by Philip Hoare
And down there also swim the largest cephalopods known to humans, and some unknown to us, too, perhaps. Giant squid with barbed tentacles, arms up to forty feet long, and eyes the size of basketballs to allow in what little remains of the light. Tennyson conjured up just such a creature,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
… Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
These real-life krakens present a terrifying vision; or at least they would, if anyone had ever seen them in their natural state. But they too, like many of these islands’ animals, seem to be invisible.
The next morning I get up three hours before dawn, pausing briefly to marvel that each encounter with a cetacean seems to demand ever-earlier risings. I dress quickly, sling my roll bag over my shoulder, and leave quietly by the back door, stepping out into the night-morning, then trudge down the hill to the shore. The Southern Cross binds the sky, pointing to the South Pole.
I walk between yellow pools of street lights. The narrow park on the other side of the road, overlooking the shore, is decorated with an arbour of whale bone arches. The sea has stopped the roaring I could hear from my bedroom, a low rumbling that, in my restlessness, sounded like a perpetually-arriving train. I fight my imagination, which wants to fill my head with images of what might lie beyond the beach.
Reporting for duty in a fluorescent-lit room, I tug on my wetsuit. Half an hour later, I’m tipped off the back of the boat and into the still-black ocean, falling through the foaming surf churned up by the propellers.
Dark fins describe a wide circle a hundred yards away. It’s difficult to see what’s happening in the half-light – still more so since I’m hanging at sea level, waves slapping at my face. Frantically I tread water, trying to keep upright.
Suddenly, scything through my misty horizon, they’re all around me. I’m in the middle of a super-pod of two hundred, probably many more, dusky dolphins.
I see their shapes, exquisitely airbrushed black and white and pearl-grey, swimming beneath me. Steadily, the fins begin to gather and steer towards me, more and more, till I’m in an eddying mass of swooping, diving cetaceans.
Everywhere I look there are dolphins; I’m encircled by them. They shoot from a single source like a shower of meteorites, their two-metre bodies zipping past, in and out of focus. I feel strangely calm. It’s hard to believe this is real at all, as if the frenzy were happening somewhere else entirely.
But it’s here, in front of my face. As I look down into the water, one animal slips into place at my side, then swims round and round, daring me to keep up. I spiral my body, only more aware of my ineptitude in their environment.
Dolphins are breaching right by me, turning somersaults in the air. How about this? Can you do that? I reach out, instinctively; they easily evade me. That’s not part of the game.
Dizzy and elated, I’m about to haul myself back on the boat when the skipper, Al, holds out his open palms, indicating I should stay where I am.
Is something wrong? He points over my head.
I look round and see dozens of dolphins heading straight at me, like a herd of buffalo. For a moment I think they’re going to swim right into me. A ridiculous notion. They, like the whales, register my every move, my every dimension, both inside and out, my density, my temperature, what I am, and what I am not. A dolphin’s sonar, which can fire off two thousand clicks a second, is able to discern something the thickness of a fingernail from thirty feet away. At the last minute the animals swerve aside, under my legs, by my side, past my head.
Many are having sex. With the males’ two-kilo testes and penises that quick-release from genital slits, and females whose receptivity is advertised by plump flashing bellies, dolphins mate continually. Al says a single female may mate with three different males in five minutes, and will even mate with other species, producing dusky-common dolphin hybrids. As Caspar Henderson observes in his Book of Barely Imagined Beings, males will even insert their penises in the shells of turtles or the rear ends of sharks; females have been seen riding piggy-back, with one animal’s dorsal fin in the other’s genital slit.
Everything is turbulence. The water is alive with clicks, as if a current were being passed through it. I feel the sensual power of their bodies as they race past. But the space between us cannot be closed. Nothing passes in between. There is no connection. As abruptly as they came, they are gone. One dolphin takes two or three last spins around me. Then the waters fall quiet once more.
Back on the boat, I crouch, shivering on the prow, to watch the super-pod pass by. They’ve fed through the night and are content to play. One dolphin swims below the bow, carrying a piece of seaweed in its beak. Māori navigators, tohunga, would appeal to dolphins for assistance in a storm: the tohunga would pluck a hair from his head and throw it to the taniwha or water spirits as a sign of their need for help – a tradition begun after they saw dolphins presenting seaweed as gifts to one another.
That afternoon, I board another boat on the far side of the Kaikoura Peninsula. The mountains that I’d ignored on my arrival, too close and too big to see, assert themselves from the perspective of the sea, monumental mirrors of the underwater canyon. The animals take on a similar scale. The southern royal albatross, the toroa, with its wingspan of up to eleven feet, is, along with its wandering cousin, the largest seabird in the world. It is also one of the longest-lived: females have been found still breeding in their sixties. Gliding on enormous wings, one circles the boat, watching us through what Ishmael saw as ‘inexpressible, strange eyes’.
A blue shark swims by, followed by a pair of blue penguins. Our boat tucks into the gentle swell as we come to a halt, and wait.
I’m on the upper deck, talking to the crew, when there is a commotion in the water ahead. Without any other warning, the huge blunt head of a sperm whale rises perpendicularly from the waves, with its mouth open. I can clearly see its massive canines. And caught between them is a three-foot-long kingfish.
Until now I thought that all sperm whales fed deep down; here was a whale eating at the surface. One of the crew points out the traces of the whale’s sonar buzzes – much more powerful than the dolphins’ clicks – creating localised circular patches, as if a ray gun had been trained through the water.
As the whale reappears, at full length this time, I can judge its bulk; the distance from its cantered nostril to the back of its skull is enough to indicate its size. Compared to the females I’d seen off the Azores, this bull is massive, at least fifty feet long and perhaps forty years old. Three decades ago it left its family, moving south in search of bigger prey, making itself more handsome and huge, and therefore more attractive to a partner. Now it has joined other males, both resident and transitory, to feed on the canyon’s rich resources. There is no ignoring this animal. It is in its prime, regnant and supreme. But here too its kind are diminished, in number if not in size. Those resources may now be dwindling, and there are fewer and fewer sperm whales to watch, for all the frothed defiance of those that remain.
The whale dives, its flukes against the mountains, angling down into the canyon, all of a scale. Our captain passes me a pair of headphones which would look more at home on the New York subway, and I listen to the loud clicks below us. He smiles as he tells me, ‘We call him Tiaki. It means guardian.’
8
The silent sea
Look across the beach from the sea, there is what the mind’s eye sees, romantic, classic, savage but always uncontrollable.
GREG DENING, Islands and Beaches, 1968
To reach Kapiti Island one must, if not in possession of a driver’s licence, board an early-morning train from Wellington. The line rumbles past colonial bungalows with verandahs and phormiums, New Zealand flax, staked by dead flower spikes, their blade-like leaves flapping in the ever-present wind. The day before, I’d stood at Island Bay to the south of the ci
ty, watching that wind bring with it one of the most violent storms seen in months.
I’d gone there in search of orca; a pod had been spotted in the harbour. Instead I was greeted with a tempest. The darkening clouds set the sand into sharp relief. One, then two rainbows arched over the horizon, joining the land and the sky. The intensity of colour and the falling air pressure had a hallucinogenic effect. Speeding towards us across the water, the sky was sucking up the sea, creating curls of feathery vapour that seemed about to turn into tornados. The full force of the tropical Pacific was meeting the chill of the Southern Ocean. It was like watching a weather forecast simultaneously slowed down and speeded up. The storm was rushing towards me. In an instant, the atmosphere became supercharged, an almost tangible mass.
I could practically feel the electricity crackling in the air. At the last moment, as the whirling wind rocked vehicles in the car park and fired perpendicular hail, catching up everything in its violent breath, I ran for cover. Waves which had rolled unobstructed over the ocean, gaining size and strength from immense gyres, were pummelling the rocks as if to tear them out of the sand. Nature was having a fit of hysteria, like an overactive child.
The next day, unless you read the newspaper headlines, you would have been forgiven for thinking nothing had happened. In the calm of the morning the train trundled on, leaving the suburbs behind for a series of beach settlements. As the sea began to reappear, in the distance, lying low, was Kapiti Island, its dark-forested outline just visible across the narrow strait.
New Zealand is one of the last places in the world to have been occupied by humans. In its sixty-five million years of isolation, it produced perhaps the greatest variety of bird species on any island, estimated at nearly two hundred. Like its whales, they too were a wonder and a resource to the Māori, who wove capes from their feathers, and threaded dead or living birds through their earlobes and kept them there till their wings stopped flapping and their bodies began to rot. When James Cook first arrived in 1769, he claimed that the birdsong, heard from the Endeavour at anchor in Queen Charlotte Sound, was almost deafening, as if a thousand finely tuned bells were ringing. But within a hundred years, animals introduced by the settlers were threatening that resonating abundance, and in 1897, in an early act of conservation to echo that of St Cuthbert on Inner Farne, Kapiti was declared a bird reserve. It has since witnessed the remorseless destruction, under the aegis of the Department of Conservation, of every mammal on the island, a violent means to a righteous end.
First they came for the domesticated animals, the cows, the pigs, the goats; all shot or slaughtered. Then they turned to the rabbits; trapped and dispatched. Most persistent were the bush-tailed possums, imported from Australia in the late nineteenth century to start a fur trade on the island; more than twenty thousand were destroyed. Then work turned to the rats. Soon enough, Kapiti was predator-free, leaving only its autochthonous avian population.
Human visitors are strictly regulated, and instructed to search their backpacks for any stray rodents. I check mine: no beady eyes down there, nor even a stray bit of fluff. A tractor tows our boat on its undercarriage, like a piece of artillery, over the grey sand and out into an uninviting sea. The wind in my face revives my hopes for the day. Every island, no matter how large or small, promises a story, a narrative of its own. ‘Every living thing on an island has been a traveller,’ wrote Greg Dening, the Australian Jesuit priest-turned-anthropologist. ‘In crossing the beach every voyager has brought something old and made something new.’
Cook called it Entry Island. Its Māori title is scarcely less prosaic, meaning boundary – Kapiti marked the division between the rohe or territories of two iwi. But then, Māori itself means ‘normal’. And though its names may be workaday, the island is not. Tui, stitchbirds, bell-birds sing and whistle in the forest. Tree ferns erupt from the dense undergrowth, turning the light itself green. It’s like walking on the bottom of the sea.
After an hour’s climb I break out of the gloom, onto the top of the mountain. As I sit to eat my picnic, a weka, sleek and brown, a cross between a turkey and an enormous starling, calmly walks up my legs in search of crumbs. I look over the trees to the sea far below, swirling around the island’s rocky skirts.
I’m on my way down when I hear someone singing ahead. Who would disturb this forest, the kiwi sleeping in their burrows and the toutouwai pecking in the dirt? As I turn the corner, I realise the sound is coming from the Māori guide who’d accompanied us on the boat over. She’s calling to a kokako, a rare wattlebird, invisible in the canopy above; and it seems to be calling back in return.
Back on the beach, I pick my way over bits of bleached driftwood, shattered pāua shells and cable-thick kelp, trepidatious yet determined to swim. Further down the strand stand two rusting try-pots. A fur seal slides into the sea and rolls onto its back, pressing its flippers together like a praying monk. These places smell of whale.
As I wait for the boat, a kaka peers at me from the lower branches of a tree, cocking its head in the questioning, almost mocking manner that parrots have. Fixing me with its eye, it declines the invitation to perch on my arm, and flies off into the canopy.
One afternoon – or it may have been an evening, or a morning, I don’t know – in 1824, an eminent physician made an unusual house call in Liverpool. He was to attend a case of measles, a common enough disease. But his patient could hardly have been more unusual, since the entirety of his face, like much of his body, was tattooed, to the extent that from a distance his features appeared to be blue-black, inhuman. He looked more like a demon.
Even in the streets of a great port such as Liverpool, this man’s appearance was remarkable. His name was Te Pehi Kupe, and in his homeland he was a celebrated warrior; yet here he was, tailored in Western dress, a dandy’s cravat around his neck. It was clear to the doctor that there was a strong attachment between this exotic figure and the sea captain in whose house he was lodged. Something had happened to bind these two men together. Their visitor was intrigued – not least, perhaps, because he was an islander himself.
Thomas Stewart Traill was born in 1781 in Kirkwall, Orkney, far off the north Scottish coast, where he had grown up with whales and seals and seabirds; Orkney means ‘seal islands’ in Norse. Its neolithic houses, whose stones are still embedded in its turf, were built of whale bones and held sacred objects carved from whales’ teeth. Like the Māori, their inhabitants had relied on the sea, rather than the land, and knew its animals well.
As a young man, Traill had studied in Edinburgh, famous for its Enlightenment spirit, and he now practised medicine in Liverpool. But he was no mere physician. In the vital issues and debates that concerned educated men of the age, Dr Traill was one of the inner circle that Sir William Roscoe, Member of Parliament, banker, historian, penal reformer and abolitionist, gathered around himself. Liverpool, from where my own ancestors would leave for America or arrive from Ireland, had been ‘the chief seat of the odious traffic’ of slavery, the starting and finishing point in the terrible triangle that bound Africa to the Caribbean and Britain. It was a horror in which one of Roscoe and Traill’s contemporaries saw an equivalence with the way we treated other species. Jeremy Bentham accepted that man might kill them for food, ‘But is there any reason why we should be suffered to torment them? Not any that I can see. Are there any why we should not be suffered to torment them? Yes, several.’
The philosopher and reformer was certainly eccentric in his ideas. In 1824, the same year that Traill met Kupe, Bentham had become fascinated by the Māori method of preserving human heads, and ordered that his own should be displayed after his death as an Auto-Icon, along with his soft body parts, labelled in decanters in the same cabinet. As the inventor of the Panopticon, Bentham had addressed the keeping of humans; now he extended his gaze to animals, in this age of menageries. He might have been writing with the fate of Chunee in mind; or indeed any other hunted or confined creature, whose treatment, as Blake had written, ‘put
s all Heaven in a rage’:
The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate … the question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Sir William Roscoe’s own views on animal liberation may go unrecorded, but like Bentham, he did not limit his energies to opposing the evils of slavery. As with so many men of his position and taste, he was an inveterate collector – not least of people. He counted among his friends Horace Walpole and Henri Fuseli, and he corresponded with notable Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Washington Irving. Evidently, he was keen to establish relations with the new republic. In May 1818 he had invited Allan Melvill, a Manhattan trader in fine goods, to his house; thirty years later, Melvill’s son Herman would visit the same port, having added an ‘e’ to the family name.
Liverpool, like Southampton, was a great gateway, open to the world. It seemed to summon such an eclectic and oddly connected cast, among them another of Traill’s friends: William Scoresby, latterly of Whitby, at that point resident in Liverpool, where he preached in a dockside Floating Chapel. Scoresby had been a champion whaler, like his father; but he was also a scientist and vicar, professions which he saw as quite compatible. ‘They surely will not deem it intrusive,’ the Reverend Scoresby informed his readers, from the pulpit of his Account of the Arctic Regions (a book which Melville would plunder shamelessly for his own) ‘to be reminded that the most important preparation for such undertakings, as well as for the whole of life, is to surrender the heart to that Saviour who has died to redeem his servants from guilt and ruin.’ It was a time in which faith and exploitation were necessarily intertwined. ‘Reader, do you understand, and have you accepted, this gracious message?’