AGAINST THE LEVIATHAN

AGAINST THE LEVIATHAN is the story of a tribe of 1,500 people called the Lamalerans, who make their home at the end of the end of the earth and are the last subsistence whalers in the world.

Each year they take enough whales both to provide their own meat and to barter with the highland tribes for the rice and vegetables they need. They have lived the lives of whalers on the island of Lembata, 600 miles northwest of North Australia, at least since 1618, when Portuguese sailors first took note of them. Since no date is recorded in their oral history, for all we know they could have been there for centuries before.

What is certain is that an ancient way of life that has sustained and nourished a people unchanged for centuries is in danger of perishing from the earth forever as a port is built next door to the village of Lamalera and encroaching technology causes divisiveness and splintering in the tribe.

The author will document it all—the Curse of the Black Goat, the Wulandoni War, the Road of Ghosts—as one form of being human, in contact with deeply elemental life rhythms, teeters on the verge of extinction.