The last whale hunters: traditions of Indonesian tribe under threat from modernity

When I first heard stories of a tribe that hunted sperm whales with bamboo harpoons, I didn’t believe them. It was 2011, and I was living on a backwater Indonesian island. Locals told me all sorts of tales – that dinosaurs lived in the surrounding jungle was one. But once I had verified that several anthropologists had indeed written about this indigenous group, I decided I had to see them for myself.

It took a week of ferry hopping to reach the tribe’s even more remote cranny of the archipelago. Finally, after hitching a ride on a dump truck turned bus that took me on a narrow dirt road over a volcano, I stepped onto a beach littered with colossal whale skulls.

This was Lamalera, on Lembata Island, home of the world’s last true subsis­tence whalers. The 1,500 Lamalerans get most of their calories by harpooning everything from sharks to devil rays, but their most important prey is the 20 or so sperm whales they kill annually. (Sperm whales still have a worldwide population in the hundreds of thousands.) They use every part of their catch, drying the meat to sustain them through lean times, and trade leftover jerky with neigh­bouring farming tribes in an ancient barter economy: six inches of dried flesh converts to a dozen bananas.

Wandering down the bone-strewn beach a few days later, I met Ben Blikololong, a 24-year-old training to become a lama­fa, a harpooner. He explained that the tribe still honoured the Ways of the Ancestors, a set of rules of everyday conduct passed down through the generations which dictate that the Lamalerans hunt for their livelihood.

Soon, however, he was questioning me about European soccer and American punk-rock bands. For I had arrived at a pivotal moment in Lamaleran history, when the modern world was colliding head-on with the Ways of the Ancestors. Ben invited me to join him at sea the next morning as he studied under his father, Ignatius Blikololong, one of the tribe’s most renowned lamafas, who was nearing retirement.

The next dawn, I helped Ben, Ignatius and a dozen other men raise a sail made of palm leaves over their téna, a majestic 35-foot-long wooden whaling boat built without nails or other modern components. We rode the wind into the deep ocean, and once the breeze subsided, we powered up an outboard engine to chase small game. That day we did not catch anything, but over the next two weeks, I witnessed Ignatius and Ben’s older brothers catch several sharks and just miss an orca while Ben studied their tactics. As I left, son and father told me to come “home” soon.