Of Men & Blubber

YANKEE WHALERS IN THE SOUTH SEAS (304 pp.)--A.B.C. Whipple--Doubleday ($3.95).

The New England Yankee may yet go down in history as supreme of all the breed of men who chose to battle whales.

A whaling ship today is a quite safe combination of floating factory and ocean liner, but in the 18th and 19th centuries, the world's most powerful animal was hunted down in ships so small that the whale could, and sometimes did, butt them into driftwood. In all man's hunting, none has been so downright risky and exciting. As a result, no true armchair adventurer can easily bypass a readable new book about whaling.

Yankee Whalers in the South Seas is a lively introduction to a fascinating subject. Yankee Author and LIFE Associate Editor A.B.C. Whipple is an enthusiast who has spent ten years poring over old ships' logs and seamen's journals, listening to the yarns still spun in old whaling towns, and chatting with whaling authorities. What he has tried for and achieved is not a history of whaling but a teaser that may send readers to other books on the subject, perhaps even to that greatly unread but incessantly discussed U.S. classic, Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

The men who went down to the sea in whalers chose a job that was both dangerous and boring. Trips frequently lasted as long as five years, and one Nantucket captain spent only six of his 41 whaling years at home. Sometimes a captain came back with enough oil from one cruise to retire for life. But there is also the story of the skipper who spent two years at sea and returned to tell his owners: "We didn't get a single goddam barrel of oil, but we had a goddam fine sail." For the average crewman the money rewards were trifling. All he could look forward to with certainty was maggoty food, cramped and filthy quarters, brutal whippings if he complained, and, since casualties were high, a good chance that he would get sea burial. Officers who died were sometimes kept aboard and brought home in a barrel of rum that was saved and used on the next trip as rations for the crew.

Author Whipple has succeeded in conveying the excitement of his subject without letting romance obscure the unpretty aspects of it. Yankee Whaling has its quota of brown island girls clambering aboard ship, eager to be nice to the white men. It also tells of islands where seemingly mild natives suddenly turned on crews and destroyed them. And there was always the chance that the whalers' crew would run into cannibals and wind up in baking ovens as "long pig."

But the great adversary was Mr. Big himself, the whale. The real Mocha Dick (who inspired Melville's Moby) was a white rogue whale. His record: "Fourteen whaleboats smashed, 30 men killed, and victory in more than a hundred watery battles." One story has it that a Swedish whaler captured Mocha in 1859. "He was old and worn out from his countless battles, and he was beyond struggling when the lance finally gouged into his lungs . . . When the Swedes got his carcass alongside, they found he was blind in his right eye and had 19 harpoon points corroding his leathery hide."

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