The female carries her young for nine months. Her tasty rather sugary milk has the warm sweetness of a woman’s. But since the whale must always forge through the waves, if the udders were located on the breast, the young whale would be constantly exposed to the brunt of the sea; hence they are to be found a little further down, in a more sheltered place, on the belly, whence the young whale was born. And the baby hides away there and takes pleasure in the wave that his mother breaks for him.
Michelet, La Mer, page 238
They say that ambergris is formed from the remains of the keratin shells of shellfish that the whale is unable to digest and which accumulate in certain segments of the intestine. But others maintain that it forms as the result of a pathological process, a sort of limited intestinal calculus. Today ambergris is used almost exclusively in the production of luxury perfumes, but in the past it had as many applications as human fantasy could dream up for it: it was used as a propitiatory balsam in religious rites, as an aphrodisiac lotion, and as a sign of religious dedication for Muslim pilgrims visiting the Qa’aba in Mecca. It is said to have been an indispensable aperitif at the banquets of the Mandarins. Milton talks about ambergris in Paradise Lost. Shakespeare mentions it too, I don’t remember where.
L’amour, chez eux, soumis à des conditions difficiles, veut un lieu de profonde paix. Ainsi que le noble elephant, qui craint les yeux profanes, la baleine n’aime qu’au desert. Le rendez-vous est vers les poles, aux anses solitaires du Groënland, aux brouillards de Behring, sans doute aussi dans la mer tiède qu’on a trouvée près du pole même.
La solitude est grande. C’est un théâtre étrange de mort et de silence pour cette fête de l’ardente vie. Un ours blanc, un phoque, un renard bleu peut-être, témoins respectueux, prudents, observant à distance. Les lustres et girandoles, les miroirs fantastiques, ne manquent pas. Cristaux bleuâtres, pics, aigrettes de glace éblouissante, neiges vierges, ce sont les témoins qui siègent tout autour et regardent.
Ce qui rend cet hymen touchant et grave, c’est qu’il y faut l’expresse volonté. Ils n’ont pas l’arme tyrannique du requin, ces attaches qui maîtrisent le plus faible. Au contraire, leurs fourreaux glissants les séparent, les éloignent. Ils se fuient malgré eux, échappent, par ce désespérant obstacle. Dans un si grand accord, on dirait un combat. Des baleiniers prétendent avoir vu ce spectacle unique. Les amants, d’un brûlant transport, par instants, dresses et debout, comme les deux tours de Notre-Dame, gémissant de leurs bras trop courts, entreprenaient de s’embrasser. Ils retombaient d’un poids immense. . L’ours et l’homme fuyaient épouvantés de leurs soupirs.
Michelet, La Mer, pages 240–42
So intense and poetic is this passage from Michelet it would be wrong to tone it down with a translation.
Those days of intense sunshine and oppressive stillness when a thick sultry heat weighs on the ocean — it occurred to me these might be the rare moments when whales return in their physiological memory to their terrestrial origins. To do this they have to concentrate so intensely and completely that they fall into a deep sleep which gives an appearance of death: and thus floating on the surface, like blind, polished stumps, they somehow remember, as though in a dream, a distant, distant past when their clumsy fins were dry limbs capable of gestures, greetings, caresses, races through the grass amid tall flowers and ferns, on an earth that was a magma of elements still in search of a combination, an idea.
The whalemen of the Azores will tell you that when an adult whale is harpooned at a distance of five or six miles from another, the latter, even if in this state of apparent death, will wake with a start and flee in fear. The whales hunted in the Azores are mainly sperm whales.
Sperm Whale. This whale, among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa Whale, and the Physeter Whale and the Anvil Headed Whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottfisch of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm Whale was almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the one then known in England as Greenland or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became known its original name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity.
Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter XXXII
Sperm whales are great whales which live in areas of both hemispheres where the water temperature is fairly high. There are important differences between their physiology and that of other whales: the whalebones, which fortify the mouth of the latter and which are used to grind up small elements of food, are replaced in the sperm whale by sturdy teeth firmly inserted in the lower jaw and capable of snapping a large prey; the head, an enormous mass which ends vertically like the prow of a ship, accounts for a third of the whole body. These anatomical differences between the two groups of whales assign them to distinct territories: other whales find the thick banks of microscopic organisms they feed on mainly in the cold waters of the polar regions, where they absorb this food with the same naturalness with which we breathe; the sperm whale, on the other hand, mainly feeds on cephalopods which flourish in temperate waters. There are also important differences in the way these giant whales behave, differences which whalemen have learnt to recognize to perfection in the interests of their own safety. While other whales are peaceful animals, the older male sperm whale, like the boar, lives alone and will both defend and avenge himself. Having wounded the creature with their harpoons, many whaleboats have been snatched between the jaws of these giants and then crushed to pieces; and many crews have perished in the hunt.
Albert I, Prince of Monaco, La Carrière d’un navigateur, pages 277–78
No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. . How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen.