by Susan Casey
During the sixties and early seventies, a brutal era of orca captures, the Southern Residents who swam past Pender Island had been targeted more than any other group. Orca hunters, working for marine parks, had used spotter planes, explosives, and nets to herd the pods, injuring and killing many animals in the process, traumatizing them all, and in the end removing forty-five individuals, 30 percent of the Southern Residents’ population. Worse, it was calves the marine parks wanted, so they’d effectively destroyed the next generation.
Responding to public outrage, Washington State sued SeaWorld in 1976 for overstepping its collecting permit. The state won, and then proceeded to outlaw further orca captures. (SeaWorld immediately moved on to Iceland and began to capture whales there, a practice it continued until 1989.) Since then, the Southern Residents have struggled to recover, but there are only seventy-nine of them left in an area rife with overfishing, sonar use, missile testing, shipping traffic, and pollution. The group is now listed as endangered.
The sole surviving orca from those shameful roundups was Lolita. After forty-three years in a tank she stood no chance of reintegrating fully into the wild, but a movement had gathered steam to relocate her to a natural sea pen: Kanaka Bay, on Washington State’s San Juan Island, near the place where she was caught. Compared to the Miami Seaquarium, Kanaka Bay would be a vast improvement, a taste, at least, of freedom. Even better: Lolita’s mother, an orca from the Southern Residents L-Pod, was still alive. The matriarch was eighty-five now, and traveled with her family. Scientists from the nearby Center for Whale Research spotted her regularly. It was possible, even likely, that Lolita would hear her calls and recognize them.
After the dark ages of hunting and trafficking dolphins, after all the pain we’ve caused them, there is a glimmer of hope—fast becoming a gleam—that the future might be different. Porter’s change of heart is only one example. The documentary Blackfish has followed in The Cove’s wake, opening millions of eyes to the real cost of keeping killer whales, animals who could never be content in even the most immense concrete tanks imaginable. As a result of increased awareness, California and Washington State have both proposed new laws banning orca captivity and breeding, with other states likely to follow. In 2014, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland, announced its intention to create a seaside sanctuary for older captive dolphins, a kind of dolphin retirement home. Such places already exist for elephants, chimpanzees, and other animals, CEO John Racanelli pointed out to the press. “We want to do right by our dolphins and by our audience, and do a better job of serving our mission,” he explained. “We want to change the way humanity views and cares for the ocean.” The National Aquarium has also terminated its scripted dolphin show, deeming the practice “antiquated.”
For marine parks, adopting a more enlightened outlook on the subject of captive whales and dolphins is clearly the way forward. Seaworld’s high-flying stock cratered shortly after its IPO, signaling the public’s growing distaste for its operations. Since May 2013, the company has lost more than a third of its value, and is now being sued by its shareholders for “failing to disclose improper practices regarding its orca population and denying the cause of the company’s failing attendance.”
On another front, an organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project, led by lawyer Steven Wise (with Lori Marino on board as its scientific advisor), was beginning to press cases asking the courts to give certain brainy animals—like chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins—some basic rights under habeas corpus, which grants status to captive persons. This process is arduous, pioneering, and sure to face resistance, but Wise’s approach is clever. Legally and philosophically, the term “person” merely indicates a distinct entity; it is not synonymous with “human being.” After all, if corporations are considered persons under the law, then why not creatures who demonstrate such sentience and self-awareness that they call themselves by name?
This same idea had bubbled up at the 2012 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest convocation of scientists, where one group presented a ten-point “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans.” “No cetacean should be held in captivity or servitude; be subject to cruel treatment; or be removed from their natural environment,” the declaration read. “No cetacean is the property of any State, corporation, human group or individual.” “Dolphins are nonhuman persons,” ethicist and philosopher Tom White explained. “A person needs to be an individual. And if individuals count, then the deliberate killing of individuals of this sort is ethically the equivalent of deliberately killing a human being.”
Now the gleam was visible to the naked eye, and still the good news kept coming. After my meeting with Porter, I didn’t hear from him for a while. When I did, it was for a good reason: his project, Ocean Walls, had gone live in a British Columbia mall. Porter sent me a video showing the exhibit in action, with dozens of people standing in front of its high-definition screens, mesmerized by the Southern Residents. “For Tilikum,” the title read, as the images appeared. A BEAUTIFUL ALTERNATIVE TO MARINE CAPTIVITY, praised the headline on TheDodo.com, an animal lovers’ Web site. Porter had also organized marine conservation talks, held against a backdrop of orca footage.
Beluga whales got some welcome news when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration denied a petition from the Georgia Aquarium to import eighteen wild-caught animals from Russia. After lengthy hearings, NOAA ruled that removing these belugas would contribute to the population’s decline; that these captures would likely lead to more captures; that the aquarium had not adequately proven the whales had been treated humanely, and that, all in all, it was a bad idea.
And then, a surprise: eighteen months after I’d visited Marineland Canada, the Ontario government issued a 125-page report, written by a team of scientists, laying out sweeping protections for captive marine mammals. Also, it advanced legislation prohibiting the future acquisition, sales, or breeding of orcas. Since Marineland was the only facility in the province that kept any of these animals, one could say these lovely new rules were written especially for John Holer.
“I envision the day when the current oceanaria will progress from being ‘prisons’ for dolphins to being interspecies schools,” John Lilly wrote, “educating both dolphins and humans about one another.” Like so many of Lilly’s predictions and pronouncements and hopes, the idea of humans and dolphins thriving together is worth dreaming about—but maybe now we were actually getting there. One might imagine such a relationship to be unprecedented, except that it isn’t. It has happened before, in a time so long ago that it almost seems like a fairy tale.
The dolphins were 3,800 years old but still lively, their black and white bodies arcing through terra-cotta waves as they leaped across the prehistoric pottery. They regarded me with their oversize feline eyes, outlined with kohl in the manner of Cleopatra. But these dolphins preceded that Egyptian queen by seventeen centuries. They were among the earliest dolphin images known to us, the first representations of their kind, painted on what looked like a rough clay breadbasket. The artist was nameless, the civilization he belonged to shrouded in mystery, but one thing was obvious: whoever created these dolphins had done so adoringly.
I stepped back so I could see them in the spotlight. If you didn’t know the origin of this piece, you might find it underwhelming. It was, after all, only a kitchen utensil. The National Archaeological Museum of Athens was the territory of thunderbolt-hurling, larger-than-life Greek gods, not whimsical little dolphins. Learning the dolphins’ story, however, would change your perspective. This pod’s place in history was central, and the tale that accompanied them one of humanity’s greatest riddles.
I’d arrived in Athens the previous day, landing in a doleful city wrung out by debt and austerity. No one was thinking about marine life. They were knotted with worry, wracked by unemployment and uncertainty about the future. My cabdriver, a Greek man in his thirties, told me that he had been trained as a civil engi
neer. He bemoaned the state of affairs that had landed him behind the wheel. “I think by this time next year we will be eating one another,” he said.
The streets were careworn and grimy and heavily graffitied. Every other storefront was empty; stray dogs prowled the streets. Even in the museum, one of the world’s finest collections, here and there the lights were burnt out, giving the building an air of abandonment and neglect. I walked through arcades of magnificent torsos, past marble friezes depicting glorious battles, memorials to classical Greek history—but I had come to see the dolphins. They were tucked into a small, underlit room on the second floor, the Thera Gallery. You could easily miss it, which was somehow fitting: the Minoans, the people who had painted these creatures, eluded us for over three thousand years.
At the height of their civilization, around 1700 BC, the Minoans had lived among the Cyclades, a group of islands in the Aegean Sea. Their main strongholds were Crete and Thera (also known as Santorini), but their influence was felt all the way to Asia, Africa, and possibly beyond. They were master seafarers, ocean savants, celestial navigators who had no qualms about sailing over the horizon at a time long before maps. Their nautical adventures were motivated by trade: luxurious Minoan goods—sumptuous wall paintings, fine pottery, gold jewelry, bronze tools, olive oil, an intoxicating drink they’d invented called wine—were coveted by even the Egyptian pharaohs. As a result, the Minoans were wealthy, and they built palatial complexes that were dripping in beauty. They were confident, too: unusually, none of their settlements were fortified. As a cosmopolitan people with roots that can be traced back to the Stone Age, you’d think the Minoans would be as familiar to us as the Egyptians, the Romans, the Persians, or the ancient Greeks. Instead they had vanished, their existence one long string of question marks.
Perhaps it’s easy to disappear when you’re buried under a hundred feet of ash, which is how their culture met its demise. Sometime around 1500 BC, an epic volcanic explosion on Thera snuffed out the bright spark of Minoan life. This cataclysm was unlike anything in history, estimated to have been four times more violent than Krakatoa, the Indonesian volcano that erupted in 1883, partially collapsed, and killed 36,000 people. When Thera’s volcano blew its top, it belched clouds of smoke and gas and rock miles into the air. It blotted out the sun, darkening the sky for months. Its roar was heard in Africa; its ashes fell in Asia. The island’s peaks heaved and shuddered, cratering into the sea, kicking up a towering tsunami that would have galloped over to Crete in less than half an hour. Where there had been mountaintops, now there was a caldera of ocean 1,200 feet deep. Once-grand palaces and cities sank beneath the waves—many researchers believe that Thera inspired Plato’s mythical Atlantis. No one knows exactly what happened to the Minoans after that, but by 1400 BC they were all but gone from the scene, replaced by the warlike Mycenaeans.
The Minoans had been erased so thoroughly that it was only by chance that archaeologists unearthed them, and to date we’ve glimpsed only a fraction of their heritage. But what little we do know about them, gleaned entirely from the artwork they left behind, suggests a happy, sophisticated, nature-worshipping people. Among thousands of Minoan paintings and ceramics and carvings, many of them meticulously detailed, there is a distinct absence of imagery portraying war or fighting or any kind of violence. Their god was, in fact, a goddess: the Minoans revered a figure called Potnia, an icon of the divine feminine. She was the source of love and creation, and the mistress of the animals: in exquisite frescoes and gold seals, she is shown dancing in olive groves with her attendant priestesses, with lions and griffins at her heel, with birds wheeling overhead and dolphins cradled in her arms.
Among the most sublime Minoan artifacts was a series of frescoes found at Thera, in a lost seaside city known as Akrotiri. Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos discovered the site, digging on a hunch in 1967 and instantly hitting pay dirt. Akrotiri turned out to be another Pompeii, only 1,600 years older. Peeling away layers of earth, Marinatos uncovered two- and three-story houses with amenities nobody expected to find in a prehistoric settlement: the Minoans even had running hot water. In the prelude to the volcanic apocalypse, the people had fled—absolutely no human remains have turned up—but the buildings’ walls were covered with murals, done in a distinctive, evocative style. They featured lavishly adorned women bending to caress lilies, swallows kissing, dolphins and monkeys frolicking, spirals painted in kaleidoscopic colors, and ceremonial gatherings attended by blissed-out Minoans, all drawn with a lyrical grace. Marinatos also found many Theran possessions that had been left behind, and the dolphin pottery at the museum in Athens had come from his excavations.
Taken as a soulful snapshot of a time and a people—what they cherished, how they lived—the Minoan artworks tell a spellbinding story, with dolphins among the key players. Other cultures have been drawn to dolphins—few animals have been mythologized so thoroughly—but the tales have been passed down orally, so they seem hazy and unreal. Their narratives, while enchanting, are hard to swallow as nonfiction. The West African Dogon people, for instance, claim their forefathers were dolphin-like beings called Nommos, who descended to earth from Sirius, a star system in the constellation Canis Major. In the Amazon, there is widespread belief that the river’s pink dolphins, or botos, are clever sorcerers who often appear on land disguised as handsome men, bent on seducing women. The botos are envoys from a parallel universe, the shamans say, guides between this world and an underwater realm called the Encante, a crystal metropolis where everything shines like diamonds. The notion that dolphins can morph into humans whenever it suits them is also found in Aboriginal Australian legend, Pacific Island chants, Native American folklore, and Greek epic poems. Certainly these myths, true or not, reflect an incomparable relationship between our two species. But while other cultures talked about their bond with dolphins, only the Minoans provided proof.
Dolphins show up with startling frequency in their art, so often that historians refer to this as the Minoans’ “marine style.” If there were any people who painted dolphins earlier, or more often, or more brilliantly, or exalted the animals more, we haven’t yet found them. So who were these playful, peaceable dolphin lovers—and what are they whispering to us from millennia ago? These aren’t idle questions. In an age when we coexist uneasily with every other life form, it seemed to me that we could use a little Minoan wisdom to go along with our bottomless stores of information.
Outside the Thera Gallery, in the rest of the museum’s displays, I was thrust into a fiercer, more recent era of warrior heroes and terrible gorgons, satyrs and pygmies and lions tearing apart horses. Zeus was spearing women everywhere I turned. As the centuries progressed, the dolphin images dwindled, unless the animals were sidekicks to a gruff Poseidon, rearing up with his trident. Everyone had weapons, many bodies were missing their heads, the ocean was seen as a hostile combatant, and no one looked like they were having nearly as much fun as the Minoans.
The old man, Artemis, sat at a rickety table and sipped from a glass of honeyed raki, his back leaned against the wall of his whitewashed house. The sun was setting over the caldera and people had gathered along pathways, in doorways, on promontories, to watch its blazing descent. All of Thera faced the sea, its buildings clinging to sheer cliff faces that plummeted to the water. In the gilded dusk, the island’s snow-white architecture was bathed in molten gold and copper. Artemis was pushing ninety and he didn’t speak a word of English, but that didn’t impede our conversation. He gestured to the glowing landscape and touched his heart. I nodded, and did the same. Then I drew a stick-figure dolphin on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. “Ah,” he said, “Akrotiri!” He picked up the raki bottle and refilled my glass.
There was nowhere I’d ever seen that had half the drama of this blasted-out island, nothing that stirred my imagination more. Motoring in on the ferry that morning, I’d reeled back in my seat when Thera came into view. Where there had once been an almost perfectly round landmass,
now there was a ravaged crescent of volcanic rock banded in striations of rust, brown, and gray. It was as though a chunk of the place had been clawed away by a giant paw and flung into the abyss. Inside the caldera, the water lay as still and inscrutable as black marble.
I had immediately set out to explore, walking narrow paths shared by sure-footed donkeys. If you slipped here, you would fall for a mile. In the pretty town of Oia I found dolphins everywhere: stenciled on walls, stamped onto hotel signs, etched into jewelry, inked on pots that were replicas of Minoan designs. In one store, I picked up an amphora ringed by cavorting dolphins, and caught the owner’s attention. He reminded me a lot of the Cat in the Hat. “Yessss,” he said, in a smooth Greek accent, “the symbol of the Minoans. They were very preoccupied with marine life, you know.”
Continuing on, I had come across Artemis, who looked like he might have been here long enough to have personally known some Minoans. “Kalimera,” I said, using the only Greek I knew. “Hello.” He smiled with rheumy eyes and motioned at me to join him for a drink. My feet were sore, Thera was hypnotic, the raki was inviting, and Artemis was delightful, so I did. Using sign language, I told him that I was planning to visit Akrotiri the next day.
My timing was lucky. Until recently Akrotiri had been off-limits, closed for eight years after a Spanish tourist died when part of the excavation’s roof caved in. The site had just reopened, and now the smothered town that had produced so many timeless dolphin artworks was once again accessible to see. I had read about it endlessly, and I knew that any investigation of the Minoans’ maritime obsessions needed to start in its abandoned streets.
What did I hope to find there? As the night rose up from the silence of the caldera, I thought about this. I suppose I wanted to know how a prosperous people had managed to live in unity with nature—for thousands of years. In the modern world, armed to the teeth with technological might, we have chosen another route. We believe in dominion: nature is ours to do with as we please. There is nothing we aren’t willing to tamper with, even our own genetic code. Not long before I’d come to Greece, a paper was released estimating that half the world’s animals have been exterminated in only two generations—and that was before you considered what has happened to plants and insects, coral reefs and rain forests and other ecosystems. We are causing extinctions, scientists say, at a thousand times the usual rate. We know we are mowing down life—we’ve made charts and graphs and we count everything on spreadsheets—but that understanding hasn’t slowed us in the least. Harmony was a quaint idea for the rustics, our actions say, but we have more ambitious plans. And to put it plainly, our approach wasn’t working so well. “We think we have understood everything,” philosopher Thomas Berry wrote. “But we have not. We have used everything.”