The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life

by Doug Bock Clark

Overview

In this "immersive, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first book [with] the texture and color of a first-rate novel" (New York Times), journalist Doug Bock Clark tells the epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to a tribe on the brink.

A New York Times Notable Book​
A New York Times Editors' Choice
Winner of Lowell Thomas Travel Book Award Silver Medal
Finalist for William Saroyan International Writing Prize
Longlisted for Mountbatten Award for Best Book
Telegraph Best Travel Books of the Year
Hampshire Gazette Best Books of 2019

One of the favorite books of Yuval Noah Harari, author of the classic bestseller Sapiens, "on the subject of humanity's place in the world." (via Airmail)

On a volcanic island in the Savu Sea so remote that other Indonesians call it "The Land Left Behind" live the Lamalerans: a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who are the world's last subsistence whalers. They have survived for half a millennium by hunting whales with bamboo harpoons and handmade wooden boats powered by sails of woven palm fronds. But now, under assault from the rapacious forces of the modern era and a global economy, their way of life teeters on the brink of collapse.

Award-winning journalist Doug Bock Clark, one of a handful of Westerners who speak the Lamaleran language, lived with the tribe across three years, and he brings their world and their people to vivid life in this gripping story of a vanishing culture. Jon, an orphaned apprentice whaler, toils to earn his harpoon and provide for his ailing grandparents, while Ika, his indomitable younger sister, is eager to forge a life unconstrained by tradition, and to realize a star-crossed love. Frans, an aging shaman, tries to unite the tribe in order to undo a deadly curse. And Ignatius, a legendary harpooner entering retirement, labors to hand down the Ways of the Ancestors to his son, Ben, who would secretly rather become a DJ in the distant tourist mecca of Bali.

Deeply empathetic and richly reported, The Last Whalers is a riveting, powerful chronicle of the collision between one of the planet's dwindling indigenous peoples and the irresistible enticements and upheavals of a rapidly transforming world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316390613
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/22/2019
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	394,521
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Doug Bock Clark is a writer whose articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, National Geographic, GQ, Wired, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

Clark also won the 2017 Reporting Award, was a finalist for the 2016 Mirror Award, and has been awarded two Fulbright Fellowships, a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and an 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship. He has been interviewed about his work on CNN, BBC, NPR, and ABC's 20/20. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Table of Contents

The Lamalerans xi

Maps xiv

A Note on the Text xix

Prologue: The Apprentice's Lesson 3

Part 1 1994-2014

1 The Lamaleran Odyssey 11

2 At Play in the Graveyard of Whales 35

3 The Child-Eating Eel and the Curse of the Black Goat 65

4 The Cleansing of Harmful Language 96

5 This, My Son, Is How You Kill a Whale 121

6 The Laughter 154

7 The Way of the Lamafa 173

Part 2 2015

8 A New Year 195

9 Nekat 209

10 The Marriage 223

11 In the Middle of the Typhoon of Life 242

Part 3 2016

12 The New Kéna Pukã 267

13 Against the Leviathan 284

Epilogue 309

About This Project 315

Acknowledgments 321

Notes 323

Glossary 345

What People are Saying About This

New York Times bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm - Sebastian Junger

"Doug Bock Clark has delivered us an amazing account of an almost mythological fight—man versus leviathan—and in vivid prose he reveals the most profound truths about both how strong we are and how fragile we are. Part journalism, part anthropology, The Last Whalers is a spectacular and deeply empathetic attempt to understand a vanishing world. I absolutely loved this magnificent book.”

New York Times bestselling author of The Stranger in the Woods - Michael Finkel

“This lyrically written and richly observed book not only tells of the Lamalerans’ spectacular feats of seamanship, but also demonstrates, with heartrending power, what all of us will lose when the march of modernity touches humanity’s final tradition-ruled outposts.”

New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours and Lost in Shangri-La - Mitchell Zuckoff

“The Last Whalers is a monumental achievement. With luminous writing and expert reporting, Doug Bock Clark provides a rare view into our shared human past, from exhilarating whale hunts to intimate family dramas. In doing so, he reveals the complex lives of men and women whose ancient culture teeters between the eternal teachings of the Ancestors and the pressures and enticements of modernity.”

New York Times bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration - Robert Moor

“Equal parts rollicking adventure and careful anthropology, The Last Whalers opened up a fresh and fascinating world to me. From the very first lines, I was riveted.”

Editorial Reviews

"An immersive, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first book...The story has the texture and coloring of a first-rate novel...Clark's writing is supple but unshowy...He closely tracks the lives of many Lamalerans, male and female, young and old, and he weaves their stories together with a history of the tribe and its beliefs. He manages to make this tribe's dilemmas universal -- no small feat...Clark brings empathy and literary skill to bear. This is a humbly told book, one in which the author's first-person voice does not intrude. This humility gives the book an organic and resonant propulsion. Accumulated tensions are only slowly released. Scenes are delivered, not summaries. This book earns its emotions...You finish The Last Whalers with hope for the Lamalerans, and hope that Clark writes many more books."—Dwight Garner, New York Times

"An immersive and absorbing chronicle that takes the reader deep into the lives of this tribe and is told with a richness of interior detail that renders their lives, and the choices they face, not just comprehensible but somehow familiar...Clark's writing about the ocean and its creatures is superb, so vivid that the reader can feel the sting of salt water up the nose...The magic in this work is Clark's decision to cede the story over to the Lamalerans themselves. In doing so, he captures the drama of the tribe as it attempts to navigate new opportunities that, while enticing, may bring about the extinction of their culture...Whether that culture will, in the end, withstand mounting pressures from the outside remains to be seen. If it doesn't, The Last Whalers will at least document all that has been lost."—Gabriel Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle

"A forceful debut...Clark's prose soars...Furthermore, his sympathy for and devotion to his subjects is real: he speaks both Indonesian and Lamaleran and fosters an intimacy that allows him to disappear entirely in the telling of their story. He brings us into his characters' lives, showing us the rhythms of Lamalera and the day-to-day tensions the villagers face...Clark successfully depicts these people in their full human complexity rather than as primitive tropes...His finely wrought, deeply reported, and highly empathetic account is a human-level testament to dignity in the face of loss and a stoic adherence to cultural inheritance in the face of a rapidly changing world."—Tim Sohn, Outside Magazine

"Doug Bock Clark has delivered us an amazing account of an almost mythological fight--man versus leviathan--and in vivid prose he reveals the most profound truths about both how strong we are and how fragile we are. Part journalism, part anthropology, The Last Whalers is a spectacular and deeply empathetic attempt to understand a vanishing world. I absolutely loved this magnificent book."—Sebastian Junger, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm

"The Last Whalers is a monumental achievement. With luminous writing and expert reporting, Doug Bock Clark provides a rare view into our shared human past, from exhilarating whale hunts to intimate family dramas. In doing so, he reveals the complex lives of men and women whose ancient culture teeters between the eternal teachings of the Ancestors and the pressures and enticements of modernity."—Mitchell Zuckoff, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours and Lost in Shangri-La

"The Last Whalers is a true work of art. This lyrically written and richly observed book not only tells of the Lamalerans' spectacular feats of seamanship, but also demonstrates, with heartrending power, what all of us will lose when the march of modernity touches humanity's final tradition-ruled outposts."—Michael Finkel, New York Times bestselling author of The Stranger in the Woods

"The Last Whalers is an intimate and moving account of cultural extinction told on a profoundly human scale, an urgent and affecting plea for understanding and preserving our myriad identities and traditions before they become forever lost on the relentless road toward a monocultural world."—Francisco Cantú, author of the New York Times bestseller and #1 Indie Next pick The Line Becomes a River

"The Last Whalers is an extraordinary feat of reportage and illumination. It introduces a remote community and an endangered way of life, but it refuses to pander to familiar tropes of the exotic, instead bringing its subjects to the page in all their glorious complexity--in all their longing, triumphs, frustrations, and joys. Its gaze is global and intimate at once, tirelessly attuned to the tidal forces and subtle eddies of what it means to be alive."—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams

"Equal parts rollicking adventure and careful anthropology, The Last Whalers opened up a fresh and fascinating world to me. From the very first lines, I was riveted."—Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration

"This is an important book. The Last Whalers pays a muscular and compassionate witness to our odyssey of being human at the time of the Anthropocene. It is an investigation into our complexities, our desires and boundaries and contradictions--what the book's heroes, the Lamalerans, aptly call 'a typhoon of life.'"—Anna Badkhen, author of Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah

"Doug Bock Clark's remarkable, gorgeously written account of tribal honor, love, and sacrifice among hunter-gatherers reminds us in this age of breakneck development that the disappearance of indigenous societies diminishes us all."—Bronwen Dickey, New York Times bestselling author of Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

"This is a brilliant, exciting, and terrifying story that reveals the hidden world of Indonesian islanders who find themselves trapped between past and future--between hunting whales with bamboo spears to survive and an outside world poised to wipe them out."—Jack Hitt, author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route into Spain

"A gripping story of a community struggling for its very survival, and of the clash between ancient and modern worlds. Clark has a graceful, almost poetic writing style, and his vivid portrait of the Lamalerans and their way of life evokes in the reader a stirring image of a lost world, an ancient society that has somehow stayed virtually untouched by the march of time...until now."—David Pitt, Booklist

"A fascinating debut...Accessible and empathetic...Clark creates a thoughtful look at the precariousness of cultural values and the lure of modernization in the developing world."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

…[a] vital, immersive and elegant debut…With glittering prose and a novelist's knack for storytelling, Clark carries readers to the heart of this community as they try to manage and adapt to the tidal wave of change that has recently arrived on their shore, asking: Who do we want to become, and what can we do to arrive intact at that precarious future? Reminiscent of Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Clark's book intimately details, with empathy and grace, the tribe's value system and the physical world on which they depend.

The New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Rush

…immersive, densely reported and altogether remarkable…[with] the texture and coloring of a first-rate novel. Like a first-rate novel, too, The Last Whalers has an abiding but unforced theme. It's about the flood of modernity, in the form of outboard motors and cellphones and televised soap operas, as seen from the perspective of a curious but wary society that fears losing itself in the deluge…Clark is hardly the first observer to study Lamaleran culture…But he brings empathy and literary skill to bear. This is a humbly told book, one in which the author's first-person voice does not intrude. This humility gives the book an organic and resonant propulsion. Accumulated tensions are only slowly released. Scenes are delivered, not summaries. This book earns its emotions…The tribe has a saying: "Hope, but not too much," which underscores their stoic endurance. You finish The Last Whalers with hope for them, and hope that Clark writes many more books.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

10/08/2018
In this fascinating debut, journalist Clark offers an account of a small hunter-gatherer society, the Lamalerans, devoted to whaling on the remote Indonesian island of Lembata. On his first visit to the Lamalerans’ village in 2011, Clark realized the Ways of the Ancestors—“a set of whaling and religious practices handed down through the generations”—still defined indigenous life there. Wondering how much longer these ancient traditions could last, Clark returned to Lembata several times in subsequent years, aiming to “immerse myself as deeply as possible in the tribe.” To that end, he hunted, wove ropes, spearfished, attended ceremonies, and bartered at the village market alongside the Lamalerans. With accessible and empathetic prose, Clark profiles the people he met there, such as Yonanes “Jon” Demon Hariona, a young man who aspires to become a “lamafa,” or harpooner, his society’s highest honor, yet also toys with the idea of seeking “a richer and easier life elsewhere,” away from his community. By exploring personal conflicts like Jon’s, Clark creates a thoughtful look at the precariousness of cultural values and the lure of modernization in the developing world. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

The danger and excitement of the hunt grip listeners from the start as a whale hunter from Indonesia's Lamalera Bay risks his life to feed his tribe. Narrator Jay Snyder gives passages about the hunt an elemental feel, creating dramatic tension that carries over into the whalers' life stories. Their stories illustrate the attractions of modern life—whether it's outboard motors or the soap operas that bring Jakarta's allure to remote communities. Author Doug Bock Clark also examines current pressures on the tribe—from the government and whaling opponents to the aging of its whalers. He asks listeners to ponder the balance between modernity and tradition. Hearing about Clark's time with the tribe while writing could make the moral questions personal for listeners as well. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2019 - AudioFile

The danger and excitement of the hunt grip listeners from the start as a whale hunter from Indonesia's Lamalera Bay risks his life to feed his tribe. Narrator Jay Snyder gives passages about the hunt an elemental feel, creating dramatic tension that carries over into the whalers' life stories. Their stories illustrate the attractions of modern life—whether it's outboard motors or the soap operas that bring Jakarta's allure to remote communities. Author Doug Bock Clark also examines current pressures on the tribe—from the government and whaling opponents to the aging of its whalers. He asks listeners to ponder the balance between modernity and tradition. Hearing about Clark's time with the tribe while writing could make the moral questions personal for listeners as well. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2019 - AudioFile

2018-10-02

Journalist Clark's carefully researched and often dramatic first book follows the residents of a small village on a remote Indonesian island as they engage in the tradition of hunting whales and adjust to the incursions of the outside world.

Over the course of three years, the author, a two-time Fulbright recipient, spent months at a time on the island of Lembata with the Lamalerans, a group of hunter-gatherers. Of the 1,500 members of the tribe, 300 are dedicated to hunting sperm whales as well as other marine mammals and fish. Scrupulously leaving himself out of the narrative, Clark focuses on a few individuals to tell the story of the group. Chief among them are two young men who aspire to become harpoonists, the most prestigious—and dangerous—position on the whaling boat. Jon, raised by his grandparents after his parents abandoned him, struggles to find a place in a society that scorns him. Ben, an expert harpooner and boatmaker, finds himself drawn by the attractions of life outside the island. The author also closely follows Ben's father, Ignatius, and other older builders and masters of the long rowboats whose construction, unchanged for generations, is guided by the "Ways of the Ancestors." Clark pays less attention to the women of the group, many of whom are sent away to be educated and work elsewhere in Indonesia, sometimes returning to care for elderly family members, though he does devote space to the daily life of Jon's sister Ika, who wants to marry a young man from another tribe. In between the stories of the individuals, the author chronicles the history of the group and the ceremonies he attended in a society that meshes Catholic faith and animistic religion. Perhaps surprisingly, among the chief villains of the narrative are the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, which promote whale-watching rather than whale-killing. The author argues that sperm whales are less endangered than the Lamaleran society.

An insightful examination of a little-known culture.

Kirkus Reviews