Chapter Five

THE WHALE’S WHALE

WATER CASCADING OFF THE CRESCENT-SHAPED FLUKES OF A SPERM WHALE.

MOBY-DICK HAD TO BE A SPERM WHALE. NOT JUST BECAUSE THE sperm whale is the only type of whale known to have sunk ships deliberately—a critical element to be sure—but because it is the only whale whose biography was fantastic enough to sustain the grand and sweeping novel that bears his name. From virtually every perspective the sperm whale is an astounding animal. Its size, its shape, its behavior, its physiology, its mighty tooth-studded jaw, its powerful tail, its grace and beauty are all wonders to behold. And in death this hulking leviathan provided the whaling industry both with its most unusual products and some of its greatest profits. The sperm whale, more than any other whale, has captured the public’s imagination, to the point that when the average person envisions a whale, it is the sperm whale that they most often see. Whether this is a relic of Moby-Dick’s great fame or the result of the inherent power that sperm whales certainly possess is open to debate. But whatever the reason, the sperm whale clearly is the whale’s whale.

The sperm whale specializes in extremes, earning it a string of superlatives. It is the biggest of the odontocytes, or toothed whales, a group that includes pilot whales, killer whales, and a wide range of dolphins. The largest male or bull sperm whales reach lengths of just over sixty feet, and weigh as much as fifty tons. No whales exhibit greater disparities between the sexes than do sperm whales, with the females, or cows, being much smaller than their male counterparts, growing to forty feet in length and eighteen tons in weight. Sperm whales have the largest skull of any whale, the largest head of any animal, and the largest brain of any species, which can tip the scales at twenty pounds. They dive deeper than any other whale, regularly descending many thousands of feet—at times well over a mile; and they can stay under the water for upward of an hour. The sperm whale’s skin, which can reach a depth of fourteen inches, is the thickest of any animal, and its tail is, in proportion to its body, the largest of all the whales, and arguably the most stunning. “In no living thing,” opined Melville, “are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes.”¹

The sperm whale goes by different names in other languages. The English “sperm whale” therefore becomes cachalot in French, Pottfisch in German, spermhval in Norwegian, and makko-kuzira in Japanese. But from the perspective of science, through the unifying power of taxonomy and systematics, one expects a particular animal to have a single scientific name, expressed as a unique genus and species that holds steady across the globe. And by and large that is the case for the sperm whale. After a tortuous history, in which the sperm whale has been given a dizzying array of taxonomic classifications, most scientists now call it Physeter macrocephalus. The genus Physeter means “blower” in Greek, and refers to the sperm whales’ single, powerful spout, while the species tag, macrocephalus, is Greek for “big head.” There are, however, still a few who identify the sperm whale as Physeter catodon. This is not a bad name, and in fact it is fairly descriptive, given that catodon is Greek for “lower tooth” or “teeth in lower jaw.” But macrocephalus seems much more appropriate because the sperm whale’s most impressive feature is its gargantuan, bulbous head, which takes up roughly a third of its body length, and which led the British at one time to refer to sperms as anvil-headed whales.²

On closer inspection, however, calling a sperm whale’s head a head seems a bit odd, because the usual physical structures one associates with that part of the body are more than a little off kilter. The brain, the eyes, the bulk of the skull, and the ears are not where one would expect them to be. Instead of these features being clustered toward the top, or at least the middle, of the head, they are quite a distance from the forward end of the whale. And then, to confuse matters further, the blowhole, or nose of the whale, is near the tip of the head, on the top and slightly off center. The two structures that give the sperm whale’s head much of its great mass and its torpedo shape are the spermaceti organ, or case, and the junk. The spermaceti organ is a cavernous, liquid-filled compartment encased in a “beautiful glistening membrane” and a thick layer of muscle.³ It can contain as much as three tons, or twenty-three barrels, of spermaceti, which means the “sperm or seed of the whale” in Latin.⁴ The junk lies beneath the spermaceti organ, and also contains spermaceti, although in lesser amounts and more solidified form.⁵ Spermaceti isn’t whale sperm, but the men who first named this substance can be excused for thinking that this might be the case. In situ and at body temperature, spermaceti is a semitransparent rose-tinted or slightly yellowish liquid, but once exposed to cool air or water it crystallizes into a milky-white waxy mass that, indeed, looks very much like sperm. John Smith noticed this liquid-to-wax transformation when he wrote about a sperm whale driven ashore in Bermuda in the 1620s, remarking that “the water in the Bay where she lay, was all oily, and the rocks about it all bedashed with Parmacity [spermaceti], all congealed like ice.”⁶

There are many theories about the function of the spermaceti organ, among them that it regulates buoyancy, generates sound, or is involved in echolocation. Some believe that it helps the whales absorb nitrogen and thereby avoid the debilitating impacts of the bends during their deep dives and ascents. The most intriguing theory is that the head of the sperm whale is designed to be a battering ram, and that the oil-filled spermaceti organ and the junk act as giant shock absorbers to cushion the blow of a collision. The evolutionary purpose of this design would most likely be to allow males to butt heads with one another in the hope of winning the affection or, at least, the sexual attention of females. This theory also explains why some bull sperm whales were able to plow, headfirst, into relatively massive whaleships, sending the ships to the bottom, while still being able to swim away to fight another day.⁷

The spermaceti organ is just one example of how little we know about sperm whales. Indeed, the entire field of cetology is rife with unanswered questions. Roger Payne, a man who has devoted his life to the passionate study of the great whales, once concluded that “conducting scientific research on this most difficult of groups can be compared to viewing a whale through a keyhole. The bulk of the animal glides past from time to time while we try desperately to figure out what on earth it is.” And, of all the whales that humans have studied, the sperm whale is arguably the one that hides it secrets most jealously. This was true more than 150 years ago, when Melville wrote that “the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life;” and it is just as true today.⁸

The spermaceti organ and the junk rest within the scooplike embrace of the skull, which whalemen referred to as the “sleigh,” the “chariot,” the “coach,” and the “trough.”⁹ Beneath the skull is the sperm whale’s most famous feature—its long, narrow jaw, which is studded on the bottom with anywhere from thirty-nine to fifty large, slightly curved, conical teeth, distributed in two rows. In large bulls these teeth can be huge, reaching a length of ten inches and weighing two pounds or more. The teeth in the top of the jaw, in contrast, are vestigial and protrude only slightly, if at all, beyond the gum line. One might reasonably think that the sperm whale’s massive teeth are used in eating or chewing food, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. The sperm whale’s jaw can only grasp but not chew, and most of the whale’s prey is relatively small and swallowed whole without being bitten first. Further confounding the dining hypothesis is that younger animals, whose teeth have yet to come in, as well as adults with grossly misshapen jaws seem to have no problem feeding despite not being able to rely on their teeth for help. It seems that the evolutionary force that led to such large teeth had more to do with fighting than feeding, with the great white gashes and scars that crisscross the head of many bull sperm whales offering evidence that the teeth are used in combat or, if not that, some extremely serious play.¹⁰

The eyes of the sperm whale, which some have likened to those of an ox, are behind and above the corner of the jaw, on either side of the body. Traveling farther down the animal, there is a change in the texture of the skin. While the head is smooth, much of the trunk of the sperm whale’s body is covered with undulating, relatively shallow ridges. The purpose of these corrugations is unclear, but some think they might reduce drag or help the whale’s body withstand pressure during deep dives.¹¹ At the far end of the animal is the graceful and powerful tail. “It has a hardness almost of iron,” wrote whaleman William M. Davis, “with elasticity greater than steel; and urged by a thousand horse-power, it becomes the terror of the puny bipeds in their fragile boats.”¹²

Another part of the sperm whale’s anatomy or, more accurately, the bull sperm whale’s anatomy which has often been an object of fascination is its penis. Although this might have something to do with the seminal nature of the whale’s name, it is more the result of a very popular and much-copied drawing done in 1598 by Hendrik Goltzius.¹³ That year a fairly sizable bull sperm whale washed ashore at Katwijk, Holland, and came to rest on its side. As evidenced by a contemporary engraving of Goltzius’s drawing, this stranding generated great excitement among the local population. Men and women surrounded the animal, with some pointing to this or that feature, while others simply stared. The most interesting scene in the engraving is near the midsection of the whale, where two men and a woman stand admiring the animal’s enormous penis, which extends five to seven feet, its tip resting on the sand. One of the men leans toward the whale and uses his staff, apparently to measure the organ’s size. The other man’s left arm is draped around the women’s back, drawing her near, while his other arm is outstretched, palm upward, toward the penis, as if to say “behold.” Yet another man, finding the protruding penis less interesting than useful, has leaped on its base and is using it as a ladder to get on top of the whale.

More than four hundred years later another sperm whale’s penis would excite similar interest among observers. On January 17, 2004, a fifty-six-foot bull sperm whale washed up on a beach in Taiwan. Seeing an opportunity to use the carcass for educational purposes, a group of local marine biologists, employing the services of fifty workmen and powerful cranes, managed to get the fifty-to sixty-ton whale onto a flatbed truck for transport to a nearby nature preserve, where a necropsy was to be performed. By the time the truck started its trip, nine days later, the decomposition process was well advanced, causing gases to build up to dangerous levels within the carcass. While traveling through the downtown streets of a nearby city the whale exploded, splattering blood and guts on cars, motorcycles, the street, and the windows of nearby businesses, creating a horrific scene that was caught on film and shown by media outlets worldwide. When the whale, still chained to the flatbed, finally reached the nature preserve, an entirely different scene played out. The Taipei Times reported that more than one hundred local residents, “mostly men, have reportedly gone to see the corpse to ‘experience’ the size of its penis,” which, like the whale in Katwijk, was protruding quite a distance from its body.¹⁴

Melville devoted an entire chapter in Moby-Dick to the sperm whale’s penis, which, he noted, was called the “grandissimus” by whalemen. “Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale,” wrote Melville, “and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.” Melville then has the “mincer,” or the crewman on board who is charged with chopping the blubber into small pieces, slice off the penis’s skin, stretch it, dry it, and cut two holes in it, thereby transforming the now leathery skin into a cassock or coat. “The mincer now stands before you,” continued Melville, “invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.”¹⁵

Sperm whales range in color from black to gray to bluish-gray to brown, depending on the specimen and the person offering the description. A few were pure white. Of course, this immediately brings Moby-Dick to mind, but Moby-Dick was not a true albino. Melville describes the star leviathan of his novel as having “a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump,” but “the rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale.”¹⁶ Thus, while Moby-Dick was white enough to be called such, he was not white all around. Besides Moby-Dick, the most famous white whale is, in fact, Mocha Dick, who was purportedly a role model for Melville when he created his toothy protagonist. Mocha Dick lived off the coast of Chile, near the island of Mocha, and was, according to a contemporary chronicler, as “white as wool.” He was a massive bull sperm whale—“more than seventy feet from his noodle to the tip of his flukes”—and “renowned monster” that had destroyed numerous boats and outwitted the many men who had tried to catch him during the early to mid-nineteenth century.

With each purported encounter Mocha Dick’s reputation grew. His reign of terror extended the length and width of the Pacific Ocean. On rounding Cape Horn, whalemen would ask one another, “Any news from Mocha Dick?” and they would dream of slaying the legend.¹⁷ His fame extended well beyond the whalemen’s fraternity, to the popular press and then into the casual conversations of friends and strangers. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal of a stagecoach ride in which a mariner told him and his fellow passengers “of an old bull sperm whale which he called a white whale…who rushed upon the boats which attacked him & crushed the boats to small chips with his jaws.”¹⁸ The sheer volume of material on Mocha Dick and the number of people who claimed to be on intimate terms with him and his ferocious disposition lends support to the notion that he did indeed exist. But determining where the reality ends and the myth begins is not a task for the fainthearted. Even the rumors of his death are separated by many years, and in some instances decades, and the honor of vanquishing this “stout gentleman” is variously accorded to a range of would-be conquerors. In the end Mocha Dick, like his literary relative Moby-Dick, will remain for the ages a whale that was larger than life.

Sperm whales exhibit a great range of interesting behaviors. Being highly social animals, they often congregate in large groups that include a mix of immature males and females along with older cows. The mature male bulls, by contrast, are solitary animals, rejoining the groups only for mating. As many as five or six hundred sperm whales have been seen in a single gathering.¹⁹ “A large party of Cachalots, gamboling on the surface of the ocean,” noted one seasoned nineteenth-century observer, “is one of the most curious and imposing spectacles a whaling voyage affords: the huge size and uncouth agility of the monsters, exhibiting a strange combination of the grand and the ridiculous.”²⁰

Sperm whales are also noisy animals. They use clicks for echolocation, and their patterns of clicks, called codas, are believed to play a role in communication. Some of these clicks are quite powerful and can travel through the water with sufficient intensity to jar nearby divers. Whalemen often heard the clicks through the hulls of their ships and, thinking that they sounded like someone hammering, referred to sperm whales as “carpenter fish.”²¹ One of the most dramatic behaviors of sperm whales is breaching, in which they catapult themselves into the air. Charles Darwin witnessed this off the coast of Tierra del Fuego during his voyage on the Beagle. “There was a curious spectacle,” wrote Darwin, “of very many Spermaceti whales, some of which were jumping straight up out of the water; every part of the body was visible excepting the fin and the tail. As they fell sideways into the water, the noise was as loud as a distant great gun.”²² Sperm whales also engage in spy hopping—lifting their heads into the air; lobtailing—raising their flukes out of the water and bringing them down in a thunderous splash; and settling—which is sinking rapidly without the use of the tail or pectoral fins.²³ This last behavior frustrated many whalemen. “I have seen the sperm-whale at rest suddenly seem a mass of lead,” wrote Davis, “and sink from the head of the boat so rapidly that the harpoon was darted, but not delivered.”²⁴

The most fascinating of the sperm whales’ behaviors is feeding, which is also probably the least understood. The mystery lies not in where they eat or what they eat. We know that sperm whales descend to great depths, where they dine primarily on squid and, to a much lesser extent, various fish, including sharks, rays, and tuna.²⁵ Of all the delicacies that sperm whales pursue, none generates as much awe and fascination as the giant squid, an elusive and imposing animal that can measure up to sixty feet long and weigh as much as a ton. Epic battles between sperm whales and giant squid are a staple of many dramatic tales of the deep. Nineteenth-century adventure writer and whaleman Frank T. Bullen, who claims to have witnessed such an event, offered a somewhat melodramatic description, in which “a very large sperm whale was locked in deadly conflict with a cuttle-fish, or squid, almost as large as himself, whose interminable tentacles seemed to enlace the whole of his great body. The head of the whale especially seemed a perfect net-work of writhing arms…. All around the combatants were numerous sharks, like jackals round a lion, ready to share the feast, and apparently assisting in the destruction of the large cephalopod. So the titanic struggle went on, in perfect silence as far as we were concerned, because, even had there been any noise, our distance from the scene of conflict would not have permitted us to hear it.”²⁶

While this account is probably fiction, there are real battles between sperm whales and giant squid, although they usually take place at great depths, not at the ocean’s surface. The traces of these clashes are often found on a whale’s head in form of large saucer-shaped scars inflicted by the squid’s barbed and powerful suckers. The squid that make up the bulk of the sperm whale’s diet, however, are a much smaller species that are just a few feet long and usually weigh no more than three pounds.²⁷

What we still don’t fully understand is how sperm whales catch their prey. There are no pictures or film of sperm whales eating. We cannot follow them on their great descents. The relatively small squid they consume are bioluminescent, thus the whales can see them in the virtual darkness of the deep; but seeing is one thing, catching is another. The squid, with their jet-propelled locomotion and great ability to shift direction instantly, are too fast and agile for the sperm whales to chase down. How, then, do the whales capture the squid? As one comes to expect with sperm whales, there are many theories but few answers. The sounds that sperm whales make might be focused into a powerful pulse of sound, or sonic boom, which stuns the squid, allowing the whales to gather them up at a leisurely pace. Perhaps the whale’s white teeth or the bright white flesh on the inside and the edges of its mouth act as beacons, luring the squid into the whale’s maw, although how this could be accomplished in the absence of light is unclear. A variation on the whiteness theme has the squid’s bioluminescence somehow being rubbed onto the whale’s mouth, thereby creating or amplifying the beacon affect. Yet another theory is that the whale opens its bottom jaw to nearly a ninety-degree angle, and the squid grab on to the jaw as the whale swims by, only to be scooped up when the jaw closes. However they do it, sperm whales are very successful predators. Dissections of sperm whale stomachs have revealed as many as thirty thousand squid beaks, the hard mouthparts that squid use to capture food. And with each squid providing two beaks, that translates into fifteen thousand individuals.²⁸

Among the more unusual items that have been found in a sperm whale’s stomach are shoes, rubber boots, toy cars and toy guns, bundles of insulated wire, dolls, coconuts, cosmetic jars, flesh from baleen whales, and fishing nets.²⁹ But surely the most unusual item is a man. Some have claimed that the “great fish” that swallowed Jonah was none other than a sperm whale, and, of course, this is possible since its gullet is large enough to allow a full-grown man to pass through it.³⁰

Leaving Jonah and the whale aside, there are more recent stories of man-eating sperm whales, and the most fantastic is that of James Bartley. According to a letter submitted to Natural History magazine in April 1947, Mr. Bartley was a young seaman aboard the Star of the East, a whaleship cruising near the Falkland Islands in 1891, when the call rang out that a large bull sperm whale was surfacing nearby. Bartley, along with his mates, jumped into a whaleboat and began the pursuit. The whale introduced itself to its attackers by smashing their boat to pieces, and in the process Bartley disappeared. The next morning the whale was killed and towed to the ship. During the cutting in, the men noticed that the whale’s stomach was moving. They quickly sliced open the undulating organ and were astonished to find Bartley, still very much alive, but unconscious and curled up in a ball. After a lengthy recovery of four weeks, Bartley told the others what happened. Apparently the whale had scooped him up and swallowed him whole. The last things Bartley remembered before coming to on the ship were sliding down the whale’s slippery throat—“the walls of which quivered at his touch”—and then finding himself in the stomach, the great heat from which “drained all his strength.” And not only that, the powerfully acidic digestive juices in the whale’s stomach had “permanently bleached Bartley’s face, hands, neck, and arms as white as snow.” As to how Bartley survived such a seemingly hopeless situation, a range of possibilities had been proposed, which were thought to have worked in concert. The first was that the whale’s teeth had “missed” Bartley; second, that he had remained “quiet” on account of being unconscious; and third, that because the whale was killed quickly, its body temperature had rapidly diminished, thereby apparently keeping Bartley from being sapped of the last of his life force. The letter ended with the writer asking for an expert opinion as to the plausibility of this tale.³¹

Robert Cushman Murphy, a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, took up the reply. Although world famous as an ornithologist, Murphy was also extremely knowledgeable about whales and whaling, having shipped out himself aboard a New Bedford whaleship, the Daisy, in 1912, on its voyage to the Antarctic in search of sperm whales (Murphy was along not as a whaler, but as a scientist, in the museum’s employ, collecting birds and other animals from the region).³² Murphy admitted that a man could be swallowed by a sperm whale, and that whalemen likely had been in the past. But he added that the story was “unadulterated ‘bunk,’” and that no man could survive in a whale any longer “than he would if he were held under water.” Murphy also had other doubts about the veracity of the letter, including the very existence of the Star of the East, concluding that the story may well have been “wholly apocryphal.”³³

 

THERE IS NO DOUBT that some whalemen marveled at sperm whales when they saw them, and thought about their form and beauty even as they were preparing to kill them. But such musings, whether common or rare, were not foremost in the whalemen’s minds. When whalemen looked at sperm whales they mainly saw three things that could make them money—blubber, spermaceti, and ambergris. The sperm whale’s blubber, while not nearly as thick as that of a right or a bowhead whale, could be rendered into oil that was cleaner burning and more valuable than that which came from other whales. Spermaceti was not only a highly valuable source of oil for illumination, but it was also used for medicinal purposes, to which William Shakespeare alluded in his play Henry IV, Part I, when he said, “the sovereign’st thing on earth was parmaceti for an inward bruise.”³⁴ Spermaceti was judged to be “a noble remedy in many cases,” including dealing with asthma and the discomfort felt after childbirth. The preparation of spermaceti for sale as a drug began with the raw spermaceti being cooked over a flame, and poured into conical molds. Once the material in the molds cooled and the excess oil was drained away, the molds would be repeatedly heated and cooled and drained of oil until the spermaceti was white and hard. Pharmacists would then use a knife to shave off flakes of spermaceti, which would be sold to customers in search of better health. Spermaceti was also applied as a cream or lotion, and by the early 1700s it was all the rage for its purported ability to soften the skin and cure “Tumours of the Breast.”³⁵ Spermaceti’s greatest fame, however, came when manufacturers learned to make spermaceti candles, a skill that became the foundation for one of the most lucrative and fascinating branches of colonial commerce. Finally there was ambergris, sometimes called “Neptune’s Treasure,” the most mysterious of all the products derived from sperm whales.³⁶

Ambergris is a gray or black waxy substance that is formed in the stomach or large intestine of sperm whales, and is often expelled during defecation, sometimes as small lumps the size of baseballs, and other times as large concretions weighing hundreds of pounds. It appears that ambergris is a by-product of irritation caused by squid beaks as they scratch their way through the whale’s digestive system or, possibly, the result of some other malady. This simple and somewhat unappealing description offers not the slightest inkling of ambergris’s illustrious history. For more than a thousand years ambergris has been a rare and exceedingly sought-after item of commerce, making it, at times, literally worth its weight in gold.³⁷ Egyptians burned it as incense in their temples, and the Chinese thought it to be a powerful aphrodisiac.³⁸ King Charles II of England favored ambergris and eggs over any other dish. Arabs placed a lump of ambergris in cups of coffee to enhance the coffee’s aroma. Italians added ambergris to chocolate, and an English cookbook, published in 1747, recommended it as an ingredient in icing for “a great cake,” while others used it as a flavoring for wine and cordials.³⁹ But it was as a fixative for perfume that ambergris achieved its most important and widespread use, serving to prolong the staying power of the scents with which it was mixed.

Even more varied than the uses of ambergris were the theories proposed for its origin. Establishing the causal connection between ambergris and sperm whales took a long time, and for many years trying to figure out where ambergris came from was a question that scores of natural philosophers tried to answer. All this conjecture was, in part, because ambergris was almost always found floating at sea or washed up on the shore, and therefore didn’t appear to have an identifiable source. In 1666 a writer who had examined the literature found that there were at least eighteen different opinions as to ambergris’s origin.⁴⁰ Among the candidates were sea foam; fish livers, the dung of an East Indian bird, fruit from underwater trees, a type of naphtha, a bituminous emanation from the sea floor, a type of sulfur, a sea fungus, the feces of a whale, or some sort of artificial material. In 1672, the Honorable Robert Boyle claimed that a document found on board a recently captured Dutch ship provided the answer. “Ambergreese is not the scum or excrement of the whale, but issues out of the root of a tree, which tree, howsoever it stands on the land, alwaies shoots forth its roots towards the sea, seeking the warmth of it, thereby to deliver the fattest gum that comes out of it.”⁴¹ In 1685, it was proposed that ambergris was “nothing but the wax, mixt with the Honey, which falls into the Sea, and is beat about in the Waves, between the tropics.”⁴² And last, but not least, there was a very old theory of Chinese origin that supposed that ambergris was “spittle” coughed up by sea dragons.⁴³

All these theories notwithstanding, it was getting harder and harder to escape the conclusion that ambergris did in fact come from whales, and sperm whales to be exact. Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century was certainly one of the first persons—if not the first—to make the connection, stating that ambergris was “produced in the belly of the whale and the cachalot.”⁴⁴ In the early 1600s the Muscovy Company informed its whaling captains that ambergris was found in the sperm whale, “lying in the entrals and guts of the same, being the shape and colour like unto Kowes dung,” and because of its “good worth” it was “not slightly to be regarded.” To ensure that no ambergris was overlooked, the captains were ordered “to be present at the opening of this sort of whale, and cause the residue of the said entrals be put into small caske, and bring them with you to England.”⁴⁵ Over a century later, in 1724, Dr. Boylston, of Boston, published a letter in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, which further cemented the case. “The most learned part of mankind are still at a loss about many things even in medical use; and, particularly, were so in what is called ambergris, until our whale fishermen of Nantucket, in New England, some three or four years past,” discovered a twenty-pound lump of ambergris while cutting into a bull sperm whale.⁴⁶

The debate over the origin of ambergris cooled considerably after Boylston’s contribution, and toward the latter part of the 1700s, further investigations erased any claims that ambergris might come from a source other than sperm whales.⁴⁷ The most persuasive evidence, of course, came from the whalemen themselves. During the nineteenth century, when the best records were kept, nearly every year witnessed at least one American whaleship returning to port with ambergris on board. One of the most impressive hauls came in 1858, when the Watchman of Nantucket returned with eight hundred pounds of ambergris, stored in four casks, and sold this treasure for ten thousand dollars, which was more than half the profits from the ship’s yearlong cruise.⁴⁸

Before whalemen could examine a sperm whale to see if it contained ambergris, they had to kill one, and that was not any easy task. Finding the whales was the first obstacle to overcome. Only the keenest of lookouts were successful at this game. In contrast to right or humpback whales, whose two blowholes are located atop their head and send out a high stream of vapor that is relatively easy to spot, the sperm whale’s single blowhole is located on the left side of the head, and the spout it sends forth is low to the surface, making it more difficult to discern. During the chase the plodding nature of right whales bore a striking contrast to the speed and unpredictability of sperm whales and the dangers they posed. As Thomas Jefferson noted, the spermaceti whale “is an active, fierce animal and requires vast address and boldness in the fisherman.”⁴⁹ Sperm whale hunters had to move more quickly, strike more decisively, and prepare more fully for the potential that a wounded and enraged animal might attack. Whereas with right whales, whalemen were mostly concerned about being hit by the animal’s tail, with sperm whales the attack could come from the tail or the head; thus the common phrase among whalemen that the sperm was “dangerous at both ends.”

An enraged sperm could thrust up or bring down its tail with such awesome force that should a whaleboat be in the way it would be smashed to pieces. Such was the whalemen’s healthy fear of and respect for the sperm whale’s flukes that they called them the “hand of God.”⁵⁰ Far more dangerous than the tail, however, was the sperm whale’s jaw. To use this mighty weapon, the sperm whale would usually turn over on its back and hold the tooth-studded bottom jaw aloft as it zeroed in for the attack. Just the sight of a sperm whale “jawing-back” in this manner could cause men to leap from their boat and remain bobbing in the water until the whale had departed or, at least, closed its menacing mouth.⁵¹ In rare instances the whale would end its attack by chomping the whaleboat in two, then chomping the remains of the boat and perhaps the unlucky crewmen as well, until satisfied that its work was done. There were also times when, instead of delivering a final blow, the whale would simply keep its lower jaw suspended over the boat for a moment or two, which must have seemed like an eternity to the terrified crew, and then roll to one side, close its mouth, and be off. And, as if the jaws were not worry enough, there was the bulbous battering ram of a head that could easily cripple a whaleboat or even the mother ship.

The colonial whalemen of the early eighteenth century, whose desires to pursue sperm whales in the open ocean were fueled by Hussey’s chance discovery, knew very little about their quarry or how best to hunt them and market their products. But time and experience would prove to be exceptionally good teachers.