Laurens van der Post: The Hunter and the Whale (Zuid-Afrika, 1967): 320 blz: Uitgeverij The Hogarth Press
Een man wiens naam nooit genoemd wordt (uit alles in het boek lijkt het of Laurens van der Post uit eigen ervaring spreekt) vertelt in "The Hunter and the Whale" over de periode tussen zijn 14e en 17e jaar waarin hij gedurende 4 jaren heeft meegevaren met de walvisvaarder Kurt Hansen met als kapitein de Noor Thor Larsen.
Op zijn 14e wordt de hoofdpersoon (door zijn vriend spottend a regular Peter Blinkoog genoemd, waarna de kapitein hem voortaam My Eyes noemt en de rest van de bemanning Pete) door die vriend die zoon is van een reder uitgenodigd om een tochtje met een walvisvaarder te maken. De vriend is steeds zeeziek en verdwijnt al snel uit het beeld, maar de verteller geniet enorm en zeker als blijkt dat hij de beste walvisspotter is die op het schip aanwezig is, is hij bij de hele bemanning geliefd.
"The Hunter and the Whale" vertelt het verhaal van Pete en een aantal markante leden van de bemanning tijdens de 4 jaren dat ze samen op walvisjacht gaan.
Ik heb "The Hunter and the Whale" nu voor de tweede keer gelezen en vind dit het beste boek dat ik van Laurens van der Post ken. Ooit heb ik "Moby Dick" gelezen, maar hoewel dat boek veel beroemder is, vind ik "The Hunter and the Whale" beter geschreven.
Herman Melville, de schrijver van "Moby Dick" heeft veel gevaren. Volgens J.D.F. Jones, de biograaf van Laurens van der Post heeft Laurens van der Post nooit in een walvisvaarder gevaren. Hij heeft sowieso zijn hele leven bij elkaar verzonnen. Dit neemt niet weg dat "The Hunter and the Whale" een prachtig boek is en dat ik Laurens van der Post één van de beste verhalenvertellers vind die ik ken.
Citaten:
- I think that is perhaps the most remarkable thing about the sea: its power to invest all that lives and moves upon it with a wonder that nothing on land can equal. Its authority over our imagination seems to me final, as if it is at our beginning as it will be at our end.
- At once his precise mind picked on the word "fond". "Fond of whaling? Almighty, no! I am not fond of whaling. I do not even like whaling."
"Why d'you do it then?"
The bald uncomprehending question was out before I knew it and I feared I might have gone too far.
The Norwegian merely shrugged. "A good question! One I have asked myself a thousand times. I can't answer it except by saying that I was taken fishing first as a young boy to help earn a poor family a living. Then I went whaling because it earned a better living. Then I woke up one day to find that whaling had become my life."
- "You friend damn sick, not?" he said again, pausing before going on in a resentful voice far too loud for my liking because I was afraid my friend could not help hearing it. "He is sick because he's spoilt rich boy. His father spoilt rich merchant. All owners are spoilt. All peoples on land spoiled. Bah!"
- Food to be sick on, fresh air and keeping on one's feet at all costs were te quickest cures, Leif assured me. In any case I was not to worry because sea-sickness was very good to the human system.
- I have never known Africans, no matter how poor who do not offer to share their food even with strangers who happen to find them eating.
- Patience is an egg that hatches great birds.
- What else in life, I wondered (as I had often done in the hunter's environment of my upbringing), could make man feel so important and full of purpose, as when they are given a chance to kill?
- Even today this whale spout holds a place in my heart with the manifestations of nature that I treasure most - the sight of a shooting star, a comet before dawn in Africa, the roar of a lion, the long lightning and the sound of distant thunder up-country foretelling the break of a great drought, and the mythological sunsets of my native high veld.
- But a vivid childhood memory came to me and I said: "You know, Leif, a great hunter once said to me: "Little cousin, you know when the last man has disappeared from the earth there will not be an animal, bird, insect, plant or flower that will not breathe a sigh of relief"."
- "I know of him, sir," I corrected, and went on to explain, adding, "He is as famous among the Africans of the interior as among my own people. They all call him "One-Bullet"."
"One-Bullet!" The Captain got the meaning at once. "Ah! So he never needs more than one bullet to kill."
The thought depressed him for a while, I think because he remembered how often it took more than one harpoon to kill a whale. Then he said: "But elephant is so much smaller than whale, not, Eyes? And earth does not heave and lift like Kurt Hansen at sea, not Eyes? Sometimes take two, three harpoons for kill. But if ever harpoon come near one-harpoon gunner, I Thor Larsen am such a man."
- "And, Eyes," Thor Larsen concluded, "tell him remember this about sperm: he may not be heaviest whale. Heaviest is blue whale and heaviest blue whale always is female not male. But in sperm, bull always bigger than cow. He not she master of the sea!"
- I did not know then that the battle of the universe is made specific for us in the small and has to be fought out not only in heroic issues, but in a trivial series of choices during a daily round.
