Whales

Wednesday, Aug 22, 2007 10:55 AM UTC

America’s great white hope

Whales play a romantic role in our national mythology, but they also helped transform a young colony into a world power.

By Ben Cosgrove

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D.H. Lawrence famously called “Moby-Dick” “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world,” and while plenty of readers might agree with only one or the other of those descriptors, there’s no questioning the book’s pride of place in America’s literary imagination. Vast, unruly, shot through with poetry (“untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven”), “Moby-Dick” remains, more than 150 years after its publication, the most astonishing, mysterious, single-volume feat in our national letters.

Small wonder, then, that Herman Melville, his masterpiece and his ornery white whale surface repeatedly in “Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America”; in fact, all three seem to companionably inform nearly every page of Eric Jay Dolin’s captivating, though weirdly uneven, chronicle of the United States’ long, profitable and deadly relationship with whales, from the mid-17th to early 20th centuries.

Now, we’re dealing with whales, whalers and a bit of American Gothic and American mythic, here, so let’s get something out of the way at the start: Despite the rip-roaring imagery adorning the book’s cover — a justifiably pissed-off beast rising from the depths, smashing a whaleboat, scattering the boat’s occupants like matchsticks — Dolin’s story is (thankfully) more than a tale of hardy men going down to the sea in ships, chasing and harpooning anything that moves.

To be sure, there are scenes of wholesale, seaborne slaughter, certain to gratify those who like their history served extra bloody. Mutinies, madness, ships’ decks awash in viscera, sweat and blubber — whaling’s innate brutality is on frequent and graphic display. But what ultimately distinguishes “Leviathan” is Dolin’s ability to show that, for generations, whaling was far less the romantic adventure of popular imagining (both past and present) than a purely, unapologetically economic engine helping to drive a young country from ambitious, increasingly aggrieved colony to world power.

Aside from a few fun, impractical facts retained from biology or social studies classes, most Americans understandably know little and care less about whaling beyond a vague familiarity with antiwhaling groups like Greenpeace, of course, and the more aggressively confrontational Sea Shepherd.

It was not always so. For a significant part of America’s history, open-ocean, wooden-vessel whaling was vital to the national economy and, for many years, as much an element of the young nation’s identity as, say, the auto industry was in the latter half of the 20th century. Dolin brings that vanished, watery world back to life, and if he sometimes falls short of his aim — namely, telling the full, unadorned story of American whaling’s extraordinary, largely forgotten rise and fall — it’s not for lack of trying.

The story begins — or at least really gets going — off the coast of North America, and like so much of whaling’s history, it’s rife with contradictions. Marveling at the rapid ascendance of a small, hardscrabble, sparsely populated island called Nantucket in the early 18th century, Dolin neatly points up the incongruity of the island’s deeply religious inhabitants embracing the violent rigors of whaling at the same time that he celebrates their success:

Quakerism [was], by mid-century, the predominant religion on Nantucket … The “fighting Quakers” or “Quakers with a vengeance,” as Melville called them, had a strong work ethic and a business sense that proved most efficacious in this emerging industry … [But] it is a bit strange that this religion, rooted so firmly in pacifism, should have been so instrumental in catapulting Nantucket to the front rank of colonial whaling communities. After all, whaling, at its most elemental, is a brutal, violent, and deadly activity, and one that a pacifist might just as soon avoid.

Dolin has a tendency to sometimes strain for a punch line or to belabor the obvious (peace-loving Quakers butchering the noble creatures of the ocean = paradox; we get it!), and few readers will come away praising his prose for prose’s sake. But over the course of 375 pages, plus an additional 80 of notes, he manages to mix the historical with the immediate and particular in such a way that we occasionally feel as if we’re enjoying a tale that seems to veer from the verifiable past into the realm of sci-fi.

Consider the sperm whale, “the whale’s whale,” as one chapter heading in “Leviathan” has it. If these animals didn’t exist, it’s unlikely that any fantasy novelist’s imagination could invent them. When most people think of whales, they probably picture the sperm. Moby-Dick was, of course, a sperm. Most depictions of 18th and 19th century whaling feature sperm whales. As Thomas Jefferson noted, the sperm whale “is an active, fierce animal and requires vast address and boldness in the fisherman.”

Males, or bulls, can reach 60 feet long and weigh 50 tons. Their brains, weighing up to 20 pounds, are the largest of any species. They can dive thousands of feet beneath the waves and remain submerged for up to an hour. The sperm whale’s skin is 14 inches thick — the thickest of any animal. Part of their diet is made up of giant squid — equally freaky, awe-inspiring creatures that can grow to 60 feet long and weigh 1 ton, and that leave nasty, saucer-shaped scars on their adversaries’ heads during life-and-death battles in the frigid, lightless, silent depths of the open ocean.

When hunted, these enormous, unpredictable, almost immeasurably strong beasts were in their element; it’s the puny predators — the whalers — who were, quite literally, at sea. So what compelled men to pile into light, fast wooden boats at the first sight of a whale’s spout on the horizon, row like mad through heaving waves, in all weather, and often into the teeth of icy winds, and try to hook into one of these behemoths with a hand-thrown harpoon and a few thousand feet of rope?

Silly question.

“When whalemen looked at sperm whales,” Dolin writes, “they mainly saw three things that could make them money — blubber, spermaceti, and ambergris.” The blubber of a sperm whale, when boiled and rendered, produced an oil that burned cleaner than that of any other whale, while the mysterious spermaceti — scientists are still not entirely sure, to this day, exactly what the tons of milky substance contained in the sperm whale’s head is actually for — was fashioned into the finest, brightest, most expensive candles of the era.

Ambergris, meanwhile, is one of those natural wonders that make one feel that perhaps God has a sense of humor, after all. It is, Dolin tells us, “a gray or black waxy substance that is formed in the stomach or large intestine of sperm whales, and is often expelled during defecation, sometimes as small lumps the size of baseballs, and other times as large concretions weighing hundreds of pounds … For more than a thousand years ambergris has been a rare and exceedingly sought-after item of commerce, making it, at times, literally worth its weight in gold. Egyptians burned it as incense in their temples, and the Chinese thought it a powerful aphrodisiac. King Charles II of England favored ambergris and eggs over any other dish.”

Killing whales, in other words, could make men rich. And nothing that has ever been able to do that has ever been left alone.

As remarkable as the characteristics of sperm and other whales (the right, the bowhead, the minke) are, however, it’s the hunting and processing and selling of their resources by American whalers — and the cultural and political vagaries of the whaling era at its height, from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries — that obviously float Dolin’s boat, and the man delves into the intricacies with an enthusiasm that enlivens the mustiest of history lessons.

Where in our schooling did any of us learn that Nantucket’s whalers attempted, in essence, to make a separate peace with their hugely important trading partners, the British, prior to the Revolutionary War, enraging the Colonies and nearly driving a dangerous wedge into the already shaky rebellion? Who knew that much of the debate in the English Parliament prior to the war between those who favored harsh measures against the colonists and those who favored a more reasoned approach to taxation and tariffs centered on fisheries and, specifically, on America’s incredibly profitable whaling ventures?

Dolin somehow manages to make the idea of a 25,000-word speech in Parliament by Edmund Burke as relevant to the story of American whaling as the harpooning of an 80-barrel bull off the coast of Fiji — just one sign of the man’s love of his topic, and of his skill at breathing life into seemingly impenetrably dull and only tenuously connected events.

Another of Dolin’s strengths throughout is his finely tuned mix of admiration for the cleverness and mettle of whalers — their increasingly efficient means of, to put it bluntly, finding and killing their quarry — and his frequent acknowledgment of that efficiency’s awful toll. In fact, the main reason that the American whalers began sailing farther and farther away from the original North Atlantic hunting grounds was that the whales were vanishing.

“The comparatively total disappearance of the whale in the Atlantic is an unquestionable fact,” naturalist Edward Augustus Kendall wrote in the early 1800s. One can hardly read those words today and not hear the modern commercial fisherman’s lament about the collapse of fish stocks the world over. Dolin doesn’t hammer us with an environmentalist’s dire warnings about how utterly destructive seemingly commonplace human endeavors can be. He doesn’t have to; the implication is enough.

Dolin does occasionally founder, however — most noticeably when he inexplicably chooses to focus (or not focus, as the case may be) on a particular theme or episode. For instance, the chapter titled “Stories, Songs, Sex, and Scrimshaw” lasts a measly six, not-very-sexy pages. Surely ships filled with men sailing thousands of miles away from home, through utterly foreign waters, for sometimes years at a time, could generate more stories, songs, sex and scrimshaw than that. A rather meandering account of a mid-19th century mutiny, on the other hand, goes on (and on) for 15 pages, until President Ulysses S. Grant finally pardons the ringleader, 15 long years after his trial. Mutinies are often terrible, bloody affairs, filled with enough drama, heroes and villains to sustain entire book-length accounts. Unfortunately, Dolin’s treatment of this particular mutiny — the only one “Leviathan” considers at length — is neither riveting nor terribly revealing. It’s assiduously researched, and carefully reconstructed, and the entire affair nevertheless just kind of peters out.

“Leviathan” succeeds, though, because its author cares, and he makes us care, not only how war and commerce and fashion and politics and the hunting of great whales were linked to one another during America’s early years but how those links (and, equally, their gradual, inevitable sundering) still echo, sometimes faintly, sometimes resoundingly, today. Dolin’s book, filled with killing and death, bravery and ingenuity, greed and hubris, brings a murky, myth-shrouded past to vivid, messy life.

Ben Cosgrove is a freelance writer in New York and the editor of the baseball anthology "Covering the Bases." More Ben Cosgrove.

Sunday, Jan 15, 2012 8:00 PM UTC

Swallowed by a whale — a true tale?

Everyone knows the story of Jonah. But my quest was to find evidence that man, gulped whole, had really survived

By Ben Shattuck

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An idea’s been floating around for some time that whales more than chewed people — that they swallowed them, and people might have survived in the stomach. Jonah’s story came first, and then there were rumors from the 19th century Yankee Whale Fishery — whaling ships leaving New York and New England ports for years on the open ocean. I’d like to believe in swallowings, but it’s tough. There is no air in the stomach, for one. There are acids. And if we are talking about sperm whales, which we are most of the time, there is the deadly passage through the 30-foot jaws lined with 8-inch teeth.

Still, you’d like to think it’s possible. You want to believe in an animal that can fit you inside them — that you might be consumed not piece-by-piece, mouthful-by-mouthful as sharks and bears would eat you, but wholly; to be encased as your full self, womb-like. You want to believe in big animals like you did when you were a kid. You want to be powerless as you are leaning into hurricane winds or with your eyes closed or looking into the ocean.

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In 1947, Natural History magazine published a newly discovered letter from 1891 penned by a man aboard the ship Star of the East that told of a fellow crew member surviving 24 hours in a whale’s stomach. Here is the story in brief:

The Star of the East was sailing around the Falkland Islands. The crew spotted a bull sperm whale and lowered the boats to give chase. As they approached, the whale turned on the boats and attacked. It stove the boat, scattering the crew in the water. All were accounted for except for one, a young whaleman by the name of James Bartley. All assumed Bartley drowned.

The next day the crew spotted the same whale, gave chase again, and this time killed it. They dragged it back to the ship and began flensing it of its blubber. As they peeled the blubber away, someone noticed something moving under the stomach lining. They cut the stomach open, and out rolled Bartley, unconscious but breathing, his face and arms bleached entirely white by the stomach acids. After waking days later, he said he remembered nothing but sliding through the whale’s throat, and that the throat quivered when he touched it on his way down.

It didn’t take much research – follow-up articles appeared in the years following 1947 – to find that Bartley’s story was fiction, a letter written by mischievous sailors to excite landlubbers. But the letter was enough to pique my interest. Was there ever an actual swallowing, some evidence embedded deep in an antiquated logbook or diary that I might uncover?

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Sperm whales would rather eat squid, which require little chewing, and not the hairy, bony things we are. That’s not to say sperm whales haven’t swallowed more than squid. In the 1960s, biologist Malcolm Clarke and his colleagues examined the remains from 2,403 stomachs of sperm whales caught by whalers off the South American coast. Aside from the hundreds of squid remains, he found seabirds, lobsters, seals, driftwood, coconuts, stones, rays, swordfish and sharks. While finding a tiny coconut in a whale’s stomach is enchanting, there’s nothing so striking as the image of a sperm whale eating a shark. It disturbs me the way turducken does, like as a close cousin to cannibalism. More terrifying, with sharks in the diet, Americans who might have been swallowed by sperm whales would have had another thing to worry about: sharing the stomach of your predator with yet another predator. To be eaten after being eaten. To be the –en of the turducken.

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In my initial foray into books about the dangers of the Yankee Whale Fishery, I found a pretty standard account of whalemen entering a whale’s mouth and then quickly being spit out. The whalemen either fell in the mouth from their perches in the whaleboats, or the whale, after smashing the boat with its flukes and snapping randomly at the debris floating in the water, chomped down on an unlucky swimmer. In 1771, for instance, a female sperm whale dragged Marshal Jenkins underwater when he fell from his boat, but she quickly resurfaced to spit him out. Job Sherman fell into a sperm whale’s mouth in 1860, Peleg Nye in 1863, Albert Wood in 1847. A November 1880 issue of New Bedford’s Shipping News tells of Wood, at the bow of a whaleboat floating over an angry whale, losing his balance and tumbling headfirst into the mouth. He landed straddling the lower jaw. The whale clamped down, dragged him underwater while smashing the boat with his fluke — immediately killing the boat steerer — then freed Wood, who bled heavily from his groin into the frothy water.

The famous Quaker captain Edmund Gardner’s entanglement with a whale paints the clearest picture of what might happen — he was photographed post-attack, his left hand, fingerless and gnarled, centered in the shot. Gardner and his crew were off the coast of Peru in 1839. They lowered for a sperm whale. Gardner, as captain, was the boat header. After the whale was harpooned, he switched places with the boat steerer to kill the whale with a lance. The whale turned on the boat, and bit the bow. An article in Our Flag – a mid-19th-century publication out of New Bedford — lightly describes the whale biting the bow as it might “the best part of an apple-tart in the munch of a hungry school-boy.” His crew retrieved him, put him in the bottom of the boat, and thought he was dead. But he croaked out that he wanted to go to a doctor in Peru, where he convalesced.

The secondary sources ended with Gardner’s story. If I wanted to find any evidence of full swallowings, I’d have to go to the heart of the Yankee Whale Fishery, where Ishmael goes in the second chapter of “Moby-Dick,” the once-richest city in America, the city that “lit the world” with its barrels of oil, the port from where thousands of men every year left to hunt the world’s biggest animals: New Bedford, Mass.

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The New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library isn’t really open to the public like a regular library. You have to set up an appointment, and when you get there, you hit the metal handicap button that is the secret buzzer for a librarian a few levels up. You wait in the street, seagulls shrieking above you, for the librarian to come to the door. He opens it a crack and asks you, “Yes?” like gatekeepers do. You explain you have an appointment. You sign the guestbook.

The inside of the library is full of polished wood. Antique oars line a wall; there’s scrimshaw in a chest, wooden boat models in display cases, books behind glass-paneled bookshelves. The spines of the books are webbed in faded gold designs looping around gothic font titles. Four paintings of moments in the whaling industry hang on the cream-colored walls: one whale ship pictured at dawn, one with a ship’s trypots burning at night, one with men stripping a whale of its blubber, and one of a French whaleboat getting smacked by a whale’s flukes.

After the librarian let me in, he pointed to the back, and called, “Michael!” I heard a disembodied voice rise from deep in the stacks, “Send him back.”

Michael Dyer is the maritime curator at the Research Library. He works at the end of a nook hidden behind bookshelves lined with whaling logbooks. He spends his days going through logbooks, the now brittle and ink-smudged paper trail that whaling captains and crew left behind centuries ago. For this I told him as I shook his hand and settled down in a chair across his desk that he had the best job in the world, and that I envied him.

I asked him if it was true, if there was a whale out there that could swallow us. He shook his head and waved dismissively. “Sperm whales’ throats are small. They can’t swallow people.”

“The Bartley story?” I said.

“Apocryphal.”

His voice was soft and low, tacked with a Southern accent. He has blue-green eyes, scraggly eyebrows bristling behind a pair of glasses. It looked as though frost had settled over his head, turning only the tips of eyebrows and hair white. He certainly fit his role. Later that day I saw him walking New Bedford’s cobblestoned streets sucking on a pale wood pipe.

“And the Gardner story?”

“That one’s very true. He was bitten, not swallowed. Edmund Gardner’s great granddaughter – she’s still alive, she’s in her late 90s – told me personally, that her mother remembered putting her hand in the dent in Edmund Gardner’s head when he was a very, very old man.”

“So no swallowings?”

“There’s a picture I want to show you,” he said, turning to his computer and opening files. “Come around here and I’ll show you. It’s an old pencil drawing of men getting chewed up.”

In his search he found a different drawing of a sperm whale with a whaleboat in its mouth. The whale had attacked the boat from the bottom instead of the more common attack called “jawing over,” where the whale torpedoed upside-down and open-jawed along the surface. I thought of looking over a gunwale to see a 15-ton animal materialize in the water beneath me. I imagined the water might be still, the boat rocking under a gray sky, my fellow crew members hunched over their heavy oars. Someone might whisper, “Where is he?” and a few moments later the water would boil and a 30-foot jaw would appear on the side of the boat. We’d be thrown upward, the sky and sea blurring in the sound of snapping wood and bones. I can’t think of anything scarier than a predator underwater. I still get scared when eelgrass brushes my toes in shallow water. A few years ago, as I paddled around a tropical beach, a curious sea turtle bumped into me and I screamed so loud through my snorkel that my mother came running down the beach, thinking shark.

Michael couldn’t find the pencil drawing he was looking for.

“Well, there are thousands of stories of men getting chewed by whales. If you want true stories, they’re here. You can ferret them out of the logbooks. It might take a while.”

He stood, and we went to front of the library, where a file cabinet full of index card references for the logbook collection. The cabinet was big as three refrigerators side-by-side, divided by tens of 6-inch-square drawers packed with hundreds of index cards, references for the mammoth collection of whaling logbooks held at the Research Library. This is where I would start my ferreting, my search for a swallowing.

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If, I’ll pretend for a moment, you were swallowed, it would happen like this: You would first be chewed. Sperm whales’ teeth are 8 inches long – longer than most blades in your knife drawer. Then you would be gulped to the fauces, the back of the mouth, and forced down. Here is where Bartley apparently touched the quivering sides of the throat. You would also touch the throat, perhaps claw at the sides of the throat like you would sliding down an icy slope. There would be no air, and you’d suffocate in acid and water, but, we’re saying, you somehow survive. Imagine a black and mucous-smothered tube sock slipping over you.

You would then enter the first stomach, coined by 19thcentury naturalist Thomas Beale as the holding bag. It’s lined with thick, soft and white cuticle. At 7 feet long by 3 feet wide and shaped like a big egg, the first stomach would easily fit you. If you were kept in the holding bag for over 24 hours, you would likely be joined by squid, but a coconut or shark might come, too. Most squid that sperm whales swallow are bioluminescent — the neon flying squid is a favorite. So in no time at all you’d be bathing in a pool of phosphorescence, a slew of green-yellow light winking around you like you were standing in a field in Maine come July when all the fireflies are sparking up. The rest would be black, very black.

As the stomach acids broke you down, you would continue through three smaller stomachs — a chain of membranous, acid-filled cavities. The second stomach is S-shaped, and the third is more like the first, only smaller. Then, liquidated, you would ooze into the intestine, and eventually leave the whale as excrement, floating out of the anus and into the cold deep ocean, dissolving still further until you had become so small as debris that you were indistinguishable from the ocean itself. You would lap against whaling ships looking for whales.

The only part of you that might not be digested would be your bones. Squid beaks, equally, aren’t digested — they pass through the sperm whale’s intestines wholly. Along the way, the beaks scrape the intestinal lining, creating scar tissue, which is then passed in its new form, ambergris — the intoxicating, aromatic substance used in the most potent perfumes that was worth, in 1869, $97.50 per pound. That’s $1,600 per pound today. The Egyptians burned it as incense. Your sharp fingerbones or splintery skull would rub on the whale’s intestinal lining, and your remains would scrape up the most beautiful smell on earth.

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Michael left me with the file cabinet. Each drawer was labeled alphabetically. In front of me was the B’s to D’s: Bone (scraping) – Deaths. Within each drawer was a line of labeled dividers. In the Bone (scraping) – Deaths were the subject Buggery and Thievery, Bounty, and Burials. I thumbed through the cards. The Bounty section included cards reading fiddle and one dollar for seeing a whale, gold watch for most whales sighted in 18 months voyage, cook cooked doughnuts for all, in the trypots, Raisins given by captain, and one very familiar one that Melville might have come across: Captain nailed one dollar to the mizzen mast for the man that raises the first whale that we get.

I went to the Illness drawer and scanned the divider labels: Asthma, Bowels. Cold virus, Colic, Consumption, Convulsions / Fits, Distemper, Dropsy, Faintings, Food Poisoning, Homesickness, Depressed, Kidney, Lips, Measles, Pleurisy, Pox, Prickly Heat, Scurvy, Seasick, Smallpox, Typhoid, Venereal.

Venereal was the thickest category. Eighty-seven notecards referencing 87 mentions in close to 87 logbooks – that’s one-third more than the Scurvy category and a magnitude thicker than the Homesickness category. I thumbed through Venereal and found, slid between endless Syphilis cards, an archaic Lady’s Fever, the whimsical Blue boar in groin, and the enigmatic doby itch. Of all the Illnesses, it appeared the stops on shore hit the whalemen the most, the damage done in the arms of a woman. One 19th-century writer calculated that during whaling season in the port of Lahaini, Hawaii, there were ”upwards of 400 instances of intercourse daily.”

Crammed between Depressed and Kidney, at only 10 notecards thick, was the file I was looking for: Injury by Whale.

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Other people have looked for swallowings before me. In 1903 the director of the Smithsonian sent a naturalist named F.A. Lucas up to Newfoundland to take a mold of a beached 90-foot “finback” whale with instruction that stomach and throat measurements be made. If Jonah had been swallowed by a big fish, perhaps the big fish was a whale, and that whale could have been something like a 90-foot finback. (This was probably a blue whale.) If the finback swallowed Jonah, its throat should be big enough to fit him. Lucas brought 20 barrels of plaster-of-Paris in St. John’s and got to work. The throat passage, needing only to fit mouthfuls of plankton, was measured no larger than the thickness of a man’s arm. The whale, he reported, was not the species that swallowed Jonah.

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Sitting in front of the file cabinet and looking at all the notecards, I thought of Russian dolls. Each step of my search for a swallowing encapsulated an equally interesting step. Inside the Research Library is a room with a giant metal file cabinet; inside the file cabinet are tens of tiny drawers; one of the drawers is labeled Illness; inside the Illness drawer are card dividers reading Blindness, Spleen. Sores. Seasick. Sick. Frostbite. Gunshot wounds. Fighting, etc; behind each card divider are dozens of cards; each card is marked with an accompanying logbook number and page number; inside that referenced logbook, which Michael would retrieve from somewhere deep in the stacks, were hundreds of entries, each one detailing the wind and storms and idle hours from a century and a half ago. I was splitting bodies to find the tiniest one, the only one not hollow, the kernel of solid truth hidden deep inside the bellies of a dozen other references.

I felt slowly dissolved, digested, in the trail of information, leading to more and more peculiar, archaic, scraps of information.

I picked out the 10 notecards from Injury by Whale, presented them to Michael, and a few minutes later the logbooks were set down on a big wooden table before me.

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Sperm whales’ jaws aren’t only for chewing and swallowing. In fact, with so much squid in the diet, they probably do very little chewing at all. A teacher once told me that the jaw of a sperm whale might be used as a tuning fork to aid their singing, like the metal kind you knock against your guitar and hold to its wooden body. Their mouths, when they weren’t chewing Americans’ limbs, were musical, judging pitch in the cold and dark depths from where they sang.

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Whaling logbooks are lovely. One from 1857 had powder-blue paper. Most are creamy brown. The writing is slanted far to the right, and difficult to read, sometimes impossible. Most of the ink is dark brown. Some is light brown. Some is black. You open them up on green foam wedges as to not over extend the binding.

The logbooks are part-business documents, part-journal, and sometime get personal. In Daniel Kimball Ritchee’s logbook from the ship Israel, there is the imprint of a pressed flower on the first page. The image is brown, but you can see the veins of the petals, and the little black dots of snuffed pistils. Behind that is a pencil drawing of a whale. And over that, a little poem:

Oh where are the Friends that to me were so dear

Long Long ago, Long Long ago

Where are the voices I delighted to hear

Long Long ago Long ago.

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Some single entries are stories in and of themselves. Scanning the pages of the 1860 logbook from the bark Triton, I found this: “Wednesday the 13^th of March In 1860. Light north wind. One watch on liberty. Employed getting potatoes on board. Discharged William Popess, who proved to be a hermaphrodite.”

I went through each of the 10 logbooks referenced by the notecards. None mentioned a full swallowing.

* In the Indian Ocean. The whale struck the third mate with his tail and thinks a rib broken in the right side.

* On a Saturday in May, 1848 a man was struck and killed by a whale. Struck and then killed him t…..”

* On December 8, 1836 the Larboard boat got stove and the cook’s leg was broken and another man was crippled.

* Thursday, June 23^rd 1869. Larboard boat struck and got stove. Joe Williams got hurt.

* July 23^rd, 1843 The mate got fast to a large whale – a regular hard customer – the Capt. and 2^nd Mate soon after fastened. The whale came near killing the Captain. He hit the Boatsteerer on the head with his flukes and knocked him overboard. Did not hurt him much, got the whale dead by 10 at night.

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Frustrated with no references to swallowings in the Injury section, I spent the rest of the afternoon looking through the file cabinet for any category that might point me in any and all entries involving whale-whalemen mishaps. I stopped when I got distracted reading references in logbooks to Unknown Islands.

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If I’m not sure whales ate Americans, I am certain that Americans ate whales. Some still do. I had whale meat stew above the Arctic Circle in a small, candlelit restaurant on Norway’s Lofoten Islands. It tastes, I described to my parents in an embarrassing and gushy email about “swooping fjords” and “stunning seascapes,” like beef soaked in shrimp-water.

Most would not eat whale meat. “Sailors were a persnickety bunch,” Michael told me as I chatted with him in the afternoon, “and they wanted their salt pork. They wanted their meat. And if they didn’t get their meat there would be big trouble. There were mutinies that happened because sailors didn’t get their meat.”

The best-known scene of an American eating a whale comes from “Moby Dick.” Stubb, the second mate of the Pequod, orders a harpooner to cut him tender, muscly ridgeline just before the tail, the tapering extremity of the whale. When Stubb is given his whale steak, he eats it by the light of lanterns filled sperm whale oil. This is a frightening thought, to have meat illuminated by light fed by the animal’s fat, the calm yellow flame at a dinner table flickering over the muscle.

The meat, after going down Stubb’s throat and into his stomach, would be digested by his stomach acids and pass through his villi and out to his blood, which flowed to his muscle. It would have fueled him the next day to hunt the whale, it would have been in the heat of his stiffening muscles as he tossed the lance, in his twitching leg muscles pressed against the loggerhead, and the tightening of his vocal chords as he screamed at his crew to ‘heave’ towards their prey, another sperm whale.

People don’t produce ambergris. The whale would have ended as foul-smelling excrement leaving Stubb, hunched over the precarious head at the bow of the Pequod.

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Having exhausted the index cards in the file cabinets, I took another approach. I went the Holy Grail of whaling logbooks, “History of the American Whale Fishery,” which the Research Library keeps handy on the tables.

The “History” includes 492 pages of tables of “Returns of Whaling Vessels, Sailing from American Ports, Since the Year 1715.” At an average of 52 entries per page, that makes for about 25,000 logbooks accounted for. The tables include name of the vessel, its class, tonnage, captain, managing owner, whaling ground, date of sailing and arrival, sperm oil / whale oil / whalebone barrels and pounds. At the end of the table is a column titled Remarks, where any odd occurrences – a particularly profitable voyage, a mutiny, or a whale killing a sailor, among others – are noted.

After compiling all references in “Remarks” to whalemen “killed by whale,” I took steps to discover if the killing was by swallowing. (I excluded “drowned by whale,” as third mate G. Thing was on Christmas day 1846 aboard the ship Florida.)

If I found in the “History of the American Whale Fishery” that the ship Milton, sailing out of New Bedford, was carrying a certain Mr. Porter, second mate who, on 5 October 1872, was “killed by a whale,” I would then go to Judith Navas Lund’s “Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages Sailing from American Ports: A Compilation of Sources.” Lund’s book is big and maroon, longer than it is tall, and lists every logbook in the Yankee Whale Fishery and where it is located. I would then find the ship Milton listed under Vessel; I would then mark down the logbook number, ask the librarian if he had that logbook in the Library; he would say “yes,” and retrieve the 140-year old book from somewhere deep in the stacks; I would put that book on the green foam wedges, find the entry for 5 October 1872, and read the following:

Fine weather and light breeze. Mr. Porter, second officer, struck a whale he stove the boat and killed Mr. Porter. He was only seen in a seconds and appeared to be lifeless. Mr. —, 3^rd Officer is off duty from injuries received from a humpback.

If I weren’t so lucky, if the librarian didn’t have that logbook – it could be Nantucket, or Martha’s Vineyard, or Peabody or lost altogether – I would take another tack. For example, after finding that in June 1843 second mate William Lacky of the Candace was “killed by a whale,” I’d go to Lund’s book and see, sadly, that the Candace’s logbook for those years is not present in the Library’s collection; I would then go to a short maroon volume of Dennis Wood’s “Abstracts,” Volume 6, Index, which is an index of logbook summaries from each vessel. “Abstracts” is around 250 pages of tables reading Ship Name, Rig (Ship or Bark) Tonnage, Dates and Volume – Page. After finding the ship Candace, I would then go to Dennis Wood’s stack of larger, elephant folio and equally maroon “Abstracts” – listed by Volume, Part, Pages; the Candace is mentioned in Wood’s 1832 – 1847, VOL. 1 PT. 1, pp 1-300 book. At the end of this, I would read the abstract, where there would be, I found, no usable information, no mention of William Lacky, and certainly no mentioned of a swallowing.

After I would fail again and again at finding any proof of a swallowing, I would settle back into my chair, defeated. My back would burn from leaning over logbooks and indexes of logbooks and indexes of indexes of logbooks, my eyes strained from trying to read illegible photocopies of century-old chicken scratch penned out on the rolling sea; I would feel thinned, liquidated, oozing onto the desks of the Research Library, dissolving still further, lapping against whaling logbooks that had been touched whalemen from so long ago.

- – - – - – - – - -

Michael came over to my table late in the afternoon, just before closing hours, with a printout of the drawing he had been trying to find.

“Here it is,” he said, “Look here.” He pointed to the top register of the drawing. “The whale’s splitting the boat clean in half. And here,” he pointed to the bottom, “a man driving the harpoon into the whale’s mouth.”

The whale was turned upside-down, jawing over. It had two harpoons stuck in its back with thread-thin coils of lines tangled in the water. Maybe it’s because of the big forehead of a sperm whale that elicits in me some connection to a baby, or the little, teardrop flippers the artist had drawn, or just because the whale was supine under the saw-toothed lines of sea, but it looked relaxed. If it weren’t for the man driving a harpoon into its mouth, I’d say this was a whale at play.

The other end of the whale, the flukes, were drawn and redrawn, telling me the artist wanted to get this part of the whale just right. Unlike the little flipper, drawn in one hasty loop, the flukes were an important body part. This was the real danger, thin and flat, a metal-hard piece of flesh swooping around, rising from underwater and smacking you dead. This was what would break your ribs and crush your head. This is what would most likely end you. In your death you would not witness a stomach glowing with phosphorescence; your skin would not turn white; you would not find a coconut; you would not be encased and warm, womb-like. The whale didn’t care for you enough to consume you because you were not its sustenance. It didn’t need you. Death didn’t need you.

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Ben Shattuck has written for McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, HTMLGiant, ReadyMade, Once Magazine, 7x7, and The Morning News, among other publications. More Ben Shattuck.

Friday, Jun 3, 2011 7:04 PM UTC

The whalers’ worst nightmare sets sail again

Animal Planet's "Whale Wars" returns with more atrocity footage, a sleek new boat, and loads of righteous ire

By Matt Zoller Seitz

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The whalers' worst nightmare sets sail again

The view from the bridge: Paul Watson, founder of the anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, surveys his boat in the season premiere of Animal Planet's "Whale Wars."

“We live on the most incredible planet, and yet we abuse it, and we abuse it mercilessly,” says Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, in the opening moments of the season 4 premiere of “Whale Wars” (Animal Planet, Fridays, 9 PM/8 central). “Right now we’re living in a major extinction event. We’ll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we’ve lost in the last 65 million years. If we don’t find answers to these problems, we’re gonna be victims of this extinction event that we’re at fault for.”

I have ethical objections to how reality shows strive to turn real people into mythic heroes; the nature-centric cable series on Discovery and Animal Planet are often especially guilty of this. But “Whale Wars” is one of the better shows of its type, and its message is so urgent that it eclipses aesthetic qualms that would otherwise obsess me. Simply put, Watson and his associates are doing heroic, valuable work — work that’s bound to provoke debate even among people who are sympathetic to his cause, because it operates beyond the law, in international waters, and necessarily includes the risk of property damage, injury and death, both for himself and his adversaries.

Watson sees his mission to harass, intimidate and otherwise mess with commercial whalers as a holy calling, and talks about it as if he were the John Brown or Nat Turner of aquatic conservation. He was kicked out of Greenpeace a quarter century ago for being too confrontational. He playfully refers to himself as an “eco-terrarist” — as in “Terra,” the word for earth — rather than “eco-terrorist,” but there’s no doubt that he and his fellow Sea Shepherds endorse and use extreme measures.

“Last year we were able to save more whales than [the whalers] killed,” Watson tells a news crew in the opening section of tonight’s premiere. “This year we’re gonna go for 100%. We’re gonna get on them right away and try to shut them down immediately.” A journalist from Japan — the world’s leading exponent of illegal whaling — skeptically tells Watson that nobody can ever stop it. “That’s what they said once, that you can’t stop slavery,” Watson replies, “But it was stopped. Yeah, we can stop whaling.”

It’s a risky mission. During Watson’s long crusade, he’s seen whalers and his own crew people injured, and has been sued, censured and otherwise treated as a pariah by Norway, the Netherlands, Canada and Iceland as well as Japan. Last year he lost one of the Sea Shepherd fleet’s vessels, the trimaran Ady Gil, when it crashed into a Japanese whaling ship. The incident set the group back a bit, depriving them of a key vessel that would have cost $1.5 million to replace and landing its captain, Paul Bethune, in a Japanese jail. But the Shepherds have also acquired an international network of admirers, some of whom kick in money to support Watson and his team. One of the highlights of the premiere is the unveiling of a privately funded replacement for the lost trimaran, a sleek, black, science fictionally striking vessel named Gojira, after the original Japanese name for Godzilla.

While the premiere touts the group’s victories, it never pretends that Watson and company have made irrevocable forward progress. Every episode of “Whale Wars” includes footage of whales, dolphins and other protected species threatened with extinction by commercial fishing. Some of the images are horrendously violent. We see twitching whales being hauled up onto ship decks, streaming gore, and helicopter shots of Japanese whaling vessels flagrantly exploiting loopholes in international anti-whaling resolutions by holding up signs that announce that they’re doing “scientific research” while behind them, crew members wrangle slabs of whale flesh.

Like the excellent, very disturbing eco-documentaries “Sharkwater” and “The Cove,” “Whale Wars” positions itself both a rousing high seas adventure and a document of an ongoing act of inter-species genocide. The group’s main foe, the Japanese whaling industry, isn’t about to give up without a fight. Even though the Shepherds’ vigilantism has been more effective than anyone could have foreseen, there is still a sense in Japan that Americans generally, and American conservationists in particular, are practicing a kind of coded racism or xenophobia — that they are refusing to respect a lucrative business and a pursuit that’s been a part of Japan’s cultural identity for hundreds of years, harming the mostly working-class whalers’ ability to earn a living, and applying a hypocritical double standard as well, by insisting that certain aquatic creatures deserve total protection even as the so-called conservationists eat other species of sea life for nourishment. Just when the Shepherds think they’ve turned the tide, here comes a press release from the Japanese whaling fleet saying it’s about to double the number of whaling vessels. Suck it, Yanks.

Is it a sin to kill an animal that’s deeply intelligent, or that exhibits faintly human-like characteristics? Isn’t that anthropomorphism disguised as moral superiority? “Whale Wars” never leaves any doubt as to where it comes down on those questions, but it also engages them actively and with real curiosity. Between the occasional outraged soliloquies by Watson and more measured statements by his colleagues and opponents, “Whale Wars” adds a dollop of Socratic dialog to its melodrama. The show’s dire tone says, Pay attention and formulate an opinion on this, because it’s important; how you feel about it helps define who you are.

And yet “Whale Wars” never forgets that there’s more to these activists’ lives than indignation. Much of the show is shot and edited like an action picture, complete with a cheesy, galumphing score that wouldn’t be out of place in a Michael Bay flick. But every now and then, often when you least expect it, the series lowers the volume, slows the pace, and becomes a travelogue of remote regions, and a paean to the remains of unspoiled nature.

Midway through tonight’s premiere is a scene that shows Watson’s own boat (named after Watson’s late friend and fellow ecological activist Steve Irwin, a.k.a. the Crocodile Hunter) cruising past an iceberg on the outer edge of the Antarctic sea. From one angle the iceberg looks like flattened top hat; from another, it looks like a woman’s shoe. The sound drops low for a while, and the score relaxes into a gentle solo piano riff that sounds like Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No.1.”

Watson and his colleagues gather on the deck to watch the iceberg as they glide past it. “So beautiful,” a crew member says. “You can’t get much more remote than we are now,” Watson says. His voice is soft, but there’s joy in it, and for a moment, he looks happy.

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Wednesday, Nov 10, 2010 3:26 PM UTC

Scientists say radiation leaving whales sunburned

As debate over ozone layer's recovery continues, evidence shows ultraviolet rays are burning some species

By Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press

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Scientists say radiation leaving whales sunburned

This undated photo released in London Wednesday Nov. 9, 2010, by The Zoological Society of London, shows the blistered skin of a blue whale. The whale, photographed in the Gulf of California, is one of several marine mammals studied by scientists who fear that the thinning ozone layer is causing them severe skin damage. (AP Photo/Diane Gendron- HO-Zoological Society of London) **EDITORIAL USE ONLY**(Credit: AP)

Scientists say some whale species off the Mexican coast are showing signs of severe sunburn that may be caused by the damaged ozone layer’s decreased ability to block ultraviolet radiation.

The seagoing mammals would be particularly vulnerable to the sun damage in part because they need to spend extended periods of time on the ocean’s surface to breathe, socialize, and feed their young. Since they don’t have fur or feathers, that effectively means they sunbathe naked.

As Laura Martinez-Levasseur, the study’s lead author, put it: “Humans can put on clothes or sunglasses — whales can’t.”

Martinez-Levasseur, who works at Zoological Society of London, spent three years studying whales in the Gulf of California, the teeming body of water which separates Baja California from the Mexican mainland.

Photographs were taken of the whales to chart any visible damage, and small samples — taken with a crossbow-fired dart — were collected to examine the state of their skin cells.

Her study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, seemed to confirm suspicions first raised by one of her whale-watching colleagues: The beasts were showing lesions associated with sun damage, and many of their skin samples revealed patterns of dead cells associated with exposure to the powerful ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun.

As with humans, the lighter-skinned whales seemed to have the most difficulty dealing with the sun. Blue whales had more severe skin damage than their darker-skinned counterparts, fin whales and sperm whales, even though the latter spend bigger chunks of time at the surface.

The study said the findings highlight the possible perils associated with the depletion of the ozone layer, which helps insulate the earth from ultraviolet rays.

That protective layer has been thinning for years under the influence of ozone-eating chemicals known as CFCs. While the emission of those chemicals has since largely been controlled, the extent to which the ozone is recovering is still under debate.

For whales, the potential danger from the sun’s rays are just one more environmental stress . All species tracked in this study are considered endangered or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. If it’s shown that the skin damage is leading to cancer, then “this could be a serious threat,” according to Simon Ingram, who teaches marine conservation at England’s University of Plymouth and wasn’t involved with the study.

So far, there were no indications of skin cancer among the whales studied, although Martinez-Levasseur noted that only tiny samples were taken of the massive animals.

She said one of her next projects will be to examine how well whales’ cells hold up under the increased ultraviolet radiation — and whether whales’ pigmentation darkens as a result of their time spent out in the sun.

In other words, she wants “to be able to see if they’re tanning.”

Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London, and the Cetacean Ecology Laboratory in Mexico also contributed to the study.

——

Online:

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/

Zoological Society of London: http://www.zsl.org/

Queen Mary, University of London: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/

Cetacean Ecology Laboratory (CICIMAR): http://www.cicimar.ipn.mx/oacis/

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Wednesday, Jun 23, 2010 4:51 PM UTC

Anti-whaling talks break down, policy reform fails

Japan, Norway and Iceland can continue to hunt, killing close to 1,500 animals a year

By Arthur Max, Associated Press

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An international effort to truly limit whale hunting collapsed Wednesday, leaving Japan, Norway and Iceland free to keep killing hundreds of mammals a year, even raiding a marine sanctuary in Antarctic waters unchecked.

The breakdown put diplomatic efforts on ice for at least a year, raised the possibility that South Korea might join the whaling nations and raised questions about the global drive to prevent the extinction of the most endangered whale species.

It also revived doubts about the effectiveness and future of the International Whaling Commission. The agency was created after World War II to oversee the hunting of tens of thousands of whales a year but gradually evolved into a body at least partly dedicated to keeping whales from vanishing from the Earth’s oceans.

“I think ultimately if we don’t make some changes to this organization in the next few years it may be very serious, possibly fatal for the organization — and the whales will be worse off,” said former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer.

Japanese officials and environmentalists traded charges of blame after two days of intense, closed-door talks failed to break a deadlock in which the three whaling nations offered to limit their catch but refused to phase it out completely.

About 1,500 animals are killed each year by the three countries. Japan, which kills the majority of whales, insists its hunt is for scientific research — but more whale meat and whale products end up in Japanese restaurants than in laboratories.

Several whale species have been hunted to near extinction, gradually recovering since the ban on commercial whaling went into effect in 1986, while other species like the smaller minke whale are still abundant. But the whale arouses deep passions around the world, because it was one of the first icons of the animal conservation movement, starting with the popular Save The Whale campaign of the 1970s.

A key sticking point is the sanctity of an ocean region south of Australia that the agency declared a whaling sanctuary in 1994. Despite that declaration, Japanese whalers regularly hunt in Antarctic waters, a feeding ground for 80 percent of the world’s whales, and the commission has no enforcement powers to stop them.

Australia has already launched a complaint against Japanese whaling at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the U.N.’s highest court.

Japan delegate Yasue Funayama said her country had offered major concessions and agreed “to elements which are extremely difficult to accept.” She blamed the failure of the talks on countries that refused to accept the killing of even a single animal.

Palmer, who worked with 12 countries to help draft a compromise, commended Japan, which he said “showed real flexibility and a real willingness to compromise.”

The United States had pushed hard for a deal to bring the three rogue nations back under the commission’s control and recognize a limited catch, but finding an acceptable number of whales to kill proved elusive. A proposal drafted by the commission’s chairman suggested a limit of 400 whales per year for five years, then going down to 200.

“After nearly three years of discussions, it appears our discussions are at an impasse,” said chief U.S. delegate Monica Medina.

Australia, leading the hardline anti-whaling nations, hailed the outcome that preserved the ban on commercial whaling, even though it is flouted by the three whaling states which claim exemptions. Australia was supported by a bloc of Latin American countries.

“The fact that there wasn’t a consensus on the compromise is the right place for the commission to be,” said Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett.

South Korea acknowledged that it wants the right to hunt whales and may apply to the commission for a quota.

The Koreans opposed the latest proposal because it “allows whaling only for countries currently involved in commercial whaling, which excludes South Korea,” said Lee Kang-eun of the department of fishery policies in Seoul.

The 88-nation whaling agency is about evenly split between countries that oppose whaling and nations who advocate sustainable whaling.

Some environmentalists have accused Japan of using its foreign aid to recruit nations into the whaling commission so they support Japan’s position. Ten years ago the commission had only 41 members, but today it includes landlocked nations like Mali that have no direct interest in whaling or ocean conservation.

But the delegate from St. Kitts and Nevis, Daven Joseph, told the media and environmental groups to stop such allegations.

“We have been accused of being surrogates. That is not the case,” he said.

Many environmentalists blamed Japan for the breakdown.

“If Japan had agreed to a phase out in the Southern Ocean, there would have been a good chance” for a deal, said Wendy Elliott of WWF.

Others expressed relief that the 25-year ban on whaling was not lifted.

“Had it been done here, this deal would have lived in infamy,” said Patrick Ramage of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

The commission’s annual meeting ends Friday. Talks now are likely to focus on less controversial issues, such as preventing collisions by whales and ships, the effects of climate change and proposed Russian oil exploration in the seasonal feeding grounds of the endangered gray whale.

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Thursday, Mar 18, 2010 1:54 PM UTC

Dubai hotel releases whale shark back into wild

By Associated Press

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A resort hotel on Dubai’s main palm-shaped island says it has released back into the wild a whale shark whose captivity had been criticized by environmentalists.

The Atlantis hotel on the city-state’s manmade Palm Jumeirah island said Thursday it released the 13-foot-long female shark back into the Persian Gulf. It says the shark has been tagged so it can be tracked for research purposes.

The hotel did not say when the shark was released. A spokeswoman could not be reached for comment.

Environmentalists and a local newspaper began calling for the shark’s release shortly after the hotel announced it had rescued it from the shallow waters off Dubai’s coast in 2008.

Whale sharks are considered a threatened species.

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