Hunting Sperm Whales in rowboats is a perilous business. With a forehead as wide as a locomotive and a body as powerful, a skewered whale can head- butt a wooden boat, burst up beneath it and toss it in the air, or take off at 20 knots, towing the boat by the harpoon line until it capsizes or shudders apart. The leviathan's huge tail flukes can smash the boat to matchwood or sweep a man overboard. Its toothy lower jaw, as long as a car, hinges wide enough to chomp on a hull-or swallow a man. Not for nothing did 19th century whalemen cry, "Stern all, for your lives!" as their fast but fragile craft closed with their prey.
Tackling this dauntingly fierce whale was once a proud calling. In Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling (Allen & Unwin; 394 pages), Granville Allen Mawer notes that in 18th century Nantucket, America's whaling capital, girls were said to be "bound by a secret oath not to entertain the advances of any suitor who had not killed his first whale." Mawer, an Australian maritime historian, describes a typical "joust" between 19th century whalemen and their quarry: in his vivid account the lancer is a knight, the harpooner his esquire. In In Search of Moby Dick (Little, Brown; 242 pages), British adventurer Tim Severin combs the Pacific for a fighting white whale. In the south Indonesian village of Lamalera, the last place on earth where men regularly hunt sperm whales by hand, successful crews "sing in triumph" and children play at being "the harpooner, the hero."
The villagers are bound to the whale by poverty as well as tradition. Every skerrick of meat, including lung and intestine, is eaten, bartered or sold. But the catch is small and erratic: there are no fat Lamalerans. Unable to buy harpoons, they forge the heads from old car springs and lash them to bamboo shafts. Such weapons are too light to penetrate the whale's hide, so the harpooner must literally press them home. Leaping from the prow "like a flag attached to the long pole and trailing behind it," he stabs the whale, tumbles from its back and scurries back to the boat. His physical embrace reflects his people's spiritual one: like the Tongans, who also feature in Severin's engaging, lore-filled book, the Lamalerans revere whales as ancestors. Unless the hunters live good lives and observe the proper rituals, they believe, the whales will shun them or attack their boats.
European whalers felt no such ties. In the tales they told while spinning yarn from frayed rope, "whales were always villains," writes Mawer, "albeit sometimes admired." The men ate the dark-red meat (Mawer gives recipes for whale's-lip jelly and brain fritters), but relished it little more than wormy ship's biscuit. For them a sperm whale was a different kind of meal ticket: its blubber, and the wax-like spermaceti in its skull, produced oil and candles that burned with unrivaled-and high-priced-brilliance. Sighting a whale, a captain became a calculator. A 50-barrel bull, its blubber "tryed out" in huge boilers on deck, could be tidily stowed as 6,000 liters of oil; 30 such whales could fill a ship -and the whole crew (in theory at least) shared in the profits. "Bear a hand, men, if you love money," rose the shout as the cedar whaleboats were lowered from the ship.
In search of these living tankers, the whaleships pushed further and further afield, on voyages that could last years (the record was 11) and range from Nantucket to New Zealand, Tonga, Chile, Hawaii and Japan. In a 37-year career, one U.S. captain spent 32 years at sea and traveled 1.6 million km. Mawer chronicles the rise of this first global industry with novelistic verve; as he remarks, the truth of whaling life was often as strange as fiction.
The ocean-roving sperm whales became more and more elusive (though their total numbers, Mawer writes, hardly changed). At the same time, cheap petroleum sent sperm-oil prices plummeting. Dumping tradition for efficiency, Norwegian whalemen adopted iron steamships with swivel guns and exploding harpoons. Stealth and maneuver were now obsolete, says Mawer: the whales could simply be chased until exhaustion slowed them for the kill. Here he ends his history; here, too, the British and American whalers bowed out. There was honor in their conservatism, Mawer writes: "In their eyes there was no skill and no sport in running the quarry down until it was as helpless as a bullock in an abattoir." Nor was there sense: by the 1960s, factory ships were "vacuuming up" over 25,000 sperm whales a year-six times the toll of a century before-and in 1986 the international community called a halt to commercial whaling.
The Lamalerans had their own tussle with innovation. In the 1970s, the U.N. sent a Norwegian expert to show them the use of motorboats and harpoon guns. But the new ways were too effective. "We did not need so many whales," a villager tells Severin. "We did not know what to do with them." The local price of whale meat slumped, and carcasses lay rotting on the beach. The villagers went back to wrestling their six-ton boats down the beach each morning, praying, then paddling out to sea.
With luck, they catch 40 toothed whales a year. Subsistence whaling is condoned by the International Whaling Commission, but it's anathema to some activists. For Severin and Mawer, however, the Lamalerans are a model, not a menace. Almost 2 million sperm whales now swim the world's oceans. Anyone should be allowed to hunt them, Mawer argues, on one condition: that "they emulate the ... whalemen of Lamalera, who are still prepared to take their chances from an open wooden boat, trusting in strong arms, an iron harpoon and a few hundred feet of line."