Leviathan. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ after nautical mile of sea. I did not know what to expect when I reached the other side, but as the boat docked, everyone else seemed to know where they were going. So I followed them, into Provincetown.

      Cape Cod curls out into the Atlantic like a scorpion’s tail. This is new land, carved out by mile-thick glaciers only fifteen thousand years ago. Its inner shores are still more recent, formed of sand carried from the far side of the Cape, an egg-timer adding even as it takes away. This is also the graveyard of the Atlantic. Its beaches bear witness to disaster: entire wrecks buried by the sand, their masts jutting from the dunes, along with human hands. Marconi, who established his radio station on this same shore, a forest of aerials among the marram grass, believed he could tune in to the voices of drowned men still hanging in the ether.

      Cape Cod is not so much the end of the land as the beginning of the sea. To Thoreau, who walked here a hundred and fifty years ago, it was a place where ‘everything seemed to be gently lapsing into futurity’. ‘A man may stand there and put all America behind him,’ he wrote; but this is where America began, too. Four centuries ago, the Pilgrim Fathers made first landfall on this sandy spit rather than at Plymouth Rock–just as they first left from Southampton, rather than Plymouth in Devon. In their search for utopia, the exiles found instead ‘a hideous and desolate wilderness’. They had little idea that its native inhabitants had lived on the Cape for millennia.

      After a month trudging through its sands, the Pilgrims rejected Cape Cod as fit only for fish and heathens. Provincetown became an outlaw colony beyond their Puritan influence, a reputation embodied by its nickname: Hell Town. Prey to piracy, war and revolution, by the end of the eighteenth century there were still only a handful of houses here. But soon this disputatious, barely legitimate port had entered its greatest prosperity–one that it owed to the whale.

      The Pilgrims had regretted their lack of weaponry when they saw how many broad-backed, slow-moving whales lay in Cape Cod Bay. It was as if the animals were anchored to it. There were hundreds ‘playing hard by us, of which in that place, if we had instruments and means to take them, we might have made a rich return’. Unlike the Indians who harvested whales for sustenance, Europeans sought profit in such animals, and had done so ever since the Basques had sailed to Labrador.

      By the time the Mayflower set sail, other ships were leaving Dutch ports to carry out commercial whaling in the Arctic. Two of the crew of the Mayflower had whaled off Greenland, and reckoned they would have made £4,000 from the whales of Cape Cod Bay. Indeed, it was the whales that had first prompted the Pilgrims to consider Provincetown as a site, and as Cotton Mather recorded, whale oil became the staple commodity of their colony. The Mayflower herself was pressed into service as a whaler, sailing over the bay from Plymouth.

      Provincetown, too, took to whaling with aplomb. By 1737, twelve whale-ships were leaving the port, bound for the Davis Straits. By 1846, Provincetown was home to dozens of vessels. Families such as the Cooks, who owned eight houses in a row in the town’s East End, could look out on their ships tied up in front of their properties much as modern cars are parked in driveways. The building that now houses a fashionable delicatessen was once the Cooks’ chandlery. Close by stood the blacksmith’s, forging harpoons and lances, while a blue plaque on another wall commemorates ‘David C. Scull, the Ambergris King’. Later, the Azoreans and Portuguese came to work in the town’s great salt cod trade. Their descendants still live here, incarnate in such names as Avellar, Costa, Oliveira and Motta, and in the annual Blessing of the Fleet, when their fishing boats are bedecked with flags and a dressed statue of St Peter is carried down to the harbour.

      In the late nineteenth century other visitors came too, ‘summer people’ brought by steamers from Boston and New York, artists and writers among them. They were attracted by the clear light that bounces around the peninsula as from a photographer’s reflecting shield, but also by its remoteness. Provincetown remained a tentative, if not dangerous place. The Portland gale of 1898 drowned five hundred people and demolished many wharves. Houses out on the sandy spit of Long Point, defeated by decades of storms, were floated wholesale across the bay on rafts of wrecking barrels to find shelter on calmer shores. As the radical journalist Mary Heaton Vorse wrote, ‘Provincetowners have spent so much of their time on the sea in ships that they look upon houses as a sort of land ship or a species of house-boat and therefore not subject to the laws of houses.’

      Gradually, reluctantly, the town was tamed. Drainage was installed, pavements laid, roads allowed access to what was, in effect, an island. ‘Indeed, to an inlander, the Cape landscape is a constant mirage,’ as Thoreau wrote. Its sands collect and drift as the town twists and turns on itself, leaving you never quite sure which way is south or which way is west. This is still a place apart, a fold-out on the map; not so much part of America as apart from it. In the summer it babbles with life, its one busy street teeming with day-tripping families and drag queens, before petering out at town limits once marked by a whale’s jaw bone stuck in the ground, and now by Josh’s garage and a straggle of beach huts from an Edward Hopper painting. And out on the ocean, the clamour diminishes like a dying chord, to be replaced by the rise and fall of the sea.

      It wasn’t until the day before I was due to leave Provincetown that I went on my first whale watch. I remember how cold it was as the boat left the bay the land’s warmth giving way to a chill sea breeze. As we sailed out of the harbour, our naturalist described the geography of Stellwagen Bank as it passed beneath us. He explained how fishermen had dredged up mastodon bones from the sea floor; how these were some of the most fertile waters on the planet; how they were crossed by the Atlantic’s busiest shipping routes. On a chart behind him, he pointed out the animals we might see. I looked at their unlikely shapes on the pamphlet he had handed out. They seemed as unreal as the dinosaurs I’d memorized from my library books as a boy.

      Then someone shouted,

       Whale!

      and in the mid-distance, a massive grey-black shape slid up out of the water and back down below. Before I knew it, there they were, off our bows, whales blowing noisily from their nostrils, rolling with the waves. Barely yards away a young humpback threw itself out of the water, showing off its white underbelly ridged like some giant, rubbery shell. It was a jump-cut close-up of something impossible: a whale in flight.

      Forgetting the children around me, I blurted out an inadvertent ‘fuck!’. Other whales were throwing their tails in the air, slapping their flippers as though signalling to each other, or to us. As I watched, more and more animals appeared, as if summoned by some unseen circus master. I was amazed by the exuberant mastery of their own bodies, and the element in which they moved so elegantly. I envied them the fact that they were always swimming; that they were always free.

      Every summer, humpbacks come to the Gulf of Maine. For six months they have fasted, and mated, in the warm but sterile waters of the Caribbean, suckling their calves with milk so rich it resembles cottage cheese, until it is time to make the annual pilgrimage north. It is the greatest migration undertaken by any mammal. Following routes of colonization first undertaken by their ancestors millions of years ago, navigating up to eight thousand miles of ocean via age-old and invisible signs, they arrive off the north-eastern seaboard, where the warm Gulf Stream meets the chill Labrador currents and stirs up nutrients from the ocean floor in a process called upwelling.

      Here, in the grey-green waters, a vast food chain is set in motion. The whales fatten themselves on sand lances and herring, growing fat with the seasonal glut. And here, less than two hours’ sail from one of America’s great cities, these gigantic animals–‘the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales’–besport themselves, ‘making more gay foam and white water generally than any other’. Even their hunters acknowledged this playfulness in their nickname for the humpback, the merry whale, although its scientific name is hardly less glamorous: Megaptera novæangliæ, big-winged New Englander, barnacled angel.

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