The Whalers’ Odyssey

A courageous tribe, a colossal foe, and a terrifying ocean voyage.

Story and Photos by Doug Bock Clark

The Lamalerans are the last of their kind. For five centuries, the Indonesian tribe has survived by hunting whales from a rocky Pacific island so remote that their countrymen call it the land left behind. Several Inuit communities hunt the massive mammals, too, but the Arctic seafarers increasingly derive sustenance from packaged foods and mechanized fishing methods. Not the Lamalerans. The 1,500 tribespeople still get most of their calories by spearing prey with bamboo harpoons. Annually, they take about 20 sperm whales—from a worldwide population in the hundreds of thousands—and use every part of their catch. They jerky the meat to feed themselves through the lean monsoon season, when storms make it difficult to launch boats.

From 2014 through 2017, over several extended visits, I lived with the Lamalerans to document their exceptional but threatened culture. The tribe has long followed the ways of their ancestors, a set of rules handed down through the generations that dictate a camaraderie so intense that anthropologists have ranked the Lamalerans as one of humanity’s most cooperative societies. Today, venerable traditions are being undermined by cell phones, television, government regulations, and other modern influences. One area where the old ways persist, though, is the hunt: Dozens of Lamaleran men still coordinate on ancient wooden boats to kill the largest toothed predator in the world, then share in the bounty.

Whaling is harsh, dangerous work, and not every hunt is successful. Such was the case in 1994, when the Lamalerans undertook a harrowing voyage that became the kind of legend that fathers tell their sons. Not only did they fight for their lives against a seemingly invincible whale, but they confronted a danger new to many of them, one more threatening than any leviathan: the outside world.

The cry resounded through the seaside village of Lamalera, beginning on the beach and sweeping through the ramshackle houses and surrounding jungle as every man, woman, and child who heard it added a voice to the shouted relay, chorusing that sperm whales had been sighted. It was a Thursday in early March 1994, and the squalls of the monsoon season were nearing their end. Many hunters were pile-driving flagstones into their village’s single dirt road, which had all but liquefied during months of rain. They dropped their shovels and sprinted to the shore. Using log rollers and their shoulders, they shoved the téna, their 35-foot wooden whaling ships, across the sand and into the surf. Captains yelled exhortations. Once the water unyoked the weight of a boat from the backs of its crew, the men leaped aboard.

Ignatius Blikololong, 44 years old and one of the most renowned harpooners in the tribe despite his slight frame, had bid a hasty but impassioned farewell to Teresea, his wife, before setting out. Teresea was due to give birth to their next child at any hour. Ignatius did not want to leave her, but he could not shirk his duty; the tribe had almost exhausted its food stores. As he clambered atop his hâmmâlollo, a bamboo platform jutting five feet from the prow of the téna, and sharpened his harpoons, he prayed for a swift and safe return.

Also aboard Ignatius’s téna, which was called the Téti Heri, was Yosef Boko Hariona, Teresea’s close relative. He was entering his sixth decade and his eyesight was faltering, but still he whaled; his son had died, and there was no other man to support his wife, husbandless daughter, and grandchildren. Yosef Boko wielded the ship’s tiller oar as the crew paddled through the breakers. Though he could no longer stroke as forcefully as younger men, he steered with savvy.

Six boats in all cut through the waves, chasing the white whale spouts, which contrasted against the dark sea and stormy sky. As they rowed the men sang:

Kidé ajaka tani-tena (Many widows and orphans cry)

Lié doré angina (Requesting for the wind to join us)

Hari hélu bo kanato. (And for the fish to come to us.)

The Lamalerans sing for every occasion. To celebrate a successful hunt or to lament returning home empty-handed. While axing trees, building boats, pestling rice into flour, weaving sarongs, rocking babies to sleep, and recounting the stories of the ancestors. The songs are more than music—they are prayers. The Lamalerans believe that everything, from whales to the sun, has a spirit they must honor. The music entreats the winds to rise, the waves to fall, and the ghosts of the tribe’s dead, whom they worship according to a unique mixture of Catholicism and animism, to help the living. The Lamalerans believe that the ancestors send sperm whales to sustain the tribe and as a reward for following the old ways.

The group of téna converged on the whales like a wolf pack. Aboard the Téti Heri, Yosef Boko called out a rhythm and ten men with hand-carved wooden oars paddled in unison. When the boats were sufficiently close to the whales, which weighed dozens of tons each, Yosef Boko shouted, “Nuro menaluf!” (hunger spoon). Colloquially, it means, “Row as fast as you’d spoon rice if you were starving!” Or perhaps most accurately, “Row like you want to feed your families!”

On the hâmmâlollo, as his crew paddled furiously to bring him within striking distance, Ignatius readied his 15-foot bamboo harpoon, which was tipped with a foot-long iron spearhead, forged in the village. He got so close to his prey that he could see ellipses of O’s dimpling its gray snout, stamped by the suckers of giant squid the whale had devoured a mile below the ocean’s surface. Ignatius crouched low, his muscles quivering as he held his weapon above his head, then he dove off the hâmmâlollo with kamikaze grace, ramming the harpoon into his prey with the full weight of his body. The harpoon’s shaft shuddered, bent, and then straightened, stuck in the soft flesh two feet below the whale’s dorsal hump. Ignatius rebounded off the animal’s flank and into the sea, then frantically swam back to the Téti Heri.

The Lamalerans’ strategy in a hunt is to land as many harpoons as possible. As a second lamafa (harpooner) from another téna added his weapon to the animal’s back, the ropes attached to the harpoons drew taut, and soon the whale was pulling the weight of both ships. Ignatius and the other hunters hoped that the animal would soon exhaust itself, allowing the men to swim alongside it and saw at it with their knives until it bled to death and they could drag it ashore. As the Téti Heri and the other boat harried their prey, the other four téna speared the remaining whales in the school, including a 30-ton female and a toothless, 10-foot infant.

At first the battle was close enough to shore that Teresea and the other hunters’ wives watched, as if Lamalera’s oceanside cliffs were bleachers and the sea a stadium. Whaling was always risky, with injuries and occasionally death resulting from the hunts, but it was also routine enough that any sense of danger was dulled. Before long two téna brought the female and baby whales to the beach, the crews singing gratefully to honor the ancestors. But the Téti Heri, along with three other téna, were dragged by their whales over the horizon. Teresea and the other women returned to weaving or cooking, keeping one eye on the sea.

By late afternoon, instead of the palm-leaf sails of the téna appearing again in the bay, a storm front arose. The ways of the ancestors forbade the use of engines on whaling boats, but the tribe did have two skiffs equipped with outboard motors, which it dispatched to find the hunters. Strafing rain turned the search party around. At dusk the downpour broke briefly, and the tribe lit signal fires on the beach to guide the whalers home. Fresh rain soon extinguished the flames. The weather made Teresea nervous, but hunts sometimes extended overnight. There was no cause for worry yet.

Through the night, Teresea crouched in her bamboo hut and cradled her pregnant belly. Her youngest son, Ben, slept on a mattress stitched out of old rice sacks and stuffed with corn husks; he had tried to maintain a vigil for his father and to comfort his mother, but eventually he had succumbed to exhaustion. Every so often, Teresea would rise and peer out the hut’s door and through the storm toward the thrashing ocean, wondering nervously whether the baby or Ignatius would arrive first.

Ignatius dove with kamikaze grace, ramming the harpoon into his prey.

Two whales had towed the Téti Heri and the other téna east. At first, Ignatius, Yosef Boko, and their fellow hunters had rested for several hours, confident that the combination of blood loss and the drogue of the boats would exhaust their prey. But as Labalekang, the volcano looming behind Lamalera, diminished from a mile-high peak to a thimble of dirt, the whales never faltered. As dusk drew near, the hunters decided that they needed to attack again.

The whale that the Téti Heri and another boat, the Kéna Pukã, had initially harpooned tore through their ropes and escaped. The men’s last chance to return to Lamalera with a catch became the whale lashed to the other two téna—and currently giving them hell. One of those boats, the Kelulus, had just been uppercut so hard by the whale’s tail that its crew was stuffing two cracks zigzagging through the hull with sarongs, trying to keep the sea from bubbling in.

As the Téti Heri attacked the whale to distract it from the listing Kelulus, Ignatius found himself confronting a grotesque beast: Its head and belly were streaked with white, as if it were partially albino, and half its lower jaw had been snapped off, probably during battle with another sea creature. When Ignatius embedded his harpoon, the whale began lobtailing—inverting itself so that its tail stood out of the water and its nose pointed toward the seafloor, then sledgehammering its flukes into the waves. Ignatius ordered his ship to flee, spooling out rope attached to the latest harpoon. To cover the Téti Heri’s retreat, the Kebako Pukã landed another spear, the tenth lodged in the animal; in retaliation, the whale stove in the ship’s bow strake. Half the crew stripped to plug the puncture with their shirts while the rest back-paddled.

Stymied, the fleet let its opponent take several hundred feet of rope, rowed close together, and conferenced. Some of the men said that, when they first attacked the school, they had seen a calf—the one that the other boats had slain and taken back to the village—suckling this whale. They guessed that it was a mother strengthened by a desire for revenge. Ignatius feared that she was not an animal at all but an unholy monster. Though she was only about 45 feet long, she had already done more damage to the boats than a bull whale could.

The sun crisped to an ember, and its last rays were blotted out by thickening clouds. As the whale drew them farther out to sea, Ignatius realized that they had not trapped the animal—it had trapped them. From the hâmmâlollo, he waved a two-foot flensing knife and addressed his fellow hunters.

“The time has come for us to cut our harpoon ropes and go home!” he shouted.

The other whalers responded, “Don’t let it go! We’ll take it tomorrow!”

And so they kept on.

Night soiled the evening. The men hammered sprung boards tight again with whetstones, roped shattered strakes back into place, and stuffed pith caulking into cracks. Lightning flared. Thunder drummed. Rain began to pellet the Lamalerans as waves tackled the téna. The men became so exhausted bailing water with halved coconut shells that they had to work in shifts. Ignatius labored stoically, not resting like the others, and tried to ignore his yearning for his wife, his worry that their child had been born, and his guilt for not being there.

Around midnight the storm subsided. The men bedded down atop wound ropes and furled sails. The fleet had rushed into battle so abruptly that they carried almost no food or drink, so the men wrung rainwater from their hair and clothes into their mouths. Yosef Boko stowed his steering oar but remained awake, tracking the whale’s movements as they were telegraphed through the harpoon ropes. As the tiller man, it was his job to guide the whalers home, and even if he could not steer them to safety right then, he felt a responsibility to keep watch. He trembled with the premonition that this whale would defeat them. When Ignatius had offered to cut the ropes, Yosef Boko had silently urged him on. If he was lost at sea, who would care for his family?

By the time dawn pearled, the broken-jawed whale was hauling the Lamalerans through sea beyond the sight of land. Ignatius called the téna together and announced, “We must have offended the ancestors yesterday for the whale to be so fierce. We must all clean our mouths so that God will entrust this whale to us and the village can eat.” The hunters prayed.

Soon after, it seemed that at last the whale’s strength began to wane. She no longer surged forward, instead paddling tiredly along the water’s surface. Rather than fountaining, she spouted only light mists in quick bursts, as if hyperventilating. Believing her to be weakened, Ignatius did not select a harpoon from the weapons rack for his next move. Instead he tied a rusty boat hook to a bamboo pole and ordered his men to row quietly forward. He slid the hook into the whale’s blowhole and yanked back.

The colossal head turned. An eye judged Ignatius.

The whale geysered, dislodging the hook. Then she head-butted the Téti Heri so hard that caulking popped out from between its boards, and the Savu Sea began trickling in. A terrifying possibility dawned on Ignatius: Perhaps the whale had only been playing weak, trying to draw in the fleet to destroy it. No blood reddened her spouting, which meant that the harpoon strikes had failed to penetrate her vital organs. Her wounds were only skin-deep.

The whale battered the Téti Heri with its tail until the téna retreated. Next it broke off the hâmmâlollo of the Kéna Pukã and rammed open the bow of the already hobbled Kelulus.

In a desperate sortie, the lamafa of all four ships gathered in a phalanx on the prow of the Kebako Pukã, the lone undamaged ship, and attacked together. But no matter how much pink blood poured from her lacerated hide, the whale’s spouting remained pure.

Ignatius was sharpening a lance with a whetstone for the next assault when the Kebako Pukã’s hull leaped beneath his feet, nearly catapulting him into the sea. The whale’s flukes tore open the bow, so that its halves only connected like a clamshell at the keel. The men fled the wreckage, swimming to the Téti Heri. The whale lobtailed, as if challenging the Lamalerans to return to the ring.

Ignatius, Yosef Boko, and many of the other men were now convinced that their opponent was an evil spirit. The hunters finally agreed to cut the ropes that bound them to the devil whale and return home without a catch. But the harpoon lines were not disposable factory-made ropes: They were the leo, the spirit ropes of the téna. They were woven from jungle cotton and the bark of gebang palms and hibiscus trees, representing weeks of communal work in the village. They could not be carelessly trashed. It was decided that someone would swim to the whale, through the shark fins now razoring the bloody ocean, and cut the lines near the harpoon heads, to save as much of their length as possible.

Fransiskus “Frans” Boli Bediona, a stocky 36-year-old with a wild beard and mane, who served as the backup lamafa on the Kelulus, volunteered for the mission. As one of the tribe’s shamans, he participated in the hunting with a religious fervor, and he had been one of the strongest voices urging the fleet not to give up the day before. Now he was sure that the ancestors were testing the mettle of their descendants, and he meant to meet that challenge.

As Frans pulled himself along a harpoon rope with one hand and clutched a knife in the other, he kicked the hammerhead and tiger sharks that zipped in and nosed him like dogs. The Lamalerans believe that a shark will not hurt a man with a pure heart, and Frans knew himself to be righteous. As he drew closer to the whale, the sharks peeled off to avoid the reach of its tail. He got within a few feet of the whale’s flukes, then hacked through the harpoon lines. The ropes were reeled in, and Frans hitched a ride on the last one.

The whale stroked away, shadowed by dorsal fins. Then she spouted, raised her flukes—either in threat or farewell—and dove. She did not resurface.

The Lamalerans believe that a shark will not hurt a man with a pure heart.

The Lamalerans set about improvising what repairs they could. The crew of the Kéna Pukã winched ropes around its prow, squeezing the boards tight enough to prevent the boat from taking on more water. It was in bad shape, but many men loaded into it, for the Kebako Pukã and the Kelulus could now support only skeleton crews. Then the whalers lashed their fleet into a line, with the Téti Heri in the lead. Abandoning the damaged téna was never discussed, for the Lamalerans believe whaling ships have spirits just as men do. Frans felt that the Kelulus and the Kéna Pukã, both ships he often served on, had mothered him through trials “like a hen protecting her chick.” Now he had to protect them.

With clouds smothering the sun and land hidden by the horizon, the Lamalerans were unable to track north toward home. To save their flagging strength, they decided to play the lottery of the wind. The crew of the Téti Heri stood up a 20-foot bamboo mast and unfurled a sail made of dried palm leaves quilted across a grid of ropes. Once, entire fleets had sailed the Pacific using such sails, but these were probably among the last in the world. The Lamalerans rotated the fabric around the mast until it caught a zephyr, and the téna skidded together over the waves.

By midafternoon, palm-fringed hills edged above the southeastern skyline like a cloud bank. It was Semau Island. The Lamalerans had located themselves, but the discovery was not a happy one: Semau lay more than 100 miles from Lamalera. Rather than try to make landfall, they decided to direct themselves homeward.

As a second evening neared, another storm swaggered toward the boats. The two damaged ones, tugged along by the functional pair, were slowing progress, so the men of the Téti Heri told Ignatius to ask the other crews to let them go ahead alone. Ignatius strained his sandpapered throat to make himself heard over the groaning squall. “May we go?” he asked. “The wind is strong. We will tell the village what has happened and where you are.”

Frans was enraged. It was unthinkable that the crew of the Téti Heri would even consider leaving: That was not the way of the Lamalerans. The most important directive of the ancestors was that the unity of the tribe was paramount. All fathers taught their sons a saying: Talé tou, kemui tou, onã tou, mata tou—one family, one heart, one action, one goal.

“We live and die together!” the men in the damaged téna answered Ignatius. “You can’t go ahead!”

The waves were sharpening into whitecaps. The crew of the Téti Heri urged Ignatius to try again.

Contradictory feelings roiled his heart: He would never abandon his tribesmen, but would not they all have a better chance of survival if the Téti Heri raced ahead? There was no point in solidarity if it meant his children, including his unborn baby, would lose their father. Ultimately, even if he wanted to remain with the fleet, he could not overrule his crew, yet he wanted the other tribesmen’s blessing to leave.

“May we go first so the village knows we are not all dead and can send help?” Ignatius shouted. Again he was rebuffed.

Only this time, as he was calling to his brethren, his crew untied the rope linking their boat to the others. Unburdened, the Téti Heri shot ahead on the turbulent sea. The other téna shrank to three bobbing figures. Then the lowering heavens curtained them off. Ignatius could not control his tears. He felt as if he had been forced to forsake his tribesmen. And he knew that the ancestors always exacted revenge for such failures—on individuals and on the tribe as a whole.

The Téti Heri could not outrun the latest gale, and before long the storm threatened to use the boat’s sail like a lever and flip the craft over. It took Ignatius and two other men to dismantle the mast, though usually one man could handle it. The tempest seemed to double the darkness of the night, and it whirled the boat and heaved the sea over the outriggers. Men slumped against the thwarts, bailing desultorily, and those too exhausted to work crawled under the sail. Five times Ignatius gathered the crew and led them in prayer, until the accumulating water forced them to resume bailing.

We are all brothers, Ignatius thought. It would have been better if we had died together. Lord, at least bring us to shore, so our families can find our bodies and give us proper funerals, and we can join the ancestors.

We are all brothers, Ignatius thought. It would have been better if we had died together.

That night the eighth child of Ignatius and Teresea came crying into the world. Even though she was a girl, she was named Ignatius Seran Blikololong Jr. Christening her with her father’s name was a way of summoning his lost soul home.

The next morning, a Saturday, dawn flickered behind wet clouds like the flame of a whale-oil lantern sparking to life behind a bamboo lampshade. Maria, Frans’s wife and Ignatius’s sister, had slept on the beach to tend the signal fires, and she woke with sand in her hair. Nearby, Fransiska, Yosef Boko’s wife, refused to eat and ignored her grandson, who cried and pawed at her for attention. The women were joined in their vigil by nearly 50 other wives, and the group watched as the village’s fleet launched to locate their husbands. The 17 boats dispersed toward every point on the compass, carrying fresh coconuts, water, and rice wrapped in banana leaves, to feed the men if they were found.

The Savu Sea is not wide; on a clear morning, it is possible to glimpse the peaks of Timor Island, situated on the other side of the expanse, from Lamalera’s cliffs. Even if the téna had been dragged south into the Indian Ocean, they should have been able to navigate back to where search parties could spot their sails. That two full days had passed without a sighting meant that the likelihood of a safe return was swiftly diminishing. The men might be added to the list of the Lamalerans, more than 39 in all, lost at sea in the previous century. Every year, the village’s priest inaugurated the hunting season by reading each name aloud.

The elders gathered under the banyan tree in the village square to try to ferret out the crime that the ancestors must have been punishing them for in sending so many men to a watery demise. A runner was dispatched to the island’s capital, a 30-mile trek over the mountains, so that government authorities could broadcast a radio message to alert ships in transit to look for the missing téna. Then the tribe gathered on the beach for a religious service.

Shortly thereafter, as if by the grace of God, someone spotted a diamond sail splitting the horizon. A motorboat was dispatched to run supplies to the téna. A man with binoculars announced to the crowd on the shore that the Téti Heri was coming in. A rumor circulated that a corpse was aboard. The whalers had been nearly three days at sea without food and water, after all. Teresea, Maria, and Fransiska wept, knowing that Ignatius and Yosef Boko crewed the Téti Heri.

When the téna made landfall, its crew was so sunburned that skin from the men’s chests and thighs had peeled away. Their lips were puffed and blistered. Bloodshot, their eyes seemed to glow. Even supported by a man on either side, the returned could barely walk.

Tribesmen had to coax Yosef Boko to let go of the tiller oar. He had barely slept the entire journey, believing that as long as he held the oar, he was protecting his crew. When he stepped out of the boat, he embraced Fransiska; though both normally prided themselves on their reserve, they were racked by sobs. At their house, Yosef Boko washed the salt water off his body with a bucket shower, devoured a plate of rice, and fell into a sleep that would last nearly a full day.

While the rest of the men were surrounded by their families, Ignatius walked down the beach toward his hut. Fear unmanned him. Where was his wife? Had something gone wrong with the pregnancy? A female relative, whose husband was aboard one of the boats still at sea, approached and slapped him on the shoulder. She cried, “Where is my husband? Where is my husband?” His throat was so dry Ignatius could not speak; he had been unable to stomach the water and mashed bananas delivered to him by the motorboat. How could he explain to this woman that they had left her husband behind?

Then he spotted his eldest daughter, who pushed her way out of the crowd and hugged him. “You have a daughter!” she said of the new baby. Ignatius croaked an apology for not being there when the baby arrived, but his daughter laughed. “The important thing is that you’re home!” she said.

Once the happy families had returned to their abodes, only the disappointed wives of the men still at sea were left to build a bonfire on the headlands. Maria threw deadwood onto the flames as if making an offering or willing the desperate light to beckon Frans home. She was increasingly sure that her husband was dead and that she was now a widow, a status every Lamaleran woman fears, not only because of the loss but because the tribe’s faith forbids remarriage. If Frans did not return, she and her three children would have to subsist on charity.

Every few minutes, eerie trumpeting echoed from the darkness like distant, mournful music. After the crew of the Téti Heri had admitted to leaving the fleet in hopes of sending help once they got home, the motorboats had been dispatched again, this time with conch shells, which could be heard over a great distance. Between calls made by the motorboats’ crews, Maria and the other yearning wives listened for any answer. Around midnight the motorboats returned alone. The wailing of the women woke the village.

For days afterward, Maria waited on the beach for sails that never came. Eventually, when all hope was lost, the village sent divers to retrieve nautilus shells, their delicate whorls bent into the shape of eternity. The tribe buried the shells in place of bodies.

Maria threw deadwood onto the flames as if making an offering or willing the desperate light to beckon Frans home.

After the Téti Heri had untied itself, Frans had furiously watched Ignatius, his brother-in-law, and the other betrayers go. It felt as if the abandonment took a long time. Each time the fleeing téna sank into a trough between waves, a moment later the tip of its sail would reappear as the ship was lofted by a roller. Frans thought of his three children, especially his infant daughter, only nine months old, with her sweet, bubbling laugh. The ancestors had granted him barely any time to get to know her. He tried not to brood on the hardships his children would endure without a father to protect them. He hoped at least that Ignatius would step in. Almost all his other male relatives—men who could have provided for Frans’s family in his stead—clung to the wrecks of the three téna.

Eventually, the Téti Heri’s sail did not rise again.

The remaining men were in desperate condition. Frans had caulked a breach in the Kelulus with his shirt, and he wore only shorts; already his chest and shoulders blazed and prickled with sunburn. Thirty-four people were crammed onto the Kéna Pukã, which comfortably held no more than 14, and it rode so low that waves spilled over its railings. The other two boats were attended by a single bailer each to keep them from swamping. The whalers could have lightened the load of their sinking ships by discarding equipment, but they believed that the leo had souls and the sails were the ships’ sarongs. Without them the boats would be naked.

Swept east, the men glimpsed the bent tip of Labalekang. The volcano, which towered above their village, provided some small hope. They began to paddle weakly, taking a few strokes and then resting. Black clouds avalanched toward their backs. Soon night hid Labalekang and brought with it a new storm. Despite having to furiously bail, Frans was thankful for relief from the torturous sun and the nourishment of the rainwater.

Dawn emerged bluebird clear, hazeless. Labalekang had vanished. The crew had lost all sense of position in the night. No one possessed the strength to lift a paddle. Some men’s speech began to slur. Frans told himself that he must not cry; he needed the moisture.

Late Saturday afternoon, not long before Ignatius and the crew of the Téti Heri would arrive home, the abandoned whalers spotted a pair of cinder-cone volcanoes to the east. The sight crushed Frans: It was Flores, two islands west of his home. The latest storm had swept them dozens of miles off course and outside any area that a Lamaleran ship would search for them. They tried to maneuver north and east, but the wind was against them, driving them farther from the Savu Sea and into the wilderness of the Indian Ocean. Some men tied themselves to their ships so that if they died, their bodies might one day be found. Frans was not ready to do that, not yet.

That night rain came again—without a storm, for once. The men suckled from their shirts, their beards, and the sail. Once they had rehydrated, some began chewing their clothes. One thin hunter gorged himself on dried tree pith. Except for a few noodles of seaweed plucked from the ocean, they had eaten nothing in three days. With too many men for everyone to lie down in the hulls of the boats, they took turns slumping over the thwarts or sprawling on the hâmmâlollos.

Frans fever-dreamed about God, heaven, hell, and his family. At a vague hour, the cloud cover momentarily parted to reveal the star-encrusted sky. The Southern Cross was staked there. Frans knew this constellation as the Pointer, since from the Savu Sea it always aimed toward Lamalera. For a moment the way home was revealed. If they could just follow that course, Frans might survive and once more balance his daughter atop his head while she screamed with laughter and pulled at his hair. But then the clouds returned and stole the knowledge of the direction where his family lay.

By Sunday morning, the Kebako Pukã was taking on so much water that the other boats could no longer pull it. The craft would have to be abandoned. Its captain, Fransiskus “Sisu” Bataona, volunteered to go down with his ship, but the others told him it was not necessary. Instead, he climbed atop the hâmmâlollo, now jutting just above the waterline. Sisu felt like a leaf at the end of the dry season, withered and about to fall. He addressed the spirit of the téna: “We now have no more strength. It is better that you go before us and wait for us on shore.” He invoked a ceremonial leave-taking sometimes used to say goodbye to the dead.

Frans fever-dreamed about God, heaven, hell, and his family.

The other Lamalerans wept. They knew everyone shared responsibility for abandoning the sacred téna. The disappointed ancestors would surely exact their vengeance.

By the time that Sisu disembarked for another boat, the currents had started to take the Kebako Pukã. The boat swiveled, its hâmmâlollo grazing the harpooning platforms of its two fellows as if in farewell. Waves edged up the prow. Soon the ocean swallowed the ship. A hoarse wail burst from the Lamalerans.

Throughout Sunday afternoon, the Lamalerans hallucinated, imagining they saw signal flares on Lamalera beach and paddling as hard as they could toward them. The extinguishing of the sun ushered in yet another night at sea and demolished the whalers’ fantasies: There was nothing ahead but darkness. The men lay still as corpses in their ships. Frans thought some of them had already died. Still, he did not lash himself to the thwarts. He could endure a little more. If morning dawned hopelessly, he would tie himself to the téna. It would be as God willed it.

A little before midnight, Frans stirred from his fugue to one of his shipmates croaking. The man was pointing a finger. Frans followed the man’s direction and saw a row of halogen-lit windows floating above the Savu Sea, framing fancily dressed men and women with pale skin. A thick beam of light roved across the waves, blinding him when it settled on the téna. Frans suddenly understood why the ancestors had teased the whalers with the phantasm of home: They had been encouraging the crews to cling to life for just a few hours more.

A metal vessel four times as long as a téna, with the words Spice Islander painted across its hull, chugged toward the Lamalerans. Salvation had arrived in the form of a cruise ship.

Frans had glimpsed modern ships while hunting, but he had rarely seen one this close. When a metal arm lowered a speedboat into the water, he thought he was delirious. The speedboat zoomed up to the Lamalerans, and its crew tied on to the téna in order to drag the bewildered whalers to the Spice Islander. Promises of food and water enticed those crew members who had prepared for death to untie themselves and climb aboard.

As the Lamalerans stepped onto metal stairs lowered from the bow, 40 or so foreigners lined the railing, aiming strange metal boxes that emitted white flashes. The hunters leaned against the sailors, infantile with weakness. The white-skinned men and women shook the Lamalerans’ hands and gave them plastic water bottles, which the men struggled to open until someone showed them how to unscrew the caps. The tourists made them pose and held up the metal boxes once more. Frans was too tired and thankful to care.

The captain of the ship, a man named Sebastianus, led them to the mess hall. They were served coffee sugared with condensed milk, along with crumbly slices of white cake, which tasted bitter to Frans and which Sebastianus told them was called bread. The captain was from Larantuka, the largest city in the archipelago where Lamalera is located, and he had met members of the whaling tribe before. His eastern Indonesian accent and familiarity with their culture put the men at ease. Sebastianus explained that the Spice Islander had been cruising from the Komodo Islands, home of the legendary dragons, to Timor, where the tourists would fly home, when he heard a radio bulletin about lost ships. His marine radar soon pinged two unidentified vessels adrift off normal shipping lanes, and he set out to investigate.

At the end of the meal, Sebastianus apologized that the two surviving téna would have to be scuttled. Frans and the other Lamalerans begged him to save the boats, explaining their spiritual value. He agreed to try. Using the onboard crane, his crew winched the Kéna Pukã onto the cruise ship’s deck, where its hull, ravaged by the whale, was bared for all to see. But when the Spice Islander’s crew tried to lift the Kelulus, the damaged vessel began to break apart.

The Lamalerans beseeched Sebastianus to drag the Kelulus to the nearest island, where they hoped to stash the wreck until they could return for it. But he explained that doing so would take them many miles out of their way, and he had to get the foreign passengers to their destination the next day, lest they miss their plane. “The law of the sea is to save people,” Sebastianus said, “not boats.”

Until then, a sole Lamaleran had remained aboard the Kelulus to protect it. Now he was brought onto the cruise ship, carrying the leo. The téna’s sail and harpoons were left for the ancestors, who would row it in the watery underworld. The floodlights of the Spice Islander illuminated the Kelulus as it began to sink. “You go ahead and wait for us on shore,” a Lamaleran cried out. “Soon we will join you!”

The rope between the Kelulus and the Spice Islander was unknotted. A whaler declared, “It’s better that I go with my téna!” and tried to climb over the railing, but other men restrained him. Many Lamalerans wept hysterically. Others covered their eyes, unable to watch the sinking of the second ship they had lost in a single hunt. Frans tried to face the tragedy unblinkingly, but inside he grieved as if he was watching the drowning of a family member.

Every téna had an eye painted on either side of its bow. As the Spice Islander motored away, its wake spun the Kelulus to face the departing Lamalerans. As the two vessels separated, the Kelulus never broke eye contact. Frans was sure that its spirit was bidding him a personal farewell. The tourists photographed the spectacle.

The Lamalerans slept that night on nests of blankets and pillows piled on the viewing deck. Frans was so exhausted he could not help but sleep, but he kept waking abruptly to unquiet thoughts. What would have happened if the Spice Islander had not discovered them? And how would the ancestors judge them for losing the téna?

“The law of the sea is to save people, not boats.”

The next morning, Frans was thrilled and unnerved as he explored the cruise ship. He had never been on a vessel that did not rock in the waves before. The air-conditioning baffled him. He was amazed by the miniature waterfall that poured from a bathroom ceiling to clean him. He was amused that the tourists pooped in a chair; Lamalerans use squat toilets. When he glimpsed the queen-size beds and ceiling lights of one of the tourist’s cabins, he could not help but wistfully compare it with his mattress stuffed with corn husks and his tiny brick house with no electricity.

Sebastianus had radioed ahead, and a crowd of government officials, journalists, and expat Lamalerans thronged the wharf of Kupang Harbor on Timor. Behind them, sunlight glittered on thousands of corrugated tin roofs, TV aerials, and radio antennas. Frans had only ever traveled to the rural islands neighboring Lamalera to fish; he had never seen anything like this. His first instinct was to hide, but he had no choice except to confront this brave new world.

As he and the rest of the whalers waited for a ferry to take them back to Lamalera, Frans wandered Kupang’s dusty lanes. He saw the impending future: multistory concrete buildings, TVs blabbing about Indonesia’s president, radios playing Ace of Base, motorbikes zooming across newly built asphalt roads. Here were more than 100,000 people who had forgotten their ancestors and abandoned the sacred past for a future that, to him, seemed cheap, chaotic, and unfulfilling. That made Frans yearn for home.

Finally, after several days, the Kéna Pukã was loaded into the cavernous metallic hold of a ferry. The tribe had been alerted by then to the survival of the men, and it sent a message directing the ferry to drop them at a neighboring village, where they had to wait several days while the nautilus shells were dug up and a shaman reversed the funerals that had been performed for them. Later, Frans would help lead a separate mystical rite to recall the souls of the sunken téna.

Yet there was no ceremony to remedy the unprecedented betrayal by the Teti Heri’s crew. It had rent the unity prescribed by the ancestors: talé tou, kemui tou, onã tou, mata tou. The ancient Lamalerans had considered this oneness so fundamental that they did not leave instructions for how to heal a break.

The tribe rebuilt their fleet, and the whale hunts continued. Frans reconciled with the men of the Teti Heri. Still, an existential rupture remained, like a leak in a téna. Over the coming years, Frans would sometimes find himself staring at the western horizon, remembering the alien world beyond it. He wondered with trepidation when it would arrive. He knew it would not be long.

Two decades later, when I met the Lamalerans, they were engaged in a desperate battle to preserve their traditions against the overwhelming pressures of globalization, which had already extinguished many indigenous cultures around the globe. Ignatius was striving to teach his son Ben how to whale, but Ben was making secret plans to run away to the tourist mecca of Bali and become a DJ. Ben was not alone among the new generation yearning for a modern life, casting doubt on the survival of the ways of the ancestors. And yet some of the tribe’s youth still fought to continue the traditions. Even after a whaling accident in 2014 almost killed Jon Hariona, the grandson of Yosef Boko, he kept striving to become a lamafa, like his ancestors before him.

The full story of the Lamalerans’ struggle to forge a place for their way of life in the new millennium is told in my forthcoming book, The Last Whalers.