Last November, drone footage was posted on Instagram of a gray whale swimming near the surface just off the coast of Dana Point, California. In the video, the whale, a juvenile maybe twenty-five feet long, cruises slowly into a lineup of surfers, its undulating tail casting arcing ripples, and then emerges from the water, exhaling through its blowhole. A few surfers paddle off in alarm, though most seem oblivious. The whale dips below the surface again, a ghostly silhouette, and glides out beyond the surfers, away.
I had been surfing in that spot just a few weeks before. Had I been in the water that day, and suddenly seen the whale’s body beneath me, gargantuan and silent, I would have, for a moment, gone cold with dread. How could I not? To be close to a whale, in the wild, not in a boat but in the water itself, is to encounter an embodied agency that exists, across every dimension, on a scale that swallows our own: its physical size, its evolutionary age, its polar voyages. The fear evoked by the whale is not a judgment on its character. Whales almost never harm humans, and when they do it is invariably the humans’ fault. And yet: what am I to a whale? After the whale passed, terror would have melted into an abiding thrill: of having met life in its largest, ancient form. Of having been blessed, in the most pagan sense of that term. In drawing close to those surfers, the whale drew them closer to its own alien dominion, offering the watery communion for which every surfer quietly longs: to be absorbed, returned, dissolved into the sea.
‘‘Would we know it, the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?” Rebecca Giggs asks in her masterly “Fathoms: The World in the Whale” (Simon & Schuster). She means the moment when the oceans become so disfigured by human activity that, seeing them, we will see only ourselves. Her answer is that this moment is already here, and most of us are missing it. For Giggs, the whale is a potent but misleading symbol of the ocean’s infinity, its alterity and expansiveness. We tend to think of the whale as a story of human redemption: a creature almost hunted out of existence by the commercial whaling industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then saved by our collective recognition that, as activists told the United Nations in 1972, whales are “the common heritage of mankind.” Since 1986, when the International Whaling Commission began enforcing a global moratorium on commercial whale hunting, many whale populations, once near extinction, have rebounded. The laying down of harpoons and the return of the whale appear to speak not just to our empathy for creatures that, like us, care for their young, create culture, and sing songs but also to the part of our humanity that respects what lies beyond it. In truth, Giggs argues, our mass consumption and globalized supply chains, our carbon emissions and throwaway plastics threaten to bring us a sea that is “not full of mystery, not inexplicable in its depths, but peppered with the uncannily familiar detritus of human life.” In 2017, a beaked whale washed up onshore near Bergen, Norway. In its stomach were some thirty pieces of plastic trash, including Ukrainian chicken packaging, a Danish ice-cream wrapper, and a British potato-chip bag. This is the “world in the whale” of Giggs’s title: not an alien dominion but the totalized reality of human domination.
The size of whales has made them, for most of human history, extremely difficult to kill. Adult grays can grow up to fifty feet long and weigh forty tons. Blue whales, the largest creatures ever to have lived, can grow almost a hundred feet long and weigh a hundred and ninety tons. When whales exhale through their blowholes, the vapor is so dense that it produces rainbows. The earliest evidence of whale hunting is perhaps as old as eight thousand years, in South Korea, where Neolithic-era shale carvings depict marine animals being hunted with lances and makeshift floats. Traditional whale hunters typically had to harass their prey to death over many days and nights. They used bludgeons and spears, sometimes tipped with poison, to serially wound and exhaust the animals, while floats were used to prevent them from diving—“sounding”—out of reach. The Inuit created their floats by inflating gutted seals, their orifices stitched shut. All the indigenous cultures that hunted whales for subsistence—on the coasts of the Korean Peninsula, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Zanzibar, Siberia, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway—did so at their peril, and with elaborate ritual and frugality, using the whale’s many parts for food, shelter, and amulets.
Then, in the sixteenth century, Basque whalers created a global whale trade. This was made possible by a technological advance: the attaching of a two-flued iron harpoon to a braided rope that could be uncoiled at great speed off a boat’s deck. Although the harpoon was unable to pierce through to a whale’s vital organs, it was, with its flared barbs, almost impossible to dislodge from the animal’s blubber. Thus tethered to the boat, the whale could not escape the hunters’ lances.
Soon Basque whalers depleted shoreline populations in the Bay of Biscay. Bigger ships, in turn, allowed the whalers to hunt in the open seas—what’s known as “pelagic whaling”—and to pursue various species at different points in their migration routes. Near Newfoundland, Basque whalers killed as many as forty thousand whales between 1530 and 1610, becoming, for a time, the world’s dominant whaling force. Their preferred method was to harpoon calves first, followed by the mothers that rushed to their rescue.
Whale hunting became a year-round business. The Dutch, the Danes, and the British joined in; by the late eighteenth century, commercial whaling had spread to South Africa and New Zealand. American colonists pioneered the onboard rendering of oil from whale blubber. In this process, a whale carcass was chained to the side of the ship, and rotated with pulleys as sickle-shaped blades peeled it like an orange; the blubber was then separated from flesh and skin, and liquefied in huge cast-iron cauldrons, underlaid with water to avoid setting fire to the ship. By turning their vessels into mobile slaughterhouses, American whalers were able to hunt whales that were then abundant in equatorial waters, whose carcasses would have otherwise rotted by the time the ships returned home. The whalers also came to use shoulder guns and bomb lances, increasing the possible distance between hunter and prey. By the mid-nineteenth century, pelagic whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States.
Why whales? Like traditional whale hunters, early commercial whalers sought out whales largely for their flesh, a food approved by the Vatican for meatless Fridays. By the nineteenth century, though, whales had become prized as a source of a much more valuable commodity: oil. In 1854, whale oil, extracted from blubber, traded at, in today’s terms, eighteen dollars a gallon. A single mature right whale could yield seven thousand gallons. Whale oil greased factory cogs, lit shop floors and streets, and, deployed as an insecticide, spurred industrial agriculture. Sperm whales were hunted for the waxlike spermaceti found in their heads, which was used as a lubricant in looms, trains, and guns, and, most significant, as a raw material in fine candles. New Bedford, Massachusetts, the center of sperm-whale hunting, was called “the city that lit the world.” Baleens, the bristly combs that certain whales, including humpbacks, have in place of teeth, were used in corsets, parasols, hairbrushes, fishing rods, shoehorns, eyeglass frames, hat rims, sofa stuffing, police nightsticks, and the thin canes used to beat misbehaving schoolchildren, which may explain the phrase “to whale on.” Increasingly, whales were seen not as prey but as a natural resource to be mined; whalers talked about migrating sperm whales as veins running through the ocean, like gold.
An estimated two hundred and thirty thousand sperm whales were killed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, that number grew to more than seven hundred thousand. In total, nearly three million whales of all species were killed in that century. (Human hunting has reduced the world’s great-whale biomass by as much as eighty per cent.) Early-twentieth-century whaling was a truly international concern, run by conglomerates of Norwegian, British, Dutch, German, Japanese, Australian, and American fleets and capital. That whaling became more aggressive is a departure from the trajectory one might have expected: the previous century’s whaling had depleted whale populations, and abundant substitutes for whale oil—cheaper vegetable oils and petroleum products—had been found. But nautical technology advanced; coal-powered and then diesel-powered ships allowed whalers to hunt species that had previously been too quick—blue, fin, sei, minke. Ships were also equipped with mechanized weapons that could detonate or electrocute, and with improved tools for processing whale carcasses, including hydraulic tail grabbers, pressure cookers, and refrigerators. These ships were noisy machines, but radar and spotter planes, perfected in wartime, allowed them to home in on whales, called “the listening prey.” At the same time, new commercial uses were found for whale oil: in explosive munitions, a trench-foot treatment, soap, margarine, lipstick, burn gel. General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid until 1973. During the Cold War, the substance was used in intercontinental missiles and submarines. Whaling had become a matter of military interest.
The International Whaling Commission (I.W.C.) was set up, in 1946, to regulate whale hunting in international waters. But the quotas that the commission initially imposed backfired, sparking a mad rush by whalers who were keen to stockpile whale oil, anticipating a scarcity-driven price surge. Commercial fleets raced to take all the whales they could get, harpooning animals and then abandoning them when fattier specimens were spotted. Whalers hunted out of season and in whale sanctuaries, and illegally targeted whale calves. Aristotle Onassis’s lucrative whaling enterprise ended when his own sailors testified, in the Norwegian Whaling Gazette, to practices on his factory ships: “Shreds of fresh meat from the 124 whales we killed yesterday are still lying on the deck. Scarcely one of them was full grown. Unaffected and in cold blood, everything is killed that comes before the gun.”
The commercial whalers of the postwar period hunted Southern Hemisphere whales to near “commercial extinction,” the point at which the cost of killing an animal is no longer worth the returns. American and European whaling operations shrank, but the cause was taken up by two countries driven by nationalist rather than by commercial prerogatives. The U.S.S.R.’s whaling industry, which had begun in the nineteen-thirties, expanded during the Cold War. The Soviet military needed spermaceti, because Western embargoes cut off its access to synthetic substitutes. More than that, the Soviet state felt that it had not taken its “share” of the world’s whales, and set quotas for its whaling industry that far exceeded domestic demand for whale meat and oil. Soviet ships, frantic to keep up with state mandates that specified the total raw mass of animals to be killed, would often bring back carcasses too decayed for human consumption, or would simply throw them overboard, unprocessed. Between 1959 and 1961, Soviet ships harvested nearly twenty-five thousand humpback whales in the Antarctic.
Japan, meanwhile, was suffering from a postwar food crisis that lasted into the nineteen-sixties, triggered by the destruction of supply chains and agricultural land. On the advice of the U.S. overseer, General Douglas MacArthur, the country turned to whaling. Whale meat was served as a cheap source of protein to elementary- and middle-school children, and became a symbol of national resilience. Though whale is eaten in very small amounts today—just one and a half ounces per person a year—whaling is still heavily subsidized by the state, with most of its output stored, uneaten. In 2019, a researcher at Rikkyo University estimated the Japanese stockpile of whale meat at thirty-seven hundred tons. After the I.W.C. imposed its global moratorium on whaling, Japan was undeterred. Until 2019, when the country withdrew from the I.W.C., Japan openly exploited a loophole that allows whales to be killed for research purposes, and any leftover whale meat to be sold as food. Between 2005 and 2014, around thirty-six hundred minke whales were killed by Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean, resulting in just two peer-reviewed scientific papers.
The I.W.C.’s moratorium, perhaps the greatest triumph of the postwar conservationist movement, was spurred by decades of dire news. In 1964, an independent committee of biologists had warned that Southern Hemisphere whale populations faced “a distinct risk of complete extinction.” The scientists reported that there were fewer than two thousand Antarctic blue whales left. A decade later, that number was three hundred and sixty, representing a population decline of 99.85 per cent since 1905. This is the sort of mass destruction that biologists refer to as a “bottleneck” event, a decisive shrinking of a species’ gene pool that may well be irreversible. Once anti-whaling advocates helped bring non-whaling (including many landlocked) nations into the I.W.C., the group’s scientists were able to take a more explicitly conservationist stance. They were also buoyed by a worldwide outcry against whale killing. Greenpeace, employing a strategy that one of its leaders called “more an imagology than an ideology,” used footage of its theatrical high-seas tactics to evoke public sympathy and outrage. A fifteen-thousand-person anti-whaling rally was staged in London, and photographs of it were broadcast around the world. Popular books were written that celebrated whales and mourned their death; Farley Mowat’s “A Whale for the Killing,” from 1972, called whaling a “modern Moloch.” Whale songs—first recorded by accident in the nineteen-fifties by U.S. naval engineers sweeping for Soviet submarines—became, in the nineteen-seventies, a big commercial success. The 1970 album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” went multi-platinum. It provided a natural soundtrack for the decade’s faddish embrace of Eastern spirituality, promising an auditory portal to higher spiritual planes, repressed memories, and past lives. And it was taken as proof of the animals’ intelligence and sensitivity. Animal protectionists, appearing before Congress during a 1971 hearing on whale conservation, played the record as part of their testimony. One of them said, “Having heard their songs, I believe you can imagine what their screams would be.”
This mass gestalt shift, from whales as an extractive resource to whales as symbols of a global inheritance, is striking in part because whales are not typical of what conservationists call “charismatic” animals. Animals that win human sympathy tend to be readily anthropomorphized (elephants, chimps, dolphins), or cute (baby tigers, pangolins), or—the holy grail of animal conservation—both (otters). Whales, by contrast, are too large to be taken in easily by the human eye, let alone imaginatively given human form. They are magnificent but hardly cute. Philip Hoare, in “Leviathan or, The Whale” (2008), notes that the “blue marble”—the photograph of Earth captured by the astronauts aboard Apollo 17, in 1972—became famous before the first photograph of a free-swimming whale did. “We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like,” he writes. Human uncertainty about the whale is reflected in the stories we have long told about the animal. Ancient cartographers used drolleries—hybrid monsters, part whale, part sea serpent—to indicate the limits of their knowledge. In the thirteenth century, Norse sailors said that whales fed on rain and darkness. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when taxonomists began classifying animals according to their internal structures as opposed to their outward appearance, they were stunned to discover the signs of whales’ evolutionary history as land-dwelling mammals: fin bones, a physician wrote in 1820, that resembled “a man’s hand . . . enwrapped in a mitten.”
And there is still much we do not understand about whales. They navigate tremendous distances—some humpbacks swim more than sixteen thousand miles each year, three-fifths the circumference of the earth—aided by unknown sensory apparatuses, and according to migratory routes that are passed, somehow, from parent to child. Scientists know that whale vocalization—the singing of humpbacks, the chattering of belugas, the powerful clicks of sperm whales (at up to two hundred and thirty-six decibels, the loudest animal noise on the planet)—performs an important communicative function. Whales converse, and perhaps commune, at great distances. Songs of humpbacks off Puerto Rico are heard by whales near Newfoundland, two thousand miles away; the songs can “go viral” across the world. Some scientists believe that certain whale languages equal our own in their expressive complexity; the brains of sperm whales are six times larger than ours, and are endowed with more spindle neurons, cells associated with both empathy and speech. Yet no one knows what whales are saying to one another, or what they might be trying to say to us. Noc, a beluga that lived for twenty-two years in captivity as part of a U.S. Navy program, learned to mimic human language so well that one diver mistook Noc’s voice for a colleague’s, and obeyed the whale’s command to get out of the water. A recording of Noc’s voice can be heard online today: nasal and submerged, but also distinctively like English. (Oooow aaare you-ou-ou-ooooo?) At the very least, it’s a better impression of a human’s voice than a human could do of a whale’s.
The whale’s aura lies in its unique synthesis of ineffability and mammality. Whales are enormous and strange. But—in their tight familial bonds, their cultural forms, their incessant chatter—they are also like us. Contained in their mystery is the possibility that they are even more like us than we know: that their inner lives are as sophisticated as our own, perhaps even more so. Indeed, contained in whales is the possibility that the creatures are like humans, only much better: brilliant, gentle, depthful gods of the sea.
The I.W.C. moratorium on commercial whale hunting has some important exceptions. It grants special whale-hunting rights to indigenous communities, including the native peoples of Alaska and of Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula, the Greenlanders, and the residents of the island of Bequia, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It also excludes species classified as “small cetaceans,” such as the long-finned pilot whale, a species of dolphin hunted off the Faroe Islands, an autonomous Danish territory about two hundred miles north of Scotland. (The Faroe Islands, unlike Denmark, are not part of the European Union, which prohibits the hunting of whales and dolphins.) The grindadráp—or the grind, for short—is a traditional Faroese drive hunt that dates back to at least 1298, when the first law regulating the hunt was introduced. Records of the hunt have been kept since 1584 (the longest such archive), and show that an annual average of eight hundred and thirty-eight pilot whales have been killed by the Faroese during the past three centuries. The grind has long been the focus of anti-whaling advocacy: gruesome photographs showing rows of black whale corpses, their necks slit, floating in a sea bright red with blood, spark outrage on Facebook and Twitter. Faroese defenders of the grind argue that the hunt is not only a traditional part of their culture but also a sustainable and ecologically friendly practice. They point out that they monitor the pilot-whale population, and hunt only a small proportion each year, consuming what they kill. In an extreme northerly landscape that does not support agriculture, the Faroese maintain that they still depend on the ocean for their food.
The irony is that pilot whales, like whales the world over, are becoming inedible. Whale blubber stores toxins that have made their way to the sea, in the form of agricultural and mining runoff or condensed emissions—an effect magnified by whales’ longevity. Mercury levels in pilot whales are so elevated that scientists have advised the Faroese to drastically reduce their consumption of whale meat, which might in turn force them to import farmed protein from elsewhere, increasing their carbon impact. The breast milk of Inuit women in Greenland, one of the least industrialized places on earth, has, because of mercury levels in beluga whales and other marine animals, become a dangerous substance. Some studies suggest that the Inuit’s mercury exposure is comparable to that of people living downstream from gold mines in China. Orca in Washington’s Puget Sound have been declared among the earth’s most toxified animals; the carcasses of beluga whales that wash up on the shores of Canada are classified as toxic waste. The most prolific whale killers are no longer the whale hunters. They are, instead, the rest of us: creatures of late capitalism whose patterns of consumption make us complicit, however unwittingly or unwillingly, in an unfolding mass biocide.
Whales consume much of the eight million metric tons of plastic that enter the oceans each year, which gather in swirling trash vortexes known as gyres and can extend for miles. Often, this plastic is from packaging that allows us to consume non-seasonal food year-round. A sperm whale that recently washed up on the Spanish coast had an entire greenhouse in its belly: the flattened structure, together with the tarps, hosepipes, ropes, flowerpots, and spray cannister it had contained. The greenhouse was from an Andalusian hydroponics business, used to grow tomatoes for export to colder climes. Food waste produced by the globalized supply chain accounts for eight per cent of carbon emissions (air travel accounts for only about 2.5 per cent), which melt the ice on which whales depend indirectly for their food. Since the nineteen-seventies, with the loss of ice-fixed algae, Antarctic krill populations have declined by between seventy and eighty per cent. Noise from industrial shipping—eighty per cent of the world’s merchandise is transported on cargo vessels—has shrunk the whale’s world: the distance over which a whale’s vocalizations can travel is just one-tenth of what it was sixty years ago. Whales have washed up on the Peloponnesian coast with ears bleeding from decompression injuries caused by anti-submarine-warfare training.
Ecologists have warned that the dramatic shifts associated with climate change could subject even relatively large whale populations to sudden extinction. There are signs that this is already happening. In 2015, three hundred and forty-three sei whales, an endangered species, were found dead on the coast of Chilean Patagonia, likely because of a toxic algae bloom. The seis, scientists said, could be “among the first oceanic megafauna victims of global warming.” Meanwhile, because whales are enormous carbon sinks, the era of commercial whaling hastened today’s climate crisis. According to one estimate, a century of whaling equates to the burning of seventy million acres of forest. The people of the Lummi Nation, who live on the coast of the Salish Sea, between the U.S. and Canada, have started to feed salmon to wild orca that are starving because of the effects of pollution and climate change. “Those are our relations under the waves,” one Lummi tribal member said.
On an Argentine beach in 2017, a stranded baby dolphin was killed by a mob of tourists intent on taking selfies with it. Something similar had happened in Argentina the year before, when a baby La Plata dolphin washed up at a Santa Teresita beach; the animal was passed from tourist to tourist until it died of dehydration. Ecological historians may one day write about the early twenty-first century as a time of frenzied cultural obsession with wild animals: anime-eyed lorises, badass honey badgers, “trash panda” raccoons. As Rebecca Giggs observes, this frenzy has been facilitated by the rise of social media. On Twitter and Facebook, animal cuteness has become the only antidote to political fury. Instagram encourages us to curate our encounters with the extraordinary, so that we may ourselves seem extraordinary. Driven by a search for the perfectly “grammable” shot, ecotourism is everywhere on the rise, though it rarely delivers on the promise of its name, which is to reconcile the impulse to consume nature with the desire to conserve it. At least thirteen million people worldwide have been going on whale-watching tours each year, leading to more and faster diesel-powered boats. Wildflower superblooms are trampled by social-media influencers. Thousands of recreational drones—like the one that produced that video of the whale swimming through the surfers off Dana Point—disturb the wildlife they so rapturously capture.
Future historians will have the task of explaining how our performative love for animals relates to our relentless extermination of them. It is not simply a lack of knowledge. Could the Argentine tourists not sense the dolphin going limp in their arms? Don’t many of us acknowledge the contradiction of flying across the world to lose ourselves in nature? Who doesn’t grasp the vulnerability of the world to our collective power? Perhaps it’s something more like willful self-deception: a refusal to believe what it is we know. Or perhaps we are simply embracing what we sense will soon be gone, memorializing what does not really exist, as social media has taught us to do. Here is my fabulous holiday; here is my happy wedding day; here is the vast ocean; here is a whale. ♦
