Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  What’s noteworthy about these legends—and for that matter, nearly all of the Northwest Coastal legends pertaining to the killer whale—is the full personage that killer whales are accorded. They transform into men when they come to land, return to their whale form when they go in the water, and emerge back in their own villages in their human form again. Certainly, it is not unacceptable for the daughter of a chief to marry such a man and doing so brings great power, spiritual and material, to the tribe in return.

  There were other cultures that similarly honored killer whales. The native inhabitants of Newfoundland, the Maritime Archaic cultural complex, honored orcas as fellow hunters and made ornate stone carvings of them that were later uncovered by archaeologists. The same is true of the Maori people of New Zealand, who called orcas upokohue. In Japan, killer whales were an ingrained part of the maritime folklore of this island nation. Their name in Japanese is shachi; rooflines of Japanese homes and ancient castles are often decorated with figures called shachihoko, half fish, half dragon (or tiger), that is a kind of caricature of a shachi.

  The Japanese, dating back to at least the 7th century, were also among the first whalers. They mainly hunted right whales, humpbacks, fin whales, and gray whales, but they occasionally harvested blue and sperm whales. After all these stocks became depleted in the 20th century, however, the Japanese took to hunting shachi, taking about 1,100 orcas between 1954 and 1997.

  In Siberia, the indigenous Yupik people mythologized orcas in a fashion similar to that of Northwest Coastal tribes, as wolves who transformed into sea creatures. The Yupik believed that orcas helped them hunt walrus in the summertime and then became wolves that seemed to assist them in rounding up reindeer in the wintertime. In any event, the Yupik clearly believed they had a mutualistic hunting relationship with their fellow apex predators.

  Western mythology casts killer whales in a much darker light, however, as made clear by their given name Orcinus orca—from the Latin “Orcus,” one of the Roman gods of the underworld—the one who punished broken oaths. He became associated with demons and was the source of J.R.R. Tolkien’s word for a kind of goblin: orcs. Orcinus orca roughly translates as “demon from hell.”

  That stands in stark contrast to their fellow dolphins (particularly the Atlantic bottlenose), who figure prominently as friends to humanity throughout Greek and Roman mythology. Where dolphins were seen as messengers of the sun god, Apollo, orcas in contrast were the minions of Hades.

  Indeed, orcas have pretty much always scared the hell out of Western Civilization. They frightened Pliny the Elder, who provided the first written description of them in 70 CE: “Orcas (the appearance of which no image can express, other than an enormous mass of savage flesh with teeth) are the enemy of [other whales] … they charge and pierce them like warships ramming.” The better part of two millennia later, they scared the bejesus out of the whaler Captain Charles Scammon, who described them in 1874 as “intent upon seeking something to destroy and devour.”

  Seen in the Louvre, Jean-August Dominique Ingres’ Roger Delivrant Angelique features a fanciful version of a seagoing “orc.”

  IMAGE REPRODUCED COURTESY OF ART RESOURCE.

  For the most part, they were feared and shunned on the seas by most seagoing men from the West for the better part of two millennia, and mythologized by those who remained on land. A fairly typical example of the conception of the “orc,” the sea monster from the deep, can be found hanging in the Louvre in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ 1819 painting Roger Delivrant Angelique, which depicts a hero from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Italian poem, Orlando Furioso, astride a winged hippogriff, rescuing a radiant and naked maiden, who is chained to a rock amid a dark roiling sea, from the black monster. The monster’s head and face more resemble the crude (and similarly off) medieval depictions of lions, being rather doglike with a mouth full of sharp teeth into which the hero is driving his lance. Gustave Dore’s earlier etching of the same scene showed a much more dragon-like creature with wings and a sinuous body.

  According to Ariosto, the orc haunted the waters around Ireland and devoured both men and women, though it apparently developed a taste for beautiful women that was never sated. Ariosto described “the monstrous orc” thus:

  What this resembled best,

  But a huge, writhing mass, I do not know;

  Which wore no form of animal exprest,

  Save in the head, with eyes and teeth of sow.

  Roger, in fact, is unable to defeat the creature because it is too powerful for him, but he manages to stun it briefly with a magic shield and escape with the maiden. (It’s also perhaps worth noting that, in Ariosto’s poem, the maddened hero himself promptly attempts to sexually assault Angelica after dispatching the orc, but fails because he can’t remove his armor.)

  Spanish-speaking Basque whalers, who pursued some of the same baleen whales as orcas and saw them as competitors, named them asesina baleenas, “whale killers.” The name, transposed and slightly mistranslated in English as “killer whales,” stuck.

  Beginning as early as the 11th century and peaking in the 16th century, these same Basques were the first Europeans to hunt and harvest whales commercially. Mostly they appear to have harvested Atlantic right whales and gray whales, but by the early 18th century, their whaling techniques—they killed both mothers and their calves—led to a serious decline in the cetaceans’ population, and the industry withered to nothing.

  Of course, by then, other Western nations had joined the hunt, and empowered by sailing technology that made it possible to ply craft across all the world’s seas, it became a global one. In the 18th century, many large whaling operations, primarily in America, and much of Europe, began roaming the world’s oceans in pursuit of great whales, particularly the mighty sperm whale, whose huge echolocation melon (the “casing” prized by whalers) produced the finest machine oil known to man and whose processed blubber helped light millions of whale-oil lamps, thus fueling the Industrial Revolution. Killer whales were too small to be of interest to these hunters, although many sailors observed them dining on the whalers’ catches that were pulled up to the ships for the process of blubber removal known as flensing and many feared the consequences if those rows of flashing teeth should come for them, which, by most accounts, they rarely if ever did. They were also observed chasing away sharks from the kill, which made sailors wonder if they were perhaps to be welcomed instead.

  There was one whaling operation, however, that not only interacted with killer whales, but had a symbiotic relationship with the orcas in the manner of the Yupik. They called these orcas “the killer whales of Eden.” Eden is a small township near the coast of Australia’s New South Wales, near where a Scottish family named Davidson had set up a homestead at the mouth of the Kiah River—two homes, actually, one on each side of the river. About 1840, the family began hunting the Southern right whales who came up to the river’s mouth to feed, going out in kelly-green rowboats to harpoon and eventually kill the creatures and then rendering their blubber for oil. They soon found that they had partners in whaling in a large pod of orcas who were also hunting baleen whales. After observing how the orcas helped them, the Davidsons figured out a working arrangement.

  The orcas would drive the whales into the river’s mouth, alerting the humans to the presence of prey by extraordinary displays of tail-lobbing and wait for the humans to harpoon and kill them. Then the Davidsons simply tied a rope and buoy around the whale’s flukes and left the first spoils to their cetacean partners, who would feed on the carcass for a couple of days, mostly taking just the lips and tongue (just as they usually did when humans were uninvolved). The whalers then would row out and bring the remains in to shore for rendering. They called this arrangement “the Law of the Tongue.”

  This went on for 90 years. Over time, the Davidsons and the orcas developed a special kinship. If orcas became entangled in the whalers’ ropes, the humans would abandon whatever efforts they were engaged in to rescue t
heir partners. These were also shark-infested waters, and occasionally the big baleen whales would smash the little green rowboats and send their occupants spilling into the sea. When this happened, the orcas would surround the men in the water and protect them from sharks until they could be rescued.

  The orcas were selective. Other whaling operations would periodically show up in Eden to partake of the bounty there, and the orcas would simply ignore them. When it came to the Davidsons’ trademark-green boats, however, the orcas were so helpful that they would even grab ropes in their mouths and assist with the hauling.

  At the time, these orcas and their exploits were a media sensation. Numerous newspaper stories told their saga, and members of the Australian Parliament came out to Eden to watch, along with hundreds of other spectators. One of the first documentaries ever committed to film, a 35-mm feature shot in 1910, recorded the killer whales in action. All prints of the film, other than a few stills, were reportedly lost in a vault fire in 1916.

  The orcas also became well known individually and were given names such as Hooky, Humpy, Cooper, Big Ben, and Big Jack, although none was more famous than Old Tom, a massive male who was noted for hauling with ropes. When Tom died in 1930 at the age of 35—his body washed up on shore, and his skeleton still hangs in the local museum—it largely marked the end of the era; by then, few baleen whales were showing up, and the whaling operations soon went out of business. The memory of beneficent orcas, too, faded quickly.

  Indeed, aside from the Eden episode, the Western record of interaction with orcas is largely one riddled with superstitious fear, more a product of the awe that is the natural human reaction to being in the presence of these creatures than a result of any actual attacks. What most impressed early observers of killer whales was their efficiency as predators.

  “Three or four of these voracious animals do not hesitate to grapple with the largest baleen whales, and it is surprising to see those leviathans of the deep so completely paralyzed by the presence of their natural, although diminutive, enemies,” wrote whaling captain Charles Scammon in his 1874 book, The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America. “Frequently the terrified animal—comparatively of enormous size and superior strength—evinces no effort to escape, but lies in a helpless condition, or makes but little resistance to the assaults of its merciless destroyers. The attack of these wolves of the ocean upon their gigantic prey may be likened, in some respects, to a pack of hounds holding the stricken deer at bay.”

  This view of orcas as merciless destroyers remained intact for most of the next century. Fishermen in the Northwest frequently brought rifles along in their boats for the specific purpose of shooting at killer whales should they encounter them, both out of fear and out of a belief the “voracious” orcas were competing with them for salmon. When they showed up near coastal communities, mothers would gather their children and put away their boats and life jackets to ensure they did not go out on the water when the fearsome creatures were present.

  Even the people who would eventually lead the way in changing perceptions about orcas held this view. One of these is John Ford, who eventually grew up to become one of the world’s leading killer-whale scientists. “I had a sort of memorable encounter with my family in our little sports fishing boat out of Sooke, just west of Victoria, out salmon fishing and a big pod went by, heading out of Juan de Fuca,” Ford recalls. “At the time—this would have been the early ‘60s—of course, we were all terrified, because they had such a fearsome reputation in those days that they could upset us and we could be ripped apart. I do have a vision etched in my visual cortex memory of the white markings of the whale as it passed under the boat.”

  The renowned undersea naturalist Jacques Cousteau, musing on an encounter with orcas in 1967, observed that “we, along with the rest of the world, considered killer whales to be the most fearsome creatures of the sea, the avowed enemies of all life forms to be found in the water, including divers.”

  On what was this reputation founded? If you examine the historical record, almost nothing. Whalers at work processing slain hunted whales at shipside sometimes claimed that orcas would try to grab them, but that was most likely a case of mistaken identity or of simply coming between the orcas and the meat they sought. In 1910, explorers with Robert Scott’s doomed Terra Nova Expedition in Antarctica reported that killer whales attempted to tip an ice floe on which a photographer and his dogs were standing, although it was likely the similarity of the dogs’ barking to the seals’ barking that attracted the orcas.

  Likewise, the only recorded attack on a human being by a killer whale involved another likely case of mistaken identity. In 1972, a surfer named Hans Krestchmer at Point Sur, California, was drifting on his board one day, looking rather like a seal, when an orca grabbed him from below by one leg and dragged him down but quickly released him after Kretschmer hit it with his fist.

  Earlier that same summer, a pod of orcas attacked the Lucette, a family sailing vessel near the Galapagos Islands by ramming it; the 43-foot yacht quickly sank, but the orcas did not attack the people aboard who scrambled into an inflatable raft. The family was forced to endure a 37-day survival odyssey northward before being rescued.

  There was, as it happens, a long-ago antecedent for the attack on the Lucette. The survivors of the sinking of the whaleship Essex, which had been rammed by an angry sperm whale in the South Pacific, the maritime disaster that inspired Moby Dick, reported a similar attack on one of their lifeboats during their ordeal, which lasted a full 89 days at sea and left only eight survivors out of twenty men. This orca had appeared out of nowhere and taken a bite out of the side of the lifeboat, then rammed it and split the boat’s stem. It was driven off by men with poles, but it had shaken these whale hunters and made them feel as if they had become prey. “We were not without our fears that the fish might renew his attack, some time during the night, upon one of the other boats, and unexpectedly destroy us,” the captain later recalled. It did not, however, and the incident remained a singular one until 1972.

  The father of the family that survived the Lucette sinking later speculated that his hull might have resembled a humpback whale. However, he also assiduously warned of the dangers posed by killer whales, should this kind of attack be repeated or develop into a trend. As it happens, it has not, to anyone’s knowledge.

  A 1963 book by a science popularizer named Joseph J. Cook (who also penned tomes on sharks and Atlantic herring) titled Killer Whale! represented itself as an objective, scientific look at orcas and their “vicious instincts,” which, according to the authors make them “the fiercest, most terrifying animal in all the world,” a creature “capable of attacking anything that swims, no matter how large. They are afraid of nothing, not even boats or ships.”

  “The killer whale is well designed for a career of destruction and mayhem,” Cook and his coauthor, William J. Wisner, wrote. They contrasted orcas with their cousins, the bottlenose dolphin. “How different the orca, which seems to be filled with a burning hatred! Nothing that lives or moves in or on the water is safe from its assaults. Its size, power, speed, agility and disposition have made this black monster feared wherever it is known.”

  Then someone got the clever idea to capture one of these terrifying creatures and to put it on display. And that changed everything.

  • • •

  It was the go-go Sixties, and dolphinariums were flourishing. Following the success of a Florida park called Marine Studios, which had discovered in the late 1930s that dolphins could be trained to perform stunts and which began putting on dolphin entertainment shows that packed in large crowds, aquarium owners around the country got into the business. By the 1950s, they were everywhere, with larger and larger facilities selling more and more tickets and taking larger numbers of dolphins into captivity.

  One of these was Marineland of the Pacific, an oceanarium owned by Marine Studios near Los Angeles, located right on the Pacific Ocean at the Palos Verdes Penins
ula. When it opened in 1954, it was the largest such facility in the world and was one of California’s biggest tourist draws (after Disneyland) for years. Initially, it specialized in truly acrobatic displays featuring Pacific white-sided and spinner dolphins.

  Then, in November of 1961, a single, disoriented female orca wandered into Newport Harbor, several miles south of Marineland, and harbor officials contacted Marineland about the animal. Their dolphin-capture specialists traveled to the harbor and tried to get control of the whale using their usual techniques and failed, but eventually they managed to net her, place her on a flatbed truck, and trundle her the fifty miles or so to Palos Verdes. Once in her concrete tank, however, the female (whom they named Wanda) went berserk. “We’d suspected the animal was in trouble because of its erratic behavior in the harbor,” recalled Frank Brocato, Marineland’s chief animal captor. “But the next day, she went crazy. She started swimming at high speed around the tank, striking her body repeatedly. Finally, she convulsed and died.”

  The necropsy placed the blame on pneumonia and acute gastroenteritis, but the experience gave Brocato and his bosses an idea: Why not see if they could keep one of these huge dolphins captive for a longer duration? The following September of 1962, he and his crew arrived in the Salish Sea with their 40-foot capture boat, the Geronimo. Eventually, off the west side of San Juan Island on a foggy day with gray mist hovering over the water, they managed to find a couple of orcas who were in pursuit of a harbor porpoise. The porpoise approached their boat, hiding around its hull, in the hope it could use the craft to evade the orcas. Brocato realized he could reach a female orca as it pursued the porpoise around his boat, so he got out a large lasso and nabbed her as she went past.