In Search of Moby Dick by Tim Severin

Author:Tim Severin [Severin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2018-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Lamalera

‘Was it not so, O Timor Tom! Thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long dids’t lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay?’

herman melville, Moby Dick

‘Call me Ishmael.’ I read again the opening words of Melville’s story, sitting high above the volcanic sand beach. It was an hour past dawn, and the sound of cocks still crowing came up from below me. A large banyan tree arched over the cliff edge where I sat, and looking down beneath its branches I could see dogs playing on the crescent of foreshore. Their paws left tracks where the retreating tide had smoothed the sand and left it damp. The horizon was indistinct in the morning light. The sea had a calm dark purple sheen except where random currents stirred a few patches into ripples. Lighter streaks were the reflections of high clouds carried by the first winds of the south-east monsoon. Opposite me the sun had just climbed above the mountain peak of Pantar Island, and it would be another very hot day. Already I could feel the sweat beginning to gather. Last night had been warm and sultry. Two or three times I had been awakened by heavy rain showers suddenly drumming on the corrugated-iron roof of the schoolmaster’s little house.

I was in the village of Lamalera, the last community on earth where men still regularly hunt sperm whales by hand. Below me I could see the thatch roofs of the sheds where the hunters kept their boats. The tropical sun had bleached the thatch a soft iron-grey. Patches of yellow straw marked where recent repairs had been made. From the open end of each boatshed poked what looked like a crude step-ladder. It was the harpooner’s platform which projected from the prow of the hunting boat, the place where the harpooner stood with his fifteen-foot lance at the moment of attack. From where I sat, I could count eleven boatsheds. There were as many again, I knew, out of my line of sight beneath the edge of the cliff. There was no one on the beach for the moment, only the dogs. What looked like whorls of light mist drifted over the ridges of the boatsheds. They were wisps of smoke oozing from the cooking fires where the families of the sea hunters were preparing their meals. In an hour, the men would come down to the beach and assemble. Crew by crew they would muster by the boats, and get ready to go to sea to hunt the whale. I planned to join them.

Lamalera lies almost at the end of the long trailing arc of southern Indonesia. Here the sweeping archipelago, which begins at the Malay peninsula, tapers away a few hundred miles from the huge continental block of Australia. With the exception of Timor, the islands give the impression of becoming smaller and smaller the further you go along the arc. Geographically this is not actually the case, but in terms of travel it is an understandable sensation.

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