Sounding the Depths of the Whale Downloaded from That in the Oceans Swim Great Whales Unnamed by Man
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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, dolphins 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 animal. Researcher Erich http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Hoyt makes a similar observation about orcas: “The size of a killer whale 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 sperm whale, southern bottlenose whale, 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 animals 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 beaked whale. 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 right whale. 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.