Samson’s house was a large portable wooden rack. On it were displayed three tiers of giant white clam-shells. Samson made a very small, very irregular, income by selling seashells to tourists who might perhaps walk so far along the seafront. Turning in past the low picket fence, and pushing open a plain plywood door painted blue, one came into a front room no more than six feet by eight. Here were stacks of clam-shells, helmet conchs, another display rack, and, on a rickety table, a scatter of smaller decorative shells. A second door led through to Samson’s living quarters where a low bed served as a sofa. There was a plain wood table, another bed with some old magazines on it, and a wooden chair. A curtain closed off the tiny back room where Samson kept his priest’s garb hung on a nail, a few spare clothes and his private possessions in two or three cardboard boxes. He was a widower, and though a daughter brought him supplies from the market, he looked after himself. Everything was neat, clean and shipshape – a dresser with a stack of assorted plates, two mugs hug up on hooks, and a washing-up bowl. There was no running water, but a tap near the back door, and a pair of dangerous-looking electric wires led to the socket where Samson plugged in his kettle.

  Slung in rope loops under the single window were the tools of his former calling. There were at least a dozen of them – harpoons and whale lances. Their shafts had been newly replaced in a heavy, reddish wood. And Samson had been overhauling his equipment, for the swivel heads and the leaf-shaped lance blades gleamed with the bright shine of sharpened steel.

  Samson gestured to me to take a seat on the ancient bed, and settling back in his chair by the table, tilted his head back and gave me one of those characteristic, almost forbidding glances. ‘My grandfather was Albert Edward Cook,’ he announced, with a slight pause of emphasis between each word, and at once it was clear that he was immensely proud of his grandfather and his family. ‘He came here from New Zealand by sailing ship. When the ship went away, he stayed. He stayed on Ha’apai, and he married a local girl. Ilise. She was my grandmother. He was a clever man, was Albert Edward Cook. He taught all the others how to catch whales. Before then, no one knew how to catch whales. He was a very smart man, very smart,’ and Samson shook his head admiringly.

  The whales that Albert Edward had hunted were mostly humpback whales. They come seasonally to Tonga to breed and to give birth in the warm sheltered waters of the Ha’apai group and the Vava’u archipelago to the north. In the 1880s there had been, briefly, a whale fishery offshore. Foreign vessels had ‘humpbacked’ off Vava’u in the 1880s, taking the whales for their oil when the supply of sperm whale was depleted, and it was probably this trade which had brought Albert Edward to Tonga for the first time. When the foreign whaleships moved on, Albert had remained. It was said that he was only in his teens, that he was part Welsh or his European ancestors came originally from Devon, even that he was related to the great Captain James Cook. In any event, he was an entrepreneur and natural leader of men. He built his own whaleboat, a smaller copy of the New England whaleboats, and with his family had begun to hunt humpback whales from the shore, using hand harpoons which he made himself, again copied from the Yankee whaleboats. ‘He was a very smaaaart man,’ Samson repeated, shaking his head in admiration again. ‘He make the boats, he show his sons what to do, and he watches the whale very close. Pretty soon, he have two boats. One boat to hunt the whale, one boat to standby, in case they need help.’

  ‘Was there ever an accident?’ I asked.

  ‘No, never,’ said Samson. ‘Albert Edward Cook,’ and now he stressed the last word, ‘never make any mistakes. He too careful. He said that a man’s life was worth more than a dead whale, and we should always think carefully. Sometimes the tail swept the boat. Sometimes the boat pulled for three, four, even six hours. But no one ever lose their life.’

  ‘When was the season for whales?’

  ‘In June we start to find. In June when the whale come from North Pole or Europe to born a baby’ – Samson knew the humpbacks migrated, but in fact they come to Tonga from the Antarctic – ‘July to October we get the whales. Then November, finish! Already born the baby.’

  Samson was seven years old when he first went whaling with his grandfather. It was pretty much a family affair, six to eight men in the boat, with a member of the Cook family as the harpooner or the boat steerer. They hunted tofu’a, the humpback whale; tofu’a a lei, the sperm whale; and punga, the killer whale. But nearly always they hunted tofu’a. ‘The palangi [the white men],’ said Samson, ‘they like the tooth of the tofu’a a lei.’ And I smiled to hear that sperm whale teeth which the white men had brought to trade with the natives were later being sold back by the Tongans.[9]

  ‘Did you catch many sperm whales?’

  Samson shook his head. ‘No. Maybe two or three in a year. Only small ones. For the teeth and bone. The meat is no good, too black. Big sperm whale are dangerous.’

  In the 1930s Albert Edward Cook handed over much of his business to his sons, Albert and Ned. They moved operations closer to Tongatapu. At first to a small island offshore, and then to the beach itself when they discovered that whale meat was very popular with the townsfolk. Meat was scarce in the Tongan diet, and between ten and thirty whales were taken every year. The oil was used in lamps and for cooking, the meat steamed in the earth ovens called umu. The skin was deep-fat fried as ‘crackling’. ‘You could tell which house used whale-oil for lamps,’ Samson recalled. ‘You could smell the oil as you walked past in the night. Sometimes you could also smell the whale meat from the oven.’

  The Cook family had been traditionalists. They followed the way of the founding father, used the same equipment and kept the same methods. In 1937 they did try the innovation that had turned close-quarter harpooning into stand-off whale slaughter when it was applied on a global scale – the harpoon gun. It was a disaster. The gun exploded, crippling the operator, a Maori specialist, in both legs. The example of the Cook family produced imitators – not so much for profit, as for access to the desirable whale meat. They made three or four new whaleboats, copies of the Cook boats, and sometimes they asked members of the Cook family to serve on them as harpooners. I got the impression from Samson that the operations were very amateur. In Vava’u, the local people tried strapping half-sticks of dynamite to the harpoon shaft. The practice required very careful timing. The fuse for the dynamite had to be cut to the right length and lit just before throwing the harpoon. The technique was abandoned after one harpooner threw the charged harpoon into the whale, the whale dived, and the whale line tugged out the harpoon. It floated up, right under the boat, and exploded, destroying the whaleboat. The crew escaped without loss of life but they had been hoisted, quite literally, by their own petard.

  As Samson spoke, he relaxed. He grew more and more animated. His powerful hands began to move back and forth, to illustrate the diving and turning of a whale, the action of throwing the whale line overboard in its wake, the hoisting of a sail, the headsman gesturing back to the man at the helm. His eyes lit up and he began to radiate a delight in his reminiscences. Sometimes he turned his entire body and threw up his arms to make a point. The pitch of his voice rose at moments of excitement, fell back in reflective pauses. Occasionally, reaching a natural break in the narrative, he would stop speaking, fold his arms, and lean back in his chair for a quiet moment, adopting a pose of the storyteller. I could see that he was a happy man, proud of his memory, of his family, of the achievements of his lifetime. And like his ancestors, he attributed human characteristics to the whales themselves. Describing the last moments of a whale, he repeated the last words of the animal: ‘Oh Mr Kuki! You have killed me!’, clasped his hands to his side where the lance had gone in, and slumped back in his chair.

  There was no triumph in his voice, no cruelty. He regarded whales as being the same as fish taken from the sea, or pigs slaughtered for a banquet. They were food.

  Samson was mindful of the people who had come down to the beach to ask for whale meat. Whale meat was cheap, one shilling for a large piece, and if they were too poor to pay, then the Cook family would give the meat free. ‘People must have food,’ Samson said. ‘We give them the meat. Take it! Take it!’ And he waved his hands in a gesture of dispensing. There was no refrigeration so the entire animal had to be disposed of in a single day. Then the bones were towed out to sea and cut loose and allowed to sink. If whaling were ever allowed to resume, Samson knew what he would do. ‘I am reverend minister now. Very kind Zizuss likes to help people. Very easy to catch whale. If you catch whale, you tell the people – you give meat to the people. No money. People come and they say, “Mr Cook! I’m hungry.” Okay. Free! Bring a basket. Free, free whale. Come and take the basket. Full of whale meat. If a bag, fill the bag. You have a motor truck. Take the meat. Free to the people. That is Zizuss’ way.’

  The more Samson talked, the more he smiled, the more he revelled in the memories. And then, in a voice breaking with emotion, he was describing the once-in-a-lifetime day when he was in the whaling boat with his father and uncle and his brothers, and his uncle called him forward and asked him to throw the harpoon. ‘You know, this time I’m a kid, a little boy. Fifteen years old. Very kid, small boy. Not a big man. The first time to shoot [strike] the whale. First time! First time I hold the harpoon, I am very, very happy. The harpoon is wood, very heavy. I hold the spear. My uncle calls my father, “Row! Pull!” All my brothers row. We come close. My uncle say, “Shoot! Kuki!’ The lad Samson threw the harpoon, struck and eventually took the whale. It was not a large one – ‘thirty, maybe forty feet’ – but Samson’s life was changed for ever: ‘My father very happy to see the son, the small son hold the spear – I am kid for the last time – my mother very happy. His son, see, he can shoot the whale. Very happy, small boy, like a big man. First time. Very happy. First time . . .’ and Samson broke down. His eyes filled with tears, as he remembered his rite of passage into the adult world, and he looked away, choking with emotion.

  As this burly, staunch man leaned forward to wipe the tears from his eyes on his sleeve, I grasped how fundamental was the link which bound man the primitive hunter to the great whale. Samson was the same as the young Plains Indian who killed his first buffalo, the Ainu in Hokkaido with the first bear, a young Masai warrior tackling a lion. Their prey held the gift of manhood. Its death validated the interlocking relationship of hunter and hunted. But first the hunter had to take the physical risk, offering his own life in the balance of the hunt. It was utterly removed from the commercial whaling of harpoon gun and factory ship, and had as much to do with the nourishing of the human spirit in hunting societies as with their need for survival.

  When Samson had regained his composure, I asked if he would demonstrate his harpoon. He agreed, and as his living quarters were so small, suggested that I should go out into the small backyard. Here I found a lean-to shed with a pile of old timber, the umu pit where Samson baked his food, and a patch of wild grass in the middle of which was heaped a pile of giant clam-shells. Whitened by the sun, they reminded me of a pile of skulls.

  I loitered there while Samson undid the complicated knots which held his stock of harpoons and lances underneath the window. When he appeared, the bright point of a harpoon, held horizontally, first emerged from the back door, followed by Samson. He was holding the harpoon reverentially, and walking with a strange, almost ceremonial gait. He was still dressed in his nineteenth-century black frock-coat and it reminded me of a priest carrying the Host. He walked past me, stopped beside the tall pile of shells, and putting the butt of the heavy wood shaft on the ground, carefully propped the long harpoon against the shell pile. Then, to my surprise, he turned without a word and walked back into his house. Two or three minutes later he reappeared, carrying a second harpoon in the same formal manner, and propped it beside the first one. As I grew more puzzled, he went back inside the house once more, still without a word, and produced another harpoon. Then another, and another, and then the first of the killing lances. All of them were propped against the clamshell pile until it reminded me of an obo, the piles of sacred rocks into which Mongols and Tibetans thrust prayer flags. Only this time the prayer flags were a dozen ten-foot long harpoons, their barbs and blades pointed skyward. As he carried out the final lance, Samson paused in his stride and looked straight at me. His expression had changed to something I had not seen before. It was as if he had withdrawn into some formal stance, like a master of a martial art preparing for a bout. The look lasted for only a second, then Samson placed the final lance against the shells, more like an obo than ever, and showed me how the first section of the whale line was tied to the harpoon with special knots.

  Taking the harpoon in both hands, he stepped back on to the open space of grass, crouched down with his knees half bent, took a half step forward, and – in a slow instant – changed. The same withdrawal, the sense of removing into some other world, came over him. It was so unexpected that I felt my skin tingle. Samson glared to left, then right, took another half pace, and straightened up. He was searching for whales and had seen one. He turned his head, and called out to an imaginary boat crew, ‘Pull! Pull!’ He looked forward again, swayed his body from left to right, took a half step to one side, hefted his harpoon, then swayed it up so that the sharp head pointed to the sky. ‘Pull! Pull! Up, up, up!’ He was screaming now. I noted that he held the heavy weapon in the classic pose, right hand on the heavy butt, the left hand on the shaft to guide it, not to throw it like a spear, as wrongly shown in many contemporary illustrations of whaling. The heavy harpoon is tossed upward like a caber so that it topples over in its trajectory. ‘Pull! Pull! That’s right!’ Samson was shouting again to his imaginary crew. He was no longer on the grass behind his house. He was out at sea, in close pursuit of the whale. With a loud cry he heaved the harpoon into the sky, it made its arc, and thudded into the grass in front of me. Samson whirled and flung his arms out, the skirt of his black coat flying. ‘Back! Back! Back!’ he yelled, waving his arms to the phantom crew. He could see them, I could not.

  He ran to a lance, snatched it from the pile, and was again shouting to his crew. They must have responded in his dream world, for suddenly Samson turned and threw the lance, the killing weapon, low and flat across the sward. It skittered past in front of me. Samson leaped and gathered in the rope, hauling back the lance for the second throw, and a third and a fourth. Samson was sweating. An old man, he was still strong enough to hurl thirty-pound harpoons and lances with a strength that was almost demonic. He was transported, there was no other way to describe it. He was pouring with sweat, and his chest was heaving with exertion. He retrieved the lance a fourth and last time, flung it, and again spun round, his arms held wide, with a loud, final cry. Then, abruptly as if a fever had broken, he stopped, took a deep breath, and his shoulders dropped. He was exhausted, and what others might have seen as the raving of an old man, I realised was something more profound: I had witnessed the hunting dance, the imitative battle, of the shaman. For perhaps ten minutes Samson Cook had not been a reverend minister of the Tongan Wesleyan church. He had been a tohunga.

 

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