Mocha Dick was a notorious male
sperm whale that lived in the
Pacific Ocean in the early 19th century, usually encountered in the waters near the island of
Mocha, off southern
Chile. Unlike most sperm whales, Mocha Dick was white, and was the eponymous inspiration for
Herman Melville's 1851 novel
Moby-Dick.
[1]
Mocha Dick survived many skirmishes (by some accounts at least 100) with
whalers before he was eventually killed. He was large and powerful, capable of wrecking small craft with his
flukes. Explorer
Jeremiah N. Reynolds gathered first-hand observations of Mocha Dick and published his account in the May 1839 issue of
The Knickerbocker, describing the whale as "an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength...
white as wool.
[2] According to Reynolds, the whale's head was covered with
barnacles, which gave him a rugged appearance. The whale also had a peculiar method of spouting:
Instead of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short, convulsive effort, accompanied by a snorting noise, as usual with his species, he flung the water from his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar, like that of vapor struggling from the safety valve of a powerful steam engine.[3]
Mocha Dick was most likely first encountered and attacked sometime prior to the year 1810 off Mocha Island.
[4] His survival of the first encounters coupled with his unusual appearance quickly made him famous among
Nantucket whalers. Many captains attempted to hunt him after rounding
Cape Horn. He was sometimes quite docile, sometimes swimming alongside the ship, but once attacked he retaliated with ferocity and cunning, and was widely feared by harpooners. When agitated he would
sound and then
breach so aggressively his entire body would sometimes come completely out of the water.
[5]
In Reynolds' account, Mocha Dick was killed in 1838, after he appeared to come to the aid of a distraught cow whose calf had just been slain by the whalers. His body was 70 feet long and yielded 100 barrels of oil, along with some
ambergris. He also had several harpoons in his body.
Nor was Mocha Dick, apparently, the only white whale in the sea. A Swedish whaler claimed to have taken a very old white whale off the coast of Brazil in 1859.
[6] Whipple reports that as of 1954 there was a man living on Nantucket who claimed to have harpooned a white whale in 1902. And in 1952 Time Magazine reported the harpooning of a white whale off the coast of Peru.
[7]
