Shark Drunk

by Morten Stroksnes

  As soon as Hugo gets the boat going again, I catch sight of a column of water shooting straight up out of the sea, many miles ahead, slightly to starboard. I turn around and signal to Hugo, who nods and ramps up to full speed. We quickly approach what now looks like a shallow islet polished smooth and gleaming in the sun. But we’re in open ocean, where there are no islets. And besides, this one is moving. We’ve already seen several porpoises, but this is clearly something else entirely. Hugo starts speculating out loud.

  “Well, it’s not minke whales, at any rate. Could it be a pod of pilot whales?”

  We’re several hundred yards away when Hugo realizes that this can’t be right either. What we see in front of us has no dorsal fin, like the pilot whale has. And it’s not a pod at all. It’s one huge animal. For a split second I wonder if it might be a submarine. Hugo’s body is tensed, his gaze fixed, his mouth open as he frantically pages through his internal catalogue of various types of whales. We’re only a couple of hundred yards away when he exclaims:

  “It’s a sperm whale!”

  In front of us is one of the largest of all toothed whales. As we approach, it starts to arch its back. When we’re a hundred feet away, it blows one last time and then lowers its head into the water. The flukes and hind part of the body stick vertically up from the surface, iconic as a rock carving, before the sea closes around them. The whale is gone, as if someone had pulled a string, drawing it down into the abyss.

  Hugo switches off the motor. He has spent nearly fifty years by the sea, and so much time in Vestfjorden that he could almost be considered part of the fauna. During that time he has seen just about everything. Groups of pilot whales are practically routine, not to mention minke whales, dolphins, and porpoises. But not once in all those years has he ever seen a sperm whale.

  Now it’s just a matter of waiting. Even though a sperm whale can hold its breath for ninety minutes—longer than any other creature with lungs—eventually it will have to resurface.

  —

  The sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) is not only the largest carnivorous animal in the world. It’s the largest carnivorous animal that has ever existed on earth. Forget the Tyrannosaurus rex, the megalodon shark, and the kronosaur. The sperm whale is both heavier and longer. Almost nothing that has ever lived, or is alive today, including the other big whales, can compare.

  The animal we saw was a solitary male about sixty-five feet long and weighing more than fifty-five tons. Males and females are not alike. The females weigh only a third of what the males weigh, and they live in groups that take care of the calves, sharing the responsibility for another female’s calf when one of them dives to search for food. Young males swim around in groups. Puberty is over when they reach the age of thirty. By then the male sperm whale has had enough companionship to last the rest of its life. From that moment on, the male becomes a solitary hunter in the oceans of the world. The whale we encountered could have swum all the way from the Antarctic Ocean. If it meets a group of females, it might mate, but as soon as that’s over, it will take off again. The males can be aggressive when they run into other sperm whales. Maybe it’s sexual frustration that makes the males fight, even in a sober state. Hugo says a horny sperm whale can get as crazy as an elephant in heat.

  —

  While waiting, I ponder what the sperm whale that disappeared into the deep might be up to. It could be hunting octopus or a giant squid, which can weigh up to a thousand pounds. On its way down, the whale might grab the octopus in its teeth and crush it against the seafloor. If the whale doesn’t find anything as it descends, it has another chance to nab food while going back up. At the bottom, the whale starts swimming upside down, scanning the water above for shapes silhouetted against the faint light from the surface. The sperm whale uses the sonar system at the front of its head to localize schools of fish or squid. If the whale spots something interesting, it speeds up, swallowing the prey in a mouth big enough to hold crosswise the boat in which Hugo and I are sitting.

  Sperm whales that have washed ashore have been found with deep sucker marks, sometimes eight inches in diameter, on their bodies. No humans have ever witnessed a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale, but if the opportunity arose, the tickets would sell out instantly. The giant squid, which was long regarded as a fictitious monster, not only has eight arms, each of which can reach a maximum length of twenty-five feet; it also has a repulsive bony beak that can crush just about anything. According to Jules Verne, the arms of this colossal aberration are like a Fury’s strands of hair. It should be easy to make eye contact with the giant squid, because it has huge round eyes, with no eyelids, so it never blinks.

  On the front of its head the sperm whale has the largest sound-producing organ in the animal world. It can weigh eleven tons all on its own. The clicks it makes have been measured to 230 decibels, a sound level comparable to that of a rifle shot fired four inches away from your ear. The males emit loud bangs like this, while the females speak more rapidly, almost like a type of Morse code.

  As an evolutionary heavyweight, the sperm whale ought to be swimming around with an enormous silver belt around its stomach. But even the sperm whale has its enemies. It gives birth to few offspring, fewer than any other type of whale, and many years are required to teach, feed, and protect the calves. Both calves and injured adults can be attacked by groups of orcas or pilot whales. In those situations the sperm whales take up a so-called marguerite formation, in which all the bigger animals make a circle around the calves. This way the sperm whales can turn in any direction and use either their tail or teeth as weapons against their attackers. This can prevent the much faster and more agile orcas from isolating the calves, which would spell the end for them.22

  —

  The sperm whale can dive to a depth of close to ten thousand feet, which is a record for mammals.23 At such depths, their lungs are nearly compressed flat. Inside its head the whale has a large chamber where the pressure is equalized as the spermaceti oil cools down, solidifying and attaining greater density during the dive for the bottom. The oil warms up to a liquid state closer to the surface, enabling the whale to float. Until about a hundred years ago when synthetic replacements were invented, spermaceti oil was the most valuable of all oils. It is pure, transparent, and pleasant smelling. A big whale could contain up to five hundred gallons of spermaceti oil in its head. The finest candles, soaps, and cosmetics were made from this pale pink, waxy, spermlike liquid. And spermaceti oil was also used to lubricate the most expensive precision instruments.

  Many other parts of the animal were also of great value. A single whale could produce several dozen tons of blubber and meat, and the huge teeth were as precious as elephant ivory. It’s said that whale hunters even made themselves raincoats from the skin of the enormous penis. That’s not the only way in which the sperm whale is endowed. It also possesses the largest brain of any animal on earth—ever. The brain weighs six times more than a human’s. The penis weighs several hundred times more.

  To top it all off, the sperm whale secretes the substance called ambergris in its digestive tract. Ambergris was the most valuable part of the whole whale, since it was used in perfumes. Many people ascribed all sorts of fantastical qualities to the substance. In the old days, when ambergris was found floating at sea or washed ashore at low tide, people thought it was something a sea monster had spit out. Hugo has found ambergris, which they used to call whale amber, on the intertidal zone. He describes it as waxy gray lumps with a characteristic, slightly sweet smell.

  The sperm whale was in high demand and was hunted so vigorously that it came close to extinction. Off of Andenes, an important fishing station at the northern tip of the Norwegian island of Andøya, this type of whale was systematically hunted well into the 1970s. Before whale hunters had grenade harpoons, they used big harpoons that went right through the whale, before catching on barbs. But the hunters still lost a lot of animals. If the whale’s vital organs weren’t damaged
, it could swim around for years with the harpoon buried in its body.

  —

  All is quiet around me and Hugo, except for a soft, musical sound from invisible currents lapping against the boat. Elsewhere around us the water licks at the underside of its own surface, which gleams above the hollows and high shoals.24 The sea is a cohesive sheet of light, so bright that it seems to illuminate itself. To the west the ocean swells in a convex arc, like an overstuffed dumpling. We’re looking at the curve of the earth. There’s still no sign of the sperm whale, and if it were an ordinary day, there would be little chance of seeing it again. But this is no ordinary day. The sea is so calm and the weather so clear that we’d probably be able to spot the colossus of a sperm whale at a distance of five miles.

  Hugo tells me about a local incident from the previous century, when a sperm whale attacked a small boat carrying a large family to church. They were going from Lottavika to Leines when the sperm whale shattered their boat. Only a sixteen-year-old girl survived; the rest of the family drowned. Apparently air pockets in the girl’s dress kept her afloat.

  The core of the story is true, but local historians think the sperm whale happened to collide with the boat while it was grazing for herring.

  On the other hand, it was no accident in 1820 when the whaling ship Essex of Nantucket was attacked by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific Ocean. The whalers on board the ship, which was eighty-seven feet long, estimated the whale to be eighty-five feet in length. They’d never seen such a large animal. For a long time the whale swam peacefully a good distance ahead of the Essex, as if keeping an eye on the ship. Suddenly the whale turned and headed full speed toward the ship, ramming it with tremendous force and smashing a huge hole in the bow. The crew on deck were knocked off their feet. A moment later the whale again attacked, shattering the other side of the bow into kindling. The whale kept at it until the 262-ton ship sank. First mate Owen Chase and more than half of the crew survived. Chase gives a sobering account of what happened in the book Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821).

  This isn’t the only documented incident in which great ships have been sunk by sperm whales. But the story of the Essex is the most famous because it inspired Herman Melville to write his book about the white sperm whale Moby-Dick. The book is filled with chronicle-like chapters on whaling and the anatomy and behavior of whales (“The Sperm Whale’s Head,” “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton,” “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?,” and so on). According to Ishmael, the narrator, the white whale becomes for Captain Ahab the manifestation of all the evil forces that certain “deep” people feel are eating away at them:

  That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.25

  The captain was insane, and his madness was contagious. The whale became the enemy of the entire crew, and almost to the same extent. Although Ishmael doesn’t realize it—because here it’s the author Melville speaking directly to his readers—Moby-Dick is the crew’s “unconscious understandings,” the “gliding great demon of the seas of life”:

  The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?26

  The whole crew follows Ahab’s lead, because the same thing exists inside all of them: an inherited and instinctive murderous force that is destructive of both the world and everyone around them. It’s also self-destructive. Moby-Dick is the mammal threatened with extinction that was slaughtered by the tens of thousands in Melville’s day, and it’s also the darkest of forces in human nature. Like the desire for revenge, or the monomaniacal search for truth and the control of “innocent” nature. Ahab is the one hunting the whale, not vice versa. In the end he is dragged down to the bottom with the line from his own harpoon wrapped around his neck. That is how he is finally united with the Great White Whale.

  —

  More than two hundred million whales, of varying species, were caught globally from the 1870s to the 1970s. Over the course of a few decades, the local whale populations, which had numbered in the tens of thousands, ended up reduced to a few terrified animals.27 Norwegian companies based in Larvik, Tønsberg, and Sandefjord carried out commercial whaling for more than fifty years in the Antarctic Ocean as well as off the coasts of Australia, Africa, Brazil, and Japan. Huge factory ships were built at Norwegian dockyards, and hyperefficient processing furnaces (historically called tryworks), were transported to South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic Ocean and Deception Island in Antarctica. In 1920, on Deception Island alone, there were 350 pressure cookers, each capable of holding twenty-six hundred gallons of oil. Before the blue whale came close to extinction, the whaling ships caught thousands of them every season, as well as a number of other species. Live fetuses were cut from the wombs of pregnant female blue whales and incinerated. The days were not calculated in hours but rather in the number of whales caught and barrels of oil produced. The smoke and steam from the enormous, roaring furnaces hovered like a thick blanket over the whaling stations. A single blue whale can have two thousand gallons of blood in its body, and the men who did the flensing waded nonstop in blubber, blood, and meat during the four-month season.

  The stench of death and putrefaction was indescribable. The furnaces and factory ships were often unable to keep up, which meant that whales were left lying on the foreshore until their flesh turned rancid and the gases inflated their bodies like zeppelins. When these carcasses were pierced, or if they exploded on their own, the stench was enough to make people pass out. The surrounding shores were like gigantic whale graveyards, where thousands of carcasses, skeletons, and bones lay rotting. Some people claimed they could never get rid of the smell; it lingered in their nostrils even decades later.28

  —

  All whales are able to communicate with one another over great distances, but increased ship traffic is making that more and more difficult. Yet this problem is surmountable compared to what the “world’s loneliest whale” has to endure. Fin whales normally communicate at a frequency of twenty hertz, and they hear only sounds close to that frequency. But several years ago whale researchers were astonished to discover a fin whale with a special handicap: it sings at a frequency of approximately fifty-two hertz. This means that none of the other fin whales can hear it, and the whale is cut off from all social interaction with its fellow fin whales. Maybe the others think it’s mute or a different species or an asocial eccentric. The “world’s loneliest whale” keeps to itself. It doesn’t even follow the migration routes taken by the others through the oceans of the world.29

  —

  As a boy, Hugo often went out on the Kvitberg II, a boat equipped for all types of fishing. In the designated season, it also went after whales. Once, from the dock, Hugo watched the crew cut open a pilot whale after the ship returned from a hunt. They hit a blood vessel, and as he remembers the incident, he saw columns of blood spraying across the deck. But he has begun to doubt this memory, because the whales would have been cut up into huge chunks weighing sixty-five pounds each by the time the Kvitberg returned from the Barents Sea. Could he have seen a whale that had been caught in Vestfjorden? At any rate, the blood vessels on the inside were as thick as cables and very visible as the heart was sliced in half. Men stood ready on the dock in Helnessund with meat hooks, which they stuck into the pieces and then dragged them along t
he wharf into the refrigerated warehouse.

  —

  Where has our sperm whale gone? The waters all around us are suddenly swarming with herring. The surface is so smooth that from far away we can see the massive schools of fish. If we’d had a seine, which of course would have required a much bigger boat, we could have easily pulled on board many tons of herring. Seabirds hover over the fish, eating so much they can hardly take flight. We see northern fulmars (which belong to the Procellariidae family), great cormorants, common eider, and ordinary seagulls. Even an arctic tern, flying low, passes our boat. Every year they fly from the South Pole to the North Pole and back.

  The gentle whispering of the sea, the dry warmth of the sun, the air so clear—such peace. These are the kinds of days that a person collects, to be recalled years later. Only one thing spoils the idyllic scene. The Scottish Highland bull. The smell is seeping through the sacks. Apparently it wants all of Vestfjorden for itself. Several seabirds turn away in midair as they get close to our boat. Others make odd maneuvers, as if for a brief moment they actually faint. It’s been almost forty-five minutes. Could the sperm whale already have surfaced so far away that we didn’t see it, only to dive down again?

  Hugo and I are in the middle of discussing the origins of the Norwegian phrase “drunk as an auk” when we hear a booming sound in the distance. We sit perfectly still and listen. There it is again.

  “It sounds like a rock slide. They must be doing some blasting on shore,” says Hugo, turning to look toward Kabelvåg.

  Again a thunderous sound rumbles across the surface of the water. It reminds me of the deepest tones from a church organ, but wetter and with a trace of heavy gurgling. This is not the sound of blasting operations on shore. It’s the whale pumping air in and out of its giant lungs.