Whaling

By Nathan Munday

1790. Nantucket whalers are invited to found the port of Milford Haven in Wales. What does the arrival of these hardy Quakers – immigrants to America a century before – mean for the local people? And what is the meaning of the beached whale that preceded them? Two cultures rub against each other and distrust grows, driven by the local preacher. As Whaling unfolds concern swerves into hysteria against the incomers and the preacher plans a grotesque, Jonah-inspired fate for the whalers. Nathan Munday's debut novel is an exciting mÉlange of original fiction, historical writing and whaling images. In it he explores our relationship with the natural world, the boundary between faith and superstition, and the age old problem of immigration. Set in historical fact this is a narrative at once modern and contemporaneous, the writing rich in imagery and deceptively tense as its story slides into allegory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jun 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781781727072

Nathan Munday

Nathan Munday is a young writer from Carmarthenshire who lives near Bridgend. He won the M Wynn Thomas New Scholar’s Prize in 2016 for an essay on RS Thomas, and was second in the New Welsh Review Writings Awards for Seven Days: A Pyrenean Adventure (Parthian, 2017). Until recently he was guardian of Ty Mawr Wybrnant, the Snowdonian birthplace of Bible translator William Morgan. He has published stories, poems and reviews in a variety of magazines, including Cheval, Wales Arts Review, and New Welsh Review. He has a website, https://nathanmunday.com/blog/ and is bilingual. Nathan is a trainee minister. 

Book preview

PART I

‘There is no isolated sin’ – Fyodor Dostoevsky

She dives again. The depth clamps the vessel as it churns through the sea; it’s propelled by a giant hand, waving goodbye to every patch of blue and black. The lights from the overworld are minimal – just the big orb looming. She swims for a while before surfacing. It feels cold and unnatural. She lifts her tail with ease, waiting for the last drops of water to skitter off her oily skin before crashing down, deep dive – swerving into the dark.

A whole world lies on her back: water-hitchhikers. Small fish too tired to swim. Crabs, crustaceans, mussels, and bits of weed ribboning on the moving reef. Her eyes are tired, but the plankton is good. Dots. Dots. Dots. Pixelating pieces of weed. Dots. Dots. More dots glowing like stars. Unlike the other fish, she has seen the real night sky when surfacing for air. She imagines other seas above the earth where rocky vessels rotate around these special lamps. She dives again.

She remembers swimming in the waters off America. She remembers looking towards the land and seeing a giant deity flinging his moccasin over the blue. The titan had too much sand in his shoe and in frustration he hurled it, with the sand, and a whole chunk of earth into the deep. Nantucket was born.

The whale dives again and dreams about the shallow waters near Madaket where her ancestors went to die. They slowly glided on the sand and stopped where the scallops closed.

Sometimes she hits bits. Pieces of wood, rubbish. To her, they are just passing obstacles dropped out of the pockets of the world. She tanks through, ignoring them or pushing them aside with her nose.

Suddenly something falls from above. It is silver and looks like an argent shooting star in the higher seas. It comes towards her. Closer. Closer. It leaves a trail of bubbles fast. She can’t avoid it.

red

It’s in her. The water is warming… red

red

She dives and gets away.

Blast it! Argh! He shouts. He sniffs. He squats. He gets up.

A spectacled young harpooner, Joseph, returns to the deck of the Sierra Leone with glittering eyes. Saliva whitens the corners of his mouth, water drips from his breeches. He pulls them up before untying the chafing cord from around his waist. Joseph shivers. Joseph is aware that he is the best. Joseph is an artist of great talent.

Curses!

A murmur runs through the men. The rhythmic sea-chop calms as Joseph reluctantly takes breath. The boat follows suit, groaning a dirge, then creaking in the deep. Its arthritic hull remembering warmer currents; its wood wooing the weed, catching it, holding it, and seducing it to stay on its body. The smaller Yankee whaleboats, still laden with men, bump against the large ship like herring.

I lost her, his words comb the wind.

His ears buzzing. Another rope is hauled up — a wetter and heavier rope — before a large, silver harpoon crashes onto the deck like an oversized crucifix extracted from the deep. Then another one. Blood comes, recalling the creature, slowly dispersing its scarlet hue on to the salt-soaked bark.

A woman cautiously approaches and hands Jo a beaker of water.

You well Jo? She asks.

Aye, aye. I’m fine woman. I lost another one.

Her hands are as dirty as his. Her thin form turns sideways, disappearing into the rigging without a word. Jo drinks and watches the life-stream as it leaves the harpoon before settling on the Sierra Leone.

The speed of the fish was otherworldly. Its presence manifested itself like a tolling bell on the crispest morning. Jo heard the fountain shooting, the shouting, and the sudden fear that descended like glory on the anaemic men that shepherded the sea. Yes, they were sore afraid when the presence made itself known. They knew what was necessary but, for Jo, the sacrifice was overwhelming. He knew that the boats would topple for a chance of a better life, or that the seas claimed their flesh, from time to time, in payment for taking such a noble prize. This time, the whale survived.

The Dart Extracted from Mr Melville’s Moby Dick

Show me his arms then. Ha! No, no. Too thin. Way too thin! Not nearly big enough to strike the first iron. The harpooner is stronger. Listen, you must understand that he’s peacemaker and warrior; he’s this strange fusion of artist and killer, creator and destroyer. He’s hard, yes. Give him good, strong arms. These things matter. Where was I?

The dart.

"Yes, the dart. Forgive me, I should clarify. The dart, that sharp harpoon, that heavy thing needs to be flung twenty or thirty feet. The chase can be a long affair. Your harpooner needs to pull the oars, throw this weight, and set an example. Sounds easy – does it not – but on the open water, ‘tis no small thing, especially the latter. That physical excursion is powered by loud and intrepid exclamations. Grunts. Shouting his tonsils sore, he’ll keep ’em going. Aye. In this straining, rowing, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, they’ll cry – Stand up, and give it to him! He drops the oar. Turns around on the chop. Seizes his harpoon from the crotch and, extracting a strength from somewhere, lunges it towards the whale. They say that five out of fifty are successful. If that. No wonder so many harpooners are marred with curse-gaze, frustrated and distant; no wonder some of them shed sweat drops of blood; and no wonder some of them wander for years looking for the single spurt. The harpooner must be the best. The harpooner must be an artist of great talent."

Herman?

Yes?

The crotch? I don’t understand.

The crotch deserves independent mention. It is a notched stick, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons. These two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands! Listen to me, you must understand that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.

Can it be retrieved? He scribbles in his pad with a shrinking pencil.

The older man shakes his head, Impossible. Impossible. Not until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse.

William John Huggins, ‘Harmony’ (1829)

Too right, I wept.

I couldn’t help it.

Those cracking bones

circling my mind like crows.

The scene reddening – its garment soaking-up

the spilt offering plugged by some

flagpole.

I’d name them,

undie them, if I could,

but no poem resurrects or

wipes away.

I pray for stopped boats and

snapped harpoons,

and the pricked consciences of their owners.

We’ll face those birds one day,

and explain why such dissonance

characterized our watch.

Too right, I wept.

I couldn’t stop it

Sh…sh…she’s wounded then?

A wiry youngster pours a bucket of sea over Jo’s feet. A simple man. He, too, is thin. If he had long hair, there’s no doubt it would be employed to patter the spray. His alabaster bottle is a black bucket. Instead, he anoints his hero with words, stammering words, twitching on the deck-floor like the movements of a passing mackerel.

Andrew Pewter does not belong to the seven privileged clans but to one of the eight unfortunate families. Whaling involves a salty class. Top-hatted captain class ruling like chiefs and under-sailors as their loyal subjects. Difficult to break into.

Yes, unfortunately.

Jo sips from the beaker, his teeth tingling from the chase. He bites down on the lip, waiting for that weakness to pass.

What’ll happen?

She’ll probably die, Andrew. Beaker plonks on deck. He wipes brown blood from his lenses. Many times, he’s thought of abandoning his spectacles and allowing the sea and all its trimmings to fuse into one mass of blue and black.

S, s, sorry boss.

Andrew skulks away; his curling hair giving him that Caesar look while his eyes reflect the mad philosophers, broken from over-thinking. He mulls over the creature and its pain, driving him into the corner where he breaks bread and counts the seconds it takes for the blood to fill each cavity, gap, and fibre of the bobbing mass. Andrew knows he’ll never hold a harpoon. No, he’s a small fish attaching himself to the bigger swimmers as they cascade through the waters. Andrew’s gaze moves towards the decks. The stench of each kill broods in his nostrils adding a degree of organicity to this man-made vessel. Sailors soon forget that the beams were crafted by their own kind, the sails sewn by their women, and the prayers uttered by their brothers. The tall men turn into mangroves, the short men are the bowing roots, cluttering the scene, swimming in the half-light of wet and dry.

Jo takes off his glasses, wiping them clean again. He begins drawing with his mind:

The Town of Sherburne in the Island of Nantucket (c.1775) Mr Starbuck Senior and Mr Folger can be seen pushing a boat into the sea in their youth. The third person is unknown to the author.

Sherburne’s dreams are all baleen.

That white-etched, saline touch,

never dissipating.

Hot sands weave memories into stories,

and scrimshaw is scratched from the seas.

Its waters clustered with translations,

cluttered with chowder cartons

slowly emptying their content

into

the

bay.

Milky hues break the shore,

clam to clam – not dust – but ground shell, sparkling like

gemstones in the flow.

This materia, these deposits, regurgitate further tales

laden with shoals of

ichthyic signs.

Nantucket sound — blue sand and yellow water — an epoch away. Every time Jo closes his eyes, the blue and yellow fold into one another like dough kneaded by his mother’s hands. He recalls his own softer, vacant hands, not laden with irons or kneaded by salt, but marinated with the memory of clam chowder. His palms warming themselves around white-blue bowls. Fingers stained with cranberries. The palette of the past is diluted with that same chowder — cloudy and fishy — seasoned with that same feeling of dread that accompanies the final dregs of a delicious stew. Once his fingers are warm enough, and the colours return like birds, he begins to see the fences: white teeth, perfectly lined in front of the houses. Windmills rotating like fish tails on the horizon, light then dark, light, and dark… and the meeting house defiantly facing the sea. The lighthouse is up again, and the gyres of its innards are re-constructed — step by step.

He walked with her on Surfside Beach. Eyelash grass blinked in the wind as faintest greens shimmered between silver and gold — an alchemy initiated by her fingers. The stretched-out sand like strips of ribbon, pulled tightly by the island’s grip. She looked around and took off her jacket, her bonnet, and her stockings.

What on earth are you doing, woman? She laughed at him. Each note, beautiful.

Come on. Nobody’s here! She kept her undergarments on. The moccasins protected her feet from the scorching sands. Her dilated pupils pearled her eyes in umber, carob, and hickory, capturing the sea in their reservoirs. An ancient Nantucketer returned, bright-eyed and brave. Jo soon followed. His clothing fused with skin and cracking shells pinched his soles. Eventually, she gave up those moccasins and threw them towards him.

Watch it!

The water lapped against their bellies. They held their clothing down, fighting the ludic current. She bent her knees, entering an oily mass like a white penitent, covering her breasts carefully with her palms – ever looking, fearing the eyes of the island. She walked…

…into the deep. The navy. Her island floated like a mountain – diamantine, upside down – rotating on an unseen surface. She stretched her hands into the void, her mother’s ring glistening like a star on a ghostly edifice. The remaining clothing streaming behind like jellyfish. She followed the line of the island with her finger before looking down.

Soft shapes.

Distant spectres.

Moving voodoo dolls,

pinned

with

harp-

oo-

n

s.

Breathless with awe at