Moby Dick was not entirely a fictional creation. This was one of the most surprising facts I uncovered while writing A Savage History: Whaling in the Pacific and Southern Oceans.  There was also Mocha Dick, ‘an old bull whale of prodigious size and strength … white as wool’, described in 1839 by explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker.

Mocha Dick was named after Mocha Island, a small island off the coast of Chile, where firsthand encounters with the whale were recorded from 1810. The thrilling thing about this whale was that, like his fictional namesake, Mocha Dick did not take kindly to being harpooned. Whenever he was attacked, the accounts tell us, he would often retaliate ferociously, first sounding (diving) and then breaching (rising rapidly), often with such power that his entire body – all 45 000 kilograms of him – would leave the water.

In one dramatic account from 1841, the skipper of the John Day (whose name is now lost) sighted Mocha Dick off the Falkland Islands and immediately lowered three whalers – flimsy eight-metre long wooden boats – to give chase.

One boat managed to harpoon the whale, but Mocha Dick then took off (on what is known as a Nantucket Hayride) and dragged the chasers for four kilometres. Then the whale unexpectedly turned and smashed into the side of the little whaling boat, swimming over it and flogging it to pieces with its flukes (its tail). Two crewmen were killed.

Now Mocha Dick stayed a little way off, waiting. The second boat approached him, and launched another harpoon. Mocha Dick dived and surfaced beneath the third boat – a whaler’s worst nightmare – and threw it into the air. No one was killed, but the whalers didn’t try again.

Mocha Dick was not the only whale to fight back. In chapter 45 of Moby Dick, Herman Melville offers a rollcall of these valiant mammals:

But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity — nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death … Was it not so, O Timor Jack! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Tom! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.

And today, from the standpoint of our enlightened times, while we can’t help but admire the courage of the brave men who did battle with the mighty whales in their tiny craft, long before exploding harpoons and factory ships, we give a standing ovation to the whales that fought back. 

John Newton is the author of released this June.