Thar she blows!

As soon as you enter the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, you start getting directions to the blue whale. Of all the stars in this strange, dead celebration of life’s variety, the blue whale is the starriest. Naturally, it is housed in the museum’s “blue zone”. If ever an animal required a zone all to itself, it is the blue whale.

I didn’t really need to come to see this institution again. I last came perhaps 15 years ago and could remember every detail f the whale – the way, surrounded by other large mammals, it dwarves them, almost filling the large, echoing gallery; its serenity, eternally suspended in space, endlessly photographed and smiled at by visitors; its small yet knowings eyes and absurdly small flippers. It lies somewhere between grandeur and ridicule: a divine joke.

The note in the upstairs gallery on balaenoptera musculus says, a little shamefacedly, that this 28.3m-long model, made of wod and plaster in 1938 and painted a tasteful, speckled blue is not quite accurate. Blue whales had not been observed underwater when the model was made, and it is too bulbous. The real thing is flatter, sleeker, more streamlined. But the Natural History Museum has no plans to modify its whale. Generations have been overwhelmed and amused by it – often both at the same time. Print the legend.

Until recently the legend was more or less all we had. “There is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like,” says the narrator in Moby-Dick. “And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour is by going whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.”

“There’s an air of mystique about whales,” says Dr Nicholas Slocum, a zoologist who runs Whale Watch West Cork. “That’s one of the reasons why they capture our imagination. You don’t see much of them – four-fifths of a whale is usually underwater – and we don’t see them very often. They live in an environment which is very alien to us, and even in coastal waters people don’t see them very often.”

Slocum takes small groups out on his boat in search of minke, fin and humpback whales. If there is a sighting, he says his passengers are “to use the modern term, gobsmacked”. “You only see a small part of them, and you only see them on their terms,” he says. “That always struck me as rather attractive.” He says the experience – this communing with whales – is “mystical”.

It is easy to get carried away by whales. Look at Herman Melville. When he began Moby-Dick, he thought he was writing an adventure story along the lines of earlier books such as Typee and Omoo, designed to recapture his increasingly disaffected readership. But as his biographer Andrew Delbanco says, “he soon swerves away from the adventures of a young man in flight from his own despondency, and he finds himself swept up by a larger tale – about a maimed sea captain and the prodigious white whale that has ‘dismasted’ him.” The book, now considered one of the greatest in the language, was a monster flop, and poor Melville was eventually forced to give up writing and become a customs inspector.

Melville knew how much he had bitten off; how uncontrollable in its extent his whale of a book was likely to be. “From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate,” he wrote at the beginning of chapter 104 (!!). Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio … Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise …”

In his 1988 book Whale Nation, the playwright Heathcote Williams wrote a long love letter in poetry to the whale – its beauty, intelligence, emotional capacity.

“Whales play, in an amniotic paradise.
Their light minds shaped by buoyancy, unrestricted by gravity,
Somersaulting,
Like angels, or birds;
Like our own lives, in the womb.
Whales play
For three times as long as they spend searching for food:
Delicate, involved games,
With floating seabirds’ feathers, blown high into the air,
And logs of wood
Flipped from the tops of their heads;
Carried in their teeth
For a game of tag, ranging across the entire Pacific.
Play without goals.”

Williams is very good on detail – and on sex.

“Mutual attraction is an elaborate, thoughtful process:
In whales the male member is erected voluntarily,
Unsheathed from within deep abdominal folds,
Erected, and then collapsed and concealed again, by an act of will –
Unlike in man,
Where it has an unseasonal, disconnected life of its own.
… And the blue whale’s penis is nine feet long,
Which may require additional self-control.”

Whale Nation is not just a love letter to the whale; it is also a hate letter to humankind – or at least that portion of it that sought the destruction of the whale. If, in the pre-industrial age of Moby-Dick, hunter and hunted are joined together in dance of death that ends in a moment of tranquillity, a century later destruction had been mechanised and there is no beauty, only brutality. Ahab’s insane, quasi-religious pursuit had become, in Williams’ words, “an essential component of our expanding economy”. His description of explosive harpoons explains why, in the 1960s and 70s when whales were threatened with extinction, some conservationists were prepared to risk their lives confronting whaling ships.

“At the end of the five-foot-long steel harpoon
A small serrated cup prevents ricochet.
The tip strikes,
Followed by a time-fused charge exploding three seconds later,
Splintering and lacerating the harpoon’s way into the whale’s side.
Next to the grenade,
Four barbed flanges pivot on hinges,
And as the whale struggles,
The strain on the rope snaps the barbs open:
They fly out, ripping into the lungs and inner organs,
Embedding the harpoon inside the whale,
Anchoring her body.”

The second half of Whale Nation is a compendium of facts and descriptions culled from books on whales which nicely echoes the extracts at the beginning of Moby-Dick (“Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian”). Some of Williams’ cullings are truly gobsmacking. “An 80ft female blue whale held fast by a modern harpoon head attached to 3,000 fathoms of line once towed a 90ft, twin-screw steam chaser, with its engines going full speed astern, for seven hours at a steady eight knots, covering over 50 miles without let-up.” Moby-Dick, a sperm whale by the way, would have been proud of her.

Commercial whale took several species of whales close to extinction. Some, notably the North Atlantic right whales, have never recovered. Blue whales number only a few thousand, whereas, according to marine biologist Dr Sidney Holt, before 1930 there were a quarter of a million feeding in the Antarctic.

But Holt is no pessimist. He believes the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982 came just in time, and that though right whales continue to struggle – they seem to have a peculiar propensity for being run over by transatlantic shipping – others such as the fin whale and the grey whale are recovering. He believes the moratorium is safe, despite Japanese efforts to organise a pro-whaling bloc on the International Whaling Commission, but that loopholes permitting whaling for “scientific” reasons are being flouted more on more, principally by Japan, Norway and Iceland, each of which has a strong commercial and cultural attachment to whaling.

There are dangers, Holt stresses, and much of the good work of the past 20 years could be undone as the pro-whaling countries become more assertive, but overall a conversation with this genial veteran of myriad conservation battles – a man who played an important role in securing the moratorium and establishing a sanctuary for whales in the southern ocean – leaves you feeling optimistic that whale populations are still viable, that somehow they have survived 1,000 years of man’s attempts to destroy them.

Mark Simmonds, international director of science at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, is less optimistic. “Many develoiping countries with no obvious interest in whaling have joined the commission and joined Japan’s team,” he says. “There is a meeting in a couple of weeks in Japan to explore the issue of how to ‘normalise’ the IWC. In the whalers’ eyes, that means the resumption of commercial whaling. Norway, Iceland and Japan are already using loopholes to flout the moratorium, and other countreies might also want to go whaling. Norway and Japan are increasing their takes, and Iceland has in effect gone back to commercial whaling. They obviously view the opposition as weak.”

The public pro-whaling case is put by the Norwegian-based High North Alliance, which celebrated Iceland’s resumption of commercial whaling in November. “They had not forgotten how to whale,” it enthused. “In just two weeks the Icelandic whalers took seven fin whales … Fin whales are huge animals; those caught were 61-70 feet long, each providing about 15 tonnes of meat and blubber.” Not that Icelanders actually like eating whale meat – only 1% eat it once a week or more. According to critics, Iceland’s refusla to bow to international pressure is principally about cultural sovereignty – the “right to whale”.

The two sides are on a collision course. One of the most vehement critics of whaling, Paul Watson, founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to confront the whalers. For Watson, it is a matter of life and death, and he has no qualms about direct action. An early member of Greenpeace, he quit the organisation because he felt it was too pacific in its approach.

The biography of Watson on the Sea Shepherd website captures the emotionalism of his approach – derived from a life-changing moment in the mid-1970s. “In 1975, Watson served as first officer under Captain John Cormack on the voyage to confront the Soviet whaling fleet … During this confrontation with the Russian whaler, a harpooned and dying sperm whale loomed over Paul’s small boat. Paul recognised a flicker of understanding in the dying whale’s eye. He felt that the whale knew what they were trying to do. He watched as the magnificent leviathan heaved its body away from his boat, slipped beneath the waves and died. A few seconds of looking into this dying whale’s eye changed his life forever. He vowed to become a lifelong defender of the whales and all creatures of the seas.”

Captain Paul Watson – as he styles himself – has been as good as his word. I tried to contact him for this article, but it proved impossible – he is at sea somewhere in the Southern Ocean, protecting the sanctuary against infringements from illegal whalers. I also tried to contact the founder of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Kieran Mulvaney, but he is lives in a cabin in Alaska. These guys don’t just walk the walk. Even Mark Simmonds, very much not all at sea in his office in Chippenham, as he sheepishly admits, is a little muffled through his beard.

Whales are a cause and a symbol. They represent timelessness, space, improbability; they are the largest creatures ever created, have the biggest brains ever created, demonstrate great intelligence, live in complex societies, use tools, cooperate with each other, can recognise themselves, have a lifespan at least as long as ours, and can speak to each other, communicating through what Slocum calls “low-frequency grunts and whines” over vast distances, some believe across oceans.

For millennia man has been fascinated by them. Holt says dolphins (classified as a type of whale) feature on Greek and Roman mosaics, and that stories of them rescuing people go back 2,000 years or more. Yet we have also spent more than a thousand years slaughtering them, and are still not averse to killing them for their meat, even if it has to be packaged as pet food.

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