Japan to Resume Commercial Whaling

photo: New Bedford Whaling Museum Blog

Bob Rocha, Director of Education and Science Programs, sums this up nicely on the Whaling Museum Blog.

Also noted in the New York Times, here.

Not for the squeamish

photo: Wikimedia

The brilliant BBC podcast, Witness, recently posted an interview with a seaman who worked on an industrial whaler in the 1950's/60's—"A personal account of the huge Antarctic industry which left whales on the brink of extinction."

(9 minutes long) Listen or download.

The Industrial Backdrop to Moby-Dick

The try pots on the Charles W. Morgan

[B]lubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree[.] -- Melville to Richard H. Dana Jr., May 1, 1850

Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber? -- review of The Whale in John Bull (London), October 25, 1851 (quoted in 2 Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 134 [2002])

*  *  *

To appreciate what Melville was doing in Moby-Dick, and to understand how the book might have struck most readers when it first appeared, it's important, I think, to keep in mind that Melville was writing about a then-thriving industry.  The age of sail, of course, was still very much alive, just as the "age of air travel" is today.  To the extent that whaling, before Moby-Dick, had anything of a romantic aura, it revolved mostly around the exotic locales that whalers visited, not the work that whalemen actually did. 

The work of whalemen was bloody, dirty, smelly, and in many ways repulsive, and whalemen themselves were generally coarse and uneducated.  In addition to being sailors and whale killers, they were butchers and processors of animal products.  The forecastle, where most of the men lived at sea, was dark, cramped, often ill-ventilated and malodorous, and bug-infested.  (In the whaling memoir Nimrod of the Sea [1874], pg. 284, William M. Davis recalls how, after a meal, "each fellow slips his plate into the netting over his berth, and the cockroaches see to it that his crockery is clean for next meal.")

I've often wondered what industry of today is viewed by modern readers in much the same way that 1850s book-buyers might have viewed whaling.  What work is ongoing, dangerous, and physical -- even in its most up-to-date form -- and, while not really new, still somewhat unfamiliar and intriguing to moderns?

I think a good candidate is offshore oil drilling in the North Sea.

Consider:  Oil drilling has been practiced for about 150 years.  In 1850, offshore whaling had been practiced for about 180 years (since the early eighteenth century).  Deep-sea oil drilling began in the mid-twentieth century, about 70 years ago.  Whaling in the south Pacific began in 1791, about 60 years before Moby-Dick.  And both jobs are hard and dangerous -- a good idea of the dangers involved in North Sea oil drilling can be obtained by watching the episode in the National Geographic series "Seconds from Disaster" on the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, which took 167 lives.

Imagine the genius required to write not just a good novel, but a masterpiece for the ages, about oil men working on a drilling platform in the North Sea.

(The points about the history of whaling are based on Chapter 2 of In Pursuit of Leviathan [1997].)

Ahab, the Old Man

Herman Melville, around age 66

"God, God is against thee, old man; forbear!"

A persistent criticism of director John Huston's 1956 Moby Dick is that Gregory Peck was too young to play Captain Ahab.  Born in 1916, Peck was about 40 when the film was released -- more than ten years younger than Leo Genn, the actor who played Starbuck.  As some pointed out, it would have made more sense if Peck and Genn had switched roles.  Genn, however, while an accomplished British film actor with a splendid voice, had no star power.

A few remarks by Ahab in Chapter 132 ("The Symphony") enable the reader to pinpoint his age at the end of the novel's action as 58.  Ahab there tells Starbuck that he struck his first whale 40 years earlier, as "a boy-harpooneer of eighteen!"  But Ahab's all-around agedness is noted throughout the novel.  He is, among other things, a "scornful old man," "the queerest old man," a "monomaniac old man," an "ungodly old man," an "insane old man," a "wondrous old man," a "frantic old man," a "crazed old man."

(Others aboard the Pequod described as "old men" are the blacksmith, the cook, and most intriguingly, Fedallah (in Ch. 48).)

To Melville, who (mirabile dictu) was in his very early 30s while writing Moby-Dick, 58 must have seemed quite old.  To me, who hit 58 recently, it doesn't seem old at all.  Granted, I'm a landsman, "pent up in lath and plaster," not running around a ship on a peg leg and throwing lances at sperm whales.  Moreover, 58 was indeed old for a whaling captain.  The authors of In Pursuit of Leviathan gathered age data for 275 whaling voyages out of New Bedford between 1842 and 1858.  The oldest recorded man on any of those voyages was 62, and only 12 men were over 50.  (See the tables on pp. 94-96.)  As the authors point out (p. 90), "on 50 percent of the voyages for which we have [New Bedford] Port Society lists, the oldest man aboard was thirty-five or younger."  (Emphasis added.)

The significance of Ahab's being an old man has been much discussed.  From a purely practical standpoint, it helps make more believable that Ahab could bend the entire crew to his will, notwithstanding repeated bad omens and his occasionally dotty behavior.  The reader has to be willing to accept that even the intrepid whale-hunter Starbuck could not withstand the "spiritual terrors" that menaced him "from the concentrating brow" of the "enraged and mighty man."  (Ch. 26.)

The Whaleman's Lay

Who ain't a slave?  Tell me that.

When Ishmael describes (in Chapter XVI) how he came to choose the Pequod for his and Queequeg's voyage, he explains that whalemen were customarily compensated by means of an oddly denominated profit-sharing scheme:

I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years’ beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver.

Ishmael doesn't tell us a whole lot more about how lays worked; there was no need to for purposes of the story.  But fortunately for the curious, the system is very well explicated in a scholarly, highly detailed study of the nineteenth-century whaling industry, In Pursuit of Leviathan, by Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, published in 1997 by the University of Chicago as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research Series on Long-Term Factors in Economic Development.

First, to clear up one misconception, the lays were not sequentially numbered from the largest share to the smallest.  In other words, the system didn't involve person A getting a 10th, B getting an 11th, C getting a 12th, and so on, until every last investor and sailor was accounted for.  For one thing, such a system would never work mathematically -- you would exceed 100% by the time you got to the 26th share.

Instead, the numbers of the lays jumped.  For example, in the November 1843 voyage of the Abigail of New Bedford, the "shortest" lay (i.e., the largest share in compensation) was, unsurprisingly, the captain's, at 16 -- meaning one sixteenth (or 0.0625) of the profits, assuming there were any.   The first mate's lay was 29, the second mate's 50, the third mate's 72.  The cooper -- typically, one of the most important artisans on a whale ship -- got the 55th lay.  Each of the harpooneers (a/k/a "boatsteerers") got the 95th lay.  All the remaining lays were well above 100.  Added up, the lays totaled about three tenths, which left about seven tenths for the "owners," who could probably be more accurately referred to as partners.

According to In Pursuit, a 70-30 split of the profits between the owners/partners, on one hand, and the captain and crew, on the other, was typical.  In addition, looking at data from over a thousand whaling voyages out of New Bedford, the authors of In Pursuit found that the distribution of lays followed a pattern: captains tended to get lays in the mid-teens, first mates in the 20s, second mates in the 30s or 40s, third mates in the 50s or 60s, etc.  

One thing the data make clear is that Melville is having a bit of fun in Ishmael's long-lay episode.  Ishmael says that he hoped to get 275.  Captain Bildad offered him 777, and Captain Peleg, after remonstrating with Bildad, then settled on 300.  As he does so often in Moby-Dick, Melville is here exaggerating Ishmael's socio-economic insignificance.  Even Ishmael's aspirational lay of 275 was absurdly long -- no one in the In Pursuit data had a longer lay than 202,with unskilled seamen (or "greenhands") usually in the 175-190 range.  

How much a whaleman's lay actually turned out to be worth depended, of course, on how successful the voyage was.  The incentives built into the lay system were meant to encourage the men to work their hardest to fill the hold with oil.  If the voyage was truly disastrous (spoiler alert: like the Pequod's), the whalemen never returned at all.  An "average" voyage in the 1830s apparently brought back oil and baleen worth about $21,000 (in 1830s dollars) (see page 120 of In Pursuit).  After subtracting about $6,000 for expenses, you were left with about $15,000 to be divided among the owners/partners and crew.  Let's say that, realistically, someone in Ishmael's shoes would have had the 175th lay, which is what Melville in fact was assigned when he sailed aboard the Acushnet.  One 175th of $15,000 is $85.71.  If we plug that into the invaluable Purchasing Power calculator at Measuring Worth, we get $2,280 in today's dollars based on changes in the consumer price index.  If the voyage lasted exactly three years, that works out to $63 per month, plus "three years’ beef and board," for which Ishmael "would not have to pay one stiver."

Ishmael spoke the truth when he observed that "this was a poor way to accumulate a princely fortune ... a very poor way indeed."  But, he goes on with philosophic equanimity, he is "quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge [him], while [he is] putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud." 

Moby-Dick Written in the Style of White-Jacket

White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of War is, needless to say, Melville's fifth book and the one that immediately preceded Moby-Dick.  Some critic somewhere (Newton Arvin perhaps?) characterized White-Jacket as not fiction, but journalism.  Whoever said that, it's a fair characterization -- the book is, at least on its surface, a straightforward account of Melville's experiences serving on the USS United States in 1843-44, lightly dramatized and padded out with stories he'd picked up from other sailors and with some editorializing about the U.S. Navy (including his celebrated condemnation of flogging).

Only a year after White-Jacket's appearance (in 1850), Melville gave the world Moby-Dick.  I'm sure no one interested in the New Bedford MDM has to be told that the two books are as different as night and day. Or maybe distant thunder vs. lightning just outside your window would be a truer contrast.

It is widely believed, I think, that Moby-Dick started out as another White-Jacket, this time set on a whaler and with a bit more excitement to improve sales.  But along the way -- as happened with Mardi (1849) and Pierre (1852) -- something in Melville took over, and the work was transformed.

Yet what if Melville had been able to stick to the White-Jacket formula?  What would a "journalistic" Moby-Dick be like?  You can get a rough idea by reading Nimrod of the Sea; or, The American Whaleman.  Published in 1874 and now readily available on the Internet, Nimrod is a memoir by William M. Davis (1815-91) of his voyage on the whaler Chelsea in 1834-38.   It is based on a journal Davis kept intermittently during the voyage, but (as he explains) he fleshes that out with "the experiences and adventures of others, such as I have been enabled to pick up in the form of yarns on board the Chelsea," incorporating "the experiences of a quarter of a century."

Nimrod describes countless details of the work that whale hunting and processing involved (many of which will be familiar to Moby-Dick fans) and aspects of the whaleman's life in the Pacific that Moby-Dick doesn't touch (such as stopping at the Galapagos Islands for tortoises that would later be killed for fresh meat at sea, and dealing with the "land sharks" who inhabited barely civilized ports on the west coast of South America).  And Davis recounts the conclusion of the hunt, the demolition of the try-works (when its bricks were joyously thrown overboard), and the return home -- topics that Moby-Dick doesn't get into, for obvious reasons.

While Davis doesn't mention Moby-Dick or Melville anywhere in his memoir, he has a few passages so reminiscent of the earlier work that it's hard to imagine he hadn't read it.  One example is the semi-erotic "spermaceti bath," when Davis and his mates use their bodies to process the material from the "case" in the sperm whale's head:

With our hands blistered yesterday by the oar, and all on fire to-day by the harsh friction of the handspike, it was luxurious to wade deep in the try-pots filled with this odorous unguent, in order to squeeze and strain out the fibres, which, if allowed to remain, would char with the heat, and darken the oil. No king of earth, even Solomon in all his glory, could command such a bath. I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs, as I stroked the precious ointment from the skin.

Another example is the cautious, halting way in which the mates go to dine with the captain:

The steward comes up the companion-way, and touching his greasy Scotch cap, announces, "Captain B----, dinner is on." "All right;" and the captain takes a turn by the binnacle, if we are running a course, and peeps at the compass. Then in the companion-way, on his way down he stops, takes a long look at the sails, and, as it were, a last farewell of the light of heaven. "Mr. F----, dinner is on." "Ay, ay, sir," says the mate, as he strolls to weather-deck. Now Mr. F---- takes a shorter peep at the compass, and, pausing in the companion, he, too, takes his upward survey. The two other mates go through precisely the same performance, only according to their respective ranks they take yet shorter peeps at the compass and glance heavenward. They then arrive simultaneously at the table, to find the captain and Mr. F---- leisurely in their second plateful. Now, the misery of the arrangement is in this: the officers must come up in reversed order -- third, second, first mate, and lastly the captain. A third mate has thus only about seven and a half moments to dispose of his grub. The old man last of all appears on deck, picking his satisfied teeth in the most tantalizing manner, and the four boat-steerers next make a dash for the table, and make clean sweep of the remnants.

Don't those descriptions sound familiar! 

Unlike Moby-Dick, Nimrod doesn't involve a white whale or a stove ship (although Davis does provide a yarn about the sinking of the Nantucket whaler Union after being rammed by a whale).  Also unlike Moby-Dick, Nimrod does include illustrations -- quite a few, and quite detailed.  If some of them look familiar, it's probably because you've seen them in the commentary at the end of the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (with appropriate credit, of course).

(For the details on William Davis, thanks to Honore Forster's annotated bibliography on 19th-century whaling in the Pacific, The South Sea Whaler, published in 1985 by the Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Mass., and Edward J. Lefkowicz, Inc., Fairhaven, Mass.)

How audio recordings saved the whales

photo: wikimedia.org

From the 12/26/2014 airing of All Things Considered: How in the 1960s recordings of whale songs were made inadvertently by a military researcher, who passed them to a biologist, who passed them to Judy Collins, who incorporated them into a song that helped launch Greenpeace.

Audio stream and transcript here.

New York Times editorial critical of Japan's Whaling

From NYT editorial, Japan is Back in the Hunt for Whales, Nov. 29:

Claiming purely “scientific” motives, Japan’s political leaders are cynically planning to resume whale hunting in the Southern Ocean, despite the International Court of Justice finding that the Japanese government regularly violated its obligations under the international ban against commercial whaling off Antarctica.

Read the entire article, with links.

Latest News from the Feejees - 8

In his talk yesterday at the Morgan Homecoming, Fred Calabretta of Mystic Seaport mentioned that Ron Howard is completing a film of In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick's retelling of the the sinking of whaleship Essex ("#1 Best Seller in Ship History" on Amazon). This has been public knowledge for a couple of years, but it was news to this blog.

imdb.com has a page with all the info. The U.S. release date is 13 March 2015. With direction by Ron Howard, it's sure to be a polished production that will put the posteriors in the seats, as they say. Will this high-profile film attract a crush of folks to MDM20 in January, 2016? I'm sure the wheels of preparation are in motion at the Whaling Museum.

Slightly related: A film version of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is scheduled for release in 2015/16. The Appalachian Long-Distance Hiker's Association is already discussing ways to aid/educate the clueless hordes that will hit the trail in the years following.

The New Bedford Homecoming of the Charles W. Morgan

Here's a quick rundown on (some of) today's events surrounding the return of whaleship Charles W. Morgan, newly restored, to New Bedford. The Morgan is "the only surviving wooden whaling ship from the 19th century American fleet." Built in New Bedford, and launched on July 21, 1841, she has been in Mystic Seaport since 1941. A multi-year restoration made the Morgan once again sea-worthy. She sailed into New Bedford harbor to be the centerpiece of a week of activities. Get down there and check it out! (Leave your backpack in the car. They're not permitted.)

Today was a chance to hear presentations from some of the Melville scholars we normally see only at the MDM. As always, these folks make me realize I have a lot of reading to do. Still, when Tim Marr opened his talk asking the audience, "How many of you couldn't finish Moby-Dick the first time you read it?", the scholars were the first to raise their hands!

I took pages of notes at these presentations, but what sticks in my mind is Dr. Marr quoting Stephen Colbert who asked, "Is Moby-Dick a metaphor for the struggle of trying to read Moby-Dick?" (Who was it said, "When one of a work's themes is the work itself, another of its themes is art."?)

The week's displays and events are the combined efforts of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Mystic Seaport, the Nantucket Historical Association, and the Melville Society. That's some major fire-power, and they've done it up royally.

Like a trade show, there are lots of booths to visit inside the hall.

An area is curtained-off for the scholar presentations.

Outside, you can visit the schooner Ernestina. I've only ever seen her covered with snow, on my way to the MDM.

You can crew a whaleboat and row out for a waterline view of the Morgan. Our boatsteerer was a member of a local rowing club, well able to instruct the green crew.

Back on land, it is worth waiting in line for a chance to snake through the restored Charles W. Morgan.

According to Wikipedia, these flags spell "J B P N." What am I missing?

The dark brown areas in the diagrams show original, 1841-vintage bits of the Morgan.

Apparently, "How much is original?" is asked often.

At 4:30, it's time to deflate the whale.

The city is much more inviting on these warm summer evenings than in the January wind and ice of an MDM.

After dinner, Robert K. Wallace opened The Art of Seeing Whales exhibition at the Whaling Museum. Take your time here—the juxtapositions are deliberate.

Was anyone else put off by all the humorless, armed police stalking the area? [no photo here]

Whaling and the Revolution

Clifford Ashley, in his indispensable book The Yankee Whaler, describes the effect the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) had on the whaling fleets of Nantucket and New Bedford.

Prior to the start of the war, Britain had no sperm whalers. This changed after the outbreak, when captured American vessels were sent to sea under the British flag. (p. xi)

In 1782 England's Greenland fleet consisted of thirty-eight ships; in 1784, eighty-nine; in 1785 there were one hundred and forty; and in 1790 over two hundred. [...] practically every whaleship in the Nantucket fleet—one hundred and thirty-four out of one hundred and fifty—was captured by the British early in the Revolutionary War, and that every whaleman captured was given the privilege of deciding whether he would continue whaling under the British flag or go to prison. (p.25)

An easy choice, that.

When the Revolutionary War began, New Bedford's fleet numbered between forty and fifty  whalers. During the war, they did not attempt to fish [...] American privateersmen brought many prizes into the harbor during the earlier stages of the war. New Bedford was the only port north of the Chesapeake not in the hands of the British, and there was a rich accumulation of colonial stores of one sort and another.

In September, 1778, Sir Henry Clinton attacked New Bedford by sea, landing 4,500 troops south of the town. Thirty-four of the town's fleet of fifty whalers were burned.

After the war, not all captured whalemen returned to the former colonies. In 1788, the British ship Amelia, crewed by Nantucketers, was the first whaleship to enter the Pacific. In 1791, the Beaver of Nantucket was the first American whaler to round the Horn.

The Rebecca of New Bedford was the first American whaler to "fill ship" in the Pacific. It sailed in 1791 and arrived home February 23, 1793. (p. 38) According to History of Bristol County, Massachusetts (D. Hamilton Hurd, 1883), the Rebecca was the first ship built in New Bedford (!?!), launched in 1785. It was considered "immensely large" at the time. Her master builder was George Claghorn, who afterwards built the Constitution, launched in 1797.

Whaling Logs, as considered by one writer

There was an interesting post recently at the blog of writer and antiquarian book dealer, Gregory Gibson. Quite a Life peruses the "sub-genre" of whaling logs, with particular attention to the log of "The Bark Triton," which left New Bedford on October 10, 1860, not to return until April 23, 1865. Lots of scans of logs' original pages.

American Whalefleet - 1839

Here are some statistics that may be of interest, taken from the enlightening compendium The Yankee Whaler, by New Bedford native Clifford W. Ashley (author of The Ashley Book of Knots). This book seems to have been dropped by the publisher, Dover, but used copies can be found on Amazon. If you're interested in the history, practice, and nitty-gritty details of whaling, whaleships, and whalemen, it's a great resource.
Ashley took the following table from Charles Melville(!) Scammon. "It shows the size and distribution of the American fleet in the year 1839, when more ports were engaged in whaling than at any other time."
Wikipedia has articles to clarify the terms bark, brig, and schooner. (The distinction between "ship" and the others is unknown to me.) I sorted the table by tonnage, the total cargo carrying capacity of a city's fleet.
It's not surprising to see New Bedford, Nantucket, and Fair Haven at the head of the list. Ashley reports that by 1823 New Bedford's fleet equaled Nantucket's, both in numbers and tonnage. Sixteen years later, New Bedford's fleet was more than twice that of Nantucket in both measures.
Poughkeepsie and Hudson, lying 80 and 150 miles up-river from New York harbor, are a surprise. Of course, those are the cities of ownership, not necessarily the home port.
I was also surprised to see such major ports as New York, Portland, Portsmouth, and last-place Boston so far down the list; and to see New Jersey and Delaware there at all.
As of 1839, these states with "ocean access" were members of "the union," but are missing from this list: Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. (Some of these states may have dabbled in whaling before or after 1839—Ashley writes that in the years after the War of 1812, i.e. after February 1815, Philadelphia sent out two whaling voyages.) Was that due to lack of capital, lack of a distribution system for product, greater demand for product in New England, or inability to compete against established whaling centers for talented shipwrights, officers, and crew?

City where owned	State	Ships and Barks	Brigs and Schooners	Tonnage
New Bedford	MA	169	8	56118
Nantucket	MA	77	4	27364
Fairhaven	MA	43	1	13274
New London	CT	30	9	11447
Sag Harbor	NY	31		10605
Warren	RI	18	3	6075
Salem	MA	14		4265
Newport	RI	9	2	3152
Stonington	CT	7	5	2912
Hudson	NY	8		2902
Edgartown	MA	8		2659
Rochester	MA	5	10	2615
Falmouth	MA	8		2490
Poughkeepsie	NY	6		2043
Mystic	CT	5	3	1797
Bristol	RI	5	1	1752
Fall River	MA	4	3	1604
Wilmington	DE	5		1578
Westport	CT	5	4	1443
Greenport	NY	4	1	1414
Lynn	MA	4		1269
Holmes' Hole (Vineyard Haven)	MA	3	1	1180
Newburyport	MA	3		1099
Providence	RI	3		1086
Bridgeport	CT	3		913
Plymouth	MA	3		910
Wareham	MA	2	2	904
Dartmouth	MA	3		874
New York	NY	3		710
Coldspring Harbor	NY	2		629
Dorchester	MA	2		581
Portland	ME	1		388
Wiscasset	ME	1		380
Newark	NJ	1		366
Portsmouth	NH	1		348
New Suffolk	NY	1		274
Jamesport	NY	1		236
Provincetown	MA		1	172
Somerset	MA		1	137
Boston	MA		1	125

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements - 2

Found in Google Books, a scan of Popular Mechanics, May, 1926. Write to J. A. Stransky Manufacturing Co. for details of the Stransky Vaporizer, which "makes practically any car give double its mileage to the gallon." Then turn to page 787 to read The Thrills of Whaling, an illustrated description of late-period whaling, using power-boats and cannon-fired harpoons.

The Mural at MDM15 (and the "longness" of the Whale)

The impressive backdrop at this year's Marathon is the work of Richard Ellis. From the photo, I estimate the length of the painted white whale to be 25 feet.

According to the Wikipedia article "Sperm whale," the whale that sank the Essex was claimed to be 85 feet long, while the Essex itself (do mariners still say "herself"?) was 87 feet long.

For those who attended the opening of the Marathon, the Whaling Museum's half-scale "model" ship, Lagoda, is 89 feet long.

For those who were at the reading of the Cetology chapter, the Museum's juvenile sperm whale skeleton is 48 feet long. According to Chapter 103, Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton, in life this whale would have been about 60 feet long.

Picture yourself in an open whaleboat (25-30 feet long) attacking a beast three times the size of the one in the mural.