By GIOVANNI MESQUITA*
Herman Melville's novel “Moby Dick” and the true story of the sperm whale that sank the ship Essex
I read, for the first time, much of Moby Dick on a trip to Rio de Janeiro by bus. Yes, we poor people went to Rio de Janeiro by bus. And from the deck of the Pequod I only disembarked at Cais do Valongo. I remember hearing that the residents of that city, at the beginning of the 19th century, had difficulty sleeping because of the whale songs that infested Guanabara Bay. In celebration, cetaceans of all origins would feast on this site.
This image of poor devils in nightgowns and pompom bonnets rolling around in bed in torturous insomnia, caused by the lasciviousness of these giant divas, is beautiful. But this poetry falls apart when we know that those discontented with these operatic seasons rejoiced when the greed of the market ended them in an authoritarian and bloody manner. The joy of these beautiful cetacean arias ended, in Shakespearean fashion, with Guanabara dyed crimson by the harpoons of the whalers.
What would be our theme, I think, whales, whalers, Herman Melville's book…? Hard to say! I never forget Aldir Blanc's text, from the book Artists' Street and surroundings. “I was with Captain Ahab […] in search of the terrible sperm whale, when the bell rang…”. Perfection of literary and poetic figures. Hail, Aldir! And in the film The dream thief, by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, harpooner One, (Ron Perlman), when asked why he gave up whaling, answers: one day I saw the look in the eyes of a whale. After that I could never hit the target again…! The theme echoes from various places.
I don't know what is more interesting, Herman Melville's magnificent novel or the story of the sperm whale that sank the Essex. To separate these Siamese twins, you must first know that they are separate things. In the fable, the Essex became the Pequod and the young Captain Pollard became an angry Ahab Gregori Peck who dies riding his obsessive passion.
The fact is: a whaler from the city of Nantucket, the Essex, 3.700 km from the Peruvian coast, near the Equator, attacked a whaler. It launched three whaleboats, hunting boats, to harpoon the giants. During the operation, one of the boats was attacked by a huge sperm whale. Disfigured, it returned to the ship for repairs. At that moment, the same leviathan attacked the ship. The impact opened a hole in the hull. While the few men on the ship (most of them were hunting) tried to veto the invasion of the water, the sperm whale maneuvered and attacked again.
This second blow, if you'll pardon the pun, hit the bow and sent the ship sinking. For more than 80 days, the survivors were adrift, with little food and water. In reports of the grim event, it is said that the same whale followed and stalked them. Hunger, thirst and fear may have been responsible for some of these sightings. Whales hunting whalers was the kid biting the dog.
At that time, street and building lighting was provided by whale fat. But perfumes and corsets also depended on it. And spermaceti was extracted from the head of sperm whales. They believed that the animal had a barrel of sperm in its head. This is where the name of this substance comes from. In reality, this waxy liquid in the skull of the cetacean, whose head is almost half its body, is used for the emergence and submersion of the sperm whale. A system similar to that of submarines. But these weaklings only dive 300 meters. The sperm whale, on the other hand, goes to 2.987 meters. These giants are a demonstration, on display, of high technology produced by nature.
But was the whale that ended Essex's prank white? No! The image used by Herman Melville was of an albino "Chilean" whale, which spent 30 years messing with the predators' bandstand. sapiens. At the time, the titans of the sea, who became notorious among sailors, were named by them. The white Pacific sperm whale was given the name Mocha Dick.
And the person who went after this story was another American, Jerimiah N. Reynolds. His book, The Mocha Dick, was released in 1839. Reynolds described Mocha as “an old bull whale of prodigious size and strength… white as wool.” Reynolds’ first record of the albino giant occurred in 1837, before the US Congress. At the time, he was speaking about exploratory expeditions in the Pacific.
For such an important ceremony, in which he hoped to raise some public money for his future maritime expeditions, Jerimiah N. Reynolds asked Edgar Allan Poe to review his speech. And, apparently, Mr. Poe was quite impressed, mesmerized enough to put 700 words of this speech in chapter XIX of his Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym.[I] And here the terrible white sperm whale crossed paths with the owner of the most horrifying feather.
The less famous “Chilean” white whale, Mocha Dick, was named after the Mocha Islands; for the “non-Gaucho speakers”, it is necessary to inform that “mocha” is the one that does not have horns. Since the sperm whale does not have horns, the name was doubly appropriate. More than 100 times, the sea “roadrunners” set traps for it and the result was failure.
Each foolproof plan that was foiled was accompanied by a “beep-beep”, I mean, a column of air that made the water splashes dance 25 meters high. Having several harpoons on its back, like remembrances of his victories, in which he punished more than thirty sea hunters, Mocha Dick was finally shot in 1838. There were 30 years of the cup on the shelf in the championships against the whalers.
The film The heart of the sea, by Ron Howard, released in Brazil in 2015, was perhaps the last moment of celebration of this history in global society. The title was taken from the book by Herman Melville, who, in turn, I look for it in Book of Jonah, from Old testment. The more atheist reader should not confuse it with the episode involving Geppetto from Pinocchio. The film, based on the book of the same name, written by Nathaniel Philbrick and published in 2000, goes back to Melville's research process.
Herman Melville was an aficionado of maritime affairs. At the age of 17, like Ishmael, the character in his book, he embarked on merchant ships. Later he spent time on whaling ships in search of enlightenment for his society. Also like Ishmael he became a teacher. Due to family financial problems, Herman Melville “played all the way”, having several jobs.
The story is not always as beautifully elaborate as the novels, but it is more inventive and implausible than they are. As Melville delved deeper into the story, he learned of the terrible plight of the Essex survivors. He discovered that the shipwrecked group had avoided sailing to the nearest coast, the Marquesas Islands, after the disaster. They were afraid of the would-be cannibals who lived there. Ironically, without food, these Christians eventually converted to cannibalism.
This practice was a kind of tradition among seafarers and was known as the “Custom of the Sea”. It was perfectly acceptable for shipwrecked crews to eat human flesh when in extreme need. However, it was necessary to follow a strict ritualistic protocol, and this had two unwavering rules. The first was to eat the corpse of someone who died naturally due to the serious conditions that always led to a shipwreck.
The second, a choice made by lottery. In this wheel of fortune, regardless of condition or position, everyone was included. It turns out that, among the survivors of the Essex, at the time of the impartial choice, there were 17 survivors, of which 7 were black. In total, 7 were cannibalized, but of these 7, this fate fell on 5 blacks.[ii] With this information, the light on my suspicion meter started flashing like crazy. It became mandatory to take a look at this “Customs of the Sea” thing.
And, to no one's surprise, there are reports that indicate that the choice, at times, was not up to fate. It was common to use the criterion of the "most expendable", and who would these be? The cabin boys (teenage sailors), passengers (especially if they were foreigners), and, as a priority group on the menu, blacks (enslaved or not).[iii] Officially this Custom of the Sea, which was widely accepted by the courts, came to an end in 1884. However, reports of new events did not cease until, as the so-called, the end of the sails.
So, as we see, novels, and even movies, don't shine the boots of real life. Herman Melville launched his Moby Dick, in the east, in 1871. For our country, the book, considering the delay, must have come here in a bottle thrown into the sea. In Brazil it was only published, with a translation by Monteiro Lobato, in 1935, with the name Moby Dick, the Beast of the Sea.
It is fair to say that in his own country, Herman Melville did not fare any better; he died without his most famous book being recognized and selling well. I don't even know if he was able to pay the research bills. According to what they say, it was only when William Faulkner and Albert Camus began to fall in love with the book that it began to be taken seriously, first among the provincial Anglo-Saxons and then throughout the world.
For me personally, as a reader and a critic, reading Herman Melville is very liberating. He doesn't seem to respect anything. Let me explain. He jumps from lessons on classicism and biology, philosophical and religious reflections, biblical or literary quotes, to the daily lives of people of his time, reporting the tragic and mocking behavior of the crew. Through his mouth, Ismael reports, straightforwardly and without pretense, neuroses, his open and loving relationship with the Polynesian, and former cannibal, Queequeg.
He already sleeps in a spoon position, with the harpooner, on the first night, at the “Estalagem do Jorro”[iv]. According to him, as if they were married. It is very interesting to see how he, the narrator, goes from fear, due to Queequeg's cannibal condition, to a bond of love[v]. Melville doesn't go as far as saying it's carnal love, but love is love...
Whaling was a disaster for this species. In the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of whales were killed. At the end of the film No Heart of the sea, the character Thomas Nickerson says to Herman Melville: “I hear a man in Pennsylvania dug a hole recently. And found oil, it can’t be… oil in the ground, who would have thought. And sure enough, it happened in 1859, so the old whaling company gave way to the oil company.
For a time, cetaceans enjoyed peace. However, this destructive industry returned with a vengeance at the end of World War I. And with an aggravating factor, the modernization of ships powered by fossil fuels and harpoon cannons. In the first half of the 1986th century, three million whales were killed. In XNUMX, an International Moratorium, determined by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), came into force to put an end to whaling.
As far as we know, three countries are boycotting the measure. For example, Japan, which allows and subsidizes the hunting of mammals. Until 2018,[vi] Their claim was that the animals they killed were being used for scientific research. As of 2019, Japan has completely lost all shame and announced that it will continue hunting because this practice is a mark of Japanese identity. I know... Denmark and Iceland have never even pretended to adhere to the International Moratorium. Long live profit.
In any case, between losses and damages, the reduction in slaughter was drastic. Since the ban, until the end of the last century, this number fell to approximately ten thousand. However, the tendency is for this number to rise again, to the glory of Japanese culture. In these two centuries, the gray whale of the North Atlantic and the right whale of the European coast became extinct. And the right whale, of the southern hemisphere, almost became extinct, with its global population reaching 300 individuals. And the largest creature of all ages that has ever lived on the planet, the blue whale, also has its population greatly reduced and is at risk of extinction.
Mocha Dick, following the probable fate of her species, was slaughtered. Melville’s whale, on the other hand, eternally inhabits the seas of our imagination, sailing in the fantasy generated by the grandeur of the oceans. In many ways, the existence of “our” sperm whales exposes the human condition. We continue to be torn between the necessary coexistence with cold and objective history and the essential projection towards things that are not, that were not and that will not be… or rather, that may or may not be. Just like the titans, who live in both worlds, the underwater and the surface, licking the salt of the seas or drinking the horizons, we are…
* Giovanni Mesquita He is a historian and museologist. Book author Bento Gonçalves: from birth to revolution (Suzano).
Notes
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship), on this page you can access the name and destinations of the Essex crew.
[iii] ARTICLE The Delicate Question Cannibalism in Prehistoric and Historic Times G. Richard Scott and Sean McMurry, P. 232. Available here.
[iv] The words “Jorro” and “arpoador” entered this sentence in a casual and non-quinseristic way.
[v] MELVILLE, Herman. Moby Dick, or The Whale. Translated by Irene Hirsch and Alexandre Barbosa de Souza. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2019. P.53
[vi] https://gizmodo.uol.com.br/japao-caca-comercial-baleias/
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