Melville, Moby Dick, chapter XXVII
The island of Pico is a volcanic cone which rises sheer from the ocean: it is no more and no less than a high rocky mountain resting on the water. There are three villages: Madalena, São Roque and Lajes; the rest is lava rock on which are dotted meagre vineyards and a few wild pineapples. The small ferry ties up at the landing stage in Madalena. It’s Sunday and many families are taking trips to the nearby islands with baskets and bundles. The baskets are overflowing with pineapples, bananas, bottles of wine, fish. In Lajes there is a small whale museum I want to see. But since it’s not a workday the bus isn’t running very often and Lajes is forty kilometres away at the other end of the island. I sit patiently on a bench under a palm in front of the strange church that stands in the little praça. I planned to take a swim, it’s a fine day and the temperature is pleasant. But on the ferry they told me to be careful, there’s a dead whale near the rocks and the sea is full of sharks.
After a long wait in the midday heat I see a taxi which, having set down a passenger by the harbor, is turning back. The driver offers me a free ride to Lajes, because he has just made the trip and is going home, and the price his passenger paid included the return trip and he doesn’t want any money he doesn’t deserve. There are only two taxis in Lajes, he tells me with a satisfied look, his and his cousin’s. Pico’s only road runs along the cliffs with bends and potholes above a foaming sea. It’s a narrow, bumpy road crossing a grim stony landscape, with just the occasional isolated village, dominated by an incongruously large eighteenth-century monastery and an imposing padrão — the stone monument that Portuguese sailors used to set up wherever they landed as a sign of their king’s sovereignty.
The whale museum is in the main street on the first floor of a handsome renovated townhouse. My guide is a youngster with a vaguely half-witted air and a hackneyed, formal way of talking. What interests me most are the pieces of whale ivory which the whalemen used to carve, and then the ship’s logs and some archaic tools of bizarre design. Along one wall are some old photographs. One bears the caption: Lajes, 25 de Dezembro 1919. Heaven knows how they managed to drag the sperm whale as far as the church. It must have taken quite a few pairs of oxen. It’s a frighteningly huge sperm whale, it seems incredible. Six or seven young boys have climbed up onto its head: they’ve placed a ladder against the front of the head and are waving caps and handkerchiefs on top. The whalemen are lined up in the foreground with a proud, satisfied air. Three of them are wearing woolen bobble caps, one has an oilskin hat shaped like a fireman’s. They are all barefoot, only one has boots, he must be the master. I imagine they then left the photograph, took off their caps and went into church, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to leave a whale in the square outside. Thus they spent Christmas day on Pico in 1919.
As I come out of the museum, a surprise awaits me. From the end of the street, still deserted, appears a band. They are old men and boys dressed in white with sailor’s caps, their brass buttons brightly polished and winking in the sun. They’re playing a melancholy air, a waltz it seems, and they play it beautifully. In front of them walks a little girl holding a staff on the end of which two bread rolls and a dove made of sugar have been skewered. I follow the little procession in their lonely parade along the main street as far as a house with blue windows. The band arranges itself in a semicircle and strikes up a dashing march. A window opens and an old man with a distinguished look to him greets them, leaning out, smiling. He disappears, then reappears a moment later on the doorstep. He is met with a short burst of applause, a handshake from the bandleader, a kiss from the little girl. Obviously this is a homage, though to whom or what I don’t know, and there wouldn’t be much sense in asking. The very short ceremony is over, the band rearranges itself into two lines, but instead of turning back they set off toward the sea which is right there at the bottom of the street. They start playing again and I follow them. When they reach the sea they sit on the rocks, put their instruments down on the ground and light up cigarettes. They chat and look at the sea. They’re enjoying their Sunday. The girl has left her staff leaning against a lamppost and is playing with a friend her own age. From the other end of the village the bus honks its horn, because at six it will be making its only trip to Madalena, and right now it’s five to.
There are two sorts of whalemen in the Azores. The first come from the United States on small schooners of around a hundred tons. They look like pirate crews, because of the motley of races they include: negroes, Malays, Chinese, and indefinable cosmopolitan crosses of this or that, are all mixed up with deserters and rascals using the ocean as a means of escape from the justice of men. An enormous boiler takes up the centre of the schooner; it is here that the chunks of lubber cut from the captured sperm whale, which is tied to scaffolding beside the ship’s hull, are transformed into oil using an infernal cooking process constantly disturbed by the pitch and roll of the boat: meanwhile coils of sickening smoke wreath all about. And when the sea is rough what a wild spectacle it becomes! Rather than give up the fruits of prey heroically snatched from the belly of the Ocean, these men prefer to put their lives in jeopardy. To double the ropes holding the whale to the scaffolding, a number of men will risk their lives climbing out on that enormous oily mass awash with rushing water, its great bulk tossed about by the waves and threatening to smash the hull of the schooner to pieces. Having doubled the ropes they will hang on, prolonging the risk to the point where it is no longer tolerable. Then they cut the hawsers and the whole crew shouts violent, angry imprecations at the carcass as it drifts off on the waves, leaving only a terrible stench where before it had inspired dreams of riches.
The other group of whalemen is made up of people more similar to common mortals. They are the fishermen of the islands, or even adventurous farmers, and sometimes simple emigrants who have come back to their own country, their souls tempered by other storms in the Americas. Ten of them will get together to make the crews for two whaling boats belonging to a tiny company with a capital of around thirty thousand francs. A third of the profits go to the shareholders, the other two thirds are divided equally between members of the crews. The whaling sloops are admirably built for speed and fitted with sails, oars, paddles, an ordinary rudder and an oar rudder. The hunting tools include several harpoons (their points carefully protected in cases), a number of fairly sharp steel lances, and five or six hundred metres of rope arranged in spirals inside baskets from which it runs forward through an upright fork on the prow of the boat.
These small boats lie in wait, concealed on small beaches or in the rocky bays of these inhospitable little islands. From a highpoint on the island a look-out constantly scans the sea the way a topman does on a ship; and when that column of watery stream the sperm whale blows out from his spiracle is sighted, the look-out musters the whalemen with an agreed signal. In a few minutes the boats have taken to the sea and are heading towards the place where the drama will be consummated.
Albert I, Prince of Monaco, La Carrière d’un navigateur, pages 280–83
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