On September 28, 1891, the New York writer Herman Melville died of a heart attack. However, his Moby Dick sold so poorly that decades later he was called "the greatest work ever made at sea" by David Herbert Lawrence. At the heart of this work, no doubt, is the mad whaling ship captain Yaha and his longtime enemy, the albino sperm whale named Beluga Whale. Sailors on board saw the sea as a road, while whalers saw the sea as a land of blood and sweat. The soil of this land, original sin and the goddess of vengeance all surround the sperm whale.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="2" > the earliest "king of the deep sea"</h1>
Sperm whales are whales in the abyss. It is the most powerful life form on earth. According to human records, the largest sperm whale is more than 20 meters long and weighs nearly 60 tons. It is the largest toothed whale in existence and the largest toothed whale ever, with the largest brain in history (5 times the size of the human brain) and the longest digestive tract (about 300 meters). Its shape will never be forgotten—the square head is a third of the length of the body, and the narrow chin is like a chainsaw.
They feed in the ocean at a depth of 2,000 meters and use ultrasound to detect dark environments. The 7.8-kilogram brain guides them to wrestle with giant squid, leaving scars all over their bodies. For a long time, the stomach of sperm whales was the only source of human understanding of the deep sea. It crushes the swallowed food with a muscular first stomach, dissolves it with a huge second stomach, and then spits out the remaining jaw fragments. A small number of foreign bodies enter the intestines, eventually forming precious ambergris.
After 2 hours of breathing, diving and fighting, they will come to the calm sea, rest for eight minutes, and then sink again; these 8 minutes of breathing will spew out more than 40 times from the "stomata" of the sperm whale, reaching a column of water up to 2 meters high. Compared to the abyss, sea level is a bright, warm, tranquil resting place; adult sperm whales with few natural predators may have rested here for 25 million years.
However, thousands of years of calm seas were broken by a terrestrial species, and giant "abyss whales" were hunted by humans because of light.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > early human hunting</h1>
"Take mermaid paste as a candle, and those who are immortal will be immortal for a long time." Burning animal fat for illumination is nothing new. Whaling has a history of thousands of years. Among some indigenous peoples in Northern Europe and North America, the tradition of coastal whaling in small groups continues. But in the 18th century, a substance endemic to sperm whales was noticed: whale oil. Unlike other animal fats, sperm whale brain oil is not a triglyceride, but a single-chain wax ester; it is not easy to deteriorate, burns cleaner, and the flame is bright and stable. Whalers cut off the sperm whale's head, place it on the deck, dig a hole in it, and let its contents flow into the barrel; after the harsh winter colds, the raw whale naphtha that returns to land condenses into a spongy agnostic shape, and then presses it to extract liquid pure sperm whale oil; the remaining solids are processed into fat.
As a result, sperm whales became the best source of lamp oil, candles, and ointment; before the advent of gas and electric lamps, they were first-class lighting fuels, almost equivalent to the brightness of standard candles. However, the glow of the sperm whale also ignited the revolution in the whaling industry, and the glow of the human industry would eclipse all the big whales.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="10" > "cargo" under a harpoon</h1>
Before the 18th century, whaling was a small-scale fishery off the northern coast. Traditional European whalers cut the balm into chunks, put it in jars, and transport it back to shore for processing. The cold of the North Atlantic ensures that dead whales don't spoil. However, in order to hunt sperm whales active in the tropical ocean, in 1760, whalers on the American island of South Tarquet invented the technology of setting boilers on ships to refine whale oil, which became the prototype of today's 10,000-ton "factory ships" so that the captured whales would not rot before they landed.
That's when whaling became an industry. Whalers no longer need guidance from shore whale watchers or small "whale workshops" on land. After the whaling boat found the whale, it put down the boat of five or six people, rowed closer, threw the harpoon with a harpoon hand, pierced the whale's lungs, dragged the whale back to the side of the boat, cut off the useful parts, and processed on the boat. Whales are tracked, hunted, cut and refined on the ocean; only whale oil and baleens are reached on shore, and only candlelight and the silhouette of tights are seen in the eyes of the townspeople. The whale no longer belongs to pure nature or to a specific coastal community; it has become a cog in society and has therefore been imposed all the power and original sin of human industry.
In 1851, when the painter Emmanuel Loitz painted his masterpiece Washington crossing the Delaware River, he asked General Washington to stand on a small whaling boat with sailors piercing a lump of river ice with harpoons on the bow.
For 150 years, in the light of human industry, sperm whales and their relatives have been staring into another abyss. While kerosene and electricity replaced candles and whale oil, harpoon cannons, boat slides and ultra-high pressure stoves also replaced whaling dinghies and boiling oil pots. Hydrogenated oil technology has made whale oil a food and soap, and the development of explosives has a huge demand for glycerin. The highest annual whaling in the 19th century was no more than 20,000, compared to 60,000 in the 1960s. Today's large cetaceans are more or less in crisis, with more than half of cetaceans under threat on the IUCN Red List.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="15" > indigenous people on Earth</h1>
A hundred years of human history is only a moment for the sperm whale, and it will not and will not have the ability to make any essential changes. The sperm whale will still descend to the deep sea below 2,000 meters after 8 minutes, wrestle with millions of years of "nemesis" squid, win, scarred, float on the surface of the water to recuperate, feed the next generation, until the whaling ship disappears, or until itself becomes extinct, but even after its extinction, future paleontologists will know that there was once such a species roaming in the earth's oceans, and its world is half abyss, half light.