by Philip Hoare
All this was accomplished despite–or perhaps because of–quotas imposed by the International Whaling Commission. The Antarctic catch for 1967-8, for example, was set at thirty-two thousand ‘Blue Whale Units’. The world’s largest animal was reduced to a mathematical quantity, and its ancient population as ‘stocks’ in bureaucratic equations. It was a terrible arithmetic:
1 BLUE WHALE UNIT = 2 FINBACKS,
OR 2 1/2 HUMPBACKS, 6 SEI WHALES.
Not only was the average size of whales in the catch declining, ‘which points suspiciously to overkilling’, as one scientist noted, but ‘the CDW–take per catcher’s day’s work–which is a measure of the effort required to take a whale, is also steadily declining, which tells us what we already know, that the whales are disappearing’. An awful possibility led another marine biologist to wonder, ‘What will be next? Will the orbiting satellite speak through space to tell the hunter where to find the last whale?’
The whales could not win. As the rorquals diminished in the Antarctic, the whaling nations turned back to sperm whales. Many thousands were caught by the fleets on their way to the Southern Ocean, in warmer waters where females and breeding stocks were found. During its London meeting in 1965, the IWC discovered ‘massive evidence’ to show that regulations about the size of sperm whales that could be taken were being comprehensively broken. As a result, the commission banned sperm whaling between latitudes of 40° north and south. That year the killing reached its historical crescendo, with the death of 72,471 whales.
One of the last whaling ports was Dundee, sending ships to waters that, twenty years later, would witness Britain’s last colonial war, and where they now lie as rusting wrecks in the rocky harbours of South Georgia and the Falklands. Some of the men who worked on the ships are still alive, and describe their work in these open-air abattoirs as an inferno. The remembered noise, the smell, the sights repulse their memories, retrospectively. If the whales had been able to scream, they say, no one would have been able to bear their work. Instead, the whales were rendered dumb in the face of destruction, as if they agreed not to protest against their abuse, the more to shame their persecutors.
I cannot claim immunity. As I walked home from school through wet autumn leaves to find my mother drying clothes by the fire, Southampton factories were processing whale-oil margarine which sat in yellowy blocks in our fridge, while my cheeks were brushed with whale fat, for ‘women will be interested to learn it goes into the making of their cosmetics’, as my encyclopædia informed me.
The lingering smell of whale.
While I read illicit American comics under my bedclothes, fantasizing about a world of sleek-suited superheroes, new processes–sulphurization, saponification, distillation–extended and rationalized the use of whales in lubricants, paint, varnish, ink, detergent, leather and food: hydrogenation made whale oil palatable, sanitizing its taste. Efficiency ruled, in place of the early whalers’ waste. Whale liver yielded vitamin A, and whale glands were used to make insulin for diabetics and corticotrophin to treat arthritis. Nineteenth-century trains had run on whale oil; now streamlined cars with sleek chrome fins used brake fluid made from the same stuff. Victorian New Englanders had relished doughnuts fried in whale oil; now children with crew-cuts and stripy T-shirts licked ice cream made from it. Their bright shiny faces were washed with whale soap, and having tied their shoelaces of whale skin, they marched off to school, past gardens nurtured on whale fertilizer, to draw with whale crayons while Mum sewed their clothes on a machine lubricated with whale oil, and fed the family cat on whale meat. In her office, big sister transcribed memos on typewriter ribbon charged with whale ink, pausing to apply her whale lipstick. Later that afternoon, she would play a game of tennis with a whale-strung racquet. Back home, Daddy lined up the family to take their photograph on film glazed with whale gelatine.
Whales imprinted with the image of the age.
It was not until 1973, when I was a teenager, that Britain began to ban whale products. Even then, it allowed exceptions such as sperm whale oil, used as engine lubricant, and spermaceti wax, for softening leather–of which it still imported a total of two thousand tons a month–along with other products ‘incorporated abroad into manufactured goods. Sperm whales had not been overexploited,’ said the Minister of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, ‘but baleen whales had.’ The Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association–which used ninety-five per cent of all imported whale meat to give its dog and cat foods ‘“chunky” appeal’, announced that it would accept its last consignment that November.
Whales may no longer have lit the world, but time still ran on their oil. Watchmakers used the superior lubricant, prized in polar latitudes for its ability to allow chronometers to function in freezing temperatures (thereby allowing the hunting of more whales by Antarctic fleets). As the giant astronomical clock of Strasbourg Cathedral ceremonially tolled European hours, it did so lubricated by the products of William Nye’s Oil Works, New Bedford.
And while whale-oiled clocks ticked, the mythic beast acquired a new meaning in the half-life of the nuclear era. In the late 1940s the American artist Gilbert Wilson became obsessed with Melville’s novel, as well as with modern science. In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, he wrote of Moby-Dick that ‘no tragedy in world literature succeeds quite as powerfully or as clearly in pointing up the mortal errors of hate and domination’. Wilson even suggested to Shostakovich that they should create an opera of Moby-Dick as ‘a catalyst for helping to dissolve American and Soviet cold war dissension and to restore world peace’.
In Wilson’s own dystopian imagination, the White Whale became an augury of atomic conflict, and Ahab’s ‘insane pursuit of Moby Dick into the Sea of Japan’ analogous to America’s ‘atrocious nuclear experiments and explosions in the same area’. Similarly, in his critical work, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, published in 1949, Howard P. Vincent considered that Moby Dick was ‘ubiquitous in time and place. Yesterday he sank the Pequod; within the past two years he has breached five times; from a New Mexico desert, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most recently, at Bikini atoll.’
A cloud like a whale.
A generation earlier, D.H. Lawrence, writing in Lobo, New Mexico, had seen in Melville’s book the ‘doom of our white day…And the Pequod is the ship of the white American soul.’ In 1952 the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James was detained on Ellis Island. Exiled within sight of Manhattan’s towers, in a dull brick block next to Liberty Island, James composed his critique of Moby-Dick, comparing Ahab with modern dictators. In James’s essay, written in the running shadow of the nuclear race, Ahab’s Pequod became a weapon of mass destruction. ‘He has at his sole command a whaling-vessel which is one of the most highly developed technological structures of the day. He has catalogued in his brain all the scientific knowledge of navigation accumulated over the centuries. This is one reason why he is so deadly a menace.’ Such potential imagery could be turned against the west, too. Twenty years later, the anti-capitalist terrorists of the Baader-Meinhoff gang, imprisoned for pursuing their own war on imperialism, assumed code names from Moby-Dick (with Baader himself as Ahab)–seeing the monster of Melville’s myth, as much as Hobbes’ state, as their target. Even now, Ahab’s crazed pursuit remains the currency of political satire as world leaders are likened to Melville’s dæmonic captain in the ‘war on terror’.
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
By the 1960s cetaceans were being bodily enlisted into the military. The US Navy instituted its Marine Mammal Program, teaching bottlenose dolphins and beluga whales to identify mines and even act as underwater sentries. Dolphins served in Vietnam where it was rumoured that they were trained as assassins, using needles fitted to padded nose-cones and cartridges of carbon dioxide to deliver body-imploding doses of gas to Vietcong divers attacking
American ships. They still play a part in warfare, deployed in the last Gulf War to clear mines from the port of Umm Qasr using cameras strapped to their pectoral fins. To some, such conscription was the ultimate perversion of the relationship between man and whale.
Human technology was catching up with its cetacean equivalent as machines mimicked whales themselves. In one experiment, a whale’s skin was replicated in rubber on a submarine’s hull, where it was found to reduce turbulence and drag; as a result, protruding parts such as radar dishes and conning towers were sheathed in rubber. This may have been the reason why one submarine was found with the sucker-marks of a giant squid. It had, it seems, been mistaken for a whale.
The development of marine acoustics during the Second World War had alerted the military to the sounds made by whales (which whalers had once mistaken for ghosts in the ocean as they heard them through the hulls of their ships). As the undersea world which everyone had assumed to be a silent place was discovered to be alive with noise, it was suggested that submarines could be disguised as whales by playing their recorded sounds. A century before, slave ships operated under the guise of whalers; now nuclear submarines sought the same deceit. Cetacean technology allowed man to invade the whales’ world, in the process creating sounds that would prove fatal for them.
As below, so above. While robo-whale submarines imitated them in the depths, lubricated by sperm oil which would not freeze at great depths and echoing with the ping of cetacean-inspired sonar, whales enabled the exploration of another extreme environment, as NASA used sperm oil for its delicate instruments and rocket engines, sending a trace of whale genes into outer space. Two centuries before, whales had sparked rivalry between Atlantic states; now they were part of the space race. One scientist who sailed with whaling fleets in the 1950s and 1960s told me that it was only when it had a lifetime’s supply of oil–I imagine marked barrels sitting in some secret cellar–that America lobbied for a ban on hunting sperm whales (despite the protests of the Pentagon). The fact that the US evolved chemical substitutes for other military uses of whale oil, while the USSR relied on sperm oil for its tanks and missiles, further fuelled the brinkmanship. Even now, space agencies in Europe and America still use whale oil for roving vehicles on the moon and Mars; and as you read this, the Hubble space telescope is wheeling around the earth on spermaceti, seeing six billion years into the past, while the Voyager probe spins into infinity playing the song of the humpback to greet any friendly aliens–who may well wonder at our treatment of the species with which we share our planet.
To the medieval world, which believed the earth to be flat, and monsters to lie in the oceans beyond their illuminated maps, the whale was a scaleless, naked fish–a convenient confusion that allowed its flesh to be eaten by monks on fast days–just as puffins were thought to be half bird, half fish, and geese were believed to be born of barnacles. Despite Aristotle’s investigations in the fourth century BC, when he concluded that whales were mammals, it was not until 1773 that Linnæus classified them as such.
Yet the confusion continued. Nineteenth-century whalers called their quarry fish, a wilful insistence that Ishmael mischievously maintained. Perhaps it was a subconscious evasion, for the hunters knew perfectly well, as they butchered their prey, that the physiology they found within was that of a creature more like themselves than a haddock or a cod. And although twentieth-century hunting revealed much of what we know about the blue whale, for instance, even here there was deception. Dimensions were overestimated because bodies stretched as they were pulled out of the water. The only way of weighing these huge carcases was to chop them up into chunks, so vague guesses were made to compensate for the tons of blood lost before the flesh met the scales. Since whales possess proportionately two-thirds more blood than humans–the better to store oxygen on their time spent in the relative safety of the depths–this was an additionally inexact technique.
It was also a self-interested investigation carried out to ascertain profitability, although many scientists, who realized the likely fate of the whale, had another agenda. In the mid-1930s a scheme began from RRS William Scoresby to tag whales. Steel darts were shot into whales and retrieved when the animals were caught; whalers were offered a £1 reward to return them to the Colonial Office, with a note of the time and place of death. The data was then analysed ‘to gather information not only on the migrations of the whales, but on the question of whether a whale returns to the same ground in the South year after year’. In 1936, eight hundred whales were thus marked and numbered. The cumulative results were astounding: one blue whale was found to have travelled nearly two thousand miles in less than fifty days.
Cetacean research remained invasive. In 1956 a project was devised by a Boston heart specialist, Dr Paul D. White–famed for attending President Eisenhower–to record a whale’s heartbeats on an electrocardiogram. This involved shooting a harpoon that contained the metal contact usually placed on a human patient’s chest into the animal; although, as one newspaper noted, ‘there is no indication so far of how the whale may hope to shed its burden when the interests of science have been served.’ ‘It can hardly be said that the animal was benefited by such a diagnosis,’ my encylopædia added. Dr White’s patient–or victim–was a fifty-foot grey whale. Having already experimented with a right whale, White discovered that the whale’s heart beat like that of a human. In the light of such knowledge, attempts were made to limit the animals’ suffering: the British experimented with a new electric harpoon for humanitarian reasons, but it did not prove successful.
As I was growing up, watching captive dolphins perform in Brighton’s underground aquarium built into the promenade–its yellowy-lit, car-park interior echoing with their clicks and all the more forlorn for its seaside setting–attitudes to whales were changing. They had done so drastically since my parents’ generation. In the 1920s the porpoise was so abundant in the River Tyne that salmon fishermen were urging ‘that steps should be taken for its destruction’. By the 1960s The Times was running a headline, BRITISH COLUMBIA STIRRED BY DEATH OF WHALE, noting that the demise of an orca had become national news in Canada.
The animal–dubbed ‘Moby Doll’–had been harpooned by the curator of the Vancouver Aquarium, where it was destined to be used as a model for a plaster replica. But the whale survived its wound and instead followed the boat. The public reaction was, perhaps, the first real indication of a new attitude towards whales. Although having extracted the harpoon, the animal was kept alive with horses’ hearts, flounders injected with blood, and baby seals (‘There were immediate protests from humanitarians’) and when it was found dead on the bottom of its tank, it was discovered ‘that Moby was no Doll. Moby was a bull.’ The following year, another orca was captured in the same seas. Named Namu, it was towed in a gill net trap four hundred miles south to its new home, the Seattle Aquarium, only for its captors to discover, two hours out of Port Hardy, that their charge was suddenly surrounded by forty killer whales ‘who seem determined to free him’. It was reported that Namu’s family had come to visit him, and that he could recognize them by their markings and scars.
Through individual animals such as Namu, whales became emblems of a new age. In the 1960s the American scientist Dr John C. Lilly made controversial claims about cetacean intelligence which led him to an equally extraordinary declaration. ‘We need a new ethic,’ he wrote,
new laws based on those ethics which punish human beings for encroachment on the life-styles and the territory of other species with brains comparable to and larger than ours. We need modifications of our laws so that the Cetacea can no longer become the property of individuals, corporations, or governments. Even as respect for human individuals is growing in our law, so must the respect for individual whales, dolphins, and porpoises.
Dr Lilly, whose plea echoed Henry Beston’s of the 1920s as well as the new age ethos of his own time, went so far as to state that dolphins were ‘probably quite as intelligent as man but in a strange and
alien way, as a consequence of their life in the sea’, and that whales had ‘a complex inner reality or mental life’. However, his fellow scientists regarded his investigations with a degree of scepticism, not least because Dr Lilly was also experimenting with LSD in his researches into human consciousness. He also went on to advise on the making of the 1973 film, Flipper.
With growing awareness of the whales’ plight and the apparent ineptitude of the International Whaling Commission, conservationists began to insist that they were entitled to comment ‘on the workings of a group that seemed to have decided that the world’s whales were theirs to parcel out’. Yet by the time the horror of whaling truly came to the public’s attention–their eyes opened by organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and acrimonious protests such as the throwing of blood over Japanese delegates to the IWC as well as direct action on the ocean itself–it was too late. The cetacean population of the world had been hunted, harpooned, blown up, butchered, ground down and consumed in a manner unrivalled by any other exploitation of the earth’s living resources.
The industry itself had long since ground to a halt by the time the eco-warriors had won their battle; a truly Pyrrhic victory, despite the piecemeal protection of the species: in 1966 all humpback whaling was banned; in 1976 fin whales, and in 1978 sei whales were similarly protected. In the last decades of unrestricted whaling, the Russians and Japanese–who had been forced to turn on the smallest rorqual, the minke whale–resumed sperm whale hunting in the North Pacific, where, from 1964 to 1974, they managed to kill a quarter of a million animals. It was as if, in advance of the end they knew must come, they exerted themselves all the more in the effort.