Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  “But then everything began to go wrong,” recalled Brocato. The female twisted and dove under the boat, pulling the heavy nylon rope right into the propellers and killing the engine. Then she ran to the end of the 250 feet of her tether and surfaced, vocalizing loudly with fearful cries. At that, the large male accompanying her, appeared out of the mist and charged the Geronimo. To Brocato and his crew, it appeared that they were about to be attacked, but the orca dove at the last moment and whacked the hull with its flukes. This happened several times. Brocato ran and got his high-powered rifle and began shooting.

  He managed to shoot the male once, after which it dove and disappeared. The female continued to struggle, and Brocato, now fearful for his craft, began shooting at her. It took ten rounds to finish her off. He towed the body into Bellingham, Washington, where it was rendered for dog food. Marineland decided that capturing orcas was not going to work out; they seemed too wild.

  Finally, in 1964, an artist commissioned by the government in British Columbia to kill an orca in order to create a life-size statue, managed to harpoon a young male near Saturna Island, just across the Canadian boundary from the San Juan Islands. The whale was only wounded by the harpoon, which remained embedded in his flesh (the hunters also tried shooting the whale, to little apparent effect); soon, the manager of the Vancouver Aquarium arrived and took possession of the orca, having decided to try keeping it alive. Presumed to be female because of his fin size, the male whale was dubbed “Moby Doll” by the local press, which descended on the scene, along with thousands of spectators, as the whale was towed into a makeshift pen in Vancouver harbor.

  Moby Doll refused to eat for his first fifty-five days in captivity, during which time he appeared to be in shock, floating listlessly in the pen. Then, without warning, he began eating fish again, voraciously so, and accordingly became much more active. However, he also developed skin lesions because of the harbor’s low salinity, and although he ate well, he did not look healthy. Sure enough, some thirty days after he had resumed eating, Moby Doll died, at which time a necropsy revealed him to be male. He had lived 87 days in captivity.

  The killer whale created such a media sensation, however, that now the demand from aquarium owners became real. When two fishermen using purse-seine gillnets near the village of Namu, about 100 miles north of Vancouver Island along the British Columbia coast, accidentally netted a large male orca, they decided not to let it go, as they normally might. They had heard the stories of big money for such a catch.

  The men contacted Ted Griffin, proprietor of the Seattle Aquarium, who flew up the next day and paid $8,000 in cold hard cash for the whale, which he then towed back the four hundred miles to Seattle in a floating cage. The cage attracted a pod of orcas who then accompanied the captive whale much of the way back to Seattle. Plaintive cries could be heard from the caged orca, although his pod gradually drifted away as the cage neared Puget Sound.

  Griffin dubbed the whale Namu after its home village and had an immediate sensation on his hands. Tens of thousands lined up to see the five-ton killer whale, which he kept in a sea pen at the aquarium on Elliott Bay along the Seattle waterfront. Griffin came to realize that the big male was a benign creature and began climbing into the pen to swim with him, giving the whale back scratches and developing a bond.

  A Seattle rock band dubbed themselves The Dorsals and put out a 45 rpm record titled “Killer Whale”: “Gotta killer whale in tow, Namu in the sea! Gotta killer whale in tow, glad he’s not after me! Five tons of whale in tow, and that’s a great big thing. Movin’ in his playpen, Namu’s really king.”

  The footage of Namu being lowered by a crane and sling into his pen at the Seattle Aquarium, with traffic whizzing past behind him on the Alaskan Way viaduct, caught everyone’s attention, and Griffin was proved to be cannily accurate about how many tickets his killer whale would sell. Better yet, he soon discovered that not only was the killer whale able to survive captivity in the waterfront pen (given a daily diet of 400 pounds of fresh salmon), but Griffin himself found he could form a personal relationship with the creature. Griffin started out swimming with the whale and then, sometime later, first his brother Jim and then Griffin clambered aboard its back and rode around the pen, hanging onto the orca’s big dorsal.

  It was enough to make him a movie star. And it did. This is how it happened.

  • • •

  Ivan Tors liked to make a certain kind of nature show. They were all, movies and TV series alike, scripted family dramas. Mostly they featured wild animals who, defying expectations (sometimes they were huge, potentially dangerous beasts such as the “crosseyed” lion Clarence in his TV series Daktari, or the large black bear who was pals with a boy in Gentle Ben) befriended humans, invariably a child and his or her adult guardian.

  Tors, originally a science-fiction movie producer (ever hear of Gog?) who specialized in featuring a mix of real science in his stories, hit upon this reliably moneymaking family-friendly formula when he produced the 1963 movie Flipper. Tors’ productions had taken an aquatic turn after they had a hit with the 1958-’61 series Sea Hunt, which launched the career of Lloyd Bridges. The story of a dolphin befriending a 12-year-old boy and winning over his fisherman dad (Chuck Connors) was a major box-office success if not an outright smash.

  The next year, Flipper became a hit television series starring Brian Kelly as the gruff father, and it remains oddly influential and durable. Indeed, it’s hard to find a marine biologist of a certain age who does not credit Flipper with creating his or her interest in the field. It was revived in the 1990s as both a movie and a TV series.

  Tors was in the middle of his run with the Flipper series when the stories about Ted Griffin and his killer whale started making national headlines. Tors himself showed up at the Seattle Aquarium to talk to Griffin about making a movie starring Namu. He told Griffin and his brother, Jim, that they could only make such a film if someone could actually ride the whale. That led to the first attempt to do so.

  Griffin recalled it years later for PBS’s Frontline: “And so while I was thinking about it, my brother went to the back room, put on a wet suit, climbed in the water with the whale and went swimming with the whale. So in point of fact, he was the very first. I hate to say that because while I was thinking about it and enjoying this period of time, Jim, practical man that he is, decided that the contract was extremely important and they had to have footage of a man and a killer whale together. Well, they had their footage in an hour, and Jim was out of the water. And he said, ‘I got all my arms and legs. Go ahead. The water’s safe, you know.’”

  Not only did the stunt persuade Tors, it also persuaded Ted Griffin to try it himself. Soon the whale riding became a regular part of his frequent interaction with the whale, but it went beyond that. Griffin had a great deal of tactile contact with Namu, who loved being rubbed. Recalling how the orca had seemed to signal a hello the first time they met in that purse-seine net, Griffin tried communicating with him with surprising results.

  “At [the] time, I could squeak to the whale, and the whale would squeak back,” Griffin recalled. “I didn’t know what I was saying to the whale, but I knew I was learning to communicate something and getting the whale to respond.”

  Griffin invited a Stanford scientist named Thomas Poulter to record the sounds in order to figure out if something real was occurring. “He had notes about who said what and when it was said. … And he said, ‘You’re not talking like the whale. The whale has entirely changed his vocalization to sound like you. And here it is on the sonogram.’ And I was just thunderstruck. But probably one of the biggest shocks that I ever had was that this whale was trying to reach me in this way.”

  When it came time to make the movie, Griffin towed Namu out to a bay near Port Orchard where it could appear as though Namu was in the wilds of the Northwest. Griffin performed most of the stunts that are seen in the film, although the star, Robert Lansing, also spent time in the water with the orca and filme
d several scenes riding him as well and coaxed Namu into performing a number of breaches and other maneuvers.

  The movie that resulted, titled Namu, the Killer Whale (later retitled, for video release, Namu, My Best Friend), was an archetype of the Ivan Tors genre, although much less successful than many of his projects. It was heart-warming family fare with a slightly provocative thesis: What if killer whales were not vicious killers at all, but instead rather gentle, intelligent creatures capable of friendship with human beings? As with nearly everything produced about orcas in this period, it’s pretty amusing to watch Namu now, in light of what we have learned about the species in the years since. For all that, it encapsulates an important moment in the history of human-animal relations, a tiny moment signifying a sea change, when people first began to realize that orcas were not only benign but also intelligent.

  Like most of Tors’ adult male heroes, Robert Lansing was a square-jawed, athletic, clean-living type of male lead. His character, Hank Donner, is a marine biologist who has set up a field camp on the shores of a remote spot in the San Juan Islands. He erects a sign onshore announcing that it’s a “Marine Research Station” and builds a dock so he can observe underwater wildlife. One day Donner witnesses a boatful of local yokels out taking potshots at killer whales from their boat. One of them, a rangy sort with a mean streak played by John Anderson, scores, severely wounding a female, who comes into shore at Donner’s camp and dies there. She is accompanied by her mate, a large male played by none other than Namu, who then remains inside the cove, mourning her death.

  For people watching these movies for laughs, this setup provides a few chortles. Orcas, we now know, never remain with their mates, and they likely never mourn them or, as Namu does in the movie, “call for his dead mate.” They remain with their mothers their whole lives (although if the script were rewritten to make this female the male orca’s mother, that would in fact be perfectly credible). Also, it doesn’t help that the sounds they give to Namu, both above and below water, sound little like actual orca calls, but more like chimp noises grafted on by the sound-editing crew.

  After Donner chases the hunters away from his outdoor lab, the orca inexplicably remains there, so Hank goes to town to buy a net to keep him in “so I can do some research on him” and to keep him safe from the locals. This is where little Lisa Rand (played by 10-year-old Robin Mattson) first hears about the orca, and soon she and her school pals are down at the cove, learning all about the whale from firsthand experience and watching Hank work with him. Hank, of course, eventually rides Namu, to the astonishment of all, especially Lisa’s mom Kate (Lee Meriwether, in the days before she became Catwoman and Barnaby Jones’ secretary).

  Then one of the yokels’ kids pulls a stunt that puts a mouthful of hooks in Namu’s mouth, and he reacts angrily, scaring the kids away and sending their parents marching down to the cove with rifles (or is that torches and pitchforks?) to string that whale up before it eats their kids. Hank stands on the dock with his friends behind him and prevents the lynching, and in the process releases Namu from his sea pen. However, Mr. Mean Streak follows him out with his rifle, tries one last time to shoot the orca and is thrown into the water with the killer whale. Of course, he can’t swim, and Namu saves him. Everyone now loves Namu. The End.

  • • •

  It probably didn’t help the box office for Namu, the Killer Whale that its hero had died only two weeks before the movie was released. It quickly sank out of sight.

  Ted Griffin always blamed Namu’s death on the water of Elliott Bay at Pier 56, where the orca was kept in captivity; Griffin believed the pollution made the orca sick. Whatever the cause, the whale contracted a bacterial infection, and overnight became entangled in the cable nets at the aquarium and drowned. Griffin had to go retrieve his body.

  “It was after dark and I had to go down in the water and I had to cut him out of the nets,” he recalled. “He was in an enclosure. And it was a very difficult time. You pull yourself together and you think OK, this has to be done and there’s nobody else to do it.

  “There are those brief moments when the light from the docks reflect in his eye and you think you see movement and you allow yourself to believe the whale’s still alive. I did. [But] I toughened up and held together until I was able to get the whale free of the enclosure and to another area where he could be removed from the water. And at that point, I was a total disaster and had to leave the area. Fortunately my partner, Don Goldsberry, was available and he being somewhat tougher than I am in this respect was able to take charge and manage the affair.”

  Griffin was emotionally devastated—he took up poetry, and drifted away from the aquarium work—but not enough to reconsider whether captivity was right for the whale he had befriended or any future whales, either. “I was resolved to have another pet, so I continued capturing killer whales, and a year later I did acquire additional whales,” he recalled. At first he started to make plans for another orca in Seattle, and then realized that he couldn’t bear it.

  “Couldn’t do it. And so at that point, it was pretty much over for me,” he said. “So I pulled things back together and started acting like a businessman, and we captured whales for zoos and aquariums around the world. Japan, Germany, England, France, and of course SeaWorld and others.”

  Griffin and his partner, Don Goldsberry, had perfected the technique that began with that first successful capture. Even before Namu’s death, with an eye toward the future, they had captured a young female. That capture had not turned out so well. The young orca had been alone with its mother when Griffin and Goldsberry had cornered them in a cove near Tacoma, Washington called Carr Inlet. Griffin harpooned the mother, intending her to be a female companion for Namu. However, the wound was deep and mortal; the captors towed her back to Seattle, and her young calf followed. Eventually the mother died, drowning herself, but the calf had been netted by then, and Griffin decided to keep her.

  When they put the young calf in the same pen with Namu, the traumatized young whale responded enthusiastically to the big male, too much so. She rammed him frequently. It caused a problem for her interactions with Griffin especially: “Interestingly enough, the whale began—maybe because she was young—to roughhouse with me in a very dangerous way,” he recalled. “And when I [was] in the water with Namu, even riding him, this whale would ram Namu with such force that it might have killed me. And when I was in the water with Namu … the whale would ram me, but not as [seriously] as some of the times that she rammed Namu.”

  At the time, he had representatives from Sea World, a big new facility in San Diego, visiting. They were very interested in acquiring a killer whale, and so he offered them the female. They agreed and wanted to buy the rights to the name Namu along with it. Griffin refused. Instead, they agreed to a concocted name for a female Namu, combining “She” and “Namu” to make “Shamu.” (SeaWorld guides at one time told customers the name means “Friend of Namu” in Salishan, but this is a fabrication.) And while there would be no more killer whales at the Seattle Aquarium, there would be many more Shamus.

  The original Shamu lived another six years at Sea World San Diego. She was always somewhat irascible, but generally had a solid reputation as a performer—at least, until that day in April of 1971 when, as a publicity stunt, Sea World publicists put a hapless front-office secretary named Annette Eckis, wearing a bikini, into a little tank with Shamu and told her to take a ride. Shamu reacted violently, grabbing Eckis by the legs and biting them, then dragging the shrieking woman around the pool before finally releasing her.

  Apparently Shamu had been acting up with her trainers, so it was decided to move her into their breeding program, where there would not be as many opportunities for dangerous interactions. Sea World vets put her on a program of progesterone to increase her fertility, but instead she wound up contracting pyometra, a condition that causes serious infections in the uterus. She died of septicemia from such an infection on August 29, 1971, at about nin
e years of age. In the wild, her grandmother lived to be a hundred.

  However, Sea World gave Shamu a kind of immortality, although it did not release the news of the orca’s death immediately. By then, her temperamental nature had forced Sea World to use other whales in her place while calling them all Shamu. It was an easy step to give all their performers the stage name Shamu, for the sake of simplifying things for the audience. Shamu is also the name given to all the cuddly killer-whale stuffed animals they sell in their gift shops, the name on the all the T-shirts and other gewgaws they sell, the name of the stadiums and other facilities in both San Diego and Orlando where killer whales are kept and perform, the very embodiment of the SeaWorld brand name. Given the sordid history behind it, though, it might be more apt to drop the final “u” from her name.

  • • •

  Quick, name the movie in which Bo Derek gets her leg bitten off.

  That’s right: Orca: The Killer Whale. Released in 1977. Starring that great chewer of lovely scenery, Richard Harris.

  It was a quickie ride-the-wave exploitation flick from Dino de Laurentis meant to cash in on the Jaws phenomenon. (Reportedly, de Laurentis called up one of his chief producers in the middle of the night after seeing the 1975 box-office champ and asked him to find an animal that was bigger and badder than a shark.) Indeed, the first victim of the titular killer whale in the film is not a human, but a great white shark rather similar to the one dispatched by Roy Scheider and Co. two years previously. So, verisimilitude was not exactly its first mission. It failed at making money, too. It does, however, give a glimpse into the popular mindset about killer whales at the time, as well as the state of some of the pseudoscience that was still being bandied about as settled wisdom about whales in general and orcas in particular. It is kind of a revealing relic of how those attitudes were in transformation.