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.
Ishmael boarded their namesake ship off Patagonia at midnight and found a fine gam awaiting. The crew passed around good flip at ten gallons the hour; when a squall struck, they reefed topsails so top-heavy they had to swing each other aloft. The beef was tough but substantial, the dumplings symmetrically globular and indestructible. The Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship, her forecastle flowing with strong drink and crack fellows.
Why such hospitality aboard English whalers? The answer lies with the Dutch, who preceded them in the fishery and passed along their fat old fashions of plenty. Ishmael discovered an ancient volume titled Dan Coopman—The Merchant—which detailed the provisions for 180 Dutch whalemen: four hundred thousand pounds of beef, half a million pounds of biscuit, nearly three thousand firkins of butter, five hundred fifty ankers of gin, and ten thousand eight hundred barrels of beer. The statistics flood the reader with good cheer rather than parching him.
Reckoning thirty men per ship, each sailor received two barrels of beer for twelve weeks, plus his share of gin. Whether these fuddled harpooneers could aim true at flying whales seems doubtful—yet they did. But this was far North, where beer suits the constitution; at the Equator, it would make a man drowsy at his post.
The old Dutch whalers were high livers, and the English have not neglected their example. When cruising in an empty ship, get a good dinner out of the world, at least. And this empties the decanter.
How can a mere oarsman presume to know the subterranean parts of the whale? Ishmael anticipates the challenge. Since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated beneath the skin of an adult leviathan. Yet he claims two credentials: he once dissected a cub Sperm Whale hoisted onto a deck; and for knowledge of the full-grown skeleton, he is indebted to his late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque in the Arsacides.
Years ago, aboard the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, Ishmael spent the Arsacidean holidays at Tranquo’s palm villa at Pupella. The king, devoted to barbaric vertu, had gathered rare inventions of his people. Chief among them was a great Sperm Whale, found stranded after a gale. Once stripped and sun-dried, the skeleton was transported up the glen, where a temple of lordly palms sheltered it. Ribs hung with trophies; vertebrae bore hieroglyphics; in the skull, priests kept an aromatic flame burning, so the mystic head sent forth its vapory spout. The lower jaw, suspended from a bough, vibrated over devotees like Damocles’ sword.
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