For the sake of oil we brave the unforgiving Seas
Moby Dick, the most famous of seafaring tales, is 206,052 words in length.
My column averages about 800 words per week. I would need to write 258 consecutive columns to equal the verbal extant of Herman Melville’s great and timeless novel.
It’s unfortunate and interesting that the author gained no significant commercial gain for his work while living.
The book was published in 1851, but only became a highly esteemed work in American Literature after his death in 1891. Melville’s wonderful read only sold 3,200 copies during his life. I might have more readers.
It is truly a shame this gifted writer, and most knowledgeable wanderer of the world, died in New York City without due credit for his unbelievably marvelous and meticulously detailed story telling talent. Why am I talking literature? Well, I think part of loving the outdoors is reading about it. I read quite a bit, and I tend to focus on stuff of outdoor adventure. Needless to say I suppose, but I have read Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, and Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It”, both multiple times.
The book is always better than the movie, invariably. A book commands our undivided attention on a so much more intimate level, and squeezes in so much more tantalizing detail. And great writers always tell stories that are about so much more than the actual story line. So you can indulge in a fascinating outdoor literary adventure, while learning and pondering the mysterious and deeper complexities of life.
That’s the bonus in reading and not merely watching.
Moby Dick tackles some of the timeless deep philosophical questions about life, death, religion, science, tolerance, race, and multiculturalism.
It’s all in there, but I’m a simple outdoor writer, so I’m not diving deep today. I do sneak in a pun now and then.
Life lessons aside, this is a wonderful story about the ultimate in fair chase hunting. It might be cliché to say, but the days that Melville writes about were truly those of wooden ships and iron men.
It is worth the long read, ye outdoors living men and women.
Can you imaging hunting a 60-foot 50-tonne whale by hand harpooning, and then letting the enormous creature tire itself while dragging around your flimsy wooden boat?
I think I should cast flies to bluefin tuna.
Why would anyone want to risk life and limb to kill a gigantic whale, which dwells and roams in the harshest environment?
Romantically, I would say it was all about the adventure, and for many individual spirited folk, I’m sure it was, to see the world on a circumnavigating vessel.
Not many, had the means to travel far and wide at their own expense. It is why young and restless have gone to war, and sailed on clipper ships, or traded fur in the Canadian North, the call of the wild and unknown, often ignoring the dire risks involved. Sometimes we adventurous sorts take unwarranted risks. I could relate a murre hunting story, from my younger days, to aptly illustrate, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Never the less, whaling and global scale adventure, most often boils down to money.
The oil, particularly of the sperm whale variety, may have at one time been the most valuable commodity on our planet.
The great whale’s head contains a liquid wax named spermaceti. Spermaceti was used in lubricants, oil lamps, and candles, before we began drilling into the ground and sea for petrochemicals.
A waste product from its digestive system is still used as a fixative in some perfumes. So you can see the connection here. Now seafarers brave the seas to find and harvest offshore oil for us humans to lubricate our devices and sustain our mobile oriented style of living.
The need for oil financed both these darkly dangerous pursuits. The pursuit of adventure by people is another matter.
This business of whaling is of deeper interest to me because my father was a whaler. My dad worked whaling operations and ships for over a decade. Of course these were later years, of steel ships and harpoons propelled by gunpowder.
But the game of chasing whales was still quite risky.
My father told me of a sperm whale tangling a harpoon cable around a diesel-powered whaler’s propeller, and eventually destroying the ship. I think it still lays rusting on Labrador’s coastline and it is a location I will hopefully be visiting soon. Stay tuned for that.
I will be cleaning and lubricating a couple of flyfishing reels later this morning. Both just did a stint against powerful saltwater fish. My lubricant of choice is Super Lube, a full synthetic product that has served me well for a decade.
It’s a far cry from whale oil, but I imagine fishers of the 19th century had far less choice.
I just converted my pickup to synthetic oil, and I’m thinking of doing the same with my ATV. Is synthetic best for our outdoor gear? Stay tuned.