Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  It was in 1982, in the unlikely setting of the Metropole Hotel in Brighton–a few hundred yards from the town’s Aquarium and its performing dolphins–that the IWC instituted its worldwide moratorium, delayed to allow the whaling nations time to comply. Yet the whale remained a victim of international politics, for all its statelessness: threatened by deafening noise pollution which causes ear damage, fatally undermining a sperm whale’s most important sense; infected by chemical pollution which generations pass on through mothers’ milk to their calves; snared by fishing lines in a frantic, drowning death as bycatch kills three hundred thousand cetaceans every year.

  Whales swallow plastic debris by mistake; the thinning ozone layer induces skin cancer; warming oceans have sent their food sources in retreat; climate change has overtaken their ancient knowledge of their environment and its resources. All the while, they move from territory to territory, in and out of legislative areas and through high seas beyond any conserving principle or responsibility, yet forever subject to human activity, wherever they go (even as my own transatlantic movements scar the sky, sign-writing my environmental sins in the air).

  There is no escape. Sometimes it seems whales are almost pathetically condemned to victimhood. Once they were scared into submission as the harpoon was applied; fed the furnaces with their own scraps; even supplied their own oil to clean up afterwards, as if to apologise for the mess. Now they are early warning systems of ecological attack, as if their own sonar were detecting destruction. Ishmael’s cetacean utopia looks further away than ever. Stressed and pressurized by our relentless encroaching on its environment, the whale can ill afford to suffer further sustained periods of active pursuit, although that is exactly what it faces. Since 1987, when the international moratorium eventually took effect (with exceptions for aboriginal subsistence hunts for Inuit populations in Greenland, Russia and Alaska, Makah native peoples in Washington state, and the Caribbean residents of St Vincent and the Grenadines), an estimated twenty-five thousand great whales have died. Japan alone has killed, under its Antarctic Research Programme, JARPA, and its North Pacific equivalent, JARPN, 7,900 minke whales, 243 Bryde’s whales and 140 sei whales, as well as 38 sperm whales, which it resumed hunting in 2000. In 2006 JARPA II took 1,073 minke whales–known to their hunters as ‘cockroaches of the sea’–and added fifty fin whales to the tally. Each year Japan kills twenty thousand smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises not covered by the moratorium.

  Although this meat appears on open sale in Japanese markets, conservationists claim that much of it is stockpiled due to diminishing public taste, or ends up as pet food. Some is sold as meat from baleen whales, which are less susceptible than toothed whales to contamination in the food chain, although in fact it is from odontocetes. The value of JARPA’s research is challenged by other scientists, who consider that it has produced no data that could not have been gathered from non-lethal methods. As with Norway and Iceland, which hunt minke whales quite openly, other, cultural motives are at work. Like Europe, Japan claims whaling as part of its heritage for thousands of years–historically encouraged by rulers who forbade the eating of land animals.

  Japan also points out that aboriginal whale hunts take place in American waters every year; what is the difference between that and their own claim to cultural precedence in coastal towns? Humpbacks are still hunted on the Caribbean island of Bequia, to techniques learned by a Bequian fisherman engaged by a Provincetown whaler in the 1870s. In 1977 it was said that the United States was ‘embarrassed’ by the continuing Inuit hunt of bowheads, of which fewer than two thousand survived. ‘They push vigorously for smaller quotas every year, and nag the Japanese and Russians…remorselessly. Unfortunately, one of the whales closest to extinction, the bowhead, is hunted exclusively by Americans.’ While the Inuit had long traditions of sustenance and religion associated with the whales, now that they were ‘rich enough in oil money to buy motor boats, powerful rifles and explosive harpoons’, whale hunting ‘has ceased being a ritual or a means of survival, and has become a sport’.

  Since Japan was encouraged and even assisted in post-war whaling by the west–whale meat was served in school lunches until the 1970s–it irks to be lectured on the subject. ‘It’s not because Japanese want to eat whale meat,’ Ayako Okubo told the New York Times. ‘It’s because they don’t like being told not to eat it by foreigners.’ Some contest that it was actually America’s overuse of pressure on the Japanese–and the moral weight of the environmental lobby–that pushed Japan into its intransigent position. Indeed, although America was highly vocal in the anti-whaling campaign of the 1970s (presenting a proposal to a 1972

  United Nations conference on the environment to ban all whaling for ten years), things might have been very different if, like Russia, Norway and Japan, the US had maintained a whaling presence in the post-war years. If its industry had not failed in the late nineteenth century, there might not have been the political impetus to ban international whaling. Perhaps this is the true legacy of Moby-Dick.

  It is true that stocks are recovering from the nadir of the mid-twentieth century. Numbers of humpback and minke whales are increasing in southern and northern oceans, and the southern right whale, Eubalæna australis, is breeding successfully off the coasts of South Africa and South America, raising hopes that its genes may reinvigorate its cousin, the North Atlantic right whale. As Richard Sabin and field researchers such as Colin Speedie note, fin whales are seen in greater numbers in the Bay of Biscay and off the coast of southern Ireland, while blue whales are swimming through the Irish Sea, a passageway which once proved fatal for the easy access it allowed to British and Irish hunters, a kind of cetacean shooting alley. Taking advantage of the modern moratorium, the great whales are reclaiming their age-old routes.

  However, this success makes them susceptible to those who consider their populations sustainable; ironically, our enlightened attitudes have exposed the whales anew. To take a thousand minkes has an exponential effect on the rest of the population by destroying complex breeding and social structures; the effect on sperm whales may be even more disproportionate. In 2006 Iceland announced its intention to resume hunting finbacks, although its efforts stalled with the discovery that the levels of mercury in the whales they caught were too high for human consumption; the Inuits of Greenland, who eat beluga and narwhal muk tak, are among the most contaminated people on earth, despite living in its least developed and apparently pristine spaces, while the whales in the Canadian St Lawrence waterway have absorbed so many industrial pollutants that one in four die of cancer. Norway, with its deep-rooted historical precedents, resumed commercial whaling in 1992. It never had any intention of abiding by the tenets of the IWC, nor does it see any contradiction in its actions: whales are as much livestock as any domesticated cow, a time-honoured resource for a maritime nation. Meanwhile, the contested moratorium remains in place, only ever a temporary solution, as both sides know only too well.

  It took time for science to recover from Dr Lilly’s extraordinary claims about cetacean intelligence; scientists were as loath to pronounce on the subject as they were to address the existence, or not, of the Loch Ness monster. None the less, it was becoming clear that whales and dolphins have brains matched only by the higher primates and humans, with whom they share the same convoluted neocortex–the characteristic wrinkles and whorls on the top layer of the organ–and which indicate exceptional intelligence. If allowances are made for their thick blubber, the body-to-brain-size ratio (the Encephalization Quotient, or EQ) of sperm whales indicates significant acumen.

  Studies show that cetaceans can solve problems and use tools; exhibit joy and grief; and live in complex societies. Not only that, but they also pass on these abilities in ‘cultural transmission’. Twentieth-century whaling may have destroyed ‘not just numerous individuals’, says Hal Whitehead, ‘but also the cultural knowledge that they harboured relating to how to exploit certain habitats and areas’. The remaining animals also expe
rienced lower birth rates as a result, and although they did not suffer as badly as mysticetes such as the right whale–which were reduced to a mere fraction of their pre-whaling numbers–the slow-breeding sperm whale population is growing at a mere one per cent a year. The 1986 moratorium may have come only just in time for Physeter.

  Dr Whitehead–along with scientists such as Jonathan Gordon and Natalie Jacquet–has spent years studying the sperm whale in the wild. There is strong evidence that these whales are ‘cognitively advanced’, he tells me; they just don’t use their brains in the same way as humans do. Their lives, lived in another medium and reliant on entirely different structures and influences to ours, demand other talents which are quite unknown to us.

  Hal Whitehead’s conclusions about the sperm whale are fascinating. He notes that while its brain is huge, it is not so unusual when seen in relative size, compared to other mammals. However, its structure ‘suggests strengths in acoustic processing and intelligence’; it has an unusually large telencephalon, the area of the brain used to produce conscious mental and sensory processes, intelligence and personality, and its neocortex–associated with social intelligence in primates–is also highly developed.

  It is precisely because the animal is so big, because its habitat is so huge, that its very existence provokes intelligence. Always moving, always in social groups, the whale’s life is invariably interconnected, dependent on one another and on each other’s knowledge. Its long, relatively safe life free from predators, and its great numbers have allowed the sperm whale to evolve elaborate social systems and cultures–although we are not quite sure what they are. And while Whitehead’s research has found no direct evidence as to its intelligence–principally because so much of that life is unknown to us–the whale’s complex social behaviour suggests a system of communal recollection, passing on information on feeding grounds and other memories. In an ever changing environment, there is an importance to the elderly, a kind of life insurance for the species.

  It may be that whales remember more than we suspect; like the proverbial elephant, they may never forget. Research on humpback brains has also discovered the presence of spindle neurons, otherwise confined only to primates and dolphins. These cells–important in learning, memory and recognizing the world around and, perhaps, one’s self–first appeared in man’s ancestors fifteen million years ago. In cetaceans, they may have evolved thirty million years ago. This discovery places humpbacks with the odontocetes–sperm whales, orcas and dolphins–as sharing complex social skills of ‘coalition-formation, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage’.

  Hal Whitehead speaks of sperm whales as not only possessing a culture–the ability to learn information as a result of social interaction–but having used it ‘to adapt successfully to the ocean’s demanding environments’. ‘There is a growing recognition that culture is not an exclusive property of humans.’ Such research suggests entire communities of whales, ocean-wide clans moving in distinctive patterns and ‘speaking’ in distinctive repertoires of clicks, like humans sharing the same language. Separate groups of the same species will act in different ways, foraging for food in different manners–methods learned maternally, passed on from generation to generation. Similarly, Clan membership is comparable to nationality in humans; two clans off the Galápagos, although genetically similar and geographically close, ‘talk’ in different dialects.

  Dr Whitehead organizes the sperm whale’s clicks into four functional groupings: usual clicks, about two a second, made by foraging whales; creaks, a regular, more rapid succession of clicks which he describes as sounding like the rusty hinge on an opening door, and which indicate a whale homing in on its prey, or scanning other whales at the surface; the communicative sequence of codas–such as click-click-click-pause-click–a kind of cetacean Morse code which suggests ‘conversations’, although ‘we do not know what information is being transmitted’. Most mysterious of all are the slow clicks or clangs made by mature males and which Whitehead compares to ‘a jailhouse door being slammed every seven seconds’.

  As scientists become aware of the complexity of sperm whale societies–which hunting may have fatally undermined by removing its matriarchs and, with them, essential knowledge needed to support the species, and by culling the large bull males with whom the females mate–those same societies face signal new threats. Even as we are able to predict the weather, it becomes unpredictable; as we find out more about whales, they start to disappear. Natural history may soon become simply that: history.

  The earth’s flora and fauna are vanishing at an average of one hundred a day. A process of extermination, first envisioned by Baron Cuvier two hundred years ago as man began to examine the nature of the whale, will be accomplished. Between beginning this book and finishing it, one species of cetacean, the Yangtze River dolphin, has been declared extinct. By the end of the century, half of all animal species–including the right whales of Cape Cod Bay–may follow the same route.

  The sperm whale, too, has an uncertain future, so slow to breed that it also may eventually perish as a delayed effect of hunting. What man started, in the purposeful culls of the two great periods of whaling, his heirs may succeed in finishing off, almost by accident. Dr Whitehead and his fellow researchers may never know the truth about the whale; although in his most astonishing suggestion–all the more so for coming at the culmination of the most detailed scientific surveys, mathematical models and precise plottings, the result of a lifetime spent studying this one species–Whitehead proposes that we may yet discover that sperm whales, the oldest and possibly most evolved of any cetacean, have developed emotions, abstract concepts and, perhaps, even religion.

  If sperm whales have religion, do they believe in us? In Melville’s counter-bible, Ahab’s blasphemous pursuit of Moby Dick ends in an apocalyptic, three-day chase. Driven to the edge of his mania, he plunges his harpoon into the animal’s side–‘Thus, I give up the spear!’–only for the rope to loop around his neck, ‘and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone’. Ahab is last seen lashed to the whale’s white side, as if crucified, his lifeless arm beckoning to the rest to follow him into watery oblivion. Then the animal turns on the Pequod and stoves in the ship, sinking her and all her crew. The entire human cargo of Melville’s story disappears, leaving the surface as if man had never existed, ‘and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago’. Ishmael alone survives–clinging to a coffin made for Queequeg–to be picked up by a passing whale-ship, ‘that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan’.

  But what most commentators neglect to note is that there is another survivor from Melville’s book: the whale itself. And if any animal were to evolve its own religion, what better animal than one that, for all its trials and tribulations, remains an immortal, omniscient power, a lingering shape in the ocean, beyond all human comprehension and physical dimension, forever spinning into space.

  XIII

  The Whale Watch

  Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  At Macmillan Wharf, the boat is ready for her first whale watch of the day. Dennis Minsky, the naturalist, is looking over yesterday’s survey, photocopied forms clipped to a board. He brushes his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair and smooths his moustache. Today he will compile another sheaf of data to be duly processed, pieces in a jigsaw that will never be completed.

  Captain Mark Delumba stubs out his cigarette in a used coffee cup, then sets a course that is always the same but ever changing. As we lose sight of the Pilgrim Monument to thick mist, the sun disappears; all sound is muffled as the land falls away to the sound of a foghorn. We are the pioneers of the day; in our watery tracks the other boats will follow, bearing a mixture of children and parents, lovers and loners, the lost and the found, all loo
king for something.

  It is a familiar sequence: the guano-spotted breakwater surmounted by heraldic cormorants and a lounging harbour seal, followed by a procession of lighthouses which mark our leaving of land’s end: Long Point, where the sandy spit drops abruptly to one hundred and forty feet; Wood End, where a satellite of Provincetown once stood; and Race Point, where the water turns rough close to the deceptive green shallows of the shore. Vessels are often turned back here; to make it this far is an achievement. In the bay, the sea may be merely ruffled by the wind. Beyond the point, it can throw our hundred-foot boat about like a baby’s bath-time toy.

  The wind picks up as we pass into the open ocean. The depth gauge falls to eighty, seventy, sixty feet, indicating the rising presence of Stellwagen Bank below us, its shape a submerged echo of the Cape. This underwater plateau, an Atlantic Serengeti, is the epicentre of the food cycle that summons the whales, animals as migratory as any bird in your garden, Dennis tells the passengers.

  It is a striking comparison: the airy bones of a flock of swallows, and the oil-rich bodies of a school of whales. Both travel equally vast distances, and this summer the returning whales are doing well. Sixty-eight cow-calf pairs have been identified, adding to some two thousand known individual humpbacks, testament to the wealth of these waters. None the less, they remain endangered: these animals’ own ancestors were harpooned by whaling ships in the last century, and some may yet become targets themselves.