The Dolphin in the Mirror (6 page)

One of the best known of such stories, not least because it is mentioned in the first act of Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night,
is the rescue of Arion of Methymna, poet and musician of great renown. He spent time in Periander's court, traveled the Greek colonies, and competed in national games (which included music as well as athletics in those days), and he was usually victorious. Through his great talents he amassed significant wealth; he gathered it up and boarded a ship at Taras, which is in the heel of Italy, that was headed for Corinth. Like the unlucky Dionysus before him, Arion realized too late that the crew he had entrusted with his life and his wealth were in fact pirates. Arion begged in vain for his life, offering to give up his money. The pirates would have none of it, because they knew that once Arion arrived safely ashore he would report them to the king. Arion was given two options: he could kill himself onboard and be given a burial ashore, or he could jump overboard right then and there. Not much of a choice.

Arion opted for the latter but asked that he be allowed to sing one last song before he jumped. The pirates agreed, thrilled by the prospect of hearing the world's most famous singer perform before he acquiesced to their nefarious will. Arion put on his full performance costume, took up his lyre, and sang "Orthian," a high-pitched song to the gods. Arion then did as he'd been bidden and jumped into the sea, and the ship sailed on to Corinth, all of Arion's wealth in the hands of the pirates. As the story goes, a dolphin suddenly appeared and approached Arion, took him on its back, and delivered him safely to Tainaron, at the southernmost tip of Greece.

Still wearing his performance costume, Arion made his way to Corinth over the land and went to Periander's court. The king wasn't sure whether to believe Arion's fanciful tale, so he had him locked up and waited for the crew. When they arrived, the king had them brought before him and asked them the whereabouts of Arion. He was safe, they claimed; they had set him down at Taras. At this point Arion stepped out of the shadows and confronted the astonished crew. They were forced to admit what they had done.

Now, these events were said to have taken place around 600
B.C.E.,
but were not put into writing until Herodotus did so some two hundred years later, based on accounts he heard from people of Corinth and Lesbos, Arion's home. Was it fact or myth? Whatever the truth, there was for five hundred years in the temple at Tainaron a small bronze figure of a man riding a dolphin, put there by Arion himself shortly after his reputed adventure.
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There were other such stories from ancient Greece of dolphins selflessly rescuing humans, but more common were tales of dolphins befriending boys, sometimes with tragic outcomes. The first important one occurred around 200
C.E.
and involved a boy named Dionysios who lived near Iasos. After school during the summer months, Dionysios and his friends went to the nearby beach and swam in the sea. One day, according to one version of the events, a dolphin approached Dionysios, who, though initially cautious, soon lost his fear of the animal. Before long, the dolphin turned up every day after school to meet Dionysios and take him on his back far out into the sea, returning him safely to the beach each time. The dolphin was said to have fallen passionately for the boy, and the relationship attracted great interest from the townsfolk. At first, crowds gathered to watch this amazing sight, but it soon became commonplace.

On one unfortunate day, the dolphin slid too far up on the sand while returning his friend to safety. Dionysios was unable to get the dolphin back into the water, and the dolphin died. The boy was heartbroken. The story eventually reached the ears of Alexander the Great, and he took it as proof that the sea god Poseidon had taken a special interest in Dionysios, and he appointed the boy to be high priest of Poseidon at the temple in Babylon.
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Dionysios's story prompted other such claims, as is often the case with unusual events, one of which again came from the people of Iasos, though it appeared much later than the first.

The boy's name was Hermias, and, like Dionysios before him, he rode on the back of his dolphin far out to sea and was returned safely each time. One day, however, a storm came up suddenly, and Hermias was swept off the dolphin's back and drowned. Plutarch described the subsequent events: "The dolphin took the body and threw both it and itself together on land and would not leave until it too had died, thinking it right to share a death for which it imagined it shared a responsibility." In relating this account in his book
Dolphins: The Myth and the Mammal,
Antony Alpers noted, "This is a good example of the great difference there can be between the things that animals do and the meaning that humans will read into them."
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Alpers did not dispute that the events took place as Plutarch described, simply noted that imputing human motives and emotions to animals was probably going too far. In any case, the people of Iasos commemorated the tragedy by minting coins showing a boy riding a dolphin.

According to Alpers, this next story, the first tale from ancient Rome, is not to be doubted: Two thousand years ago, a young peasant boy lived near Lucrine Lake, a shallow inlet near where the city of Naples now stands. Each day the boy had to walk around the lake to reach his school at Pozzuoli. Living in the lake was a dolphin known locally as Simo, a Greek word meaning "snub-nosed." The boy took to calling, "Simo, Simo," at the water's edge, and, it is said, the dolphin came and ate bread from his hands. Before long, Simo began to ferry the boy across the lake, taking him to school in the morning and then back home in the afternoon. This went on for several years, until one day the boy fell ill and died. According to Pliny, who recorded the events, every morning afterward, the dolphin arrived at the place where he had always met the boy, apparently still looking for him. The dolphin had "a sorrowful air and manifesting every sign of deep affection, until at last, a thing of which no one felt the slightest doubt, it died purely of sorrow and regret."
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Most of what is in this story is probably true, except, as Alpers pointed out, that the dolphin ate bread—very unlikely, although certainly possible, as dolphins will sometimes ingest unusual foods or items. And whether it died of "sorrow and regret" is a matter of interpretation and anthropomorphism. The point here is not to focus on the occasional and probably inevitable anthropomorphism of the storytellers. Instead, this tale and the others I've related reveal a time when close relationships between human and dolphin were not uncommon. The two historical accounts I mention here are just the first of many recorded in ancient Greece and Rome. There were numerous others, and we can even make a connection with similar narratives in modern times.

I'll make that connection with events recorded some two thousand years ago at Hippo, a Roman colonial town on the north coast of Africa, not far from modern-day Tunis, and similar events witnessed just fifty years ago at Opononi, a small town on the north coast of New Zealand.

Pliny the Elder wrote the story of a boy and a dolphin at Hippo, and he said in a letter he wrote to his poet friend Caninius that the tale "is true, though it has all the qualities of a fable."
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The young boys of the town loved to play in the waters, and one game they especially liked was seeing who could be carried farthest out to sea. One boy, bolder than the rest, was far out to sea one day when, to his consternation, a dolphin approached him. The dolphin at first swam around and under him, and then dived, rose under the boy, took him on its back, and swam much farther out. The boy was, quite properly, terrified. But then the dolphin turned around and took the boy safely back to the beach, where the other boys were in awe of what had just happened. Did their friend have supernatural powers? In the days that followed, the dolphin reappeared in the midst of the boys, but they were too timid to get too close. Eventually, the original dolphin rider mounted the dolphin again, and it repeated its previous feat. The dramatic spectacle of the boy riding a wild beast of the sea attracted large crowds of spectators. Unfortunately, managing the crowds of strangers proved to be a financial burden on the town's budget, and sadly the elders secretly decided to do away with the dolphin.

At Opononi in New Zealand, two thousand years later, a young female dolphin, who came to be known locally as Opo, cavorted with young girls and boys in the sea, just like the dolphin at Hippo. Opo seemed to like to be touched and sought out the gentler youngsters for special attention. Jill Baker (a girl at last!) was Opo's favorite, and she would always leave the company of the other children when she entered the water. Although Opo didn't engage in dramatic feats of swimming far out to sea, she did allow Jill, and a few others, to ride her. Two mammal species, separated by ninety-five million years of evolutionary history, playing together, enjoying an extraordinary bond of great simplicity, a rapport that stretches across the ages.

In his survey of the history of dolphins, the eminent anthropologist Ashley Montagu cited the story of Opo and other such contemporary examples, and said, "The so-called myths of the ancients were based on solid facts of observation and not, as has hitherto been supposed, on the imaginings of mythmakers."
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Yes, storytellers often fall to improperly anthropomorphizing. And, yes, some storytellers no doubt embellish their tales. What storytellers don't? But at its core, the connection between humans and dolphins is undeniable and reaches back thousands of years.
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In the early Christian church, images of dolphins represented positive values such as salvation, teachings about grace, the beauty of the human soul. But before many centuries passed, the reverence and respect for dolphins as sacred beasts that was so prominent in ancient Greece and Rome began to fade away. It's not that reverence for the dolphins had been universal in those ancient times. Dolphins were fair game for the hunt in a few places, which was what led Oppian to condemn it in such forceful terms, but among the leaders of civilization and culture, the bond was indeed powerful. However, starting in the second half of the first millennium and into the first half of the second millennium, all that changed. Stories such as the ones you've just read began to wane. As the force of human activity moved to the beat of dominion over the Earth, as natural resources were seen more and more as ours to exploit, rather than protect, dolphins moved from being sacred to being mundane, just another resource to be exploited for our material benefit.

In the early nineteenth century Frédéric Cuvier, younger brother of the great French zoologist Georges Cuvier, noted the dramatic slide in respect dolphins had suffered from ancient to modern times. Dolphins went from being viewed as a "gentle, good-natured and intelligent animal, most responsive to benevolent treatment" to being dismissed as "merely a voracious carnivore, whose ends are solely those of feeding, resting and reproducing, and whose instincts serve no purpose other than the satisfaction of those needs." It is much easier to slaughter animals if you think of them as voracious carnivores rather than gentle, good-natured, and intelligent creatures.

In his 1973 book
The Cosmic Connection
Carl Sagan pondered what our unrestrained slaughter of dolphins and whales told us about ourselves. Noting that there was emerging evidence that dolphins and whales were far more intelligent than most people had thought possible, he said: "They have acted benignly and in many cases affectionately toward us. We have systematically slaughtered them. Little reverence for life is evident in the whaling industry —underscoring a deep human failing." Know Thyself.

A shift in attitude toward dolphins and whales was afoot as Carl was writing those dark words, a gradual stirring of an ancient but long-dormant worldview. As modern scientists began to uncover and document the remarkable abilities of the dolphin mind, the nonscientific public rediscovered the visceral connection with dolphins and whales that the people of ancient Greece and Rome had seen as part of the natural order of things.

Stories of dolphins saving shipwrecked sailors and keeping sharks at bay when swimmers were in trouble once again began to rise in our consciousness. In the early 1970s, the eerily beautiful songs of the humpback whales struck a primordial chord in all but the most hardened listener. Whale-watching tours and swim-with-dolphins programs were in the nascent stages of what has become a multibillion-dollar business. I know from my own experience the profound feeling of being with a "presence" when I am with dolphins. It is almost impossible to put into words. But I think I know what it means:

Know Thyself, each and every one of us. Know Thyself as a species with privileges and responsibilities on this Earth, responsibilities to recognize and honor the inherent value of other species.

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Today, tragically, dolphins and whales are being brutally slaughtered and driven toward extinction by modern and otherwise civilized humans. Despite a brief moratorium on whaling in the mid-1980s, today whaling is still practiced by many countries and territories, including Canada, the commonwealth of Dominica, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Grenada, Indonesia, Japan, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, the Grenadines, and the United States.
Moby-Dick
is an American classic about the brutal practice that was discontinued, though there is one exception: each year, nine indigenous Alaskan communities are permitted to hunt a total of fifty bowhead whales. I'm sharing the scientific and personal experiences I've had with dolphins—these remarkable minds in the water—in the hope that you will become as convinced as I am that they deserve global protection and respect.

S
UMMER
1977.

As I lay in the darkness under oppressively humid tropical heat, I could hear the soft murmur of crickets in the nearby grove of torchwoods; the trees' sweet aroma hung in the air. My simple thatched cabin was dark as pitch; the only light came from a few stars shining through the wooden louvers of the window that overlooked the lagoon just outside. Every few minutes, the constant, soft ratcheting of the crickets was interrupted by another sound:
chuff.
It was way past midnight, and sleep was nowhere near. I'm a night owl anyway, so I'm used to late hours. But this night it wasn't my nocturnal habit that kept me up.
Chuff.
It was eager anticipation.