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WHALE HUNTING LAMALERA, INDONESIA
Lamalera is a village which is perched on the rocky
slopes of an active
volcano on the southern coast of the island of
Lembata, in Nusa Tenggara Timur in eastern Indonesia. An anonymous
Portuguese document of 1624 describes the islanders as hunting whales
with harpoons for their oil, and implies that they collected and sold
ambergris. This report confirms that whaling took place in the waters
of the Suva Sea at least two centuries before the appearance of
American and English whaling ships at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
The Christian Mission has been in place in the
community for a hundred
years, schools have been established and a
training workshop teaches
carpentry. It is a fishing village in a
region where most communities
support themselves by agriculture.
Lamalera has very little productive land, so the villagers have to
fish in order to survive. Their preferred quarry is sperm whale.
Catching sperm whale with hand-thrown harpoons from small open boats
powered by muscle and palm-leaf sail is no easy task, and the hunt is
by no means uneven between man and whale. The tail flukes of a whale
can smash the timbers of the boats and many boats are temporarily
disabled by their prey. Harpooners have been disabled and killed. But
the attraction of the whale is its size. The flesh of the whale (and
shark and manta ray) is cut into strips and sun dried in the village.
The meat is then carried to small markets where it is bartered with
mountain villagers. One strip of dried fish or meat is equivalent to
twelve ears of maize, twelve bananas, twelve pieces of dried sweet
potatoes, twelve sections of sugar cane, or twelve *sirih* peppers
plus twelve pinang nuts.
Commercial whaling is banned throughout much of the world, but subsistence whaling is ermitted by International Whaling Commission regulations in Alaska, the USA, the USSR and Greenland. Indonesia is not, however, a signatory to the IWC. Seven whales were caught in Lamalera in 1987.
(Please contact us for more information and tour available to this
place;
Leonardus Nyoman, +62 81 236 62110 or e-mail:
leonardus.nyoman@gmail.com)
Sources:
http://www.therai.org.uk/film/catalogue_2/79_lamalera.html
Anthropologist:
Robert Barnes**