Word: whaler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...been fascinated by whale talk since he worked with the Navy during World War II. During his work he made tapes of underwater sounds, later tried them out on an ancient mariner from the whaling port of New Bedford. One sound always got an instantaneous response from the ex-whaler: "That's a sperm snappin' his spouter...
...Bedford whaler, the John Howland, spotted the five starving Japanese who had given up all hope after nearly seven months. Having taken the castaways aboard, Captain William H. Whitfield went right on chasing whales. To Manjiro, whose usual catch was bass, whaling was a mighty experience. Quick, curious and alert, the young lad picked up English rapidly, learned the whaler's tasks and pitched in with a will. Captain Whitfield, a widower, took such a fancy to him that he brought him home (Fairhaven, Mass.), changed his name to John Mung, put him in school and took...
Should the conversation slip around to what ship you took to Europe, remember this point: you either went first class on a palatial liner or worked across as a stripper on a grimy whaler out of Oslo. There is no such animal as an in-between ship. The last average ship to make interesting conversation was the Santa Maria...
...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...
Captain George Pollard of Nantucket, Mass, had been out in one of the whaleboats himself, that day in 1820, when the whaler Essex began to founder. Nobody could have been more dismayed than Captain Pollard when he headed back to his stricken ship. "My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?" he cried. And from Mate Chase, bobbing with other survivors in a small boat, came the laconic answer: "We have been stove by a whale...