Excerpts on Whaling from Herman Melville's Moby
Dick, 1851
These
excerpts come from Melville's famous 1851 novel about the doomed
hunt of the Pequod and its obsessive Captain Ahab for the
titular white whale. While the book is a work of fiction, Melville
had personal experience as a sailor which included service on
whaling ships. Moreover, the basic narrative of the book was
inspired by several famous whaling incidents in the decades
preceding its publication. Melville's description of the process
of hunting and processing sperm whales at sea is broadly accurate,
providing insight into an industry that killed hundreds of
thousands of whales during the 19th century. The whale oil
harvested was used as fuel for lamps, an industrial lubricant, and
an ingredient in perfume.
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat
pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as
temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling
the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it
needs a strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into the
fish; for often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy
implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty
feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the
harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost;
indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to
the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and
intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top
of one’s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and
half started—what that is none know but those who have tried it.
For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at
one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then,
with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer
hears the exciting cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He now has
to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way,
seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength
may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No
wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of
fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder
that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no
wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the
boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years
with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is
but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the
voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you
expect to find it there when most wanted!
Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical
instant, that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and
harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent
jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then they change
places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft,
takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.
Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both
foolish and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from
first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and
no rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under
circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would
sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long
experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has
convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery,
it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the
before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused
them.
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of
this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not
from out of toil.
CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So,
in productive subjects, grow the chapters.
The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent
mention. It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet
in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard
gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the
wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end
slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly
at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest
as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary
to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called
the first and second irons.
But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected
with the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if
possible, one instantly after the other into the same whale; so
that if, in the coming drag, one should draw out, the other may
still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances. But it very
often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive
running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it becomes
impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his
movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the
second iron is already connected with the line, and the line is
running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly
tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the most
terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water,
it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line
(mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most
instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not
always unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties.
Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown
overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the
lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all
directions. Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again
until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse.
Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all
engaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when
owing to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand
concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten
loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about him. For,
of course, each boat is supplied with several harpoons to bend on
to the line should the first one be ineffectually darted without
recovery. All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as
they will not fail to elucidate several most important, however
intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.
***
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex
officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory
Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor
a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand
red oxen to the sea gods.
In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other
ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted
green, and which no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch
of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the
lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck.
The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies,
was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of
the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great
blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. And
now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the
mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the
body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the
two side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round
the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew
striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd
at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on
her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old
house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her
frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to
the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered
by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift,
startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards
and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into
sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the
first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale
precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from
the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by
spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass
continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water,
and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line
called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck
and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off,
and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being
hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the
main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a
moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro
as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good
heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and
pitch him headlong overboard.
One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen
weapon called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he
dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part of
the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second
alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold
upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon,
this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once
more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong,
desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so
that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper
strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for
lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the
one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale,
the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip
through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished
parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment
sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if
it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work
proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously;
both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the
blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship
straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of
assuaging the general friction. . . .
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this
skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the
bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered
that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed
state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the
coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that
animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a
lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have
ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of
the whale’s skin.
Source:
https://mobydick.wales/contents/