The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  In his attempt to make sense of these shifting, clicking clans, Hal organises whale society into four categories, defined by space and number: concentrations spread in areas over hundreds of kilometres; aggregations, of ten to twenty kilometres; groups, over areas from hundreds to thousands of metres; and clusters, animals within a body length of each other. The greater of these gatherings are invisible to us, simply too big to see; we can only detect them in scientific or statistical time, as it were. But we can sense they are there, like those exosolar planets, wandering through a watery universe.

  Again and again over these days at sea, as I enter the water I gradually get better at judging what the whales will do and how they might react to me. I realise how subtle the signs are, in the same way that you can see in a person’s eyes what they think of you long before they might put it into words. I swim alongside a large juvenile, lingering long enough to take it all in, from head to fin, from the glowing white mandible to the chunk taken out of its caudal peduncle, a ferocious scar above its tail. Later, I see the same whale even closer, an encounter which leaves us both open-mouthed, the animal’s jaw agape, slowly opening and shutting. Afterwards I wonder if it was out of stress, just as ravens will half-open their beaks in fright.

  Whales would do well to fear our world. Many have marks and wounds, testaments to struggles with fishing gear or ship-strikes. ‘They’re tough,’ says João when I climb back into the boat, babbling my description. ‘They heal very well.’ Their bodies appear as forbearing as their cetacean souls, although I was once rebuked for daring to presume that a whale might possess such a thing.

  I think João is laughing at me.

  Back down below, a young calf eyes me up, then spy-hops at the surface for a better look. Underwater, it’s pale, cherubic and innocent, till it lets slip a cloud of runny poo in my face – possibly an act of defensive deception, or maybe even play. It’s joined by another, equally inquisitive juvenile. Emboldened by each other, they come a little closer.

  Suddenly, their number is dramatically swollen: a huge female, with an additional two calves, twirling around to appear out of the turquoise gloom. I sing to myself as I’m caught up in the crowd; I’ve never shared the water with so many whales. There are whales across the entirety of my vision; wall-to-wall whales wending this way and that; perpendicular, horizontal, vertical columns in the sea. More than ever, their subtle colours shine through the water; the filtered light playing on their backs, dancing on their sides. Only something so huge could be so elegant; they move more delicately because of, rather than in spite of, their mass.

  Only one of these calves can belong to the large female. What I am witnessing, as these huge animals twist and turn around one another, forever touching, forever reassuring, is a cetacean crèche. For a moment it seems I might be adopted too. The mother looks at me serenely, perhaps aware of her power, while her brood, encouraged by the protection of her flanks, peer as curiously at me as I peer at them.

  Then she decides it’s time to move on. Gathering her charges together, she takes off into the blue, with barely perceptible acceleration. I’m left treading empty water, surrounded only by ocean.

  On our final day at sea, our licence runs out. The high season is upon us, and we are no longer permitted to enter the water with the whales. We must content ourselves with seeing them from above. It is then that a group of sperm whales chooses to socialise at the surface.

  It is one of the most astonishing sights I have ever seen. Slate-grey shapes in the water, they continually touch one another; it is difficult to tell where one whale starts and the other ends. Heads rise up out of the water as glossy black cylinders, bobbing with specific gravity, glistening like oil. Mouths gape with new young teeth like shiny white buds. To see them in the open air seems almost stranger than witnessing them underwater. I could be watching elephants at a waterhole, although each of these juveniles is bigger than any pachyderm.

  For hour after hour they interact, heedless of our presence, adults and young alike engrossed in themselves. At one point a young whale appears to push itself over another, as if to roll over its back. Another lolls lackadaisically on its side, lulled in the motion of the waves and its playmates’ micro-tides. Flukes and fins, flanks and bellies are intertwined, yielding and caressing. There is clearly sensuality, pleasure in intimate contact. I watch as two whales come head-to-head, touching brows, or more precisely, noses. How intense it must be to come so close to one’s fellow whale in an almost physical transference of emotions, perhaps even ideas.

  After this transcendent display, which leaves us feeling as rapt as the whales, a pair appears just off our bow. At first I think they’re still playing with one another; only when they begin to swim straight at us do I realise it is a mother and calf. They continue to head for our prow, where I’m perched. I’m sure that at any moment they will shear off and dive.

  But they don’t. They keep coming, right up to the rib, so close that I could reach down and touch them. I can see the calf’s head bobbing along, and through the water, barely beneath the surface, the mother on her side, presenting her entire length, easily dwarfing our craft. She is looking up at us, we are looking down at her. The whiteness of her jaw glows green like an iceberg through the inches of ocean that separate us. The hypnotic state of the past three hours is sundered. And so the pair pass by, and swim on.

  * Note to editor. Maybe we shouldn’t publicise this? Imagine the protests fishermen might lodge about these greedy leviathans. I doubt that they’ll be reassured by the argument that the whales were here first.

  5

  The sea of serendipity

  The birds may come and circle for a while … But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the ‘nothing’, the ‘no-body’ that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.

  THOMAS MERTON,

  Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 1968

  The night that fell so abruptly has yet to shift. It lies over the island like a hot, thick blanket. I awake, the ceiling fan spinning. Outside, palms are scissored out of the sky. The white noise of the sea breaks through my dreams and onto the shore.

  Drew and I squeeze into the tuk-tuk, knees drawn up on the plastic-covered seat; a gilt Buddha swings from the rear-view mirror. The muezzin’s call from across the street has already begun. At four in the morning people are walking to work in the middle of the road, leaving the pavement to the animals. There’s a sense of a place falling apart and putting itself together. A community speeding slowly towards some determined point, in five hundred years’ or five minutes’ time. Bikes loom out of the dark with huge boxes of fish balanced over their back wheels; our headlight reflects the retinas of dogs stretching themselves after a night curled up in the dust.

  We turn down a lane lined with low cottages in varying states of construction and collapse. The tuk-tuk jerks to a halt at a gap in the trees, out of which a man appears, gathering up his green-and-orange sarong against the rubbish that lines the footpath. Handsome, with high cheekbones, Rasika wears a peaked camouflage cap that lends him the air of a freedom fighter. We follow him past squashed plastic bottles, single flip-flops, and coconut husks. At the end of the path is a starlit sea.

  Rasika steadies the Kushan Putha for us to board it. This does not take long, since the boat barely measures twenty feet, little more than a canoe, its fibreglass patched here and there, with uncertain stains on its once-white surface. We balance on the makeshift blue-painted planks that straddle the boat, padded with nylon-covered pillows held together by safety pins. Rasika pushes off from the beach. I feel a slight lift as the sand scrapes beneath us and the boat surrenders to the lapping waves.

  As we leave Mirissa behind and move out into the bay, my eyes get used to the darkness. I see fishing boats all around, returning from their night’s work, nets bulging with silvery fish. Others are racing ahead, black shapes against the even blacker water.
They somehow make the dark companionable. We pass a flashing green light on the breakwater; the headland beyond is barely distinguishable. So close to the equator, day and night begin and end sharply, although the mountains delay the dawn, holding back the sun from the eastern shore. Venus flares before dipping into the blue. Up in those hills, Julia Margaret Cameron took her last look at the sky. Somewhere, too, my ancestor may have ruled over his plantation; perhaps he even sailed over these waters on his own final trip.

  But all this beauty is a bit too much for me. It’s still only five-thirty, so I push my roll bag into the space under the prow, climb into the cubby-hole, tug my hood over my head and curl up on the lumpy floor. It’s surprisingly comfortable. Lulled by the gentle rocking, I feel the water through the thin hull as it vibrates with the outboard motor. Here in the belly of the boat, a place reserved for dead fish and smelly nets, the knowledge of what might lie below makes my berth feel warm, womblike. It’s as though I were sleeping under the sea. I could easily spend the night here, covered by the omnipresent layer of salt, careless of what I might look like or how wet or dirty I might be.

  None of those things matter now; they all evaporate with our intent. That subtle scrape of sand was a momentous leaving; if we carried on from here, we’d have to sail for ten thousand miles before we made landfall again, in Antarctica. This ocean links the hottest part of the earth to the coldest; in between is a vast, living arena.

  My body, which had been bumping gently on the floor, rolls to a halt; Rasika has slowed the engine to a purr. Woken by the lack of motion, I slide myself out of my hole, sliding out into the light, eyes blinking. The sun has begun to break the horizon, scorching away the stars. But we have not stopped to admire the sunrise. Ahead, the surface has been broken by black shapes: the sharp fins and lithe, leaping bodies of spinner dolphin. Excitedly, I clamber to my feet.

  ‘Come on, my boys!’ I shout, as they swerve and swoop. They start to spin on cue, turning full circle in the air, showing off their sleek-striped flanks and pink-flushed bellies like salmon over a weir. Rasika starts up his engine and they’re off, racing in front of our bow as their kind do the world over, as if every dolphin were performing in a perpetual oceanic Olympics.

  This close, it’s easy to see how they earned their binomial, Stenella longirostris, ‘narrow long snout’. With every break of the surface their beaks poke up, prominent as broom handles, armed with dozens of sharp teeth – perfect for feeding on the fish they’re rounding up below us.

  Suddenly a group of common terns drop out of the sky, all angles as they dive into the same bait, whistling as if with the joy of having found such a fertile source of food. There’s a series of sharper splashes – the frenetic, jagged leap of yellowfin tuna, launching themselves out of the water in their ferocious pursuit. Spiky slivers of silver with big round eyes, they look like something out of a cartoon. This concentrated spectacle will be repeated a million times throughout this ocean on this calm morning.

  Then the phone rings. Rasika reaches down into a box and pulls out a 1980s-style desktop telephone, complete with push buttons and a cable trailing out the back. Drew and I look at each other in amazement; maybe the line runs all the way back to shore? Our boatman talks to a fellow fisherman, then, carefully replacing the receiver, revs the engine back into action. He navigates from a lifetime at sea, just as his fellow fishermen have come to determine the movements of their catch by the waxing and waning of the moon. Nineteenth-century whalers observed similar effects on sperm whales, which seemed to congregate around full and new moons. Such lunar assemblies may have more to do with feeding on squid, but the image of great whales guided by shafts of moonlight through blood-warm waters is too poetic to disavow. Buddhists believe any human spirit might be reborn as a bird or a fish, or a whale, or vice versa; that any animal can become another. In their cosmology, there is no God, no dominion, nor any distinction in the morality we apply to living things, since they are connected and interdependent, and capable of attaining enlightenment. And in a Buddhist culture where each full moon brings a national holiday, work and play are set to natural rhythms. Inshore at dawn, men fish from wooden stilts, perched like human herons in the surf. They put out to sea in vividly-painted boats balanced with outriggers, looking more like carnival floats. Their piratical crews dangle from the yardarms, decked out in outrageously bright sarongs as if trying to outdo one another on a Fourth of July parade. Even their nets are multicoloured – as if, under this tropical sun, nothing should be dull or monotone.

  The ocean is alive. Flocks of flying fish skitter like overgrown dragonflies, dozens at a time. As we pull alongside another fishing boat, its crew yank a great silver mass from the floor: a huge sailfish, its beak a stiletto blade. One of the men pulls its dorsal fin out like a fan; it must be a metre high, electric blue and spiny. Their shiny prize took six hours to land, bucking and twisting once it was in the boat. It is a valuable catch; they won’t have to work for a week. Later, we’ll watch as another crew free a green turtle from their nets. Other marine wildlife are not so lucky: by-catch and overfishing are endemic problems throughout the Indian Ocean, a consequence of its crowded shores.

  Further out at sea, another boat hoves into view – a mere dot on the horizon one moment, up close and larger than life the next. Sticking out from its sides like the antennae of praying mantis are huge rods made from stripped branches, sturdy enough to land a tuna. Bhangra blares from a sound system. In return for this operatic performance, the crew ask for cigarettes, employing a characteristic swivel of the head that might mean anything from acquiescence to approval – a subtle ambivalence in a country that runs on good manners. Rasika speaks volubly and rapidly in Singhalese, although it’s not entirely clear whether the crew are denying that whales even exist, or whether they’ve seen vast schools of cetaceans, just over there, yes, there, over there; or, no, none at all.

  As the land diminishes with every nautical mile, it loses all importance, reduced to a blur in the distance. To the south lies one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes; on it, the same slow-moving juggernauts I see from Southampton’s shore, prosaic compared to the fishermen’s painted craft. At least half a dozen dark shapes dot the horizon, moving relentlessly against the sky.

  Rasika points ahead, almost whispering the word we’ve been waiting to hear. I can’t see anything. Then, there, yes, something white against the blue.

  And again. It must be as tall as a house.

  And again – a vertical plume in a horizontal world. A geyser erupting out of the ocean.

  Kushan Putha’s engine picks up speed. We’re really moving now. I lean forward, white knuckles to the grabrail in front of me, head down, bent double, to an endurance test determined by the whims of a whale. Suddenly, right off our bow, the whale surfaces, sending its calling card into the air. The steamy blow is two storeys high. Balaenoptera musculus: the blue whale. Something so beautiful as to be unbelievable.

  It is a gradual revelation. First, a dark lump, the splash-guard to the whale’s blowholes. Then, rolling behind its wedge-shaped head, its body – no more a mere body than a skyscraper is a building; a living construction that leaves words in its wake.

  I’ve only seen this creature as a shape against a white page, laid out with the rest of its relatives in the austere context of a field guide, or modelled in a museum. The reality is so far removed, so enormous, that the only thing I can fix on is the colour. It really is blue, at least in certain lights: a deep, petrolly blue, or the blue of a swallow’s back; the concentrated essence of water, with an added iridescence. Like sperm whales, these chameleons seem to change colour with every angle, every glimpse. One moment they’re mottled grey and turquoise, organically patterned like lichen on a beech tree or the sheen on a plate of zinc; the next, the blue becomes so black it is as deep as the lacquer on a Japanese chair. This illusive quality makes the whale even harder to comprehend – as if that weren’t difficult enough already.

  Only after
wards, looking at my photographs, do I recall what I must have seen but not registered in the moment: that with its forward motion the animal drags the sea down with it, as if the water were parting to make way for the whale. Its imperial progress demands nothing less. It is animate, yet not set apart from the ocean; it is the ocean itself. I think of the visible rays in medieval paintings that connect God’s gaze to his saints, as Drew tells me about a scientist who has devised a laser that, by bouncing off either end of a whale, instantly gauges its size. All I have are my eyes.

  Then, as the sequence plays out, something almost ridiculous: the animal’s dorsal fin, risibly small, an afterthought of sorts. The stubby bump only serves to make what went before appear even bigger. It is followed, inexorably, by the thick tailstock – the caudal peduncle – restoring to proper proportion an animal the size of an airliner. Densely muscled, it is charged, ready to to rise high into the air and jack-knife down below.

  But first we must wait as the whale blows and rolls through the water. Everything is stilled by expectation, diminished by this deferred miracle. All around the world people are going about their business; we are watching a blue whale about to dive.

  Subtly, the whale changes momentum, goes up a gear. You can’t put your finger on the moment that it does, but it’s obvious when it starts to happen. You feel the animal flex and ripple, drawing up and pulling down.

  Suddenly its flukes are held sharp against the sky, as though a giant sail had been raised out of the waves. They are utterly enormous, broad and of a piece, yet at precise right angles to the animal, like a plane’s tail fins. They hang there for a second, wobbling with their magnitude and the power of the body to which they are connected. They announce the end of the encounter. With this final flourish, our audience is over, leaving us wanting more. There’s something sexual about whales, Drew and I agree. Sleek, sensual and untouchable, they are the ultimate tease. It is that which draws you on.