PETER WAY N E MOE

Sounding the Depths of the Whale Downloaded from http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ That in the oceans swim great whales unnamed by man. ––Philip Hoare

I The first whale I saw was off the coast of Santa Barbara in April 2005.1 That day, because of wind and four-foot swells, we had little chance of sighting the misty spout of a gray, but after three hours at at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 sea, our captain spotted one in the distance. On a beam reach, we gained on the gray's four- to five-knot swim, porpoising off our bow wave. Should the whale sound, we would lose her. We arrived where the gray had been sighted. The catamaran in irons, our captain lowered the main and silent we waited. Minutes later, 10 feet off starboard, she surfaced parallel to the ship. Her exhale startled me, sending me stumbling across the deck. Having only ever seen photographs of whales, I was not prepared for the power, the weight, the heft of breath pushed through two 10-inch blowholes. If she could create such force through mere respiration, what could this whale do with a flip of her flukes, a nudge of her head, to our ship? The gray went below, the ocean smoothing over the spot of her shallow dive with a footprint 15 feet in diameter. There was silence on deck, silence soon interrupted by the calls and the cheers of the crew. As we relived the moment and imagined the future––“Did you hear her breathe?”“Do you think she'll breach?”––the whale resurfaced, now on our port. We rushed toward her, to the other side of the vessel. The whale inhaled and, leading with her right side, rolled under our

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.4 (Autumn 2014) Advance Access publication September 11, 2014 doi:10.1093/isle/isu100 © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Sounding the Depths of the Whale 859 ship. She reappeared on our starboard, and again we rushed toward her, to the other side of the vessel. On this third surfacing the gray lin- gered longer, but we soon saw more and more of her arched back and then her flukes rose above the water (preparation for a deep dive) and the whale disappeared. We never saw her again.

II

What I remember most about this encounter is that I never saw the Downloaded from entire whale at once. The gray was longer than our catamaran, and as she surfaced––snout rising above the sea first, then blowhole, then dorsal ridges, and finally her flukes––I saw only glimpses of her at a time. Never her belly, never her pectoral fins. Never the whole whale.

The sea hid much, if not the majority, of the . Researcher Erich http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Hoyt makes a similar observation about orcas: “The size of a is misleading when viewed from the normal breathing posture. One sees only the tip of the iceberg––from the ‘forehead’ to the saddle patch. Another third of the body length and seven-eighths of the total bulk are underwater” (146). Hoyt deftly describes my encounter––the “total bulk” of the gray was obscured from view, and as such, the whale (that gray in particular and whales in general) was, and is,

obscure. at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 The whale is obscure not only because we rarely see it in full, but also because only recently have we even had the means to see it in full. Philip Hoare puts our viewing of whales in context with other techno- logical advancements:

It was only after we had seen the Earth from orbiting spaceships that the first free-swimming whale was pho- tographed underwater. The first underwater film of sperm whales, off the coast of Sri Lanka, was not taken until 1984; our images of these huge placid creatures moving gracefully and silently through the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computers. We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like. (31) The same year that sperm whales were first filmed underwater, Smithsonian published The World's Whales: The Complete Illustrated Guide. The title cannot help but be read as ironic. This “complete illus- trated guide” is far from complete, relying on sketches of whales–– such as the pygmy , southern , Longman's and Hector's and Hubb's beaked whales––when 860 ISLE photographs (the book's preferred method of documentation) are not available. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of sketches in the book, many of the whales not yet photographed in 1984, and some 30 years after the publication of The World's Whales, we still do not know all that teems within the seas: Even now there are beaked whales or ziphiids, known only from bones washed up on remote beaches––esoter- ic, deep-sea with strange markings which biolo- gists have never seen alive or dead, so little studied that Downloaded from their status is “data deficient.” New cetaceans are still being identified in the twenty-first century, and we would do well to remember that the world harbours [sic] animals bigger than ourselves, which we have yet to see; that not everything is catalogued and claimed and digitized. That in the oceans swim great whales http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ unnamed by man. (Hoare 31) The ocean gives continual reminders that we have not yet seen, cata- logued, claimed, and digitized all its cetaceans. In New Zealand in 2010, the most rare whale in the world washed ashore, so rare that the corpse was initially misidentified as a Gray's . DNA testing showed the creature to be something else––the elusive, enig- matic spade-toothed beaked whale. In the past 140 years, the whale at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 has only been seen twice and the sole artifacts we have of it are three partial skulls. Earlier that same year, researchers lead by Erich Hoyt sighted an all-white orca in Russian waters and named the bull Iceberg. But Iceberg (and Moby Dick, for that matter) is not the only white whale in the seas. The humpback Migaloo––an Aboriginal word meaning “white fella”––migrates along the Australian coast. In 2012, another white humpback was sighted off the coast of Norway. The whiteness of these whales evidences that we have hardly seen all the ocean harbors, and the misidentification of the spade-toothed beaked whale in New Zealand shows that even when we do see a leviathan, we are unsure of its name. Names are hardly inconsequential. They are (one of the primary) means we have for understanding an animal that spends just five percent of its life at the ocean's surface. Representing what little we know of the whale, a name summons a narrative, so that when we do partially see one the name becomes a shorthand for a story. Consider the . We know that it swims slowly, does not fight once har- pooned, does not dive deeply, floats when dead, and has an abun- dance of blubber. It was the “right” whale to hunt. Or the sperm whale, so named because whalers thought the thick, gelatinous, waxy Sounding the Depths of the Whale 861 material in its forehead to be the whale's sperm (science now specu- lates the fluid is used for buoyancy, diving, and echolocation). Just as the right whale is named by an industry that hunted the whale to near extinction, so too the sperm whale's name reflects the use of sperma- ceti for cosmetics, leatherworking, and lubrications. We made crayons of these animals, washed our bodies in soaps from their fats, lit our street lamps with their oils. The sperm whale's and the right whale's names both derive from their exploitation at the hands of humans. These names bear a narrative. Downloaded from

III In August 2008, in the San Juan Islands of Washington's Puget Sound, I saw orcas hunt. Off the coast of the Bell Chain Islets, a group of transient orcas––T-90, T-100, T-101, T-102, T-124, and eight others–– http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ came upon a rock covered with seals. The 13 orcas split, with T-102 (the bull of the group) staying on the northern side of the rock and the 12 swimming to its southern side. The bull orca surged toward the rock, creating a wave that crashed against the seals. Frightened, the seals flopped their way up the rock and away from the water. T-102 in- creased his efforts, bigger waves now harassing the seals. The seals inched over the top of the rock and down its backside, their eyes on

T-102 and their backs toward the dozen orcas awaiting them. The natu- at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 ralist on our ship explained that this hunting practice is common, and he prepared us for what would likely happen next: the seals would dive off the southern end of the rock, seeking escape from T-102 only to fall prey, unwittingly, to the remainder of the pod. We may see, the naturalist warned us, a seal drug under and a large pool of blood rise to the surface. The children on the boat cried. Some adults squirmed. I—I was excited. Flushed, I loosed the straps of my lifejacket. Here is the killer whale living up to its name.

IV Eighteenth-century whalers coined the moniker whale killer in re- sponse to the ferocity with which orcas attack other whales. The name later inverted to become killer whale. The killer whale's scientific name––orcinus orca––takes up this association with death, translating to “whale from the realms of the dead.” This etymology, along with Orcus being a Roman god of the underworld, inspired the orca nickname demon . Whether demon dolphin, whale from the realms of the dead, whale killer, killer whale, or orca, this animal has a voracious ap- petite. The larger males in the San Juan Islands can eat upwards of 400 862 ISLE pounds of salmon each day, and their hunting is facilitated by 48 conical teeth, 30 mile-per-hour bursts of speed, and camouflage coloring (the black back renders an orca invisible when viewed from above against the depths of the ocean; the white belly renders an orca invisible when viewed from below against the light of the surface). As I watched T-102 taunt the seals, I could not help but feel a bit of the fear I felt when that gray sank below and then rose aside our cata- maran off the coast of Santa Barbara––but it was a different fear with the orcas. The gray was terrifying for its size; the orca for its repu- tation. These cetaceans are the apex predator of the oceans. Not a Downloaded from single animal feeds upon them. And the orca is not a picky eater, preying upon Baird's beaked whales, beluga whales, blue whales, bowhead whales, common dolphins, Cuvier's beaked whales, Dall's , dusky dolphins, fin whales, finless porpoises, gray whales, harbor porpoises, humpback whales, other killer whales (cannibalism http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ likely the result of a low food supply), minke whales, , north- ern bottlenose whales, right whales, sei whales, short-finned pilot whales, sperm whales, striped dolphins––and the list does not end there. Orcas also consume seals, otters, octopi and squid, and many varieties of fish, bird, and reptile. And yet, humans are absent from an orca's menu. Wild orcas do not have a proclivity for human flesh, though they are curious about us. Erich Hoyt offers numerous examples: divers interviewed by at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 Jacques Cousteau told a tale of being orbited by orcas for several minutes off the Moroccan coast in the 1960s; a shipwrecked sailor in 1972 near Baja hugged his raft while three orcas circled him for hours on end, “close enough to touch” (Hoyt 88). Both divers and sailor were spared. In 1911, an orca in the Arctic broke through the ice, fling- ing explorer Herbert Ponting into the frigid waters, but Ponting, splashing and thrashing in the brine, did not die in the belly of the whale. He, too, was spared. In 1972, 18-year-old surfer Hans Kretschmer was bitten by an orca off the coast of California. Kretschmer's is the only documented attack of a wild orca upon a human, and he needed 100 stiches to close up the wound. Hoyt hypothesizes Kretschmer and Ponting may have been mistaken as seals, given that the orca in each case fled the scene. Humans, on the other hand, know exactly what we are after when we take on the orca. It has been common practice for whalers to kill killer whales interfering with a hunt. In 1956, the US Navy slaughtered hundreds of orcas off the coast of Iceland (at Iceland's bequest), the whales biting into the fishing industry's profits. There are countless other attacks. In the infamous August 1970 Penn Cove Roundup, the Seattle Public Aquarium dropped bombs from helicopters to corral Sounding the Depths of the Whale 863 some 80 spooked orcas into one of Whidbey Island's bays. Six were captured. Five others drowned. To sink the evidence of their pillaging, aquarium employees filled the dead whales' corpses with rocks and bound anchors to their tails. But orcas are smart; since the Roundup, they have never returned to Penn Cove. Given the life span of orcas, by now those living in the 1970s have likely passed away, suggesting that the narrative of the Roundup, or some knowledge tied to it, is being passed down generation to generation, the orcas avoiding the site of such sorrow.

In 1971, the US Navy was involved in another debacle, this time Downloaded from less bloody than its 1956 run-in with the orca: U.S. Navy researchers call killer whales uncooperative after teaching them to retrieve objects from the ocean floor. An orca named Ishmael escapes on a training ma- noeuvre [sic] off Hawaii, never to be seen again, while http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Ahab takes researchers on a 50-mile 24-hour chase before being recaptured. (Hoyt 259) How fitting that the orca Ishmael escapes, calling to mind Melville's closing to Moby-Dick, where Ishmael quotes Job's messenger: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” (427). But few orcas do escape. From 1965 to 1973, at least 223 orcas were captured (though not neces- sarily taken) from the coast of Washington. (Lolita, caught in the Penn at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 Cove Roundup and currently held at Miami's Seaquarium, is the only captive orca from the capture era still alive.) What is especially tragic about that number is how easily the orcas were trapped. Being at the top of the food chain, the orcas had nothing to fear in the sea, and in the early days of the capture era, they often swam, inquisitive, right into their captors' nets. They quickly learned better. But though we no longer capture these animals, we are still a danger to them: in February 2012, three-year-old calf L-112, Victoria, washed ashore dead. “Her internal organs had been blasted,” Phuong Le of The News Tribune of Tacoma tells us, “her ear bones were dislodged, and her brain had been vibrated into chunky soup.” Researchers are still inves- tigating what killed Victoria, but signs point toward naval sonar testing in Washington's Puget Sound. As we kill and capture and maim these whales, I do not understand why wild orcas do not turn on us. Bears do, moose do, wolves do, lions do, and even sperm whales fight back, but the whales from the realms of the dead––the wild ones, at least––refrain. Captive orcas don't, the six-ton whales dragging their trainers under the surface, amassing scores of attacks in 50 years of whale captivity. Of the four resulting human deaths, three involve the same whale: Tilikum (who 864 ISLE is worth millions as he sires many offspring). In 1991, Tilikum, then held at Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia, drowned his trainer Keltie Byrne; in 1999, Daniel Dukes broke into SeaWorld Orlando at night to swim with the orcas and was found nude atop Tilikum's back in the morning; in 2010, Tilikum thrashed trainer to death in front of a SeaWorld Orlando “Dine with Shamu” audience. In the days following a 2006 incident at SeaWorld San Diego where pulled trainer Ken Peters underwater, David Letterman joked, “It's a killer whale. It's not like you haven't seen its resume.” Downloaded from

V T-102 continued charging the rock, but then something strange happened, strange even by the naturalist's account. The bull stopped.

Bored? Distracted? No longer hungry? Was tormenting the seals a http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ teaching moment for the calves of the pod? The orcinus orca, these demon dolphins, regrouped and swam away. The seals relaxed, and we humans did too.

VI In Siberian Yupik mythology, orca and wolf are the same animal. The orca comes ashore in winter to become the wolf and in summer, the wolf at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 returns to the sea to become the orca. The roots of the myth: both are black and white; both are under matriarchies, living and hunting in packs and pods; both are apex predators––one of the land, the other the sea. Having for centuries seen a gregariousness in the whale that science did not begin studying until the 1970s, the Yupik recognize that the orca is a social animal, as is the wolf. The Yupik call the orca arrlug,aname that conjures up this myth in a way that killer whale––a name steeped in a narrative of animal as predator alone––cannot. I kept the arrlug in mind as I returned with my family to the San Juan Islands in July 2012 to see the whales again. Specifically, I wanted to see J-2, Granny, born in 1911 and matriarch of J-pod. I had seen her once before, accompanied by J-8, J-11, J-19, and J-41, in 2006 off the coast of Point Roberts, near Canadian waters. In preparation for my 2012 voyage, I charted J-pod's travel via the Orca Network's sightings map and online hydrophones. The resident orcas of the Salish Sea stay primarily in the San Juan and Gulf Islands, though they do head to the open ocean for days at a time in search of food. The morning of our whale-watching trip, Granny had been sighted in False Bay, swim- ming north with J-8, Spieden (born in 1933). We met them at the south- ern end of Henry Island. Sounding the Depths of the Whale 865

Using radar, our captain was careful to keep the state-mandated 200 yards from the orcas, but even at that distance, these are impressive. And again, I was taken by the whales' breathing––for these two, a raspy, hoarse, labored exhale. Granny's 101 years and Spieden's 79 are atypical; most orcas live about 50. In that lifetime, female orcas, not unlike humans, will reach sexual maturity in their early- to mid-teens, give birth any time of the year, wean their young at 12–24 months, and breed into their 40s. They are one of the very few non-human to go through menopause.

These whales are no longer called demon dolphins. That story is Downloaded from not in circulation. In the San Juan Islands, orcas are named by their pod affiliation––of which there are four: three resident pods (J, K, and L) and the transient pod T––and by their order of birth. Hence the names J-1, J-2, K-1, K-2, etc. The whales also have nicknames, based on age and position within the pod (Granny, J-2), on Native American culture http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ (Skagit, K-13, and Samish, J-14), on science fiction (Yoda, K-36, and Spock, K-10), on dessert (Oreo, J-22, and her sons Doublestuf, J-34, and Cookie, J-38), on music (Opus, K-16, and her daughter Sonata, K-35). L-72 was first photographed near British Columbia's Racer Rocks, and she is called Racer. There is Ripple, K-44, and Cappuccino, K-21. These names––both the scientific and the casual––give the orca an identity apart from the generalizing whale killer, names hardly laden with the foreboding death of whales from the realms of the dead. at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 I was not watching a whale killer or a demon dolphin that day, but rather a matronly Granny, a plump Blackberry, a streaking Comet. These names tell a different story, narrating the social proclivities of animals that live in pods, groups of three to 25 whales that live, sleep, hunt, raise young, and travel together. Orca matriarchies run four generations deep, the whales remaining with their mothers their entire lives. On occasion, multiple pods will join together to form a superpod of 10s to 100s to 1,000s of orcas. Vancouver, British Columbia resident Billy Proctor “claimed to have seen more than 1,000 blackfish in [Echo Bay] several times during the 1950s: ‘So thick you could walk across their backs’” (Hoyt 73). When we saw Spieden and Granny (both of J-pod) joined by L-87, Onyx, our naturalist explained the novelty of this mixed pod. Onyx, a 20-year-old bull whose mother died when he was 12, had been adopted by Granny and, as she is the matriarch of J-pod, welcomed into thefamilybytheotherJ-podorcas.HadJ-podnottakeninOnyx,he likely would have died given his solitary existence. This sociality extends beyond orcas. Hoyt tells of his recording and analyzing orca calls with hopes of replicating them on his synthesizer. Using a hydrophone to listen to orcas, Hoyt waited for a break in their song and then injected his own phrase via an underwater speaker: 866 ISLE

I pressed the keys [of the synthesizer] in the pattern I had devised, monitoring the imitation whale phrase as it passed out the underwater speaker. I held my breath. Two seconds went by. And then it came: A chorus of whales––three, maybe four––sang out a clear, perfect imitation of what I had just played them––in harmony! They did not repeat their own sound; rather, they dupli- cated my human accent. But wait––after the mimicry, they added something––a new phrase at the end. An

invitation to continue? (54) Downloaded from

Clicks, moans, and groans are not the orcas' only means of communica- tion, with each other or with humans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the whalers of Eden, Australia, hunted in tandem with orcas. Orcas would trap baleen whales––blue, southern right, http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ minke, and humpback––in Twofold Bay and then notify whalers of the hunt by breaching near shore. The breach became a signal, a sign, a gesture––maybe even a silent word?––and the whalers, upon seeing an orca leap out of the sea, would rush to their skiffs, head to open water, and, working in conjunction with the orcinus orca, kill their prey. The Eden whalers left the carcass overnight so that the orcas could feed on the lips and tongue of the slain animal (an orca's favorite part of a kill); in turn, the orcas left the remainder for the citizens of Eden (fig. 1). at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 This Edenic interspecies communication and collaboration with its prelapsarian overtones combines two narratives of the orca. The whale killer surfaces here in the orcas' chilling and plotting and methodical trapping and hunting and slaying of prey. These orcas coordinate a hunt not only with their own, but with us humans as well. And that is what is most startling: there is a strong social element here. These demons in Eden's waters communicate not only with each other through an underwater language we have yet to decode, but also across species, with humans, through the gestures of a body some 30 feet in length, some 13,000 pounds in weight. Granny seemed impatient. She had been swimming toward Henry Island, but Onyx and Spieden lagged behind. Twice she returned to them, coming alongside the two, rolling to her side, and clapping her pectoral fin against the water's surface. When that failed to get their atten- tion, she slapped her flukes on the surface––on our ship 200 yards away, the taillob was a sharp crack, a firecracker pop, a dry trunk snapped in two. As the matriarch, Granny's calls to regroup and head north should have been heeded by Onyx and Spieden, but, for whatever reason, they demurred. Granny's final show of authority was grand. With two thrusts of her tail, the 101-year-old whale––a whale who wheezes as if Sounding the Depths of the Whale 867 Downloaded from http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/

Figure 1: In this frame from a film shown in Sydney, Australia in 1912, the leader of the orca hunt, Old Tom (22-feet long with a five-foot, eight-inch dorsal fin), and a crew of whalers from Eden surround a humpback calf (Wellings, National Library of Australia, vn3103733). Whalers harpooned the prey, and the orcas, taking the harpoon lines in their mouths, drug the wounded whale underwater, drowning it. Old Tom's skeleton is now on display in the Eden Killer Whale Museum, his teeth bearing deep grooves from years of harpoon lines rubbing away his enamel. The orcas hunted at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 alongside the Davidson family for four generations. asthmatic––generated enough power to propel her entire body out of the sea and spin tail over the head, cartwheeling a full 360° before crashing back into the ocean. Upon this display, Onyx and Spieden dutifully came to Granny's side, and the three arrlug continued north.

VII Lime Kiln Point State Park rests on the western side of San Juan Island, fronting the Salish Sea, its frigid waters lapping the rock- strewn shore. There is a small lighthouse atop an outcropping of large boulders, and picnic tables and park benches scatter the bluff. Commonly called “Whale Watch Park,” Lime Kiln is best known as a place to watch orcas feed on salmon forced by the prevailing currents into tangled kelp beds below the cliff. A nearby interpretive center capitalizes upon a full stock of whale memorabilia: orca t-shirts, orca coffee mugs, orca pencils, orca books, orca stuffed animals, orca paper- weights. The interpretive center also houses a life-size replica of the 868 ISLE six-foot rippled and ridged namesake dorsal fin of the area's most famous orca, Ruffles, J-1; born in 1951 but not sighted since November 2010, researchers believe him dead. On the third rainy day of our honeymoon, my wife and I drove to Lime Kiln with hopes of seeing whales. We came upon a bearded man in a yellow parka and hip waders. Cradling a clipboard, binoculars hanging from his neck, he reached for his walkie-talkie. A marine biol- ogist, he was radioing another on the southern end of the island, both tracking L-pod.

“Where are the orcas?” I asked. Downloaded from “About six miles south,” he replied, scribbling notes on his water- proof pad. “When will they be here?” The scientist, in silence, glared at me.

And rightfully so. In my eagerness to see the whales, my question http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ turned them into animals expected to appear at my bequest, to perform on cue. My question spoke the narrative most familiar to us today, a story told by the common household name for orcas: Shamu. If we are telling the story of the orca, we cannot help but narrate its commodification, but the name to tell that story is not Shamu or even Willy. It is baleena pinta––Spanish for orca, translating to “painted whale.” I read it as this whale's most complex name, one that puts the commodification of the orca in relation to other narratives. The story of at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 killer is told in a name that (not unlike blackfish) calls attention to the coloring of the whale that serves as its camouflage. The story of the social orca––the arrlug––is told here too, in that baleena pinta again points to the whale's coloring. Every pod of orcas around the world has a patterning unique to that pod––differently shaped and placed eye patches; larger, smaller, or absent saddle patches; varying shades of black, sometimes brown, on their backs; their bellies spanning a spectrum from white to yellow. These painted patterns distinguish both pod and individual. Baleena pinta tells a third narrative too (one I doubt was in mind when the name was initially uttered), a story allud- ing to the economies surrounding the whale by way of noting the economies of the arts, as both paintings and whales are goods circulat- ed in economic exchange. But baleena pinta, in its complexity, tells a fourth narrative. It is a narrative in stark contrast to the jarring, halting, haunting sounds of orcinus orca, the harsh k repeated twice (it also appears in killer) as is the haunting or––which, if we are to take Edgar Allen Poe at his word, is the scariest sound in all of language. Against that, baleena pinta has a soothing rhythm, the product of the long eeeena repeated in each word. There is a movement in this name, the swell of waves and the Sounding the Depths of the Whale 869 thrust of flukes, rising up ba, cresting at leen, and descending on a, only to begin again, rising up, cresting, and descending pinta. The words mirror the fluid motions of the whale, swimming, communicat- ing, hunting, mating within the deep. Baleena pinta, by its rhythm––the rhythm evocative of the ebb and flow of the tides––is a sound-image, one narrating the movements that define a whale's existence. The sounds themselves become that tale.

VIII Downloaded from Last year, squirreled away in a mom-and-pop used bookstore, I found a copy of Reginald B. Hegarty's Returns from Vessels Sailing from American Ports, 1876–1928. It is a thin, green book with a gilded title, pages brittle, yellowed, and cracking, pages that smell not of sea but of cellar. Hegarty details every whaling ship—its name, rig, tons, http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ captain, and agents—sailing out of America during those 52 years, as well as where each ship was bound, when it sailed, and when it arrived (if at all). The far columns display how many barrels of sperm oil (sper- maceti) and whale oil and pounds of whalebone the ship gathered. The final column in the log notes any extra-ordinary circumstances sur- rounding the voyage. All this in some 50 pages of small font, the final pages collecting the average prices of whale oil for each year ($1.13 per gallon in 1877 with a steady decline to $.12 per gallon in 1932). at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 Within each year, entries are alphabetized by vessel name. Hegarty couldhaveorganizedhisbookbytheannual yields of the ships, or by the dates the ships sailed and retuned within the calendar year, or by length of voyage, or by size of ship, but no––Hegarty chose names by which to write his history, to tell the stories embedded in his ledger. Every name in the returns is a narrative, and the stories narrated by these names are the tragedies marked by a mutiny, a hurricane, a ship lost at sea or condemned at port. Sailing out of New London, the Helen F., cap- tained by John Spicer and owned by Williams & Haven, was lost at the Cumberland Inlet in the winter of 1876–77. The Abram Barker,sailingout of San Francisco on December 4, 1893, was lost off Cape Navarin on May 7, 1894, the crew saved by the Horatio, captained by E. B. Penniman. There is the Draco––I assume named after the dragon slain by Hercules, a poignant name given the ship's own slaying of leviathans––and the Arizona, both lost at sea in 1879. The A. R. Tucker,sailingoutofNew Bedford on June 6, 1899, saw its captain, M. Millard, die at sea. First mate Bento took over, only to then be killed by an unspecified whale. The human deaths here are not numbered. To find these in the ledger, one must either tally the dead captains or read by implication, inferring the human fatalities when a ship never finds port. In contrast, 870 ISLE animal deaths are meticulously counted, measured, and documented in the returns columns. The Swallow docked in New Bedford on April 10, 1887, with 8,000 pounds of whalebone. The Josephine, sailing out of Boston in 1898 and at sea 131 days, returned home bearing 2,100 barrels of sperm oil. The , captained by W. H. Robinson and sailing from San Francisco, only managed, in a long nine months at sea, to take a single whale. Hegarty's log moors in a historical moment wherein whales had no individual names. (For that matter, the other key party in these voyages––the working-class sailor––is not named individually either.) Downloaded from There is no acknowledgment, or suggestion, that one whale might be unique from another. Science had not yet learned that individual humpback whales can be identified by their speckled flukes, that indi- vidual sperm whales can be identified by their sonar calls, that indi- vidual orcas can be identified by their saddle patches. In the log, a http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ is a gray whale. A sperm whale is a sperm whale. The animal has no individuation, no story unto itself, but it does have the shared narrative of whaling. In an effort to add another layer to that narrative, I am trying to change how I say whale, no longer pronouncing it as wail, but instead drawing out the h. The result is a voiceless wh that pours into a voiced ale, an exhalation like the draft that escapes in the puff of baleena pinta's b and p. I hear this pronunciation as a sound-image that mirrors, or at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015 at least attempts to with my feeble lungs, the breathing of these mammals. Melville, in the “Etymology” prefacing Moby-Dick, quotes Richard Hackluyt on the h: “While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true” (qtd. in Melville 7). The reason the h is so important, the reason its absence distorts the whale, the reason it “almost alone maketh up the signification of the word,” Melville tells us, is that the h is at the root of the Swedish and Danish word for whale: hval. Melville points to Webster's Dictionary: “This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted” (qtd. in Melville 7). In changing my pronunciation of the name, I change my relationship with the whale, identifying it by the narrative of a life defined by trips to the surface for air, identifying it by the narrative of a whale's rolling movements within the depths of the sea, identifying it by the narrative told by an arched, vaulted body. Pronouncing whale like this, I, unavoidably, tell another story, the story of a name that can transform into a verb (to whale), a noun (whaler), and a gerund (whaling). I cannot think of any other animal— Sounding the Depths of the Whale 871 save for the fish, which itself can be a sloppy term for whale—whose own name tells of its demise, the name a narrative of death. If anything, the story whale, and all the names for a whale, tells is this: a single name cannot bear all the narratives that have been told, are being told, and will be told about—and by—these animals. For the time being, I settle on whale, a name that narrates the sad (but changing) story of human and whale interaction, a name that calls attention to the whale's arched, vaulted body, and a name that, because of its breadth, tells the individu- al stories of Granny, of Migaloo, of L-112, while also suggestive of all the other whales we have seen (albeit partially) and named, as well as all Downloaded from those we are yet to––and may never.

Acknowledgments

I thank Paul Lindholdt, Patty Chantrill, Dan Barlow, Lauren Hall, http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Kristen Paine, Justin Sevenker, Noel Tague, and Ryan McDermott for seeing this essay through its many, many iterations; Scott Slovic and an ISLE reviewer for helpful feedback; and Jenna Moe for embracing cetology.

OTES N at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015

For the sake of readability, I have not cited all I have gleaned from my sources, though I have cited direct quotations. Readers would do well to spend time at the websites of The Whale Museum, The Orca Network, and The Salish Sea Hydrophone Network. I would also point readers toward the research of Philip Hoare and Erich Hoyt, as well as the recently released docu- mentary Blackfish. All are excellent. 1. This essay is the first in my series of whale-related pieces. “Of Chiasms and Composition, or, The Whale, Part II” is forthcoming in Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy. “Of Tombs and Wombs, or, The Whale, Part III” is forthcoming in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

W ORKS C ITED

Blackfish. Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite. Magnolia Pictures, 2013. Film. Hegarty, Reginald B. Returns of Whaling Vessels Sailing from American Ports, 1876–1928: A Continuation of Alexander Starbuck's “History of the American Whale Fishery”. New Bedford, MA: Reynolds Printing, 1959. Print. Hoare, Philip. The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Print. 872 ISLE

Hoyt, Erich. Orca: The Whale Called Killer. Willowdale: Camden House, 1990. Print. Le, Phuong. “Cause of Orca's Demise Unknown.” The News Tribune. Tacoma News, 15 Apr. 2012. Web. 30 Aug. 2012. Letterman, David. Late Show with David Letterman. New York: CBS, 2006. Television. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. Ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Print. Minasian, Stanley M., Kenneth C. Balcomb, and Larry Foster. The World's Whales: The Complete Illustrated Guide. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1984.

Print. Downloaded from Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Fifth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. 752–60. Print. Salish Sea Hydrophone Network. SeaSound Project of the Whale Museum. 4 Feb. 2011. Web. 1 Feb. 2013. “Welcome to Orca Network—Sightings.” Orca Network. n.d. Web. 1 Feb 2013. http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Wellings, Charles Eden. Whaleboat fast to a whale, Twofold Bay. National Library of Australia: Canberra, 1912. Digital Image vn3103733. The Whale Museum. The Whale Museum. Web. 1 Feb. 2013. at University of Pittsburgh on February 24, 2015