WHALING

Farther south, on March 7th, 1850, Rob and the crew hooked up to their first sperm whale on Brazil’s Abrolhos Banks. It was a large bull, and after striking it, the unfazed beast took them on a “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” for a good part of the afternoon. Toward sunset, and with roiling thunderheads on the horizon, it sounded and threatened to take out all their line. They cut it off then, attaching a large board called a “drag” to the end, hoping to simply slow the beast’s flight. The crew rowed after it for a while longer, then eventually gave up as the line squall closed in. Killing a whale was a maritime bullfight: a long drawn-out and barbaric affair, quite similar in many ways to one of the classic Spanish pageants. As in the ring, there was a series of prescribed acts, an array of weapons, and the final estocada, or plunging of the sword. Often a terrifying encounter, killing a great whale required superb skill, considerable strength, and good luck. After the whale was spotted, usually by a boatsteerer in the crow’s nest who in tradition decried “thar she blows” upon seeing the white vaporous cloud of a spout, the captain ordered the crew to lower the whaleboats for the chase. Mostly rowed, whaleboats also had a small mast with a gaff-rigged sail that could be used to sneak up on a whale quietly, or after a long, unsuccessful chase just to get the tired men home. Each boat carried six men. Four of them rowed, while a bow man rowed a bit and then took up the harpoon. The sixth crew member—who might be the first, second, or third mate, or even the captain—held the great steering oar and took charge of the action. Each whaleboat had a large wooden tub in the middle, in which a long rope was coiled and attached to the end of the harpoon. There were also one or more lances on board, great wide blades attached to long poles. These were used once the whale was close enough to touch, and they were plunged into its side to help speed the whale’s bleeding. Most boats also carried a flense, a huge long-handled knife, like a machete on a broomstick. Near the end, the crew would try to use the flense to cut the tendons of the whale’s tail, hobbling it to prevent any further runs or a dramatic escape.

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If the darter was good or lucky, the harpoon reached the heart or lungs and would kill the whale quickly. More typically, once the harpoon was set, the whale, reeling from the pain, swam straight away or sounded, heading to the deep. Rarely did they turn to fight, though gray whales were known to do that, and sperm whales, too, on occasion. If the whale “ran” straight away, the crew got a Nantucket sleigh ride and the line hissed out of the tub, smoking hot, stripping away from around a post amidships. If the whale sounded, the line would equally uncoil, but simply feed straight down into the deep. The men in the whaleboat were left bobbing in fear, since they didn’t know where the whale was or when it would re-appear. Sometimes the whale “ran the line out,” or the line broke, or the dead whale simply sank before the crew could get the carcass back to the ship. Crews lost about 10 percent of the whales they harpooned. After the whale ran for a while, which sometimes took hours, the crew would slowly haul in the line until they were close enough to use the lance. When the whale was fully exhausted, the harpooner would then use the lance to reach the lungs or heart. One trick was to shove the lance into the thrashing mammal and twist it, in a move known as “churning,” ideally deep enough to wreak havoc on the lungs. At last, blowing blood to form a crimson sea, its eyes would widen and then fade into an opalescence of death. Its great tail fluke would pound the sea in a final flurry, then calm as the endmost spasms coursed through, and the great whale would finally turn over, dorsal fin down.

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During Rob’s time, whalers focused on only a few of the roughly fourteen larger whale species. Initially, from the Colonial period until the early 1800s, American whalers chiefly sought the right, humpback, and sperm whales. 1 The Atlantic’s population of the gray whale, the scragg whale, as noted had already been driven to extinction by the Basques more than a hundred years before. The cantankerous gray whale off the coast of California and its equally isolated population off Japan and Korea were already rare and had the bad habit of charging whaleboats when harpooned. The other speedy baleen whales, such as the blue or sulphur-bottomed whale, fin whales, and the smaller sei and minke whales, remained elusive until the still-distant future. The sail-powered nineteenth-century whaling ships, with their whaleboats propelled by blistered palms and bent backs, were simply no match for them. The last great whale, the bowhead whale, was a high Arctic species and heretofore had been fairly hidden except to indigenous hunters. Living north of the Bering Strait, it was only recognized and targeted beginning in the late 1850s. Distressingly, whaling became truly untethered in the twentieth century. 2 With oil fields opening across the nation, sperm whales lost their economic interest and baleen whales were again the target, but this time for their “whale bone” and meat. “Whale bone” was actually the baleen plates in their mouths, which were used in human goods where plastics or spring steel are employed today. Now sustained hunting shifted back to “inshore” species and brought the near annihilation of right and bowhead whales. Hunting for the remaining great baleen whales ratcheted up with high-powered harpoon guns and factory ships. In the final push, the blue, fin, and sei whales that had swum too fast for Rob’s ships were now the quarry of modern high-speed diesel-engine boats. Coupled with ice-breaking steel hulls, the specter of death now penetrated the great whales’ last refugia, the polar regions. Following a brief respite, as the world waged war in the 1940s, the gears of commerce shifted higher again in the 1950s and 1960s. In the last throes, an ethnocentric Asian, Russian, and Norwegian predilection for whale meat led to the decimation of the remaining populations of the humpback, blue, and fin whales.