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I weep for the whale - and despair of our ignorance
Independent on Sunday, The, Jan 22, 2006 by Philip Hoare
To experienced observers, there was never going to be a happy end for those crowds gathered on London's embankments to watch a whale struggling in the Thames's cappuccino-coloured waters. Yet the scale of those numbers says much about our fascination with these creatures. Swimming through the heart of the city, the northern bottlenose seemed to have been disgorged for our curiosity.
Ever since the leviathan swallowed Jonah (or indeed, Pinoc- chio), the symbolism of the whale has run deep in our culture like a dark and sometimes ominous shadow. Even now we know little about these enigmatic creatures. Only last July, a new species of snubfin dolphin was identified in Australian waters.
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Our ignorance about whales - the largest, loudest, and longest- lived creatures on the planet - speaks volumes about our hubris as a species. It is why, since the 1970s, the whale has been an emblem of a threatened world. The plangent song of the humpback, sung in impenetrable cycles which are an expression of brains bigger and perhaps as powerful as our own, was recorded and sent into space on the Voyager probe. But their song may well be a threnody for both our species. Each summer I spend eight hours a day off the coast of Cape Cod, watching whales. I've seen up to 11 species of cetacea, from white-sided dolphin to gigantic, 80ft fin whales, gliding effortlessly under our boat and emerging to spout - drenching us in a fishy, atomised cloud. Nothing prepares you for a humpback's leap, as a 50-ton creature throws its entire bulk into the air, suspended for a split-second before it crashes back into the ocean. Nor could anything be more full of life.
In contrast, the death of the Thames whale may well prick our collective consciences - not least because we suspect our own culpability. Recent images of Greenpeace activists battling a Japanese whaling fleet in the declared whale sanctuary of the Southern Ocean roused righteous indignation' as does the knowledge that since the international moratorium on whaling in 1987, Japan alone has killed 7,900 minke whales, 243 Bryde's whales, 140 sei whales, and 38 sperm whales, under the guise of "scientific research".
Britain was still whaling within my lifetime, and anyone born before 1960 probably ate whale in margarine or ice cream, or used it in cosmetics. Norway, which still kills hundreds of minke whales every year, took up hunting the northern bottlenose whale in 1973, when the British market for whale meat - as pet food - officially closed. The bottlenoses suffered particularly in the great age of whaling: 22,000 were killed in the last quarter of the 19th century by British and Norwegian fleets - although these figures pale in comparison to the greater cetacean holocaust of the 20th century, when 360,000 blue whales died. Fewer than 4,000 remain.
Yet it is the whale's own suicidal tendency to strand - the ultimate reason for the Thames whale's demise - which brings man into contact with cetaceans. By tradition in England, stranded or beached whales become "Royal Fish" - as Herman Melville narrates in the ur-text of cetology, Moby-Dick' indeed, Elizabeth I was fond of whale meat. Collapsing under their own enormous weight, the whale's sheer size becomes the mechanism of its death.
Our modern age might take the whale's fate as an omen of a world out of kilter. Last month, in the shallow waters off Cape Town, six Arnoux's beaked whales, equally seldom-seen denizens of deep water, made a similarly unusual appearance close to shore. Scientists feared that they too, like the Thames whale, would meet a sad end. Yet they disappeared back into the ocean, leaving only their mysterious mottled shapes in afterimage, these antediluvian ghosts come to haunt us with our collective sins.
Our ignorance of whales speaks volumes about our hubris
Joan Smith is a way
Copyright 2006 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
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