In search of moby dick, p.12
In Search of Moby Dick, page 12
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So it was with a rather awed view of native whaling that I went north to Vava’u. I wanted to see humpback whales, and follow up a description of ‘humpbacking’ written when Samson’s grandfather had begun work in Tonga. The Cruise of the Cachalot, ‘Round the World after Sperm Whales’ was by an English adventurer and rover, Frank Bullen. Like Melville sixty years earlier, Bullen had been swayed by the lure of the sea, the excitement of the chase, the danger, and the exotic locations. In the preface to his book he says he is setting out to give ‘for the first time . . . an account of the cruise of a South Sea whaler from the seaman’s standpoint’. Apparently he had never read Moby Dick, because he continues, ‘Pending the advent of some great writer who shall see the wonderful possibilities for literature contained in the world-wide wanderings of the South Sea whale fishers, the author has endeavoured to summarise his experiences.’ But whaling with hand harpoons from sailing ships was on its last legs by the time Bullen joined the decrepit Imperial, a rickety old whaleship which he disguised under the name Cachalot.
Bullen’s tale often repeats episodes similar to what Melville wrote about life on board a whaleship, about the habits of whales, the risks and accidents. There is no White Whale in Bullen’s account, but there are several encounters with ‘fighting whales’. In the Indian Ocean the lookouts on the Cachalot sight a ‘solitary’, a bull sperm whale leisurely puffing his way along, oblivious to the whaleship which lowers two boats, expecting an easy target. But when the harpooner struck, Bullen recalls, ‘a surprise awaited us. As we sheered up into the wind away from him, Louis [the harpooner] cried, “Fighting whale, sir; look out for the rush!” . . . he [the whale] turned on us, and had it not been that he caught sight of the second mate’s boat, which had just arrived, and turned his attentions to her, there would have been scant chance of any escape for us. Leaping out of the water, he made direct for our comrades with a vigour and ferocity marvellous to see . . .’ A tremendous battle ensues between the angry whale and the two boats, which ends when the second mate uses a shoulder-held ‘bomb gun’ to fire a grenade down the animal’s throat. By then a thrashing blow from the whale’s tail had splintered one of the boats and killed an oarsman outright.
This ‘fighting whale’ had a malformed lower jaw. It turned out at right angles a short distance from the throat, the break thickly covered with barnacles and limpets, and was the result of an old injury. Perhaps this is what made the whale so irascible. Surgeon Beale had noted broken jaws in otherwise healthy sperm whales nearly a century earlier. Bullen had studied Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale as well as his fellow whaling surgeon Bennett, just as Melville had done. Bullen’s was a straightforward ‘manly’ account. Almost every chapter produces its hair’s-breadth adventure – narrow escapes from great sharks, storms, quarrels aboard ship, and so on – and some of them stretch the reader’s credulity. On one occasion after their whaleboat is sunk, Bullen and his crew finish up sitting like a row of seagulls on the corpse of a floating dead whale. While they await rescue, they eat chunks of raw whale meat and drink rainwater which collects in the cavities in the body. But Bullen was a good observer, too. He is watching a school of sperm whale, when ‘as if instigated by one common impulse they all elevated their massive heads above the surface of the sea, and remained for some time in that position, solemnly bobbing up and down among the glittering wavelets like movable boulders of black rock. Then, all suddenly reversed themselves, and, elevating their broad flukes in the air, commenced to beat them slowly and rhythmically upon the water, like so many machines.’ It is a perfect description of what marine biologists now call spy-hopping and lobtailing.
Bullen was a great admirer of the Polynesian sailors. He had made his promotion to fourth mate by the time the Imperial called at Honolulu, and took on a number of Hawaiian volunteers. The captain assigned two of the ‘Kanakas’, as Bullen called them, to his boat crew. Samuela and Polly were natural whale hunters, and Samuela became the lead harpooner. At Futuna Island more Polynesians were recruited, and Bullen remarks how they were ‘willing, biddable, and cheerful learners. Another amiable trait in their characters was especially noticeable: they always held everything in common. No matter how small the portion received by any one, it was scrupulously shared with the others who lacked.’ When the cruise ended in New Zealand and his Kanakas set off homeward, Bullen declared that saying goodbye to them was the worst part of his whole experience. ‘No man could have wished for smarter, better, or more faithful helpers than they were.’ He also waxed lyrical about the beauty of the Vava’u archipelago. The Imperial lay at anchor while her four whaleboats cruised between the islands looking for whales. Here was ‘every variety of landscape, every shape of strait, bay, or estuary, reefs awash, reefs over which we could sail, ablaze with loveliness inexpressible; a steady caressing breeze, and overhead one unvarying canopy of deepest blue . . . when at sunset we returned to the ship, not having seen anything like a spout, I felt like one who had been in a dream . . .’
For once, reality matched the rhapsody of physical description. Vava’u is enchantingly beautiful. The scatter of fifty or so islands are forested in luxuriant green; the sea channels between them glow with the turquoise and aquamarine promised by tourist brochures; and each morning the trade winds bring a pleasant breeze. The only town, Neiafu, lies on the edge of an anchorage reputed to be the finest between California and New Zealand, and when long-distance yachts come to replenish, their crews still find it difficult to get away. One of William Mariner’s fellow captives from the Port au Prince had felt the same. A European ship offered to take him back to England. The man replied that he was old, and would far prefer to live out his time in the comfort of Vava’u. The Vava’u group is voluptuous and seductive.
I stayed on Mounu, a tiny gem of an island – you could walk around it in ten minutes – because it was among the whales. From time to time the breeze would bring a strange sound, a dull, regular thumping. There might be a dozen blows, then silence, then again a dozen thuds. Occasionally the thumping sounds would be repeated over and over again, lasting for twenty minutes or half an hour. They were the sounds of humpback whales lifting their huge tails out of the water and repeatedly beating them on the sea. Or they were rolling over and over like children showing off in a swimming pool, flailing their fifteen-foot-long pectoral fins and smacking them down in a burst of spray. Or they were sending shock waves of sound through the ocean by leaping at a steep angle from the water, and falling back with a gigantic splashing thunder. No one is quite sure of the reason for these antics. Is it sheer playfulness? Are competing bulls sending warning signals? Are the whales merely advertising their presence as suitors? Or are they trying to shake off skin parasites? The species are such spectacular acrobats, the water is clear, and the whales stay conveniently in the shallows, so whale scientists come to Vava’u to study the humpbacks’ behaviour, and film crews to film.
Nosa is their preferred guide. Over six feet tall, handsome and with a superb physique, Nosa was the very image of the splendid South Sea islander. He tended to wear a loose singlet which showed off his well-muscled brown chest against which bounced a pendant in the shape of a traditional Polynesian fish hook of carved bone. There was a small earring in his left ear-lobe, and he also had a gold tooth in his mouth which gleamed when he laughed, which was often. He was in his twenties, and after leaving school had started work as a bartender, then as an assistant for a tour diving company. He switched to his present job four years earlier when whale-watching in Vava’u began. Now he operated a boat based on Mounu, and took tourists and scientists to observe the whales in the same locations where his uncles had once tried to harpoon the animals with half-sticks of dynamite. Nosa had learned his whale-watching skills from his boss, a New Zealander, and excelled at the work. Once again, the Pacific islander was adapting to the habits of the foreigners.
The relationship between islander and great whale was still ambivalent. When I told Nosa about Samson Cook and the whale-hunting days, Nosa’s eyes gleamed. He slapped the steering wheel of the whale-watch boat and chortled, ‘Oh, the meat must be good!’ He took fishermen out to sea to catch big fish – mahi mahi and tuna – and I had the impression that to Nosa a caught whale would not be any different from any other edible creature of the sea. Yet Nosa had a highly developed understanding of the local whales. He knew when and where to look for them, and he was uncanny in his ability to anticipate their movements. The whales often moved in groups of three – a mother, a calf, and an escort. If Nosa’s clients wanted to swim with the whales, he would abruptly spin the steering-wheel of his boat and head off in a completely different direction, stop the engine, and tell his clients to jump in the water and wait. Five minutes later the whales would turn round and pass the spot that Nosa had anticipated. The ‘hunchbacks’, as they were sometimes called, were not hunted very much in the nineteenth century. They were too swift through the water – Bennett’s ship, the Tuscan, mistook humpback whales for sperm whales off the coast of California and tried chasing them, but had to give up when outpaced. Also the humpbacks produce little oil compared to sperm whales, and their bodies are not as buoyant. Harpooned humpbacks often sank and were lost or, if the sea was shallow enough, the hunters had to wait until the gases in the rotting flesh brought the bloated carcass back to the surface. Yet the whalemen knew of the ‘songs’ of the humpbacks long before they were first recorded by scientists in the 1970s. A Yankee whaling captain wrote of their ‘doleful groans’, and humpback ‘talk’ is how the Tongans put it. Nosa himself had seen humpbacks singing when lying comfortably on their backs underwater, or when travelling – indeed in almost any activity. His observations at that time contradicted scientific theory, which held that humpback whales only sing when hanging vertically in the ocean and stationary. Later the scientists changed their minds in the light of such eyewitness evidence, and this had left Nosa with a slightly sceptical view of the scientists. ‘How come they say they know about whales, when they spend so much of their time in school or at conferences? If they want to know whales, then they must come and swim with them. Here!’ And he twirled on his helmsman’s seat, shaking his head from side to side and roaring with laughter.
Watching the whales with Nosa was to add moving pictures in bright colours to what I had read in Beale and Bennett’s whale books. The humpback mothers and calves kept to warm, sheltered waters in the bays and channels. Their pale underbodies showed up in the water so their paths could be traced as racing spectres in the blue sea. Their long fins often looked like the wings of underwater aircraft. When they were loitering, Nosa, who swam alongside them, described them as ‘just like airships’. The calves had small lungs, so mother and child would frequently surface to breathe. They appeared with the characteristic first, strong, exhalation, a sound so distinctive that experienced whalers claimed that even in pitch darkness they could identify any particular species by the sound of that first breath. Mother and calf would then swim along close to the surface, dipping and bobbing for perhaps half a dozen breaths, before sliding beneath the water with that arching of the spine that gives them their name. When it was the prelude to a deeper dive, there came the slow, high, controlled flourish of the broad tail, a gesture which the baby would try to imitate but sometimes fail at, flopping sideways with an endearing splash. In a playful mood, the calves were as curious as human children, and left their mother’s side to come over to inspect the boat. Medieval Norwegian sailors claimed that humpback whales – the ‘merry whale’ – were so curious that they deliberately put themselves in the path of a boat to take a closer look – then became angry if the boat ran into them. Nosa pointed out that multi-hulled yachts were particularly attractive to the animals. On one occasion an adult humpback had once surfaced right beneath Nosa’s boat, briefly lifting the hull off its waterline until the animal, unharmed, swam away. ‘It make your heart beat a little faster,’ Nosa grinned, pounding his own massive chest. ‘Everybody a little afraid, I think.’
The present generation of adult whales around Vava’u appeared surprisingly relaxed. Often they allowed the watch boats to come within a few yards, and even when skittish, the whales rarely fled as if frightened. Watching the calves coming so close to the boats, I wondered whether these younger whales would grow to accept the presence of the boats as part of their normal environment. Nosa hoped so. ‘They are like us. They are mammals. After four, nearly five, years working with whales I think people shouldn’t kill the whale. People in Tonga thinking they should kill the whale because most people in Tonga never see whale. If they see how beautiful it is, they will never want to kill whale.’
He paused, searching for the right phrase. ‘I don’t know how to explain this: it’s so marvellous. I think the whale is so beautiful.’ He waved his huge hand, shrugged amiably, and gave a gentle, self-conscious smile.
‘I must confess,’ Bullen wrote at the end of his stay, ‘that I felt far greater sorrow at leaving Vau Vau than ever I did at leaving England.’ He was still enraptured by the beauty of the islands and the friendliness of the people. When the Splendid weighed anchor and left, the people of Vava’u helped to man the windlass. They had asked the visiting whaleship if they could have the meat from the humpbacks after the blubber was removed, and it was given to them. But on the whole, Splendid’s campaign had been a failure. Bullen could not understand why so few whales had been caught, although the Tongan whaling grounds had been left alone for many years by foreign whaleships. Samson Cook, the native harpooner, could have told him. ‘When whale born, only one born the baby,’ he had said to me. The recovery rate of the whale population was very, very slow. The stocks of humpback whale were already badly depleted in Bullen’s time, and would come close to extinction when the factory ships appeared in the southern ocean twenty years later. Those vessels slaughtered thousands of humpback whales, and a very minor casualty was the livelihood of men like Samson Cook. His geography was inexact but he was aware of what had happened. ‘In Germany, Russia, England, America, Japan – too much kill the whale, bye-bye the whale, finish the whale.’ And he realised that whale stocks had to be protected. ‘Let the whale grow up. Maybe next time, plenty whale. We don’t know. Now we stop. Now plenty whale. Plenty.’
But what of Moby Dick? Samson had seen sperm whales with white patches on their bodies. Nosa could identify individual humpbacks by the white markings on their flukes and flippers and undersides. But neither Nosa nor Samson had ever encountered an animal remotely like Moby Dick, nor even heard of one. Yet I left Tonga satisfied with what I had learned. Nosa had shown me how close observation brings a sympathetic understanding for the living animal, and Samson had revealed a quite different context for the myth of Moby Dick in the Pacific. Melville’s book has a highly charged scene when the three pagan harpooners – Tashtego the Gayhead Indian, Daggoo the huge African, and Queequeg the tattooed Pacific islander – pledge themselves to the pursuit and death of the White Whale. They drink a toast from the hollow sockets of their harpoons, as Ahab looks on. Melville intended the scene to be full of drama and symbolism. But he had touched upon the more intimate relation between native peoples and the great whale. For some Pacific peoples a ‘fighting whale’ was not a remote adversary to be hunted down for revenge or profit. It was a creature, Samson’s memories had shown, which met the spiritual needs of the hunters, even as the great animals could supply some of their material wants. If the whales vanished, man would be diminished.
Part Four
Lamalera
‘Was it not so, O Timor Tom! Thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long dids’t lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay?’
herman melville, Moby Dick
‘Call me Ishmael.’ I read again the opening words of Melville’s story, sitting high above the volcanic sand beach. It was an hour past dawn, and the sound of cocks still crowing came up from below me. A large banyan tree arched over the cliff edge where I sat, and looking down beneath its branches I could see dogs playing on the crescent of foreshore. Their paws left tracks where the retreating tide had smoothed the sand and left it damp. The horizon was indistinct in the morning light. The sea had a calm dark purple sheen except where random currents stirred a few patches into ripples. Lighter streaks were the reflections of high clouds carried by the first winds of the south-east monsoon. Opposite me the sun had just climbed above the mountain peak of Pantar Island, and it would be another very hot day. Already I could feel the sweat beginning to gather. Last night had been warm and sultry. Two or three times I had been awakened by heavy rain showers suddenly drumming on the corrugated-iron roof of the schoolmaster’s little house.
I was in the village of Lamalera, the last community on earth where men still regularly hunt sperm whales by hand. Below me I could see the thatch roofs of the sheds where the hunters kept their boats. The tropical sun had bleached the thatch a soft iron-grey. Patches of yellow straw marked where recent repairs had been made. From the open end of each boatshed poked what looked like a crude step-ladder. It was the harpooner’s platform which projected from the prow of the hunting boat, the place where the harpooner stood with his fifteen-foot lance at the moment of attack. From where I sat, I could count eleven boatsheds. There were as many again, I knew, out of my line of sight beneath the edge of the cliff. There was no one on the beach for the moment, only the dogs. What looked like whorls of light mist drifted over the ridges of the boatsheds. They were wisps of smoke oozing from the cooking fires where the families of the sea hunters were preparing their meals. In an hour, the men would come down to the beach and assemble. Crew by crew they would muster by the boats, and get ready to go to sea to hunt the whale. I planned to join them.
