Many incarnations of a strange tale of a whale hunt seem to have originated from a Spanish explorer in the late sixteenth century; Pulter’s “This Huge Leviathan” (Emblem 42) is one of them. The whaling story appears in José de Acosta’s The Natural and Moral History of the East and West Indies, published in 1590 and translated into English in 1604. Acosta was a Jesuit missionary and philosopher who traveled to Panama, Peru, and Mexico. But he never voyaged to Florida; his description of this whale hunt is based on the report of “some expert men.”1 Acosta characterizes American “Indians” simultaneously as evidence of God’s might, “wherein appears the power and greatness of the Creator,” and as “so base a nation,” firmly asserting the inferiority of their race to his own. He effectively erases their tribal identity from the story by referring to them only as “Indians.” A postcolonial reading of the text may emphasize parallels between the struggle of the hunter and the whale and the colonizer and the colonized. The term “conqueror,” for example, used to describe the hunter, evokes the conquistadors who subjugated Indigenous peoples all over the world to Spanish rule. Eardley notes that Pulter may have read the tale in Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or, Purchas his Pilgrims (1625), which features Acosta’s version of the story.2 Purchas was a clergyman and never travelled outside of England; he was a compiler of travel stories related to him by explorers and sailors.

One of these expert men may have been Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda. The son of a Spanish officer, he was born in Colombia or Peru around 1536. At the age of thirteen he boarded a ship bound for Spain and survived a shipwreck, arriving on the coast of Florida. He was captured by the Calusa and lived among them and other Indigenous tribes in Florida for seventeen years. He was rescued around 1566 by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the Spanish governor of Florida from 1565 to 1574. Fontaneda returned to Spain in 1569 and wrote his memoir, an account of his time in Florida addressed to the king of Spain, by 1575. An account of a whale hunt is featured in an extant manuscript written in Fontaneda’s hand. It is possible that he intended to include it in his memoir but later decided against it.3 It is similar to Acosta’s story, albeit much briefer. The date of Fontaneda’s death is unknown. Acosta returned to Spain from his own travels in 1587, so it is possible that he heard the story of the whale hunt from Fontaneda or had access to his manuscript. According to Fontaneda, this manner of whaling was a ritual of the Tequesta, a tribe that inhabited the southeast Atlantic coast of Florida.

According to Fontaneda, the whale hunt held a spiritual importance for the Tequesta as a part of the funeral rites for a chief. He describes the hunt as a prelude to a wake: the major bones of the chief are placed in a chest and publicly displayed in the house of the chief for the community to visit, and then the hunters “open the head [of the whale] and remove two bones . . . and these two bones they put in this chest in which they place the dead, and they adore this.”4

Pulter was not the first to versify this whaling legend: Friar Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo includes a similar story in his epic poem “La Florida” (c. 1598–1615).5 Escobedo was a missionary who voyaged to America to convert its Indigenous inhabitants to Catholicism and wrote this epic on his return to Spain. Like Acosta, he insists on the reliability of his sources. His poetical account matches the other versions of the story, although curiously, the hunters of his poem drive stakes into the whale’s ears rather than its nostrils.

Footnotes