Ch. 29

SPERM WHALE BEHAVIOR

Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.

Ishmael, “The Chase—Third Day”

The final three-day battle against Moby Dick raises the believability of three aspects of sperm whale behavior that inspire fear and drama: humans can locally track a sperm whale over multiple days; sperm whales are aware of their human hunters; and a sperm whale can be consciously aggressive to humans in three ways: with its tail, jaws, and head.

Yet earlier in the novel, in addition to his musings on sperm whale intelligence, Ishmael shows through the events of the story other aspects of sperm whale behavior that create an alternative view to an aggressive, evil sperm whale. These observations instead evoke a sympathy for this species, notably that sperm whales suffer when harpooned and sperm whales behave in human-like units with social structures that are similar to ours.

TRACKING SPERM WHALES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Marta Guerra Bobo steers the power boat Grampus behind a sperm whale at the surface of Kaikōura Canyon, New Zealand. Shallow, welded of aluminum plate, and powered by a 115-horsepower engine that can hurl the boat at speeds of up to 30 knots, Grampus is less than twenty feet long—two-thirds the length of the boats the American whalemen rowed and sailed in the mid-1800s.

Guerra keeps the boat back and well clear so as not to spook the large male. Each time the animal spouts—about once every ten to twenty seconds—she says “blow” into a hands-free microphone set up by the wheel (so she can collect the exact timing later). The whale’s dorsal fin, his hump, pokes out of the water. Because it’s a calm day, forward of the hump is a portion of the whale’s gray back and head that’s visible floating over, or more through, the surface. Guerra can see wrinkles in the skin and the large bunched ball of flesh to the upper left of the head that surrounds the s-shaped blowhole. Forward-slanting, the spouts are thick, bushy, white, and clearly discernible, even against the overcast sky.

When Guerra shifts the engine forward to keep up with the whale, she tries to do so during the spout.

“I don’t know if it matters,” she says. “But it’s possible the shift in gear startles them.”1

Guerra’s assistant, Rebecca Bakker, is ready with the camera.

“He’s getting ready to go,” Guerra says.

The ridge of the whale’s spine curls up as he arches. Bakker clicks image after image as the tail rises, facing down as it sheds sea water, then the tail slowly folds over, upwards, aloft, to display its ventral side, spreading wide and tall into the air before sliding under the surface. The sperm whale dives down with barely a splash.

“It’s Tiaki,” Guerra says. She recognizes a few nicks out of the trailing edge of the left fluke and a scalloping on the edge of the right fluke. Tiaki means “guardian” in Māori. He is one of two dozen or so regular males that are in the region for part of every year, going back to 1988 when whale watchers began keeping records.2

Guerra speaks the exact time of the dive into the microphone. She confirms the hydrophone trailing astern is recording Taiki’s clicks as he descends. She then steers the boat forward to look for skin floating on the surface or for a cloud of defecation. Guerra motors directly over the oily foot, the calmed circle of water where the whale has just dived. Back ashore, she’ll calculate the exact depth beneath the boat from high resolution charts, but she doesn’t have the depth sounder on now because the sonar pings, which sound eerily like sperm whale clicks, might also distract or disturb the whales. Off the starboard side of her boat, the tiny rapid eddy created by this fifty-foot sperm whale swirls in the sea. Off the port side, Guerra scoops with a hand-net a little wormlike twirl of skin. She sticks the sample into a bag that she’ll freeze when she gets back ashore. Guerra taps the location and other data into her electronic tablet, using software that the designers named (true story) “Ahab.” Next, carefully watched by two Salvin’s albatrosses (Thalassarche salvini) who float nearby in hopes they’re bringing up fish, Guerra and Bakker sample the temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and chlorophyll-a of the water column down to 1,800 feet in order to build an oceanographic snapshot of the waters in which Tiaki forages.

After the two researchers haul up by hand their measuring device, known as a CTD (for conductivity, temperature, and depth sensors), Bakker plugs into a different hydrophone. This one doesn’t record but is only for tracking. She listens for the next sperm whale by semi-circling the receiver underwater, similar to how you’d turn your head back and forth to locate the direction of the wind between your ears. In the headphones the clicks sound like distant, rhythmic, underwater snaps—like a second-hand on an old clock. In ideal conditions, they can hear a male sperm whale from as far as seven miles.

Headphones still on, pointing with her arm, Bakker says: “I can still hear Tiaki on his way down. But it sounds like there’s another one that way. He’s faint, but maybe two and a half miles?”

Guerra throttles up and drives toward where Bakker pointed, using the GPS to judge distance and a patch of cloud to navigate her new course. The clicks are louder the closer you are, but there can be other factors, such as the orientation of the animal’s head at a given moment, the sea state at the surface, or the topography of the bottom. When the sperm whale is about to capture a squid or fish, the clicks speed up until it’s almost a buzz or a creak. When a sperm whale ascends, he or she usually clicks at first then goes completely quiet, unless pausing to feed opportunistically on the way back up to the surface. A couple times, even without the hydrophone, Guerra has heard the sperm whale’s click through the metal hull of the boat. These were likely the sperm whale’s slower clicks, the clangs, which might be part of male-to-male communication; they are so loud that they can be heard with hydrophones from perhaps more than twelve miles away.3

After speeding and thumping across the waves, driving Grampus as aggressively as would Starbuck if he had his hands on a four-stroke engine, Guerra stops the boat to allow Bakker to put the hydrophone back in the water.

“Definitely louder,” Bakker says. “About point-four miles that way.”

Guerra throttles up again, and off they go.

“I quite like this tracking,” says Bakker, who traveled from Holland for the research opportunity. “It’s like good-natured hunting.”

Kaikōura Canyon is arguably the most accessible and reliable place in the world to see male sperm whales all year round. American and English whalemen started hunting these waters in the 1830s. It’s one of the most biologically productive deep-sea habitats on Earth. The coastal shelf drops off almost immediately into the canyon, which can be over a mile deep. The canyon snakes and empties into a wide trough that’s nearly twice that. Guerra’s research aims to determine why sperm whales favor this particular region of the world. Kaikōura is occupied almost solely by adult males. She uses stable isotope analysis of sperm whale skin, the oceanographic and topographic data where the individuals choose to forage, and a range of other data to develop a sense of exactly what, where, when, why, and how sperm whales forage in this region of the South Pacific.4

Guerra was born in Madrid. Her father is a doctor. Her mother, a naval architect, was the first woman to earn this profession in Spain. Guerra has now been studying the sperm whales on Kaikōura Canyon for the equivalent of over fifteen months over a period of four years. She goes out each day the weather permits. She has now had approximately nine hundred close encounters with male sperm whales, nearly all of them just like this one with Tiaki. (My rough guess is that Melville had a couple dozen or so.) Guerra was also once part of a team that got even closer to the males, riding up in small boats to sample the blow and to temporarily tag six different males.5

As Guerra and her assistant track the next whale, a fleet of three large whale watch boats with hundreds of tourists are out on the water, too. No more than three boats of any type are allowed around a whale at any time. The boats keep their distance. They do not get in front of a whale. The Kaikōura whale boats use jet engines to reduce their sound impact underwater. They carry their own hydrophones. The captains share information over the radio and sometimes ask Guerra to guide them.

Tourists after sperm whales have a different experience here than when on a boat watching for baleen whales in other parts of the world. Sperm whales usually dive for a solid thirty to forty-five minutes, or even more, and then only come up for roughly eight to ten minutes in between. When sperm whales are on the surface, they rarely do anything except swim slowly forward and blow, as they recover from the dive. You can barely see anything besides some of their back. After the whale dives, offering a vision of the tail, the show is over. The whale watch boat speeds off to try to find another whale. In all her time on the water, Guerra has seen sperm whales breach only a few times near their boat and several more times at a distance. She’s seen a few of the other notable behaviors, such as lobtailing—waving the flukes—and surfacing tailfirst, but she has never seen whales raising their head vertically to look with their eyes, known as spy-hopping. My point here is that Melville really did have to boil the sap and add a great deal of fancy to the behavior of the sperm whale at the surface. The inability for Ahab or Ishmael to get a true vision of the whale, even when alongside being butchered, was not only poetic but true. And appreciating the final scenes of Moby-Dick is similar to being able to enjoy a sperm whale watch in the twenty-first century: you need to already be compelled about the idea of the sperm whale, to have well-formed a detailed imagination of the organism, because that brief vision of what amounts to a distant, floating, puffing log, or even the graceful sinking of its tail, won’t do much for you if you’re not already fascinated and if you haven’t already built an imaginary world before and after that dive.

Tracking whales with Guerra and her research assistant off New Zealand, I realize that their methods had returned to a type of hunter’s knowledge similar to what the open boat whalemen once had. Modern researchers, pioneered by the likes of Hal Whitehead, who himself began and continues his sperm whale research in a sailboat, have a much greater understanding of sperm whale behavior than did the twentieth-century researchers. The twentieth-century whalemen learned a great deal more about whale anatomy as they dissected so many animals killed by explosive harpoons and reeled up onto their steel decks with power winches. Time at sea with Guerra also makes you wonder, in an age before hydrophones, how the nineteenth-century whalemen ever found a sperm whale at all.

TRACKING SPERM WHALES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

At the start of the voyage of the Pequod, Ishmael argues in “The Chart” that Ahab will locate the White Whale in a specific region of the world at a given time of year. In “The Chase—Second Day” Ishmael describes how once Ahab has sighted Moby Dick he’s able to track the whale over multiple days. He uses his human lookouts and, by dead reckoning, estimates the animal’s speed and direction under the water as it swims:

And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude.6

This aspect of sperm whale’s behavior is helpful for the fictional purposes of the novel, and Ahab even overruns Moby Dick on the final day as he underestimates the wind and his ship’s speed.

Ninenteenth-century whalemen certainly knew that there’s a difference between whales foraging locally and when they’re in transit. Whitehead has observed that when sperm whales move to different areas, they tend to swim at a surprisingly slow rate of about two and a half miles per hour, which is more sluggish than a ship under sail in moderate winds. He found that they travel in straight lines, covering about sixty miles a day, which, if the wind were favorable, would be an easy day of progress in transit for a whaleship like the Charles W. Morgan or the Commodore Morris.7

Guerra has read Moby-Dick, which she says is obligatory reading if you’re getting a PhD studying sperm whales. “Ahab’s timetable tracking sounds a bit stretched to hold as a general rule,” she says. “But you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whalemen got it right every once in a while. Spermies can be so predictable some times, and I imagine that if they are on the move on a steady course they would be doing pretty consistent speed. So maybe!”

COULD A SPERM WHALE RECOGNIZE A HUMAN?

The male sperm whales who come back year after year to Kaikōura Canyon seem comfortable with the whale watch boats and Grampus. New Zealand whalemen hunted sperm whales in the Canyon as late as the 1960s for only two seasons, but they were destructive. Could some of the individuals remember?8

Guerra says that it is the sperm whales new to the region that are more likely to adjust their behavior in response to her boat and the whale watch vessels—they’ll dive slightly more quickly or shift directions while swimming at the surface—which she cautiously believes to be nervous, avoidance behaviors. She has never seen the males approach the boats, turn back toward them, or even seem to have any curious interest. Yet decades before her research, one of the founders of the first whale watch company in New Zealand, naturalist Barbara Todd, observed one sperm whale from 1988 to 1991, which they named Hoon, who often floated close beside their boats. Hoon seemingly enjoyed watching the tourists, and he spent far more time at the surface near their vessel than the other whales, exhibiting a variety of behaviors, such as surfacing with his tail first. Todd felt certain the whale recognized their boat and exhibited human-like play.9

Certainly there is ample evidence among the smaller toothed whales, such as the bottlenose dolphins and the beluga whales, of individual animals recognizing individual humans, learning from humans, and engaging with them. There’s no reason to assume this could not happen between sperm whales and humans. It just rarely if ever does, because our habitats are so physically distant. Only in the past couple decades have free divers without the bubbles and sounds of tanks been able to get close to sperm whales in the water for more than a few moments, but this is, of course, still for short blips of time and only near the surface.

That said, significantly to an environmental reading of the novel, Ishmael never actually describes or even implies that the White Whale senses, by vision or however else, that the Pequod chasing him is any different than another whaleship—or even that he particularly “sees” or chooses Ahab.

SPERM WHALE AGGRESSION: TAIL SLAPS, BITING, AND THE BATTERING RAM

Ishmael never fully anthropomorphizes the White Whale in a Peter Rabbit sort of way, nor does he show the world through the whale’s point of view. Ishmael does relate over and again, however, building up to these final scenes, a variety of stories that invest in this particular whale an “unexampled, intelligent malignity” that approaches that of a devious and all-powerful human warrior—or at times even an immortal demigod. In his first full introduction to this whale in the chapter “Moby Dick,” Ishmael says: “More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.” Thus Ishmael relays, secondhand, that the White Whale was believed to strategize and even duplicitously feign fear.10

As the novel progresses over the voyage, Ishmael tells various stories of men injured and killed in the pursuit of Moby Dick, usually by the animal’s tail, jaws, or head. These are all sailors’ stories of various degrees of separation told to the men of the Pequod. With subtle phrases, including “as if” or “seemingly” or “ascribed to him,” Ishmael is clear that there is a layer of the yarn to the behaviors of Moby Dick. Ishmael builds the suspense, the idea of this exceptional sperm whale. He fuels a debate for the reader and the characters within his story about whether the White Whale is a “dumb brute” as Starbuck would have it, or if Moby Dick is an evil or Divine agent or principle, as Ahab does. Meanwhile, in chapters such as “Moby Dick” and “The Affidavit,” Ishmael defends and supports his facts about the history of this individual sperm whale’s dangerous behavior and his capabilities.11

In the closing three days of the chase, the crew and the reader finally see the White Whale in the flesh, introduced among imagery of the delicate paper nautilus and the streamers of the white tropic bird. Ishmael bears witness to a set of behaviors that at first seem to tilt more toward an imagined monster. Yet they are all actual known sperm whale behaviors. During the first day, Moby Dick chomps a boat in two with his jaws after gnawing and holding it there in his mouth for a time. The White Whale pokes his head vertically out of the water, spy-hopping, and then circles the men in the water. On the second day, Moby Dick breaches. He smashes two more whaleboats, this time with his tail, and he comes up underneath another boat with his head. Moby Dick seems to parry and plan against Ahab and his men, both when the animal surfaces and when he travels. On the third and final day of the chase, Moby Dick turns from the whaleboats and hammers his head into the Pequod, thus sinking the ship and drowning the entire ship’s company, sparing, by chance, our narrator. Most of these behaviors are the actions of what seems to be only a literary, foaming leviathan that’s whipped up for the drama of the fictional climax. Yet, as ever, these animal behaviors are all far less fictionalized when you examine them carefully.

Melville’s contemporaries were contradictory about the extent of sperm whale aggression toward hunters. Charles W. Morgan, in his speech on the natural history of the sperm whale in 1830, just before making a passing reference to the Essex, spoke of the sperm whale as “in general harmless, but now & then individuals are found exceedingly fierce & bold.” Surgeon Beale opened his The Natural History of the Sperm Whale explaining that the ferocity of this species has been greatly exaggerated, even in previous scientific literature. Melville underlined and marked up his copy of this section where Beale decried the falsehood of the previous accounts of this animal having “a relish for human flesh” and Baron Cuvier’s misguided belief that every fish and shark in the sea is so horribly frightened of the sperm whale that they will not even approach a dead carcass. Beale wrote instead of the sperm whale’s timidity. When harpooned the sperm whales seem at first paralyzed with fright, he wrote. If they have not been killed quickly, though, they then can “shew extreme activity in avoiding their foes; but they rarely turn upon their cruel adversaries.” If boats and men were injured, it was only in the whale’s frantic attempt to escape. Seemingly exasperated in his defense of sperm whales, Beale wrote: “Not one [author] has stepped forward to vindicate its history from the absurd and fabulous accounts.”12

Defending the sperm whale’s passivity, however, was not a torch that Melville wanted to bear for this little fiction project of his. Melville instead turned to the likes of Dr. Frederick Bennett, for example, who was normally more temperate and independently minded than Beale. But Bennett’s observations and writings on sperm whale aggression aligned far more conveniently for the story Melville wanted to tell. In Narrative of a Whaling Voyage, Bennett explained that after being attacked, sperm whales will not just respond due to pain but will try to protect another whale that has been injured: “Should the animal be allowed time to rally, it often becomes truly mischievous. Actuated by a feeling of revenge, by anxiety to escape its pursuers, or goaded to desperation by the weapons rankling in its body, it then acts with a deliberate design to do mischief.”13

Bennett went on to relay from various accounts from specific ships each of the aggressive behaviors that Melville attributes to the White Whale in the final chase.

Regarding the tail, Bennett described three incidents of sperm whales killing men with swipes of their tails, including one thwack in the North Pacific by a whale that was not harpooned himself but defending another one who was.

Regarding the jaws, Bennett included a couple of accounts of sperm whales attacking with their teeth. He personally gammed with the whaleship Augusta in the South Pacific in 1836, which had a boat on deck that had recently been “nipped completely asunder by the jaws of a harpooned whale.” Bennett wrote that sperm whales sometimes continue to bite a boat into fragments or keep its mouth threateningly open for several minutes—thus laying some groundwork for Melville’s moment when his White Whale literally holds Ahab’s boat in his mouth long enough for Ahab to fanatically grab at the teeth. In historic illustrations and comic books, angry sperm whales are constantly crunching up boats and whalemen in their mouths, as if they were pretzel sticks. Even beyond Bennett’s accounts, this seems to have actually had some historical validity. For example, in 1856 whaleman-artist Robert Weir illustrated an actual event in which a sperm whale chomped and lifted up a whale boat, just as Ishmael describes in that first day of the chase. (See fig. 51.) And later in Weir’s voyage, another boat was pierced by a whale’s jaw “making a hole as big as the head of a barrel.”14

Melville himself, while aboard the Acushnet, likely heard on the whaling grounds the story of another whaleship, the Coral, during a gam near the Galápagos. Only a couple months earlier, a lone sperm whale had chewed a boat into “many Hundred pieces,” according to an account of one of the mates. The bull whale, spouting blood, then reportedly turned on another boat and “Eat [that] Boat up,” causing the drowning of one of the men before the mate finally killed the animal.15

From a modern biological perspective, sperm whales using their mouths to defend against human hunters makes sense. Most terrestrial mammals are aggressive with their mouths, of course, as are some of the other toothed whales, such as Risso’s dolphins, bottlenose dolphins, and Cuvier’s beaked whales. Modern biologists have watched female sperm whales use their jaws to defend against killer whales. The rake marks gouged into the heads of older sperm males suggest that they might engage in jaw-to-jaw battle, like bucks locking antlers or hippos sparring with their open mouths. (See earlier fig. 12.) Divers have observed sperm whales using their mouths in play, too.16

The White Whale in Moby-Dick has a “crooked” and “scrolled” jaw. Surgeon Beale witnessed two healthy sperm whales with scrolled jaws, commenting on how this showed teeth were not essential to their feeding. Beale never saw competition between sperm whales, but the sailors told him this was a common behavior. Beale reported that he knew of no female sperm whales with scrolled jaws. Melville clearly agreed that the scrolled jaw was a trait of strength, an acquired scar from an alpha battle for power and status—just as is Ahab’s ivory leg. Modern observers have reported a sperm whale’s jaw broken from a fight with killer whales, and another account claimed broken jaws from intraspecific battles, but these don’t heal in a curl.17

A scrolled jaw, in fact, is more likely a birth defect, rather than healed from any kind of battle. Biologists working from the decks of twentieth-century whaleships estimated scrolled or short jaws, i.e., jaw deformity, occurred in about one in every two thousand whales. Dozens of examples have been documented. (See fig. 52.) It does seems to be more common in males, but several females have had scrolled or broken jaws, too.18

As for actually eating the wood of the boats, the squid that sperm whales swallow nearly whole are often quite large and a range of surprisingly large animals have been found in sperm whale stomachs, such as seals, sharks, and rays. Inanimate objects have also been found in sperm whale stomachs, such as stones, fishing gear, coconuts, and even once a human corpse a day after his shipmates saw the man gobbled.19 I don’t know of any account of wood shards from stove boats found in whale stomachs, but it seems credible.

During the final chase, the White Whale does more than kill with his tail and chop up whaleboats with his scrolled lower jaw. With his head, his “battering ram,” Moby Dick overturns whaleboats and then in the final pages of the story turns and crashes into the hull of the Pequod so powerfully that he sinks the ship. There are dozens of reliable stories of sperm whales bashing whale boats, although these are usually, if not always, a defense behavior rather than a blind, flurried response in the moment of being harpooned. (See fig. 53.) Bennett reported that he heard that “New Zealand Tom,” an enormous bull male with a “white hump,” smashed up all manner of boats. Whaleboats were lightly built with cedar so as to be quick and nimble. This, however, left them fragile to impact. For example, Nelson Cole Haley aboard the Charles W. Morgan in 1852 wrote of a calf sperm whale, “taking our boat for his dead mother,” accidentally smashing a hole in the bottom of their boat.20

SPERM WHALES SINKING SHIPS

What was big news was not a sperm whale smashing a whaleboat, but an entire whaleship. The story of the Essex is the first and only popular account of a sperm whale ramming its head and sinking a full whaleship that Melville would’ve known when he wrote the novel. Ishmael describes the event in “The Affidavit.” Ishmael also writes of the whaleship Union, which reportedly sank in the Atlantic in 1807 after accidentally running into a floating sperm whale at night. In 1849 a collision with a whale wrecked the lesser-known Peruvian merchant ship the Frederic off the coast of Nicaragua; in 1850 a sperm whale in the midst of the hunt bashed a hole in the hull of the whaleship Pocahontas, forcing the ship to run into Rio de Janeiro; and that same year the whaleship Parker Cook was rammed twice by an enraged whale, although the ship was not sunk. Ishmael does not mention any of these, almost certainly because Melville hadn’t learned of them.21

In the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex, which was likely ghostwritten in collaboration, the first mate Owen Chase explained that they sighted a pod of whales and lowered the boats. He personally harpooned one bull, who in response put a hole in their boat with his tail. They rowed back to the Essex where Chase went to repairing the stove boat on deck by hammering nails around a canvas patch. Meanwhile, the captain and the second mate’s boat had made fast to a different whale. Chase soon spotted an exceptionally large bull spouting near his ship, which made for their hull. “He came down upon us with full speed, and struck the ship with his head,” Chase wrote. The whale hit the ship’s bow, he said, and it felt like they’d struck a rock. The whale continued bumping under the ship and knocked off a portion of the Essex’s sacrificial keel. Chase reported that the whale was “in convulsions.” He watched the whale “smite his jaws together.” The whale then swam across the ship’s path, turned, and came directly at the Essex a second time: “Coming down apparently with twice his ordinary speed, and to me at that moment, it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him, and his course towards us was marked by a white foam of a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail; his head was about half out of water, and in that way he came upon, and again struck the ship.” On this second attack, the whale bashed a far larger hole in the hull, sinking the ship for good. The whale swam off to leeward. They never saw it again. They were busy preparing to abandon their rapidly sinking ship, handing down their copies of Bowditch and their quadrants.22

Although few dispute that the sperm whale hit the Essex a second time, there was some public debate about the sperm whale’s intentionality, even after the story was published. In an 1834 issue of the North American Review, the author declared that “no other instance is known, in which the mischief is supposed to have been malignantly designed by the assailant, and the most experienced whalers believe that even in this case the attack was unintentional.” Melville almost certainly read this, since it was republished in Olmsted’s narrative. Twenty-first century scholars have also wondered if the banging of Owen Chase’s hammer—a perfect twist on the carpenter fish stories—might have even somehow enraged the sperm whales. This is highly improbable. Sperm whales might be agitated by the sound, perhaps intrigued by something heard more distantly, but the idea that the sperm whale would mistake a hammering above the surface, transferred through the hull, for another male, twice, is hard for experts such as Whitehead and Guerra to believe.23

News of the sinking of yet another whaleship by the head of a sperm whale, a ship named the Ann Alexander, arrived to New York in November 1851, just as the first American edition of Moby-Dick was published. An editor friend sent Melville the newspaper clipping reporting the sperm whale smashing into the hull, to which Melville wrote back excitedly: “I make no doubt it is Moby Dick himself, for there is no account of his capture after the sad fate of the Pequod about fourteen years ago.—Ye Gods! What a Commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.” A couple critics at the time even believed Melville whipped up Moby-Dick immediately after—to take advantage of the event. Meanwhile the Utica Daily Gazette wrote of the absurdity of the sinking of the Ann Alexander, which prompted the New Bedford Whalemen’s Shipping List to fire back in print to not only defend the reality but also satirize how little landsmen knew about what happens out at sea. The following year the captain of the Rebecca Sims seemed to have killed the very whale, since two of the Ann Alexander’s harpoons were in the animal and its head was injured with shards of wood still stuck in the flesh. Historians have found still other nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples of whales punching holes in wooden hulls and even a couple modern accounts where sperm whales hit steel boats.24

So the question then is not really if sperm whales attacked boats and ships with their tails, jaws, and head, but, especially during events when they were not being harpooned, why would they?

Nearly all of the evidence of male sperm whales fighting each other by using their mouths or head-butting is from historical, less reliable sources, but they probably do fight occasionally. Bottlenose dolphins will leap out of the water and butt their heads together, seemingly out of male competition. Bottlenose dolphins will use their heads to ram other ocean porpoises and dolphins of different species, too. Killer whales will do the same. If sperm whales do bang their heads together, it has not been commonly observed in areas like Kaikōura where solitary males are foraging or even in the equatorial regions or the breeding grounds when the males are joining groups of females and juveniles. Whitehead and his colleagues, who research primarily in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, have observed male sperm whales swimming near groups of females without any observable aggression, and the one time they did see a fight between males, it was over in fifteen seconds and involved their jaws and tails, which seems to match historic descriptions. Bennett presumed that the aggressive behavior of the whale against the Essex was because this whale was the “guardian of the school,” which, again, has been proven an unlikely Victorian anthropomorphism since males seem to visit the units of females and juveniles only briefly.25

Guerra was surprised by Melville’s depiction of sperm whale aggression. Her experience on the water, like Beale’s, is that male sperm whales are skittish and passive. She had read the story of the Essex and other violent clashes with humans. Although she has never seen a whale attacked or in great pain, she very much doubts any intentionality or malice in these animals. Only once on Kaikōura Canyon has Guerra seen what appeared to be potentially aggressive behavior between two males, which she believes was over foraging territory. One sperm whale, one of the regulars, began swimming rapidly toward another until they both met underwater. The other, a transient arrival, was later sighted several miles away while the regular remained foraging in the area.26

Today’s whale biologists, such as Guerra and Whitehead, cautiously believe that males most commonly identify their competitors’ size by clicks and codas. That passively settles disputes most of the time, rather than resorting to jaw-locking or head-ramming.

A couple recent studies have taken up the wreck of the Essex by approaching the event not from behavioral observations in the wild, but from a physiological and evolutionary standpoint in the lab, beginning with a series of questions: Could a sperm whale actually sustain a ramming into another whale or a ship? If the animal’s bulbous head and the oil sacks within have evolved for sensitive echolocation, why would a whale risk damaging these organs? And could this really be a behavior that would elevate a male’s reproductive fitness?

In 2002 experimental biologist David Carrier and his colleagues found that in comparison to the evolution of all other toothed cetaceans, the male sperm whale’s bulbous head is far larger than the female’s: thus, the size of the head is a secondary sexual characteristic. This, however, might have evolved to produce more effective echolocation sounds for mating, related to the ability to catch larger fish in deeper waters, and/or evolved for louder intimidation sounds. But perhaps this might also involve the slamming of heads? The spermaceti organ, the hard skin at the front of the head, and the fused vertebrae seem physiologically indicative of this kind of aggressive behavior. Certainly other animals put their vital organs, even their lives, at risk for competition within their species. Male elephant seals will tear at each other’s heads and necks to establish territory. Cocks fight. Rams ram. Competition in a huge variety of mammals can and does sometimes result in injury or death. And head-butting is common in a range of other cetaceans.27

Then in 2016, Carrier and another set of colleagues, led by Olga Panagiotopoulou in Australia, tried to model how and whether the sperm whale might sustain this sort of cranial impact. They consulted with a bioengineer in Japan, and found, just as Ishmael claimed in “The Battering Ram,” that the fluid and physiological structures within the head act as a shock absorber in the way a boat fender does between boats and the dock. They examined in particular the lower oil sack, the junk, which is far more suited to impact, since it has evolved transverse tissue partitions. (See earlier fig. 34.) The junk’s potential evolution for the purpose of battle is supported by the fact that scratch patterns on the heads of sperm whales tend to be more often on the skin around the junk, not on the top or sides of the heads where the spermaceti sack is less protected.28

A fascinating support of this battering-ram-by-junk theory occurred as early as 1845, if we are to read this logbook keeper’s words literally. A sperm whale rushed at the hull of the whaleship Joseph Maxwell after it had been harpooned. The whale “hove his junk out struck the ship on the starboard bow.” The whale was spouting blood afterward and apparently escaped, having done no damage to the ship.29

SPERM WHALE SUFFERING AND “GIVING THY VOICE TO THE DUMB”

Ishmael’s depiction of the White Whale’s aggressive behavior is instructive, accurate, documented, and possible for an individual male sperm whale. What is perhaps still more surprising are the subtle methods with which Ishmael builds sympathy for the sperm whale, as a species, as he leads up to the closing scenes. In addition to the potential vulnerability to extinction in “Does the Whale Diminish?,” it’s significant for the 1800s that individual sperm whales suffer in the novel. Ishmael says that sperm whales have formed large schools for safety in response to human hunting. In the novel, true to life, sperm whales regularly live in social families that evoke our own. At one point in “The Dying Whale,” Ishmael even suggests a religion of sun worship as they die—a behavior observed by some of the whaleman of Melville’s time. In these ways, Ishmael blurs the line between human and nonhuman. He crafts a story in which the depiction of whales is far more complex and nuanced than simply one madman hunting a single otherly, lesser creature. Especially for most twenty-first-century Anglophone readers, who have been taught from the earliest age to see majesty and intelligence in whales, by the time we get to the final chase and see the White Whale at last, the sperm whale as a species is very much not a malignant monster, but a social, awe-inspiring animal with human-like emotions.30

When the Pequod begins killing whales in the Indian Ocean, Ishmael toys with the reader’s emotional response to the hunt. After Ishmael muses on the size of the brain and the implied wisdom of the sperm whale, Ishmael then shifts to tell a story in “The Pequod meets the Virgin” in which the men harpoon and torture an old, sick whale. The large bull is laboriously lagging behind a school of whales, breathing poorly with a stump of a fin and covered with “unusual yellowish incrustations.” Ishmael chooses to explain the following even before the animal is harpooned, speaking for the whale’s suffering because the animal cannot:

So have I seen a bird with a clipped wing, making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.31

Ishmael pulls back at the end of this passage just short of complete sympathy: the bulk of the beast was, however, enough of a reason to withdraw any protection. The men of the Pequod catch up to the whale and all three boats harpoon the animal, who dives, and lays prone and suspended under the water, held “up” by the lines. For the first and only moment in the novel, Ishmael hazards to tuck the reader’s imagination inside the head of the whale for a brief moment, using the same language, including the word “phantom,” that he has previously had humans use to describe the whales: “Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!” The old whale surfaces. He bleeds profusely as they stab him over and again with lances. The men now see that the animal is blind from growths over his eyes. Yet even then, Ishmael makes sure the pious reader does not dare to hypocritically judge the whale hunters without judging him or herself for creating the economic demand in the first place: “[The old whale] must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”32

Despite Starbuck’s “humane” order to stop, Flask stabs the dying whale in his infected sore, which sends the whale reeling, spraying blood, gore, and presumably pus on all the men’s faces and clothes. In a final flurry, the old whale capsizes the boat, wrecks its bow, and then finally dies. When they bring the dead whale alongside the ship they discover the old stone harpoon in his head, elevating the whale still further with his venerable age and the distance he had traveled during his life. To make the “murder” still more shameful, the corpse then sinks before the Pequod is even able to get any economic gain from its death: the entire enterprise was a cruel waste. Ishmael doesn’t let the reader feel sympathy for the whale too long, though, because in the very next chapter he delivers “The Honor and Glory of Whaling.”

Other writers and whalemen in Melville’s time had also considered the suffering of whales and even the morality of the entire practice. Reverend Henry Cheever’s The Whale and His Captors, published only months earlier than Moby-Dick, has moments of sympathy and advocacy for the whales themselves. Scholar Mark Bousquet argued that Cheever’s is perhaps the first major work that revealed a trickle toward the future reverence most Americans now feel for whales. Cheever was a missionary, a man of the cloth not making his living off the animals. Yet even his sympathies were temporary, favoring the men by the end of his story. In addition, a few working whalemen in their journals and later published manuscripts also expressed some misgivings about taking the lives of these animals. For example, Enoch Cloud, a whaleman on a voyage from 1851 to 1855, wrote of the sorrow of taking of one of God’s creatures as it was “bleeding, quivering, dying a victim to the cunning of man.”33

As Ishmael alludes in “The Whale as a Dish,” Anglophone movements on both sides of the Atlantic, led by those in England, had begun to consider animal welfare and the potential for nonhuman suffering and intelligence. In 1749 some Englishmen complained of animal sports such as cockfighting. In 1776 Reverend Humphry Primatt published a book The Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals, which leads with Scripture, “Open thy mouth for the dumb.” Primatt wrote that animals feel pain. A decade later, more famously, Jeremy Bentham advanced the argument by proposing: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” In France, as early as 1804, Bernard Germaine de Lacépède, who Ishmael declares to be “a great naturalist” but whose illustrations of whales he believed to be awful, wrote a lament about the human hunting of whales that could easily be written today: “They flee before him, but it is no use; man’s resourcefulness transports him to the ends of the earth. Death is their only refuge now.” In 1822 Richard Martin, known at the time as (true story) “Humanity Dick,” pushed through a law in England protecting working animals such as horse and sheep from cruel treatment. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals followed in England in 1824. Students at Cambridge in 1829 debated whether Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” might sway public opinion on the treatment of animals. The United States lagged behind by a few decades, but legislation was led by Melville’s two home states: New York was the first in 1824 to enact laws against cruelty toward domestic animals, followed by Massachusetts in 1835.34

Before the Pequod sets sail in Moby-Dick, even before the reader has seen a whale death as graphic as the old, sick, injured whale, Ishmael digs at the hypocrisy of the Nantucket Quaker merchants. Ishmael compares violence against whales with violence against our fellow humans. He says of Captain Bildad: “Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore.”35

HUMAN-LIKE WHALE FAMILIES

In “The Grand Armada” and then “Does the Whale Diminish?,” Ishmael anthropomorphizes the whales by suggesting they had begun to aggregate in much larger groups, “immense caravans” of “what sometimes seems thousands on thousands,” because the animals are “influenced by some views to safety,” and “it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.” As discussed earlier regarding sperm whale intelligence, does Ishmael imply here, want his reader to embrace, a higher cultural intelligence in whales with this global alteration of behavior? Regardless, it certainly cultivates a sympathy in that they are on the run and victims.36

In “The Grand Armada,” just before the Pequod enters the Pacific Ocean, the crew rows into a vast herd of whales in which they look down and see mothers, calves nursing, and sperm whales making love. Queequeg and Starbuck do not kill any calves, for fear of upsetting the school of whales and jeopardizing the safety of the men in the boats, but naturalists and whaleman at the time had debated how much human-like loyalty the mother sperm whales actually had for their killed calves. (See fig. 54.) It was a common practice to kill a right or sperm whale’s calf first in order to ensure the mother would stay close and be easier to kill next. But it is surely not without meaning that Melville has the hunting that does take place in “The Grand Armada” end with several whales killed wastefully, without any whales brought alongside for oil. Consider the effect of this scene on the twenty-first-century reader, how it is interpreted now, or this beside the story in the summer of 2018 of a mother orca in the Pacific Northwest who pushed around her dead calf for a thousand miles and at least seventeen days, the first calf that had been born to their endangered population in three years. Was that mourning?37

MOBY-DICK SHOWED A WIDER RANGE OF HUMAN PERCEPTIONS OF WHALES

No author in the nineteenth century, or arguably ever, came even close to the level of nuance and complexity regarding the human perception and relationship with whales, perhaps with any marine animals, as did Melville in Moby-Dick. Honestly, I don’t know of a single work of fiction or nonfiction that does so much with ocean organisms until perhaps John Steinbeck and Ed Rickett’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941) and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—and then maybe Farley Mowat’s depiction of a fin whale in A Whale for the Killing in 1972. Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind (1941) was revolutionary in its scientifically tempered consideration of the lives of marine animals, but she chose to barely engage with human perceptions of her fish and seabirds. Similar to how he shows all the men of the Pequod considering the doubloon, Melville in Moby-Dick, often presciently, shows seemingly every possible way one might consider a whale from a human point of view. Ishmael’s multi-nuanced perspective, Elizabeth Schultz wrote, “moves us toward the elimination of nature as abstract other—whether as divinity, as voraciousness, or as endlessly exploitable object.” Ishmael combines the rational, objective, scientific, honest Darwinian perspective on the sperm whale, while also celebrating and exploring the whale through the emotional, subjective, poetic wonder of the Emersonian perspective. The narrator splices these together, Schultz argued, to form a third way of seeing this species: by the end of the novel, Ismael has expanded his view to perceive all whales and all of the natural world with a brotherly, proto-ecological, proto-environmentalist eye for interdependency that was far ahead of his time.38

Again, Ishmael was not the first to be touched by the sperm whale’s wasteful suffering at the hands of man, nor even the first to find parallels to humans in the sight of a whale mother and calf under the water. Where Melville was especially ahead of his time was in his eagerness to reveal all facets of humanity’s relationship with the whale, to describe a whale in such depth as an individual, to connect and equalize humans among nonhumans, and, perhaps most significantly, in even having man fail before the nonhuman animal, both as an individual and as a species, both physically and morally. Remember, Ishmael is a survivor of an event in which a sperm whale sank the ship that drowned all of his shipmates. Yet he does not rage like Ahab. All of the characters in his story, aside from perhaps sharkish Queequeg, are less than the whale. They are weaker, less just, more hypocritical, more frail and more flawed and irrational than the animals they hunt. In “The Grand Armada” Ishmael compares the gallied whales to herding, sheeplike humans that when alarmed in a crowded theater panic and trample each other to death: “For there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”39

Roger Payne, the marine biologist who revolutionized whale conservation with his recording of whale song in the 1970s, wrote in 2018: “I feel that Melville came closer than anyone has ever come to demonstrating that whales can help humanity save itself—help us make the transition from Save the Whales to Saved by the Whales.”40

Back in 1851, Melville’s older brother Allan wrote to the publisher about Melville’s shift of the title from just The Whale to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. He thought the expanded title appropriate, “being the name given to a particular whale who if I may so express myself is the hero of the volume.”41