If you walk down toward London’s docklands past Tower‑hill, you might spot a disabled beggar.
Sailors call men like him kedgers.
He holds up a painted wooden board. The painting shows how he lost his leg, a terrible, tragic scene.
You can see three whales and three small whaling boats.
One boat — the one that supposedly still held his whole, unharmed leg — is getting crushed in the jaws of the lead whale.
People say for ten straight years this man has shown that painting.
He’s held up his stump for a skeptical public to stare at.
Now, finally, the story in his painting feels real.
His three whales look just as believable as any whale picture you’d find around Wapping.
And his stump is every bit as genuine as any injury you’d come across out in the western wilderness.
Even so, this poor ex‑whaleman never gives some big dramatic speech about his missing leg.
He just stands there, eyes downcast, sadly staring at what’s left of his limb.
All across the Pacific Ocean, you’ll find these little handmade drawings and carvings of whales and whaling adventures.
You can also see them in Nantucket, New Bedford, and Sag Harbor.
Fishermen carve them right onto sperm whale teeth.
They carve designs into stiff bone strips taken from right whales, the kind women used to stiffen their old‑fashioned bodices.
Whalers call all these little hand‑carved trinkets skrimshander.
They make them in their free hours out at sea, working rough bone into detailed little pieces.
Some sailors keep tiny sets of sharp tools that look like dentist equipment, just for doing this carving work.
Most of the time, though, they only use their pocket jack‑knives.
With that one handy sailor’s tool, they can make almost anything their seafaring imagination dreams up.
Spend a long time far away from normal society and religion, and any man slips back into a more raw, primitive way of living.
That’s the natural state human beings started out in.
A real whale hunter is just as much a primitive as an Iroquois warrior.
I count myself as one of those primitives.
I answer only to the king of the cannibals — and I’d be ready to turn against him any day.
One thing primitive people show at home is unbelievable patience for slow, careful handwork.
Take an old Hawaiian war club or spear paddle.
Every inch is covered in complex, layered carvings.
It’s just as impressive a display of human persistence as a huge Latin dictionary.
They only used broken sea shells or shark teeth to carve all those complicated twisting patterns into wood.
It took years of steady, slow work to finish each piece.
That same patient drive lives in white sailor‑primitives too.
Working with nothing but their beat‑up pocket knife — sometimes using a sharp shark tooth — they carve sculptures out of bone.
Their work isn’t perfectly polished, but the patterns are tightly packed and full of detail.
It reminds you of Achilles’ famous shield from old Greek stories.
There’s wild, rough feeling in their art, similar to the prints made by that brilliant old Dutch artist, Albrecht Dürer.
You often run across wooden whales inside the sleeping quarters of American whaling ships.
Sailors cut side‑profile whale shapes out of dark, hard wood from Pacific islands.
Some of these carvings are surprisingly accurate.
You can spot brass‑cast whales hanging by their tails as door knockers on some old country houses with steep gabled roofs.
If the servant answering the door tends to doze off, a heavy whale‑shaped knocker works best.
Still, these decorative brass whales rarely look much like real whales.
Old church steeples sometimes have thin sheet‑metal whales set up as weather vanes.
They sit so high up, and feel so clearly marked “do not touch,” you can never get close enough to judge how well they were made.
There are barren, rocky places on earth where steep broken cliffs spill piles of weird‑shaped rock across flat ground.
Among those rocks, you can find shapes that look like fossilized giant sea monsters, half buried in grass.
When wind blows hard, the grass ripples like green ocean waves washing over those stone whale forms.
Then there are mountain regions.
Travellers are surrounded by huge, curving mountain walls all around them.
If you hit exactly the right viewpoint, you’ll catch brief glimpses of whale silhouettes along the rolling ridge lines.
Only someone who really knows whaling will notice these shapes.
And if you want to find that exact view a second time, you have to write down the precise latitude and longitude of where you stood.
Mountain illusions like this are random.
Finding your original spot again would take huge effort.
It’s like the Solomon Islands.
Mendaña once marched across those islands, and Figueroa wrote accounts about them — yet parts of them still remain poorly mapped and mysterious.
When your mind is full of thoughts about whales, you start seeing them in the night sky too.
You pick out shapes of huge whales and small boats chasing them among the stars.
It’s like how ancient eastern peoples, obsessed with war, would see battling armies formed from cloud shapes.
Up north, I’ve watched the constellation of the great whale circle around the North Pole, turning with the moving stars that draw its outline.
Beneath the bright Antarctic skies, I’ve imagined myself climbing aboard the star ship Argo.
I joined the hunt for the star‑whale Cetus, far past the long star Hydrus and the Flying Fish constellation.
If only I could ride that celestial whale.
I’d use frigate ship anchors as my handgrips, and tied‑together harpoons as my spurs.
I would leap up through the highest heavens.
I want to see for myself: do those legendary skies, with countless unseen tents of heaven, really exist beyond what mortal eyes can see?