A Whale I'd Like to Meet
Many of us have been bemused by the legends in folk tale and song of the days when spermaceti ruled the American economy, fortunes were made by wooden ships and iron lances, and whale oil lit the New England evenings. It was brought home from far oceans hundreds of barrels a trip by weathered, hard-hided but bright-eyed men from Nantucket and New Bedford. The fishermen in these towns had learned the trade of the hunt at first from Indians who confined their hunt to whales washed ashore. It is said the first sea-going whaler was a Nantucketer who got blown offshore by mistake while closing on a whale. In the year 1819, stout, slow ships manned by perhaps two dozen men we setting out from New Englad on a regular basis to round the Horn and fill their holds with whale oil from the large pods that were to be found in the open Pacific. The fleet had grown dramatically from the early years -- Nantucket had a fleet of about thirty, and New Bedford another twenty or so. The dangers of their lives and the dogged physical persistence of these men of these men, who left their wives and children for two years at a time to seek fortunes in whale oil, made them famous -- as renowned in their profession as cowboys were to become in theirs. It was a high risk, taken for high reward. One such vessel cleared the headland at Nantucket outward bound in August of 1819 on the newly refitted whaling ship Essex, with provisions for two and one-half years' voyage. She carried twenty men away from the coast of America and out to the Gulf Stream in light breezes, and rounded Cape Horn over Christmas, reaching the western coast of Chile in January of 1820.
In that year, Charles Darwin became eleven years old, Queen Victoria's coronation would not happen for another seventeen years, and King George the III, who had lost the American Colonies for the Empire, had been declared insane but nine years earlier, no further back than 1991 is today. The Battle of Waterloo, in which the Duke of Wellington finally stopped the encroachments of Napoleon Bonaparte, had been in the headlines only five years before. Very little representation, however, had been given to the whales prior to that time.
One individual whale changed that. Little is known about him except that he had a temper, and apparently a sense of justice, and was smart enough to add vectors. He was gray in color, longer from head to tail as ten full grown men stretched out, or 60 feet. Fully a third of his length was provided by his huge boxy head, the eyes and the ear-holes set well back from the blunt prow. His lower jaw was rich with teeth -- about fifty of them distributed along the perimeter of his seventeen-foot long jaw. His teeth, had you cared to measure them, were about seven inches long and weighed about 20 pounds each; they did not mate with an upper set as yours do, but would nestle in fleshy sockets along the upper jaw. His steering flippers were five feet long, and three wide. He weighed a good forty-five tons, and ate a full ton of fish, skate and squid on a good feeding day. Let us call him Gris, for that was his color - a dark blueish gray, of plumlike texture.
He lived among a pod of his kind, and bonded closely with them; they spent their days hunting the bottom-dwelling giant squid, or protecting calves on the surface while the calves' mothers dove thousands of feet to feed. They would spout, or lobtail, or sing to each other, or just spend hours "logging" in the water like huge motionless gray sculptures. It is clear, however, that this individual whale loved his kind with an intense attachment.
He and his pod were playing at diving and spouting on the morning of the 20th of November 1820, although they did not much care that that name had been assigned to the morning in question. The shoal was cruising about 40 miles south of the Equator, along the line of longitude sailors call 119º West; but they did not much care for those numbers and their meaning, having a different shape and dimension to their world.
The first mate of the Essex was an upstanding and humane Nantucket sailing officer named Owen Chase, and it is to him we owe the legacy of a detailed description of what this whale did, and why. When the Essex lowered her boats, Owen Chase was the lead iron in the first boat, and after waiting a while for one of the pod to surface, made the first strike. The whale, a cousin of Gris', was wounded, in great pain, and outrage, and he lunged upward and struck down with his tail hard enough to stove the whaleboat, a long, light clinker-built craft designed for speed more than sturdiness. Owen Chase was thrown off his feet and when he stood up, his boat was taking on water through the stove side. He cut the line to his harpoon with a hatchet kept handy for that purpose and managed to stopper the leak with some canvas and several jackets from the crew; and the damaged whaleboat limped back to the ship to make repairs. The captain, leading the ship's second boat, went on and struck another whale from the shoal, while the second mate in his boat assisted. While Owen Chase was patching the whaleboat, and moving the ship down toward the site of the other two boats, he observed Gris of the weather bow, about twenty rods (or 100 yards, more or less). Chase described Gris as lying quietly for a while, his head toward the ship. He then noticed Gris making way at great speed directly down toward the ship, and ordered the helmsman to turn her bows up into the wind in order to avoid catastrophe. But the whale came down even faster and struck the ship directly of the weather bow forward of the chains, perhaps the most lethal spot he could have chosen. The whole ship heaved to a sudden stop, trembling, and the men aboard her were aghast, so stunned with surprise as to be speechless. For, bear in mind, there was no record in all the history of whale chasing, of any whale anywhere turning around and attacking a whaling ship. It wasn't in the books, and it wasn't in the tales, and it just wasn't done. But Gris did it.
As Owen Chase recovered his wits, he immediately set men to the pumps. But the bows were already taking in more than the pumps could handle, and began to settle into the water. As Chase began signaling the two whaleboats which were still away, he saw Gris again, lying about 500 yards off. Evidently the huge whale was upset, either from the pain of his head from the collision, or from the loss of two of his clan; for whatever reason, he was thrashing angrily on the surface, an unusual behavior for a sperm whale, making great clouds of foam appear on the ocean, thrashing continuously and violently. Chase began ordering the remaining boats made ready for launch, as it was clear the vessel was going down by the bows, when a deckhand called his attention back to Gris, who was again heading for the Essex. Owen Chase later wrote, "I..saw him coming down apparently with twice his ordinary speed, and to me at that moment it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect".
At that time the Essex was running at about three knots; and Gris was running at a similar speed. Thus their combined speed was six nautical miles per hour, about 600 feet per minute, the whale exerting himself so energetically as to leave a foamy wake 16 feet wide. Gris' massive head again took the Essex on the bows, just under the cathead on the ship's windward side. At the second of impact, Gris' massive body did about
900,00 foot-pounds of work on the whaling ship, sufficient to guarantee her destruction. Within ten minutes, while the men on board scrambled to launch their boats with whatever they could grab, her shattered bow brought her down and she lay over on her beam ends, ironically kept afloat for a short while only by the hundreds of barrels of whale-oil in her hold.
Of the twenty men on the crew list of the Essex, only six were finally to survive the gruesome survival battle that followed; in three boats they set out to make their way to the coast of South America. Between the 20th of November and the 18th of February the crew fought gales, drought, starvation, and the terror of having their boats attacked by sharks, and the most insane privations that can be imagined. Owen Chase's boat, which had separated from the others during a midnight gale, was finally rescued at 33º45' south latitude, 81º03' west longitude, by a British brig. They made Valparaiso on the 25th February, the survivors of Gris' attack arriving in absolute distress and poverty. The Captain of the Essex, George Pollard, had also fought his way to within a few hundred miles of the coast, and was rescued with the remainder of his boat by an American whaler. Of the 14 lost sailors who died of exposure, starvation and thirst while adrift in these small boats, five were eaten after death in order that the others might survive; and one was shot in sacrifice for this purpose.
Gris, after he had done his damage, went back under the hull of the Essex and was not seen again, by the men in those boats. Owen Chase relived the nightmare of Gris' attack repeatedly while adrift in the long days under the Pacific sky, and concluded that it could only have been a calculated attack motivated by the wounding or killing of three whales from the same pod to which Gris belonged, and remembering especially the ferocious countenance of the whale as Gris drove to the attack -- his tail thrashing and his jaws opening and snapping in the furious fighting stance of the sperm whale.
Chase ended his days as a night-watchman on the Nantucket waterfront; Gris ended his in unknown waters, surrounded, it can be hoped, by his friends, his descendants, and his cousins, at play in the wide reaches and vast depths beyond the reach of sailors. His feat became a legend among his enemies, providing the true grounds for the nineteenth century best-seller Moby Dick, and the twenty-first century best seller Ahab's Wife.
But these works--both great in literary virtues and of comparable merit in the works of our language--focus on more land-bound interests; they do not imagine him as he must have been, a solitary hero from a mysterious species; they do not tell the story of the whale I would love to meet.
Regards,
Amos