Vincent noted that this story was printed half a century after the attack on the Desmond, and that Mocha Dick had achieved his own legendary status without the need for association with Moby Dick. Eight weeks after the tussle with the Desmond, two boats from the Russian ship Sarepta killed a whale and were getting ready to tow the carcass to their mother ship when Mocha Dick surfaced nearby, and charged down at them. One whaleboat took refuge from the onslaught by dodging behind the dead whale. But Mocha Dick caught the second boat in his jaws and crushed it. The surviving boat sneaked back to the Sarepta without being molested, and the Russian vessel stayed in the area for three hours hoping to retrieve the dead whale. But Mocha Dick stood guard, and the Sarepta was forced to abandon her catch. A lucky Nantucket ship found the dead whale adrift two days later and by whaling custom claimed possession. Mocha Dick was nowhere in sight.

  Mocha Dick then appeared off the Falklands. A huge sperm whale brazenly breached so close to the English whaleship John Day that the backwash made the John Day roll ‘as if in a gale’. The whaler launched three boats against this audacious newcomer, and one boat managed to get a harpoon into Mocha Dick. The boat was dragged for three miles before the ‘fighting whale’ turned round and swam right over the boat like a sea-going juggernaut, pausing only to thwack the wreckage with his vast tail, reputed to be twenty-eight feet across. This left two men dead. The whale then sank down into the ocean and lay doggo until one of the remaining boats came up and unwisely tried to pick up the whale line still trailing from the harpoon in Mocha Dick’s side. At that instant Mocha Dick came bursting up from the sea, overturned the boat, smashed it, and killed two more men. Wisely, the John Day withdrew from the skirmish.

  Mocha Dick’s final and most rambunctious challenge was on an international scale. He defeated no less than three whaleships, the Scottish Crieff, the English Dudley, and the American Yankee. If reports are to be believed, these vessels came upon the white whale off the coast of Japan, as Mocha Dick was battering an unfortunate merchant ship carrying a cargo of timber. Apparently from sheer malice the whale had charged the merchant vessel and knocked off her stern so she had settled in the water, her decks awash. Determined to put an end to the menace of Mocha Dick, the three whaleship captains agreed on joint action. Each lowered two whaleboats, the first to attack the whale, the second to act as a rescue craft. The crews drew lots to decide who would lead the onslaught, and the choice fell on a boat from the Yankee. That boat advanced warily to the spot where Mocha Dick had last been seen and waited, fully alert. After twenty minutes Mocha Dick surfaced within range, and the mate of the Yankee succeeded in planting his harpoon. For the next five minutes it seemed that Mocha Dick had lost his fighting spirit or was badly hurt. The great whale lay still. But then he turned and, swimming at a furious pace, first bowled over a Scottish whaleboat, then took up an English boat in his jaws and crunched it to shreds, crushing two men. Those who had been tipped into the water swam for their lives to avoid the great tail as it deliberately flailed the sea near them. Two men did not get away fast enough, and their deaths brought the carnage to four. Mocha Dick now returned his attention to the waterlogged timber ship. Still towing the Yankee’s boat behind him, he swam straight at her and rammed. The force of the blow was so great that the vessel turned keel up. By now the Yankee’s men had seen enough. They cut their line and began to row back to their mother ship. But Mocha Dick still had his grand finale to deliver. He swam underwater towards the Crieff, and suddenly shot up just beneath her bow in a thunderous arc. He missed the ship by inches, and carried away her jib boom and bowsprit with his enormous bulk. Splashing back into the ocean, he raced towards the Yankee’s boat. The crew took one look and promptly jumped into the sea to save themselves. They looked on aghast while Mocha Dick took their twenty-eight-foot whaleboat in his mouth, and calmly ‘chewed it as a horse does his oats.’

  Vincent cites one terminal report of Mocha Dick. In August 1859, far away from the Pacific, a Swedish whaler took a huge sperm whale off the coast of Brazil. It was said to be a hundred feet long, with a jaw that measured twenty-six feet. The animal was old and exhausted, and did not put up a fight. On closer inspection the veteran was found to have a badly scarred head and to be blind in his right eye, the results of countless battles. On such evidence the immense creature was claimed as the true Mocha Dick.

  The Acushnet, the real-life whaleship on which Melville gathered his whaling experience, had disappeared from the scene while the legendary Mocha Dick was still careering through the oceans. Acushnet was wrecked on St Lawrence Island at the entrance to the Bering Strait in August 1851 while on another whaling voyage. A passing brig, the Wyandott, picked up her captain, crew and 250 barrels of oil from her cargo, and brought them to Honolulu. Two months later Melville published his masterpiece and immortalised Acushnet as the venerable Pequod. He may not even have known the fate of the original. He had, however, found out what had happened to the ship’s company he deserted nine years earlier on Nuku Hiva. A former shipmate, Henry Hubard, visited him while he was writing Moby Dick. Hubard had completed Acushnet’s four-year voyage and returned to the home port of Fairhaven. Melville jotted down a list of what Hubard could remember had happened to the rest of the crew. It was a grim roll-call. Hubard knew of only nine foremast hands who had ‘come home’. Six others had run away at various ports, mostly on the coast of South America. One of them later committed suicide when he got back to the United States. Four more had been put ashore due to sickness, including two men who were suffering ‘with disreputable disease’. They were dropped off in Hawaii. Significantly, only one of the ship’s officers – second mate John Hall – had come back with Captain Valentine Pease. Both the first and third mates abandoned the voyage midway. The first mate left the ship after he ‘had a fight with the Captain’ and the third mate apparently supported him because the two officers both quit the Acushnet while in Patya in Peru. Their fates are not known. Captain Pease, Melville notes dourly, ‘returned & lives in asylum at the Vinyard’.

  Captain Pease clearly ran an unhappy ship, and he may have been a part-model for Melville’s creation, the half-crazed, obsessive Ahab, whose pride turns to blasphemy and brings ruin. Melville makes much of the God-fearing nature of his Quaker Nantucketeers, and I had noted how Christianity still plays a role among the whale hunters I met. Pamilacan and Lamalera are both very devout Christian communities, and this is against the general pattern. Muslims make up the crews aboard most of the traditional trading craft of Indonesia, and the ‘sea peoples’ of the Philippines are either animist or Muslim. Tonga is a special case. In the island kingdom there are few opportunities for anyone to be other than Christian, and Samson Cook had emphasised his devotion by becoming a minister of the Tongan church. Christian faith, it seems, still sustains the whale hunters, offering a shield against the dangers of their work. I recalled how the fishermen of Pamilacan always came ashore on the way to the whale shark reefs to light candles in the Church of San Isidoro and pray for a safe return. In Lamalera there is scarcely a gesture or custom during the whale hunt which does not have its Christian gloss – the holy water sprinkled on boat and crew before the launch, a paternoster after the sail is hoisted, another prayer if the fishing is bad and to ask the Lord to intervene to improve the catch. The anthropologist Bob Barnes has shown that many of these Christian formulae are grafted on earlier pagan customs, but the graft has succeeded to an astonishing degree. Twenty-five kilometres to the north-west of Lamalera is another coastal fishing village, confusingly called Lamakera. It is entirely Muslim. Until recently the men of Lamakera also hunted whales, using a design of boat which the Lamalera men jealously say was copied from their own. The Muslims hunted baleen whales, not sperm whales. Now they have given up taking whales except when they meet a whale by chance when hunting manta ray. Their lack of success, say the Lamalera men, is because they are Muslims, foul-mouthed and blasphemous. They do not have the pure heart which comes from Christian prayer. Sperm whales, they contend, deliver themselves only to Christians.

  Two antique harpoons provide a link between Lamalera and the world Melville described. The two harpoons are kept carefully stored as clan property in the house of Kena Puka. The keeper of these relics brought them out to show me. They are surprisingly lightweight, no more than three or four pounds. Each has a long slender shaft of wrought iron, with a broad two-flanged arrowhead. The men of Lamalera have never made or used harpoons of this shape and suppose that they must have come from some foreign ship. Melville would have recognised them at once. There would have been dozens of them shipped aboard the Acushnet when she sailed from Fairhaven, and the ship’s blacksmith would have been able to forge replacements when they were lost. Normally each harpoon was stamped with an identifying mark, but the antiques in the possession of the Kena Puka clan are plain. There is no way of knowing which ship once carried them or where and when they were thrown. Their keeper could only tell me that an earlier Kena Puka had seen a dead whale floating on the sea. The crew hauled alongside the carcass and found the two harpoons embedded in the flesh and retrieved them. He could not tell me when this had happened, except that it was a very long time ago. If the harpoons did come from a Western whaleship, then she may have been cruising for whales about the time that Moby Dick was written. That classic broad arrow-pattern of harpoon head went out of common use 150 years ago.

  Mocha Dick, it will be remembered, carried twenty rusty harpoons in his blubber when he was finally caught and rendered down, according to Reynolds. And Melville has Queequeg recognise Moby Dick as the whale which has ‘Oh! Good many iron in him hide . . . all twiske-tee betwisk . . .’ The tattooed South Sea islander falters for a word and turns his hand round and round ‘as though uncorking a bottle’ until Ahab cries, “Corkscrew! . . . aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie twisted and wrenched in him.’ Losing harpoons was commonplace. Melville was familiar with shipboard tales of harpoons lost and harpoons recovered, though he took his detail from his favoured whaling authors. Captain Bunker from New Bedford, ‘of whom almost everybody has heard’ according to Henry Cheever, threw a harpoon into a whale in ‘north latitude thirty degrees and thirty minutes, and east longitude one hundred and fifty four degrees’. The whale broke the line, and the harpoon was gone. Five years later the captain was sailing in precisely the same latitude but fourteen degrees farther to the west, when ‘he made fast to a noble whale, and after a hard struggle succeeded in getting him alongside. And lo! When cutting him up a harpoon, rusted off at the shank, was found fast anchored in the old fellow’s “cutwater”. “Hallo!” said Captain Bunker jesting, “here is my missing old iron.” What he said proved to be very truth, for the blubber-kept harpoon was the identical one he had lost five years before, having on it the ship’s name, and his own private mark.’

  These lost harpoons served, by chance, as tracker tags. When they were recovered, the whalemen began to glean some idea of the migrations of the sperm whale. Stone lances and bone harpoons found in whales caught in the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada led Captain William Scoresby Jr, another of Melville’s sources, to guess they were the hunting weapons of Eskimos who lived on the northern edge of the New World and had not yet encountered Westerners and obtained iron from them. Scoresby theorised that the whales had swum the length of the North American coast, perhaps from the Pacific Ocean itself, and that meant there was a north-west sea passage. Nearly two hundred years later we still know little about the migrations of sperm whales. They are such sea-wandering creatures that their distribution and movements are difficult to track. Separate populations of sperm whales are scattered around the world’s oceans, each inhabiting its own range. But it is a mystery whether these populations intermingle from time to time, and to what extent, or if some sperm whales – the lone ‘emperors’ in particular – travel huge distances from one ocean to the next. The whalemen long ago recognised ‘nursery herds’ of cow whales and their calves, and now it is appreciated that a ‘nursery herd’ is the primary social unit. An older female leads and each mother whale teaches her child the pod’s distinctive vocabulary of clicks and grunts. When a pod splits up, and one group swims away to find another territory, some scientists claim to detect a similarity of language between the two halves, generations later.

  So the sperm whales of the Gulf of Ombay can be said to be descendants of the whales which swam there in Melville’s time. ‘A large whale called Timor Jack is the hero of many strange stories, such as his destroying every boat sent out against him,’ wrote Beale, and Melville underlined the words ‘Timor Jack’ in his copy of Beale’s book. Perhaps Melville thought of choosing Timor Jack as his model for Moby Dick, or he might have been tempted to select ‘New Zealand Tom’ who destroyed nine whaleboats ‘before breakfast’ one day in 1804. The fighting whale of New Zealand was distinguished by a ‘white hump’. But in the end Melville apparently preferred Mocha Dick as his main inspiration. Timor Jack was left to the mercy of the real-life whalers. They determined to be rid of him. A whaleman craftily attached a floating cask to the line of the first harpoon, to distract Timor Jack’s attention. While the whale watched the cask, the whaleboats closed with him and killed him.

  What drove the Western whalers to these acts of deliberate slaughter? Sailing halfway round the world for profit, they arrived in the whale’s natural arena with the rampant spirit of the gladiator. They had to conquer the great sea beast; nothing less would do. This is one of the messages which Melville may have meant us to understand. There are as many interpretations to his tale as there have been readers, but time and again the white whale is taken as a symbol of vulnerable Nature at the mercy of Man the predator. On the last and fatal day of the chase, First Mate Starbuck implores Captain Ahab to stop his insane pursuit and leave the whale alone. ‘See!’ he cries. ‘Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him.’ But Ahab presses on to his own destruction. It is exactly what the sea hunters of Pamilacan and Lamalera would have warned: harm the white sea beast, and general disaster will follow. The hook jumpers of Pamilacan do not attack the white manta ray, nor the white whale shark, and in Tonga Samson had told me that the Cook family never took such risks. The whale hunters of Lamalera go farther: they revere the white whale as much as fear it. The white whale is an ancestor. It has its proper place among the creatures of the sea, and is not a selected target for their harpoons. The whale hunt is a matter of survival, not of conquest. And more than a hundred years after Melville’s tale, the story still belongs to a survivor – and that survivor, tragically or justly, may or may not be Man.

  After what I had seen on my travels in search of the white whale I had come to appreciate the plight of the whale hunters themselves. In Tonga Samson no longer hunts whales by the edict of his king. The President of the Philippines banned the hunting of the whale sharks soon after my visit there in an effort to preserve the remaining stocks. On Pamilacan today no one knows for certain how the community will survive. Already in Lamalera the crews of the tena are mostly old men. With the passing of the generations – or a whale-hunting ban – a way of life, a skill, a diversity of culture will inevitably vanish. What consolation there is remains the same as the grand outcome to Melville’s story of Moby Dick – the wondrous survivor is, still, a white whale.

  ‘. . . and knowing that after repeated intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some men go further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal.’

  herman melville, Moby Dick

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  Acknowledgements

  I wish there had been some way in which those people who generously helped me to accomplish my quest for the white whale could have participated in some of the high points of my experiences. David Brettell and his colleagues at Henshaw Inflatables Ltd had taken particular care in preparing the bright yellow dinghy which allowed me to accompany – and film – the tena fleet of Lamalera while it was in action offshore among the sperm whales. David Allen OBE, Chairman of DHL WorldWide Express, Cecilia Lawrence, and the team at DHL. Cork airport – who have helped me on previous expeditions – made sure that the dinghy got safely to Indonesia and back again, with the assistance of the DHL staff at Denpasar, Bali. Tony O’Connor of RTE Dublin arranged the loan of lightweight video equipment from which the still images for the book are taken, and another long-standing ally and friend, George Durrant of Ampair Ltd, donated solar panels to recharge the camera batteries. Malaysian Airlines helped with travel, and before I set out for eastern Indonesia Dr Robert Barnes was liberal with his advice about Lamalera’s culture and most thoughtful in allowing me to benefit from his own extended visits to the area. In the field I was fortunate to meet by chance Karl-Heinz Pampus to help me with any problems of the Lamaholot language. Richard Hardiman of Amerada Hess was munificent in arranging for Trondur Patursson to join me in Indonesia so that this book could be illustrated with Trondur’s superb drawings.

 

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