In Search Of Moby Dick – Tim Severin

asked Melville rhetorically. ‘His brown hand was on the boat’s gunwale; and he was hauled aboard in the very midst of the mad bubbles that burst under the bows. Such a man, or devil if you will, was Bembo.’ Melville did not claim himself to have seen a man leap, harpoon in hand, on the back of a sperm whale.

It was another ‘wild yarn’ of the whale fishery, and it seemed a tall story. Later I was to learn differently. For the moment I was interested that Bembo joined the ‘Julia’ when she called by the Bay of Islands in New Zealand at the start of her whaling voyage. This was the place where many of the Maori harpooners signed on, and then spread among the islands of Polynesia during the mid- to late nineteenth century It was precisely by this route that a young part-Maori harpooner named Albert Edward Cook had come to Tonga in 1890, and established the Tongan whale fishery which lasted almost a century, until it was banned by Finow’s descendant, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, the current King of Tonga.

And it was Albert Edward Cook’s grandson that I wanted to meet. He was Tonga’s ‘last harpooner’. The first thing I noticed about Samson Cook was his almost stone-faced expression. He had lean, regular features, a strong nose, and pronounced cheekbones. Two deep furrows ran from the side of his nose down to the corners of a wide, straight and close mouth, giving him a slightly patrician expression.

His skin was the colour of milky coffee, the product of his mixed descent, part Maori, part Tongan, part European. At sixty-seven years of age, his grizzled hair was almost all gone, and when he tilted his head back slightly and looked at you through his narrowed brown eyes, he seemed almost stern. He had what in the theatre is called ‘presence’. He also had large, square hands with strong fingers, and although only about five feet seven inches tall, he gave the impression of being a much bigger, more dominant man.

He was barrel-chested; he had not an ounce of surplus flesh on him, and he walked on thick strong legs with a slight limp.

© Tim Severin 2000 Tim Severin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. First published in 1999 by Little, Brown and Company. This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books. OceanofPDF.com Table of Contents Cutwater Part One Nuku Hiva Part Two Pamilacan Part Three Tonga Part Four Lamalera Tailpiece Acknowledgements A Note About the Author OceanofPDF.com Cutwater ‘I have seen Owen Chace [sic] who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.’

herman melville, Moby Dick OceanofPDF.com With an off-cut of heavy canvas, Owen Chase was hastily nailing a temporary patch over a hole in the bottom of his whaleboat. The hole was fresh, knocked that same hour through the thin cedarwood planks by a swipe from the tail of a whale he had harpooned. It was a measure of Chase’s professionalism that the moment the accident happened, he had taken up a hatchet and chopped through the line to free the whale from the foundering boat. While his crew bailed, Chase stuffed three or four jackets into the hole to plug the leak as best he could.

Then he ordered his men to row back to the mother ship, the Essex. The damaged twenty-seven foot boat had been hoisted aboard as smartly as possible, and now lay upturned on the quarter of the Essex. First mate Owen Chase was in a hurry. He wanted to rejoin the other two boats from the Essex, including Captain Pollard’s, which were still out on the water, and now some distance downwind.

They were in hot pursuit of a small pod of whales, and it appeared that the captain’s boat had successfully harpooned one of them. Owen Chase judged it would be quicker to put this makeshift patch on his own boat than to unlash and lower one of the spare boats which were snugged down in stowage.

Chase was from Nantucket, like his ship, and he regarded the incident as a run-of-the-mill mishap in the fishery. What happened next, however, was anything but ordinary. As he was driving the tacks, Chase glanced up and saw a sperm whale, a very big one, come to the surface about a hundred yards off the windward bow. The sea was calm, and the animal lay quietly on the water, spouted two or three times, then disappeared. Noting only that it was an unusually large specimen, perhaps eighty feet long, Chase turned back to his work.

Two or three seconds later he saw the animal again. Now it was less than a ship’s length away and appeared to be swimming steadily in the direction of the Essex. The animal was moving at no more than three knots, and for a moment Chase did not react.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Title: –
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• Pages: 194
• Language: English (en)

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