“De whale make no sound at all when you hit it. It just lash de tail and it gone,” says Ollivierre. “Dan let go of everything an put his two hands on de rope. De whale have to take de rope from him; he have to hold it down.”
A struck whale gives a few good thrashes with its tail and then tries to flee. It is a moment of consummate chaos: the line screaming out through the bow chock; the crew trying to lower the mast; the helmsman bending the line around the smoking loggerhead. Some men freeze, and others achieve ultimate clarity. “After we harpoon it, that frightness, that cowardness go from me,” says Harold Corea, who at sixty-three is one of the oldest members of the crew. “It all go away; I become brave, I get brave.”
Brave or not, things can go very wrong. Around 1970—Ollivierre doesn’t remember exactly when—a whale smacked the boat with a fluke, staving in the side and knocking Ollivierre out cold. When he came to, he realized that the rope had grabbed him and turned his leg into a loggerhead. It sawed down to bone in an instant, cauterizing the arteries as it went, and nearly ripped his hand in half. Ollivierre refused to cut the rope because he didn’t want the whale to get away, but finally the barnacle-encrusted fluke severed it for him. The boat returned to shore, and Ollivierre walked up the beach unassisted, his tibia showing and his foot as heavy as cement. Two men on the beach fainted at the sight.
There is no such thing as an uneventful whale hunt; by definition it’s either a disaster or almost one. As soon as the harpoon is fast in the whale, the crew drops the mast and Dan tightens up on the loggerhead to force the whale to tow the boat through the water, foredeck awash, men crammed into the stern, a twenty-knot wake spreading out behind. Too much speed and the boat will go under; too much slack and the whale will run out the line. (There is one account of a blue whale that towed a ninety-foot twin-screw chaser boat, its engines going full bore astern, for fifty miles before tiring.) Every time the whale lets up, the crewmen put their hands on the line and start hauling it back in. The idea is to get close enough for Ollivierre to use either a hand lance or a forty-five-pound bomb gun, whose design dates back to the 1870s. It fires a shotgun shell screwed to a six-inch brass tube filled with powder that’s ignited by a ten-second fuse. Ollivierre packs his own explosives and uses them with tremendous discretion.
The alternative to the gun is a light lance with a rounded head that doesn’t catch inside the whale; standing in the bow, Ollivierre thrusts again and again until he finds the heart. “De whole thing is dangerous, but de going in and de killing of it is de most dangerous,” he says. He’s been known to leap onto the back of the whale and sit with his legs wrapped around the harpoon, stabbing. Sometimes the whale sounds, and Ollivierre goes down with it; if it goes too deep, he lets go and the crew pulls him back to the boat. When his lance has found the heart, dark arterial blood spouts out the blowhole. The huge animal stops thrashing, and its long white flippers splay outward. Two men go over the side with a rope and tie up the mouth; otherwise water will fill the innards and the whale will sink.
As dangerous as it is, only one Bequian has ever lost his life in a whaleboat: a harpooner named Dixon Durham, who was beheaded by a whale’s flukes in 1885. So cleanly was he slapped from the boat that no one else on board was even touched. The closest Ollivierre has come to being Bequia’s second statistic was in 1992, when the line caught on a midship thwart and pulled his boat under. He and his crew were miles from Bequia, and no one was following them; Ollivierre knew that without the boat, they would all drown. He grabbed the bow and was carried down into the quiet green depths. Equipment was rising up all around him: oars, ropes, wooden tubs. He hung on to the bow and clawed desperately for the knife at his belt. By some miracle the rope broke, and the whole mess—boat, harpoons, and harpooner—floated back up into the world.
Ollivierre found his VHF radio floating among the wreckage and called for help. Several days later, some fishermen in Guyana heard a terrible slapping on the mudflats outside their village and went to investigate. They found Ollivierre’s whale stranded on the beach, beating the world with her flippers as she died.
The next day, Ollivierre, Hazell, and Corea are back up at the lookout, keeping an eye on the sea. Corea, who was partially crippled by an ocean wave at age nineteen, is one of the last of the old whalers. Hazell is the future of Bequia whaling, if there is such a thing. They sit on the hilltop all morning without seeing a sign. No one knows where the whales are. A late migration? A different route? Are there just no more whales?
After a couple of hours Ollivierre is ready to call it quits for the day. If the others see a spout, they can just run over to his house and tell him. More than anything he just seems weary; he’s whaled for thirty-seven years and fished up until a few years ago. Enough is enough. He says good-bye and walks slowly down the hill. Corea watches him go and scours the channel one more time.
Hazell squats on a rock in the shade with half his life still ahead of him. He is neither old nor young, a man caught between worlds, between generations. Down the hill is a scarred old man who’s trying to teach him everything he knows; across the ocean is a council of nations playing tug-of-war with a twenty-seven-foot sailboat. Hazell would try to reconcile the two, if it were possible, but it’s not. And so he’s left with one simple task: to visualize what it will be like to face his first whale.
A long winter swell will be running. The sunlight will catch the spray like diamonds. He’ll be in the bow with his thigh against the foredeck and the harpoon held high. The past and the future will fall away, until there are no politics, no boycotts, no journalists. There will be just one man with an ancient weapon and his heart in his throat.
ESCAPE FROM KASHMIR
1996
The guerrillas appeared on the ridgeline shortly before dusk and walked down the bare hillside into the Americans’ camp without bothering to unsling their guns. They were lean and dark and had everything they needed on their persons: horse blankets over their shoulders; ammunition belts across their chests; old tennis shoes on their feet. Most of them were very young, but one was at least thirty and hard-looking around the eyes—“a killer,” one witness said. Jane Schelly, a schoolteacher from Spokane, Washington, watched them come.
“There were ten or twelve of them,” she says, “and they were dressed to move. They didn’t point their guns or anything; they just told us to sit down. Our guides told us they were looking for Israelis.”
Schelly and her husband, Donald Hutchings, were experienced trekkers in their early forties who took a month every summer to travel somewhere in the world: the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia; the Annapurna Massif; Bolivia. Hutchings, a neuropsychologist, was a skilled technical climber who had led expeditions in Alaska and the Cascade Range. He knew about altitude sickness, he knew about ropes, and he was completely at ease on rock and in snow. The couple had considered climbing farther east, in Nepal, but had set their sights instead on the Zanskar Mountains in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. For centuries, British colonists and Indian royalty had traveled to the region to escape the summer heat, and over the past twenty years it had become a mecca for Western trekkers who didn’t want to test themselves in the higher areas of the Himalayas. It is a staggeringly beautiful land of pine forests and glaciers and—since an Indian government massacre of thirty or forty protesters in its capital, Srinagar, in 1990—simmering civil war.