Lamalera Whale Hunters

Many would have frown upon the notion of whale killing or even pictures of whale hunting. I even know of some who refuses to eat tuna just because certain fishing methods incurred the deaths of dolphins. In Indonesia's Nusa Tenggara archipelago, about 800 kilometers east of Bali, there is a village called Lamalera, where people have made a living from whaling for hundreds of years.

Hunting Whales and dolphins by hand is always dangerous, sometimes deadly and never pretty. During the hunting season the whale hunters sail out every day to try their luck. If they manage to get close enough to a sperm whale - often over 12 meters long - the harpooner jumps from a small boat onto the back of the victim trying to thrust his hunting weapon into it. If this is done successfully, a chase of several hours begins. In some cases though, the match is won by the whale, which can hit the harpooner fatally with its tail and even sink the boat.

The whale hunters of Lamalera undoubtedly pursue a bloody profession and the agony of the whales caught by them isn't nice to look at, not even in a documentary. But they do it to make a living; they have no choice. The area around the village isn't suitable for farming and keeping up the tradition of their ancestors is a must for these people.

Still, it may not be long that the traditional whale hunting culture of Lamalera - a sustainable economy and lifestyle - will be gone forever. The number of hunters in the village has drastically shrunk in recent years.











quoted from vanhulsenbeek:

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 permitted 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.
source: images from www.vanhulsenbeek.com