February 7, 2023 • 28 mins
Today, Herman Melville's magnum opus Moby Dick is lauded as a classic of American literature -- but it turns out Melville didn't invent the whole thing on his own. In the first part of this special two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max dive into the story of a real-life white whale named Mocha Dick, and how his tragic story inspired Melville to create a fictional white whale all his own.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Oh boy,
(00:27):
welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. We are coming to
you with a whale of a tale. Heads up that
this episode might contain some stories that are not for
everyone in the crowd, so do be aware before we
get into a bunch of moby dick jokes. Let's introduce
(00:49):
our super producer, Mr Max Williams. Give him up. WHOA, Yeah,
I'm not looking forward to this story. I've asked me
heart these taking a trip downed into Davy Jones as locker,
which is a thing. Um. I always confused Davy Jones
with Casey Jones from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They're
not the same. Um, just f y I if anyone
(01:12):
else that same mistake. Uh. And then there and I
think it was a missed opportunity for them not to
call the guy Long Jones Silver instead of long John Silver. Uh.
That's over there on the horizon as we record Scattered
to the winds. That's Mr Noel Brown. Hi. M Ben Bullen.
(01:33):
We are using the theater of the mind to go
on a sailing sojourn today a maritime journey that's gonna
be a two parter, folks. This week we're looking at
the Brutal and all two true stories that inspired Moby Dick,
(01:56):
the the story canonical novel by Herman Melville, loved by some,
hated by many. A high schooler, right, yeah, uh, chat
GPT can knock that right out for you, high school
or is just kidding? Did you hear about that? By
the way, did you have heard about this chat gpt
(02:16):
is is putting in some guardrails to supposedly prevent cheating
using this chatbot, but apparently it's not even very good
at detecting whether or not something is AI or not,
and more likely will lead to students being accused of
using a I when they're actually writing just bad essays.
And it's doing a great job with a continuing run
(02:38):
of Seinfeld. I don't know if you guys saw that,
but seven on twitch with even complete with poorly placed
laugh tracks. Yes, and there was a time when I
think there was a bit of a ghost in the
machine or a burp in the system, and the chat
GPT Seinfeld kind of stud and accidentally went into some
(03:02):
anti comedy and for ten minutes. It just stood there
in front of the microphone. It was great fun. Hey,
you know, they can't all be bangers. They can't all
be bangers. But Moby Dick certainly is a story full
of bangs and wallops and injustice and great hunts. Um,
(03:23):
it's about whales, Yes, the titular white whale Moby Dick,
which was actually named after a real creature. I didn't
know this thanks to research associate Zach Williams for hipping
us to Mocha Dick, which sounds like a cheeky name
for a coffee beverage. Um. Mocha Dick was the name
(03:43):
that was given to a a cetacean that was sited
off the coast of Chile near Mocha Island, and apparently
the dick part is thought to have been put there
out of a practice of giving whales deadly ones, in
particular names like Dick or Tom. You think those would
be the innocuous whales with the kind of more run
(04:05):
of the mill names like Dick or Tom. Yeah, maybe
it's like prison rules. The guys with the really innocuous
names are the ones you have to be the most
careful of. Yeah, like little John being the tallest, right, right,
like a guy named snake bite probably good dude, a
guy named Smurf watch out, Uh Papa Smurf or Smurfat
cower and terror. But yeah, we're talking about sperm whales.
(04:29):
And back in the day, sperm whales were prized for
and they were killed by the whale load for their
high quality oil that was used in a number of
industrial applications. Uh. They were also because they were apex
animals of the sea in a very real way. They
(04:51):
wouldn't take this stuff just uh laying down doing the backstroke.
They were very aggressive. And that's that's what a lot
of Melville's novel from eight fifty one is about. I
love that you're pointing out Mocha Dick so the first time,
the first time he encounters whalers, the whalers unsuccessfully attempt
(05:14):
to kill Mocha Dick. And what's strange about this is whales,
like many other cetaceans, are incredibly intelligent animals. We know
that they're able to communicate through multiple generations via the
whale songs, right, which are unique and are very much
um akin to language. So and beautiful by the way,
(05:37):
I mean, you know, there's sort of a bit of
a cliche of relaxing in a bath, you know, with
scented candles playing types of whale songs. I think that
was actually a scene in The Big Lebowski where the
dude is is really stressed out because of all the
crazy stuff going on in that movie, and then he's
in the bath smoking a j and listening to a
cassette of whale songs. Yes and to the And we
(06:01):
know that these creatures, in addition to being huge and intelligent,
they're also very long lived in the wild. And so
over the course of the next almost thirty years, this
one whale Mocha Dick earns a reputation as one of
the scariest folks on the maritime block. Uh. He has
(06:23):
been spotted and attacked by at least one hundred different
whaling ships, and he escaped everyone. He destroyed, like absolutely
scuttled and sank twenty of those ships. And it was
only the very last ship that put an end to
his life. And I'm gonna be honest just you know, folks,
(06:45):
you can be mad if you want when I say it,
But team Mocha Dick all the way here. I'm team whales.
Oh absolutely, have you ever have you, either of you guys,
ever heard of the kind of b movie that was,
I think a response to Jaws, or might have been
just before Jaws, but it's called Orca. I've heard of it.
I can't remember the specifics of the plot. Yeah, I
(07:06):
mean it's mainly just a revenge tale because this the
titular whale uh her her, you know, pups what do
you call whale babies? Um, are killed by a w
ship calves correct, and this whale seeks revenge on them.
What did her wrong? Um? And it's actually pretty well shot.
(07:27):
I think it's a seventies movie, nineteen seventy seven, so
Jaws having come out in nineteen seventy five obviously, you know,
create a sort of a craze for unstoppable underwater creatures.
I think they actually used real whale footage in the
film too. But I think it is actually true because
of what you mentioned about the intelligence of these creatures,
(07:47):
and they don't forget, and that they can, in fact,
in the same way uh Corvid's target those that have
annoyed them or done them wrong. Uh. That is a
thing that could potentially happen, and it also a big
part of the plot of the new Avatar movie. Um,
there's a lot of whales, and you know, they talk
about the whales kind of having this magical secretion, which
(08:10):
is based on a real thing to something called ambergrease
that is a really stinky, kind of oily substance that
isn't the same as blubber and it is used in perfumes. Yeah.
I know about that one because of Futurama exactly. I
know about that one because of research I did on
how messed up the cosmetics industry is. So I think
(08:31):
it's illegal though to use, you know, I mean, it's
it's a legal deep birdenest soup. But that hasn't stopped
a lot of people because people are again you know,
I'll just say it team whale. And there's some interesting
(08:53):
threads I want to sew in here as we go,
So let's continue setting up this story. So very few
things occurred in a vacuum, uh Mocha dicks entire careers
is followed the way that some investigative reporters might follow
the career of criminals today. There's a guy named Jeremiah
(09:14):
and Reynolds who documents the life and Times of Moka
Dick in an issue of a magazine called The Knickerbocker
in eighteen thirty nine. We know that Moka Dick is
indeed a dude, a male, an old bull whale, and
he was white as wool like he uh he was
(09:39):
like a um, we're pulling some quotes here, but we
also just summarized, uh. He looked like people weren't sure
whether it was because he was so old, but he
probably had Albanism. And he also was terrifying to witness
if you're a human sailor, because out the horizon you
(10:01):
see this roar, right, this expansion of water flinging from
his uh flinging from this animal. And this guy even
had barnacles apparently that had clustered around his head, which
is very unusual. It looked like he almost had armor,
(10:21):
if we're being honest. And no one was sure when
Mocha had been discovered or like when Moco was born.
They think that he had been sited, as we mentioned
the top somewhere before eighteen ten, near the island of Mocha,
(10:41):
but they just followed his his his wake of shipwrecks
that he left, and then certainly in the eight, there
would be some amount of cataloging of these type of
creatures and a little bit more of a scientific approach
to these large sea creatures. But some of these sailors
may not have cared too much about that or had
access to and probably still thought these were demonic sea monsters. Yeah,
(11:05):
and and you know, it's something we talked about and
stuff that once you know, one thing you have to
realize when you hear stories of sea serpents or big
monsters from the sea demolishing ships. A lot of those
ships were much smaller than they're they're depicted in fiction.
So it's not outside the realm of possibility that something
(11:27):
as big as a sperm whale could absolutely put one
to ruin. Even the name of the ship in the
story Moby Dick the Peaquad, it just sounds like a
little tiny key thing, doesn't it. Yeah. Yeah, And and
of course that's not to diminish the Peaquad tribe which
the which is the namesake of the ship, at least
(11:49):
per Ishmael in the in the book. But speaking of names,
I do want to shout out how weird the English
language is. The study of set Asians broadly is satology,
so you would be a statologist, but you can also
go specifically to whales and uh. In the past you
would have been called a whaleologist or the inexpert in whaleology,
(12:15):
which sounds so very made up, like Tim and Eric
level made up. I'm a whaleologist in the institations are uh,
they include whales, dolphins, and porpoises, whales being obviously the
most massive of these three varieties. So and they are
also mammals because they do give live birth and they've
(12:36):
got they've got a lot of the same brain functions
that you would see in very intelligent mammals, um like
an elephant or uh, some primates, not all dolphins we know,
I mean all the dolphins studies, like some of the
experiments done by John C. Lily in terms of their
ability to communicate and even thought that they were potentially
(12:58):
like head telepathy or something. Right, A lot of a
lot of fuss made about the intelligence of dolphins. Yeah, yeah,
And that story is one that gets repeated on podcasts
of plenty for good reason. Not entirely family friendly, but
it shows you some of the bleeding edges of science
(13:18):
at the time. Max, your hand gesture is accurate and inappropriate. Yeah,
well it's not all the way dolphins sex. It's like
second base. Yeah, is that third base? I don't know, Uh,
you know, we're not we're not sports. Dolphins don't play baseball.
Is the issue that that's actually one of the big
(13:38):
issues they're so from from the first time that people
know of this Mocha Dick character, this this whale, we
we see that it has been actively hunted by this
very brutal whaling industry. And it's not a aping without
(14:00):
battle scars. This feels like a very heavy metal thing.
And he was carrying heavy metal. He would he was
hit by all sorts of harpoons that had chains attached,
and they dragged after him for up to a hundred
yards at least per the per the contemporary reports. And uh,
(14:21):
it's I don't know, I mean that must be so
traumatic to the animal. Yeah, And I mean obviously, um,
James Cameron is a you know, professed naturalists. He uh,
you know, has just done deep sea expeditions with his
you know, vast resources that even some scientists couldn't afford
to do. Um, and he is very you know, enamored
(14:43):
by sea creatures and the whales in Avatar to whatever
you wanted the with the Shape of Water. No, it's
a different movie, very similar. There there's you know, there's
battle scars. The whaling industry is very much paralleled in
this kind of future, you know, society in Avatar. And
I a should really like the movie a lot, And
(15:05):
I was very skeptical when he announced, you know, this
movie I made fifteen years ago or whatever, we're gonna
make like ten more. It is already, I think, in
on par with the grosses of the first Avatar movie.
So Jay's camera man. He's a bit of a megalomaniac
and apparently a nightmare to work for, but he knows
his business, and thank goodness, he likes the ocean. So
(15:27):
Moka Dick becomes so famous that whaling captain's talk about
him as a way of greeting each other when you
see another ship going across the Pacific. One of the
things that you always say in your conversation with the
other captain is any news from Mocha Dick. Like every
(15:49):
whaling captain wants to nail this poor whale. The the
idea is that this is like the Golden Grail. This
is the ultimate huntsman's trophy. And the weird thing is
that if you didn't, if he didn't mess with this,
(16:11):
not in the natural wonder of the world, then he
would just swim by and probably be like, hey, thank
you for not inexplicably trying to kill me and giving
me these non consensual piercings. Well, that was a thing.
I can't remember where I heard it, but it was recently,
maybe on NPR. I was talking about sea life and
(16:33):
mentioning the fact that in general, like, of course there's
a food chain and creatures eat other creatures, but there
are no like just agro species that are just like
trying to mess with other species just because um, it's
all very kind of carefully balanced sort of system, and
humans are just not like that. We go after things
(16:55):
because they freak us out and because we are made
to feel smaller by them, and therefore we want to,
rather than find out what their deal is, just you know,
murder them. It reminds me of one of the most
insightful far Side cartoons that Gary Larson ever made. It's
a caveman who watches a bird fly, then flaps its
(17:17):
arms and then builds a bow and arrow and shoots
the bird and that's classic human And with that, let's
talk about me, and let's talk about how Mocha Dick
met his his end. Uh. He went out like a
g he went out like a hero. Because according to
the story, Mocha Dick, after surviving all these attempted assassinations,
(17:42):
sees a mother whale and her calf, and the calf
has just been this juvenile well has just been killed
by whalers, so it went belly up. And when the
mother realized her child was dead, she turned on the
whalers and tried to destroy the ship. They harpooned her
(18:03):
and mortally wounded her before she was able to strike
this ship. Mocha Dick was in the area, saw this
and attacked the whaling ship directly. Uh. He destroyed one
of the smaller boats, but they have multiple boats. He
was injured by a harpoon. Yeah, and this is almost
exactly the plot of that that seventies movie Orca that
(18:25):
I was talking about. It's very much like a revenge tale.
So again I mean this this. You know, Mocha Dick
was not operating on full capacity after numerous encounters with
with man uh and and all of man's implements of
(18:49):
you know, murder and and torture. So inevitably Mocha Dick
succumbed to his wounds. Yeah. Unfortunately, this this giant was
brought down by the Lily Putchin forces of man. Right,
is that right? The it's in Gulliver's Travels the Tiny Yeah. Yeah,
(19:14):
so so I think that's an accurate comparison. Um. You
can see the writing about his death, which is coming
to people's second hand in many cases, and is also
embellished a little bit as a modern myth with each retelling. So,
according to the story, he shoots up twenty feet above
(19:35):
the waves. Uh. He tries to dart away. They pursue
him through rough water for a quarter of a mile
because he's that big, and he's messed the surface of
the water up that much. Uh. He is quivering and twitching.
He's under his death throws. The reporting uses the phrase
(19:55):
as if under the influence of Galvinism, which means it
looks like he's being elect tricute. It the waist twitching. Yeah,
And they came near him. They were able to get
close enough because he was weakened, and they started just
hacking at him. Uh. And he tried to he tried
to fight back, but he was just too They were
(20:20):
up on him, like stabbing him, and uh, he was
just too wounded to make to make an escape when
she was trying to do and uh, they killed him.
Isn't it funny how oftentimes man thinks they're so great
and powerful, but it's totally cheating. You know, they're using
(20:43):
all these other implements and they have the deck stacked
in their favor. You know, this whale survived multiple encounters
and they just wore him down over time and then
finally just you know, dealt the death blow. But good lord,
what a fight, mocha Dick. But I think we're all
on team team Dick here, team whale for sure. Yeah.
(21:06):
And it's weird because in this rewarding you will see,
you know, this is a story of adventure on the
high seat. So the UM it occurs in the larger
literary ecosystem of man conquering nature heroically. And that's how
all these things are, That's how all these adventure narratives
(21:29):
are depicted, just like UM thirty seven days apparel from ephemeral.
That's that's one to one kind of encounter, right, except
in this case, the wild happens to be the whale
and uh, and here there is a kaiju story exactly.
And it wasn't until later in America or in literature
or the cannon. I guess that you had folks like
(21:50):
Jack London who were more identifying with the animals, you know,
and it was more about how can we live in
balance with with these uh, with these creatures. And so
we say that because if you read the reporting of
the death of Mocha Dick, then you see that it
(22:11):
comes like gets depicted as the humans heroically getting so
close to death themselves. It's like UM on a much
larger mythical level. It's like if you've ever played tech
In or Street Fighter or Soul Caliber, and you get
to the point where if either side takes one hit,
(22:32):
the game is over. And the humans got that that
at last hit. So that's that's how it's depicted. Uh.
You can see UM. You can see the first first
person narratives where they're saying things like he's fit up
at last I screened at the very top of my voice, Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah,
And you know, they're literally throwing up their caps and
(22:54):
dancing around around the corpse of this whale and presumably singing,
presuming we singing, And so hilay around me, boys, and
let us set on him. I cried for I saw
his spirit was broken at last, But the lands and
spade were needless. Now the dying animal was struggling in
(23:14):
a whirlpool of bloody foam, and the ocean far around
was tinted with crimson. Yeah, and it just it just
goes on and this, and so we know that Herman
Melville what was aware of the story, right, it's this
albino whale that is captured global imagination. Mocha Dick, is it?
(23:41):
I mean, Moka Dick, Moby Dick. It's not too long
of a logical leap, but it is only part of
the inspiration for the novel Moby Dick. And in the
next like in part two, I think we're going to
talk about the crew. But before we end, I had
I had an update. I know you've probably heard this
(24:03):
story because we talked about it before at some point,
The World's Loneliest whale. Remember this guy who sung we
haven't Okay? So you know, all whale songs have some
stuff in commons so they can communicate with each other.
There was one whale who was called the fifty two
Hurts whale because his song He's a blue whale, not
(24:26):
a sperm whale. His song, which are the bigger? Which
are bigger? Even? Right? Aren't the great blue whales the biggest? Art? Yeah?
And uh, the blue whales have a frequency of ten
to thirty nine hurts and this this guy's voice was
so so different that he couldn't really communicate with other whales,
(24:51):
and so he's called the loneliest whale. He actually inspired
a song by the K pop group BTS. It's called
Walian fifty two. It's like alien whale. And uh, I
just mentioned this because there's a happy ending with this guy. Apparently,
as of October of twenty twenty two, some stytologists or
(25:14):
who allologists, they prefer the term marine scientists. Uh, they
heard two different fifty two hurts calls within ten minutes
of each other off the coast of California. So finally,
our our poor buddy who is standing in the corner
of the ocean, uh talking to fifty two hurts, found
(25:37):
someone who heard him, who hurts him? If oh no, wait,
that's worth it? Yes, from the perspective to have an
audio nerd. You said ten to fifty two hurts, So
fifty two hurts is like sub base frequencies, like if
you think of, like, you know, a song, those are
frequencies that are gonna be like eight oh eight kick drums,
(25:58):
like in the lowest part of that. And ten isn't
even on the graph of what would you'd use in
an audio recording because it's outside of the realm of
of human hearing. Yes, so most blue whales again are
like ten to thirty die and hurts. So for some reason,
this guy is on his eight oh eights on his
fifty two hurts. But we wanted to uh, we wanted
(26:21):
to have at least one part of this of today's
story that wasn't us uh excoriating whalers of the past.
It's like the part in the blind melon video or
the little be girl finds her people and then they
frolic gleefully together in the meadow. What a wonderful image.
(26:42):
Now imagine that breaks me up every time with two
wheel two whales dancing, And that's gonna be part one
of our journey. But tune in in a few days
for part two, where we look at the story of
the crew that likely inspired the crew in Moby Dick.
(27:03):
In the meantime, thanks to our super producer call him
is Ishmael or call him Max Williams, just don't call
him during dinner. Yes, yes, uh. And also big big
thanks of course to Alex Williams. We have some breaking news.
We might have our dear old pal Mr Casey Pegram
(27:27):
returning for an episode in the near future. Ah Casey
on the case indeed um. Also huge thanks to Christopher
hasciotis here in spirit uh he's Jeff Coades, Jonathan Strickland,
and and to you Ben for for for being my
uh my mate. I don't know anything about nautical terms
(27:50):
this ocean voyage and where is friendship found? It's not
down on any map. True places never are under the scene.
We'll see you next time. For more podcasts from my
(28:10):
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Oh boy,
(00:27):
welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. We are coming to
you with a whale of a tale. Heads up that
this episode might contain some stories that are not for
everyone in the crowd, so do be aware before we
get into a bunch of moby dick jokes. Let's introduce
(00:49):
our super producer, Mr Max Williams. Give him up. WHOA, Yeah,
I'm not looking forward to this story. I've asked me
heart these taking a trip downed into Davy Jones as locker,
which is a thing. Um. I always confused Davy Jones
with Casey Jones from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They're
not the same. Um, just f y I if anyone
(01:12):
else that same mistake. Uh. And then there and I
think it was a missed opportunity for them not to
call the guy Long Jones Silver instead of long John Silver. Uh.
That's over there on the horizon as we record Scattered
to the winds. That's Mr Noel Brown. Hi. M Ben Bullen.
(01:33):
We are using the theater of the mind to go
on a sailing sojourn today a maritime journey that's gonna
be a two parter, folks. This week we're looking at
the Brutal and all two true stories that inspired Moby Dick,
(01:56):
the the story canonical novel by Herman Melville, loved by some,
hated by many. A high schooler, right, yeah, uh, chat
GPT can knock that right out for you, high school
or is just kidding? Did you hear about that? By
the way, did you have heard about this chat gpt
(02:16):
is is putting in some guardrails to supposedly prevent cheating
using this chatbot, but apparently it's not even very good
at detecting whether or not something is AI or not,
and more likely will lead to students being accused of
using a I when they're actually writing just bad essays.
And it's doing a great job with a continuing run
(02:38):
of Seinfeld. I don't know if you guys saw that,
but seven on twitch with even complete with poorly placed
laugh tracks. Yes, and there was a time when I
think there was a bit of a ghost in the
machine or a burp in the system, and the chat
GPT Seinfeld kind of stud and accidentally went into some
(03:02):
anti comedy and for ten minutes. It just stood there
in front of the microphone. It was great fun. Hey,
you know, they can't all be bangers. They can't all
be bangers. But Moby Dick certainly is a story full
of bangs and wallops and injustice and great hunts. Um,
(03:23):
it's about whales, Yes, the titular white whale Moby Dick,
which was actually named after a real creature. I didn't
know this thanks to research associate Zach Williams for hipping
us to Mocha Dick, which sounds like a cheeky name
for a coffee beverage. Um. Mocha Dick was the name
(03:43):
that was given to a a cetacean that was sited
off the coast of Chile near Mocha Island, and apparently
the dick part is thought to have been put there
out of a practice of giving whales deadly ones, in
particular names like Dick or Tom. You think those would
be the innocuous whales with the kind of more run
(04:05):
of the mill names like Dick or Tom. Yeah, maybe
it's like prison rules. The guys with the really innocuous
names are the ones you have to be the most
careful of. Yeah, like little John being the tallest, right, right,
like a guy named snake bite probably good dude, a
guy named Smurf watch out, Uh Papa Smurf or Smurfat
cower and terror. But yeah, we're talking about sperm whales.
(04:29):
And back in the day, sperm whales were prized for
and they were killed by the whale load for their
high quality oil that was used in a number of
industrial applications. Uh. They were also because they were apex
animals of the sea in a very real way. They
(04:51):
wouldn't take this stuff just uh laying down doing the backstroke.
They were very aggressive. And that's that's what a lot
of Melville's novel from eight fifty one is about. I
love that you're pointing out Mocha Dick so the first time,
the first time he encounters whalers, the whalers unsuccessfully attempt
(05:14):
to kill Mocha Dick. And what's strange about this is whales,
like many other cetaceans, are incredibly intelligent animals. We know
that they're able to communicate through multiple generations via the
whale songs, right, which are unique and are very much
um akin to language. So and beautiful by the way,
(05:37):
I mean, you know, there's sort of a bit of
a cliche of relaxing in a bath, you know, with
scented candles playing types of whale songs. I think that
was actually a scene in The Big Lebowski where the
dude is is really stressed out because of all the
crazy stuff going on in that movie, and then he's
in the bath smoking a j and listening to a
cassette of whale songs. Yes and to the And we
(06:01):
know that these creatures, in addition to being huge and intelligent,
they're also very long lived in the wild. And so
over the course of the next almost thirty years, this
one whale Mocha Dick earns a reputation as one of
the scariest folks on the maritime block. Uh. He has
(06:23):
been spotted and attacked by at least one hundred different
whaling ships, and he escaped everyone. He destroyed, like absolutely
scuttled and sank twenty of those ships. And it was
only the very last ship that put an end to
his life. And I'm gonna be honest just you know, folks,
(06:45):
you can be mad if you want when I say it,
But team Mocha Dick all the way here. I'm team whales.
Oh absolutely, have you ever have you, either of you guys,
ever heard of the kind of b movie that was,
I think a response to Jaws, or might have been
just before Jaws, but it's called Orca. I've heard of it.
I can't remember the specifics of the plot. Yeah, I
(07:06):
mean it's mainly just a revenge tale because this the
titular whale uh her her, you know, pups what do
you call whale babies? Um, are killed by a w
ship calves correct, and this whale seeks revenge on them.
What did her wrong? Um? And it's actually pretty well shot.
(07:27):
I think it's a seventies movie, nineteen seventy seven, so
Jaws having come out in nineteen seventy five obviously, you know,
create a sort of a craze for unstoppable underwater creatures.
I think they actually used real whale footage in the
film too. But I think it is actually true because
of what you mentioned about the intelligence of these creatures,
(07:47):
and they don't forget, and that they can, in fact,
in the same way uh Corvid's target those that have
annoyed them or done them wrong. Uh. That is a
thing that could potentially happen, and it also a big
part of the plot of the new Avatar movie. Um,
there's a lot of whales, and you know, they talk
about the whales kind of having this magical secretion, which
(08:10):
is based on a real thing to something called ambergrease
that is a really stinky, kind of oily substance that
isn't the same as blubber and it is used in perfumes. Yeah.
I know about that one because of Futurama exactly. I
know about that one because of research I did on
how messed up the cosmetics industry is. So I think
(08:31):
it's illegal though to use, you know, I mean, it's
it's a legal deep birdenest soup. But that hasn't stopped
a lot of people because people are again you know,
I'll just say it team whale. And there's some interesting
(08:53):
threads I want to sew in here as we go,
So let's continue setting up this story. So very few
things occurred in a vacuum, uh Mocha dicks entire careers
is followed the way that some investigative reporters might follow
the career of criminals today. There's a guy named Jeremiah
(09:14):
and Reynolds who documents the life and Times of Moka
Dick in an issue of a magazine called The Knickerbocker
in eighteen thirty nine. We know that Moka Dick is
indeed a dude, a male, an old bull whale, and
he was white as wool like he uh he was
(09:39):
like a um, we're pulling some quotes here, but we
also just summarized, uh. He looked like people weren't sure
whether it was because he was so old, but he
probably had Albanism. And he also was terrifying to witness
if you're a human sailor, because out the horizon you
(10:01):
see this roar, right, this expansion of water flinging from
his uh flinging from this animal. And this guy even
had barnacles apparently that had clustered around his head, which
is very unusual. It looked like he almost had armor,
(10:21):
if we're being honest. And no one was sure when
Mocha had been discovered or like when Moco was born.
They think that he had been sited, as we mentioned
the top somewhere before eighteen ten, near the island of Mocha,
(10:41):
but they just followed his his his wake of shipwrecks
that he left, and then certainly in the eight, there
would be some amount of cataloging of these type of
creatures and a little bit more of a scientific approach
to these large sea creatures. But some of these sailors
may not have cared too much about that or had
access to and probably still thought these were demonic sea monsters. Yeah,
(11:05):
and and you know, it's something we talked about and
stuff that once you know, one thing you have to
realize when you hear stories of sea serpents or big
monsters from the sea demolishing ships. A lot of those
ships were much smaller than they're they're depicted in fiction.
So it's not outside the realm of possibility that something
(11:27):
as big as a sperm whale could absolutely put one
to ruin. Even the name of the ship in the
story Moby Dick the Peaquad, it just sounds like a
little tiny key thing, doesn't it. Yeah. Yeah, And and
of course that's not to diminish the Peaquad tribe which
the which is the namesake of the ship, at least
(11:49):
per Ishmael in the in the book. But speaking of names,
I do want to shout out how weird the English
language is. The study of set Asians broadly is satology,
so you would be a statologist, but you can also
go specifically to whales and uh. In the past you
would have been called a whaleologist or the inexpert in whaleology,
(12:15):
which sounds so very made up, like Tim and Eric
level made up. I'm a whaleologist in the institations are uh,
they include whales, dolphins, and porpoises, whales being obviously the
most massive of these three varieties. So and they are
also mammals because they do give live birth and they've
(12:36):
got they've got a lot of the same brain functions
that you would see in very intelligent mammals, um like
an elephant or uh, some primates, not all dolphins we know,
I mean all the dolphins studies, like some of the
experiments done by John C. Lily in terms of their
ability to communicate and even thought that they were potentially
(12:58):
like head telepathy or something. Right, A lot of a
lot of fuss made about the intelligence of dolphins. Yeah, yeah,
And that story is one that gets repeated on podcasts
of plenty for good reason. Not entirely family friendly, but
it shows you some of the bleeding edges of science
(13:18):
at the time. Max, your hand gesture is accurate and inappropriate. Yeah,
well it's not all the way dolphins sex. It's like
second base. Yeah, is that third base? I don't know, Uh,
you know, we're not we're not sports. Dolphins don't play baseball.
Is the issue that that's actually one of the big
(13:38):
issues they're so from from the first time that people
know of this Mocha Dick character, this this whale, we
we see that it has been actively hunted by this
very brutal whaling industry. And it's not a aping without
(14:00):
battle scars. This feels like a very heavy metal thing.
And he was carrying heavy metal. He would he was
hit by all sorts of harpoons that had chains attached,
and they dragged after him for up to a hundred
yards at least per the per the contemporary reports. And uh,
(14:21):
it's I don't know, I mean that must be so
traumatic to the animal. Yeah, And I mean obviously, um,
James Cameron is a you know, professed naturalists. He uh,
you know, has just done deep sea expeditions with his
you know, vast resources that even some scientists couldn't afford
to do. Um, and he is very you know, enamored
(14:43):
by sea creatures and the whales in Avatar to whatever
you wanted the with the Shape of Water. No, it's
a different movie, very similar. There there's you know, there's
battle scars. The whaling industry is very much paralleled in
this kind of future, you know, society in Avatar. And
I a should really like the movie a lot, And
(15:05):
I was very skeptical when he announced, you know, this
movie I made fifteen years ago or whatever, we're gonna
make like ten more. It is already, I think, in
on par with the grosses of the first Avatar movie.
So Jay's camera man. He's a bit of a megalomaniac
and apparently a nightmare to work for, but he knows
his business, and thank goodness, he likes the ocean. So
(15:27):
Moka Dick becomes so famous that whaling captain's talk about
him as a way of greeting each other when you
see another ship going across the Pacific. One of the
things that you always say in your conversation with the
other captain is any news from Mocha Dick. Like every
(15:49):
whaling captain wants to nail this poor whale. The the
idea is that this is like the Golden Grail. This
is the ultimate huntsman's trophy. And the weird thing is
that if you didn't, if he didn't mess with this,
(16:11):
not in the natural wonder of the world, then he
would just swim by and probably be like, hey, thank
you for not inexplicably trying to kill me and giving
me these non consensual piercings. Well, that was a thing.
I can't remember where I heard it, but it was recently,
maybe on NPR. I was talking about sea life and
(16:33):
mentioning the fact that in general, like, of course there's
a food chain and creatures eat other creatures, but there
are no like just agro species that are just like
trying to mess with other species just because um, it's
all very kind of carefully balanced sort of system, and
humans are just not like that. We go after things
(16:55):
because they freak us out and because we are made
to feel smaller by them, and therefore we want to,
rather than find out what their deal is, just you know,
murder them. It reminds me of one of the most
insightful far Side cartoons that Gary Larson ever made. It's
a caveman who watches a bird fly, then flaps its
(17:17):
arms and then builds a bow and arrow and shoots
the bird and that's classic human And with that, let's
talk about me, and let's talk about how Mocha Dick
met his his end. Uh. He went out like a
g he went out like a hero. Because according to
the story, Mocha Dick, after surviving all these attempted assassinations,
(17:42):
sees a mother whale and her calf, and the calf
has just been this juvenile well has just been killed
by whalers, so it went belly up. And when the
mother realized her child was dead, she turned on the
whalers and tried to destroy the ship. They harpooned her
(18:03):
and mortally wounded her before she was able to strike
this ship. Mocha Dick was in the area, saw this
and attacked the whaling ship directly. Uh. He destroyed one
of the smaller boats, but they have multiple boats. He
was injured by a harpoon. Yeah, and this is almost
exactly the plot of that that seventies movie Orca that
(18:25):
I was talking about. It's very much like a revenge tale.
So again I mean this this. You know, Mocha Dick
was not operating on full capacity after numerous encounters with
with man uh and and all of man's implements of
(18:49):
you know, murder and and torture. So inevitably Mocha Dick
succumbed to his wounds. Yeah. Unfortunately, this this giant was
brought down by the Lily Putchin forces of man. Right,
is that right? The it's in Gulliver's Travels the Tiny Yeah. Yeah,
(19:14):
so so I think that's an accurate comparison. Um. You
can see the writing about his death, which is coming
to people's second hand in many cases, and is also
embellished a little bit as a modern myth with each retelling. So,
according to the story, he shoots up twenty feet above
(19:35):
the waves. Uh. He tries to dart away. They pursue
him through rough water for a quarter of a mile
because he's that big, and he's messed the surface of
the water up that much. Uh. He is quivering and twitching.
He's under his death throws. The reporting uses the phrase
(19:55):
as if under the influence of Galvinism, which means it
looks like he's being elect tricute. It the waist twitching. Yeah,
And they came near him. They were able to get
close enough because he was weakened, and they started just
hacking at him. Uh. And he tried to he tried
to fight back, but he was just too They were
(20:20):
up on him, like stabbing him, and uh, he was
just too wounded to make to make an escape when
she was trying to do and uh, they killed him.
Isn't it funny how oftentimes man thinks they're so great
and powerful, but it's totally cheating. You know, they're using
(20:43):
all these other implements and they have the deck stacked
in their favor. You know, this whale survived multiple encounters
and they just wore him down over time and then
finally just you know, dealt the death blow. But good lord,
what a fight, mocha Dick. But I think we're all
on team team Dick here, team whale for sure. Yeah.
(21:06):
And it's weird because in this rewarding you will see,
you know, this is a story of adventure on the
high seat. So the UM it occurs in the larger
literary ecosystem of man conquering nature heroically. And that's how
all these things are, That's how all these adventure narratives
(21:29):
are depicted, just like UM thirty seven days apparel from ephemeral.
That's that's one to one kind of encounter, right, except
in this case, the wild happens to be the whale
and uh, and here there is a kaiju story exactly.
And it wasn't until later in America or in literature
or the cannon. I guess that you had folks like
(21:50):
Jack London who were more identifying with the animals, you know,
and it was more about how can we live in
balance with with these uh, with these creatures. And so
we say that because if you read the reporting of
the death of Mocha Dick, then you see that it
(22:11):
comes like gets depicted as the humans heroically getting so
close to death themselves. It's like UM on a much
larger mythical level. It's like if you've ever played tech
In or Street Fighter or Soul Caliber, and you get
to the point where if either side takes one hit,
(22:32):
the game is over. And the humans got that that
at last hit. So that's that's how it's depicted. Uh.
You can see UM. You can see the first first
person narratives where they're saying things like he's fit up
at last I screened at the very top of my voice, Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah,
And you know, they're literally throwing up their caps and
(22:54):
dancing around around the corpse of this whale and presumably singing,
presuming we singing, And so hilay around me, boys, and
let us set on him. I cried for I saw
his spirit was broken at last, But the lands and
spade were needless. Now the dying animal was struggling in
(23:14):
a whirlpool of bloody foam, and the ocean far around
was tinted with crimson. Yeah, and it just it just
goes on and this, and so we know that Herman
Melville what was aware of the story, right, it's this
albino whale that is captured global imagination. Mocha Dick, is it?
(23:41):
I mean, Moka Dick, Moby Dick. It's not too long
of a logical leap, but it is only part of
the inspiration for the novel Moby Dick. And in the
next like in part two, I think we're going to
talk about the crew. But before we end, I had
I had an update. I know you've probably heard this
(24:03):
story because we talked about it before at some point,
The World's Loneliest whale. Remember this guy who sung we
haven't Okay? So you know, all whale songs have some
stuff in commons so they can communicate with each other.
There was one whale who was called the fifty two
Hurts whale because his song He's a blue whale, not
(24:26):
a sperm whale. His song, which are the bigger? Which
are bigger? Even? Right? Aren't the great blue whales the biggest? Art? Yeah?
And uh, the blue whales have a frequency of ten
to thirty nine hurts and this this guy's voice was
so so different that he couldn't really communicate with other whales,
(24:51):
and so he's called the loneliest whale. He actually inspired
a song by the K pop group BTS. It's called
Walian fifty two. It's like alien whale. And uh, I
just mentioned this because there's a happy ending with this guy. Apparently,
as of October of twenty twenty two, some stytologists or
(25:14):
who allologists, they prefer the term marine scientists. Uh, they
heard two different fifty two hurts calls within ten minutes
of each other off the coast of California. So finally,
our our poor buddy who is standing in the corner
of the ocean, uh talking to fifty two hurts, found
(25:37):
someone who heard him, who hurts him? If oh no, wait,
that's worth it? Yes, from the perspective to have an
audio nerd. You said ten to fifty two hurts, So
fifty two hurts is like sub base frequencies, like if
you think of, like, you know, a song, those are
frequencies that are gonna be like eight oh eight kick drums,
(25:58):
like in the lowest part of that. And ten isn't
even on the graph of what would you'd use in
an audio recording because it's outside of the realm of
of human hearing. Yes, so most blue whales again are
like ten to thirty die and hurts. So for some reason,
this guy is on his eight oh eights on his
fifty two hurts. But we wanted to uh, we wanted
(26:21):
to have at least one part of this of today's
story that wasn't us uh excoriating whalers of the past.
It's like the part in the blind melon video or
the little be girl finds her people and then they
frolic gleefully together in the meadow. What a wonderful image.
(26:42):
Now imagine that breaks me up every time with two
wheel two whales dancing, And that's gonna be part one
of our journey. But tune in in a few days
for part two, where we look at the story of
the crew that likely inspired the crew in Moby Dick.
(27:03):
In the meantime, thanks to our super producer call him
is Ishmael or call him Max Williams, just don't call
him during dinner. Yes, yes, uh. And also big big
thanks of course to Alex Williams. We have some breaking news.
We might have our dear old pal Mr Casey Pegram
(27:27):
returning for an episode in the near future. Ah Casey
on the case indeed um. Also huge thanks to Christopher
hasciotis here in spirit uh he's Jeff Coades, Jonathan Strickland,
and and to you Ben for for for being my
uh my mate. I don't know anything about nautical terms
(27:50):
this ocean voyage and where is friendship found? It's not
down on any map. True places never are under the scene.
We'll see you next time. For more podcasts from my
(28:10):
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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