8/22/2023 0 Comments Whale harpoon tattoo![]() ![]() No one was killed, but the whalers didn’t try again. ![]() ![]() Mocha Dick dived and surfaced beneath the third boat – a whaler’s worst nightmare – and threw it into the air. The second boat approached him, and launched another harpoon. Now Mocha Dick stayed a little way off, waiting. Then the whale unexpectedly turned and smashed into the side of the little whaling boat, swimming over it and flogging it to pieces with its flukes (its tail). One boat managed to harpoon the whale, but Mocha Dick then took off (on what is known as a Nantucket Hayride) and dragged the chasers for four kilometres. In one dramatic account from 1841, the skipper of the John Day (whose name is now lost) sighted Mocha Dick off the Falkland Islands and immediately lowered three whalers – flimsy eight-metre long wooden boats – to give chase. Whenever he was attacked, the accounts tell us, he would often retaliate ferociously, first sounding (diving) and then breaching (rising rapidly), often with such power that his entire body – all 45 000 kilograms of him – would leave the water. The thrilling thing about this whale was that, like his fictional namesake, Mocha Dick did not take kindly to being harpooned. Mocha Dick was named after Mocha Island, a small island off the coast of Chile, where firsthand encounters with the whale were recorded from 1810. Reynolds in the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker. There was also Mocha Dick, ‘an old bull whale of prodigious size and strength … white as wool’, described in 1839 by explorer Jeremiah N. This was one of the most surprising facts I uncovered while writing A Savage History: Whaling in the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Moby Dick was not entirely a fictional creation. ![]()
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