Call me Ishmael, Moby Dick opens in arguably the world’s most famous line, and goes on to explain that Ishmael is having a bit of a time of it:  

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent ne from deliberately stepping into the street – and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Translation: For God’s sake, would someone please invent Paxil!

With no Paxil available for 138 years, he goes to look at the water for a while. When that doesn’t necessarily soothe him, he does what we all do – he goes to a bar. At the Spouter-Inn, he initially gets annoyed by some members of a whaling crew who are there. But eventually he sits back and listens to their tales. From this, he somehow decides that the best way to cope with his ‘melancholy’ is to set to sea for 4 sexless, joyless, landless, boozeless years and try to kill massive animals from a little boat with a metal stick so that others could have candles.

And in this, we have the gist of whaling.

Whaling had been happening in Europe since at least the 11^th century. In North America (aka the New World), it seemed to happen shortly after someone first threw up on Plymouth Rock. The locals used beached whales for several useful purposes and the colonists followed suit. In the beginning, they whaled near the coast (sometimes from the coast with, I’m guessing, a rod of steel and a net the size of an ice cream truck). Through the 1700s–1800s this extended further out to Greenland, South Atlantic, the West African coast, and the Canaries. The trips got longer. They decimated local grounds and found farther richer ones. By the golden age of American whaling between 1820-1860, these whaling expeditions brought them to the Japan grounds, Australia and New Zealand, the far Pacific, and the Galápagos. These were years-long expeditions.

Young men were recruited for whaling at pubs. What better place to inspire young men with bravado and promises of adventure and what better time than when they feel nostalgic, manly, and fearless. Pubs were prime hunting grounds for such recruitments throughout history, and we could replace whaling here with the Crusades, bear baiting, and joining a rugby club. With no Xbox to fuel one’s adrenalin, men at the time had to go west on horseback, join the navy, or join a whaler. Of the men who joined a whaler, it was said there were three varieties: ones running from something on land, ones who wanted to make it a career as an owner, and ones looking for adventure. The only one, it was followed-up, that went on a second trip was the guy who wanted to be an owner.  

The realities were, of course, radically different from the dream. The soldier indeed saw the Tetons, but he did so while suffering hugely from dysentery and just before his scalp was cut away from his skull and his bones got bleached by the sun. The naval seaman marvelled in the majesty of the Pacific, but while scratching his skin away from scurvy. The whaler learned a hard reality, but perhaps in a more mundane way. The work was hard and gross. They washed clothes with urine and the cockroach was so ubiquitous that men wrote about them variously as hated guerilla, tasty food flavoring, and, once Stockholm syndrome had locked in, as beloved roommates. The food was hardtack and necessarily salted and treated as long journeys didn’t make for lots of fresh food. If they were lucky, they had whale brains or porpoise meatballs. Life on board was mostly boring and there were long hours spent at mundane activities like washing clothes (after peeing, evidently), swabbing the deck, and playing music or carving scrimshaw. All of this is harder to swallow if you were not getting wages, but lay-pay. This meant they got paid a share of the voyage’s profits. Sometimes that might be 1/350th of the profits. And, it might stun you to learn, big whaling companies and captains often treated these men very unfairly. They took out room and board, and so a man might come back from four years of whaling to get $20 or, worse, told that he owed money.

For those who live overseas from their family there can be no better invention than the video call. Unless you’ve been living under a rock on Jupiter for the last six years, this magic platform of soul-stealing technology means you can talk face to face with people anywhere as long as they have a connection, a camera, and a face.

Thursday night, I had plans with a friend who lives in Prague. In the end, he suggests meeting online. It’s cold and shitty outside; a steady cold rain has been coming down as if the gods have accidentally left their shower just a little bit on. Plus, my friend and I have a tendency to shoot Becherovka as if he’s a mob informant, so home is better. Nevertheless, I am more than happy to go along with this. I celebrate by making vegetarian chili and picking up some beers at the local shop.

We drink and chat. The night is gloomy and long outside, but we are happy. One of the few downsides to meeting friends for drinks is the part where you have to pay your (and sometimes another’s) bill and then make the long slog home. In mid-November, that long slog is done in the dark and the cold and the wet. Tonight, I am in the comfort of my own home, literally a sideways pratfall into my bed. My beer and drinks have already been paid for. No waiter will show up at my desk with a bill, a judgemental look, and a credit card scanner. The night ends in 40% happiness. I watch videos and send some messages after our chat, but the content of these skirts my memory.

Until I wake up the next morning. My head is ringing and there are tears of past joy gathering in my eyes. Burke has left out the Aleve and I grapple with its cap like a UFC fighter. After I hydrate, cry, caffeinate, cry in joy because I don’t have to teach today, I take out my phone. The first message is from my sister: ‘So, is 2 pm my side OK? Can maybe do 1:30.”

“Huh,” say I, in a growing panic.

It’s 5:30 am on Tuesday, so I’m trying to find a reason to be happy that I’m alive. It is a well-known, established fact that Tuesday, across all humanities and cultures, sucks. To help me deal with the fact that Tuesday has once again arrived, I kibosh politics and Reddit, I don’t think about my classes for the day or the swamp of work awaiting me. I stumble from room to room in my dark flat, pushing buttons, emptying bladders, and feeding a small animal who won’t stop meowing at me. All things part of a routine morning, but would likely fascinate an alien making notes were I actually an inmate on a human zoo on Tralfamadore.

With coffee entering my system, my ass in a chair, and the cat not meowing, I approach content. But then I open my computer and go to Smithsonian. Smithsonian is like a daily shot of B-12 catered just for my likes and needs. It hits all my happy spots: history, culture, folklore, travel, cuisine. Name it, I love it. So it was with a quavering hand and a sense of deep betrayal that I would come across a title of vastly triggering effect:  This Massive Web – Home to More Than 100,000 Spiders – Found in a Cave in Europe Could Be the World’s Largest

My horror existed on several levels. In the first place, I was harboring a hope that there weren’t 100,000 spiders on the Earth let alone living in one house. That hope, as are they all, was murdered in the street. Also, they live in Europe – where I also live. This means that they can get to me without a boat, a thing which troubles me greatly. One of the only reasons I can sleep at night is because the Goliath Bird Eater and the Giant Huntsman spiders exist across an ocean or two. The 100,000 spiders (that’s 800,000 eyes for those counting) in this article live in a cave nearby. They only need to take a train to get to me and with so many of them they could definitely organize such as thing.