Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.
His first testimony concerns recognition. Ishmael has personally known three cases in which a whale escaped after being harpooned, only to be struck again years later by the same man. In the most striking instance, three years passed—perhaps longer—during which the harpooneer journeyed through the African interior, surviving serpents, hostile tribes, and tropical disease. Meanwhile, the wounded whale ranged the oceans. When man and beast finally met again, the victory went to the hunter. Two iron harpoons bearing identical maker’s marks were recovered from the carcass. Ishmael himself occupied the whaleboat on both occasions and recognized a distinctive growth beneath the creature’s eye, the same mark he had noted years before. Such evidence proves that whales are not interchangeable commodities but distinct individuals with recognizable histories.
Beyond personal experience, Ishmael summons the fame of celebrated whales. Among whalemen, certain leviathans achieved notoriety across oceans and decades. These were creatures so dangerous that prudent sailors saluted them from a distance rather than risk closer acquaintance. Timor Tom haunted the straits of the Orient, his scarred flanks marking him as an old survivor. New Zealand Jack became a byword for terror among vessels cruising near the tattooed shores. Morquan, called King of Japan, spouted a column that sometimes shaped itself into a pale cross against the sky. Don Miguel bore strange markings across his back like the inscriptions of some lost language. These whales carried names as recognizable to seafarers as those of ancient conquerors. Some, like New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, were eventually hunted down by captains who weighed anchor with the specific purpose of ending their reigns.
Ishmael then turns to what landsmen do not know. The public remains ignorant of whaling’s true toll because disasters at sea go unreported. A sailor dragged to his death off New Guinea will never appear in any newspaper; the mail routes cannot carry news from such waters. On one Pacific voyage alone, Ishmael spoke with thirty ships, each of which had lost men to whales, and three had seen entire boat crews perish. Every lamp that burns in a comfortable home is lit by oil purchased with human blood.
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