A Whale For The Killing (13 page)

Bitter words... bitter, and unfair; but I had lost my capacity for objectivity and was ruled, now, by irrational emotions. I was no longer willing, or perhaps not able, to understand the people of Burgeo; to comprehend them as they really were, as men and women who were also victims of forces and circumstances of whose effects they remained unconscious. I had withdrawn my compassion from them, in hurt and ignorance. Now I bestowed it all upon the whale.

AS WITH SO MANY ASPECTS of the life of the fin whale, so it is with their intimate and personal relationships—we know almost nothing about the subject. We have never seen them in the act of making love. No man has ever witnessed the birth of one. We do not even know with any certainty how long the gestation period is; how often a female gives birth; how old she is at sexual maturity; or even how she manages to suckle her young under water.

Examination of foetuses taken from dead finners suggests that the young are born in early spring, perhaps in March or April. At any rate, this is presumed to be the case amongst finners who live in the North Atlantic. Because late-term foetuses have only a very thin blubber layer, and therefore not much insulation, some biologists believe the young must be born in warm southern waters, perhaps in the mysterious region near the Sargasso Sea. Other cetologists are equally positive that, because of the quantity and extreme richness of the mother’s milk (it is ten times richer than that of a Jersey cow), baby fins can produce enough internal heat to enable them to survive even in far northern waters. These men suggest that the young are born near the edge of the arctic ice pack. But the fact is that nobody knows.

Again basing their conclusions on examination of dead foetuses, biologists surmise that the gestation period is between ten and twelve months and they think that, at birth, young finners must be eighteen to twenty feet in length and weigh nearly two tons! The growth rate after birth seems to be equally fantastic. Avidly guzzling at its mother’s twin breasts, the young whale is thought to grow to a length of about forty-five feet, and a weight of perhaps twenty tons, during a nursing period of six to eight months. After that its growth slows. It apparently takes at least six and probably as many as eight years for the youngsters to reach puberty, by which time the males—always somewhat smaller than their mates—may be sixty feet long and the females about sixty-five. Although sexual maturity seems to come relatively early, there is new evidence suggesting that finners are not fully grown until about the age of thirty, by which time a female may be seventy-five feet long and weigh as much as ninety tons. Until recently, science thought the finner’s lifespan was rather brief—perhaps twenty or thirty years. But during the last few years a method of ageing baleen whales, by counting the number of concentric growth rings in their horny ear plugs, has been developed and it now seems certain that, left unmolested, a blue or a fin can expect to surpass three score years and ten with ease. In fact, the baleen whales may be the most long-lived of all mammals, including man.* And since they are preyed upon by no natural enemies in adulthood, except, of course, for us, and appear to be singularly free from fatal diseases, they are probably one of the very few non-human forms of life that nature would permit to die of old age, if man did not intercede.

* Probably we will never know what the “normal” lifespan of any of the great whales really was. Because the oldest were also the biggest, they were prime targets of harpooners in the modern catchers. So thorough was the hunt for the big ones that, since 1950,
almost no fully mature rorquals of any species have been taken.
Few, if any, are left alive. However, scientists recently examined the ear plug of one of the last really large finners, which had been killed half a century ago (the plug had been kept in preservative). They estimated its age as between eighty and ninety years when a harpoon ended its life.

It is my belief that, until they are sexually mature, the young remain in company with their parents as part of the family group—the pod. Unhappily, it is during this youthful period of relative inexperience that they are most vulnerable to the whalers, and catch records show that at least half the fin whales killed in recent years never even had a chance to mate and so help perpetuate their kind. Today, as we hunt them toward extinction, the family pods are almost always small; however, records from earlier whaling days show that fin families often numbered as many as eight individuals.

We know nothing about their courtship or even how the young whales find their mates; but we can guess that both events used to take place during the periodic assemblies when all the families which occupied a given portion of the ocean came together for a while. Tales of such concentrations are common in the old records although none have been reported in North Atlantic waters during the past forty years.

Today the few remaining fin whale families are so widely scattered that a young finner may have to wait many years before encountering a potential mate. This is the more deeply tragic because finners seem to be strictly monogamous. There is nothing to indicate that a sexually mature daughter ever produces young while she remains in the family pod, or that a widowed female will mate again except with an unattached male. Polygamy, which is the rule among sperm whales, has helped that nation to partly hold its own against our depredations. But the practice of monogamy among the finners may prove to be a luxury their decimated species cannot afford.

The love-making of the fin may always remain a secret, and I for one will not regret it; let them keep their tender intimacies well hidden. However, this we do know: the bonds between a mated pair are of legendary tenacity; and if this be not love, then love is nothing. Whalers have long been aware of this, and have bloodily profited from the knowledge. They knew that if they could harpoon the female in a pod, her mate would remain by her, so completely reckless of the risk that he all too often joined her in death.

The reverse is not always true. A female will abandon her endangered mate if she is pregnant or has a calf in tow. However, if she is not driven by the need to protect the next generation, she too will often remain with a dying mate until the bombs explode deep in her own vitals.

I knew one old Scots gunner who in his day had killed more than two thousand whales but who had never overcome his revulsion at striking a female of the rorqual tribe.

“We never wanted to know too much about them,” he explained. “It was too much like murder as it was. I think if I’d had the Celtic gift of ‘sight’ and could have looked into the minds of those beasts, I’d have had to give up the sea and go ashore for good. There’re times when too much knowledge can stand in a man’s way.”

THE DISASTROUS EVENTS of Sunday, coupled into the bargain with the discovery that the whale was a female who might very well be pregnant, made it even more urgent that I obtain help. I decided I would have to follow through on my earlier decision and at ten o’clock on Monday I sent the following telegram to the Canadian Press head office in Toronto:

SEVENTY-FOOT WHALE WEIGHING ABOUT EIGHTY TONS TRAPPED LARGE SALTWATER POND BURGEO SINCE JANUARY
21
STOP POND FORMS NATURAL AQUARIUM HALF BY HALF MILE DIMENSIONS ALLOWING WHALE CONSIDERABLE FREEDOM MOVEMENT STOP DURING FIRST FIVE DAYS LOCAL SPORTS USED WHALE AS TARGET HIGH-POWERED RIFLES AND STILL CONTINUE HARASSMENT WITH SPEEDBOATS STOP HAVE PREVAILED RCMP HALT SHOOTING BUT FEARFUL OTHER DANGERS STOP THIS IS FIRST GREAT WHALE EVER REPORTED SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES PROVIDING ABSOLUTELY UNEQUALLED POSSIBILITIES FOR STUDY BUT URGENTLY REQUIRE ASSISTANCE PROTECT ANIMAL AND ORGANIZE FEEDING PROGRAM STOP WHALE RAPIDLY LOSING WEIGHT OTHERWISE APPEARS GOOD CONDITION IS TOLERANT HUMAN BEINGS DESPITE PERSECUTION STOP FOR FURTHER DETAILS PHONE ME BURGEO.

I was hardly sanguine enough to believe this sparse account would set the media world afire; I only hoped it would be of enough interest to the press and radio people so they would call back for more information, out of which they might make a story that would stir
someone
in the outside world to action. Consequently, Claire and I were flabbergasted when we switched on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s noon report of world and national news and heard my account of the trapped whale already being headlined.

Luck, which until then had run so heavily against her, seemed to have veered in the whale’s favour, and for a reason which we could not have imagined.

Because of our long absence away from Canada, we had not been aware of a story which had been running for many weeks about a pod of white whales (relatively small, porpoise-like, toothed whales) which became trapped by an early freeze-up in a long inlet on the Arctic Coast near Inuvik, a small community near the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Unable to escape to the open sea beneath fifty miles of new ice, the seventeen whales in the pod were at first able to keep a breathing space open by their own efforts. But as the weather grew colder and their little patch of open water inexorably contracted, their situation became critical.

The plight of these little whales roused great interest in Inuvik, and a committee was formed to try and save them. By early January, the ice had closed in so completely that the whales only had a strip of open water forty feet long by twenty wide in which they could surface. The Inuvik committee had flown in power saws with which to keep the breathing hole open and the battle to save the white whales had become a national cause.

On that same balmy Sunday when the trapped finner at Burgeo, some six thousand miles to the southeast, was being harried by sportsmen in motorboats, a full-scale arctic blizzard was sweeping into the Inuvik region, sending the temperature plunging to 40° below zero and preventing anyone from reaching the inlet where the white whales were trapped. On Monday, even as my telegram was clicking into the Canadian Press office in Toronto, a wire was on its way to that office from Inuvik, bearing the news that the breathing hole had frozen over during the night and the white whales had perished.

The tragic conclusion to the Inuvik story and the breaking of the Burgeo story appeared on the desks of news editors almost simultaneously and the editors were not slow to make the transposition from one story to the other. As Monday wore on, the telephone circuits linking Burgeo with the outer world began to overload to the point of collapse with calls from radio stations, newspapers and wire services, all seeking amplification of the brief CBC report. The young woman who operated the radio relay station at Hermitage had to perform superhuman feats to keep communications open. I never did know her name; but later on, after a particularly hectic night during which she exhausted herself on the whale’s behalf, she so far departed from protocol as to call me personally and, in a voice tearful with fatigue, assure me she would continue to do everything she could to keep the line functioning “so that poor beast has got a chance.”

The media demands prevented me from visiting the whale on Monday, but Danny Green kept me posted. “She’s swimming as smart as ever,” he reported by phone. “Right quiet, too, and blowing stronger than yesterday. The quare thing though is t’other whale. He was right off the cove all the time we was to the Pond, and the Hann boys says he was there every toime they went in and out. Constable Murdoch and me watched for a good while, and here’s the quarest thing: both them whales was spouting right together; and both was sounding together, though they was half a mile apart and never could have seen each other. Maybe ’tis foolish, but I believes they’s a pair and they talks somehow. You say the one inside’s a she? Well, bye,
I
says the one outside’s a he!”

ALTHOUGH THE NOISES made by the smaller, toothed whales, as they are used for sound ranging and echo location, have been studied, we have barely begun to investigate how these complicated sounds are used for communication. That they
are
so used is not in doubt. The studies on dolphins of Dr. John C. Lilly, while not as conclusive as some orthodox scientists would wish, have made this point. Lilly, and those who have worked with him, have shown that dolphins possess intelligence—alien to ours as it must be—which is nevertheless worthy of comparison with ours; and that these relatively (as compared to the rorquals) primitive little whales can not only exchange complex information but can also transmit to one another rich emotional feelings to a degree unsurpassed by any non-human animal of which we have any knowledge.*

* See
Man and Dolphin,
1961, and
The Mind of the Dolphin,
1967, by Dr. John C. Lilly.

As yet we can only guess at the communicatory capabilities of the rorquals and other great whales. Until two decades ago it was actually believed by science that most, if not all, the baleen whales were completely dumb! Although they had been hunted for centuries, apparently no man had ever heard one of them utter a single sound. However, the use of supersensitive hydrophones (designed to eavesdrop on enemy submarines) has recently resulted in the astonishing discovery that the rorquals are amongst the most “talkative” of living beings. The range, complexity and frequency of their outpourings is so great that the few scientists who have studied rorqual sounds admit to being completely baffled when it comes to interpreting, or understanding, their modes, purposes or meanings. Some of the weirdly melodious sequences may very well be music in the highest sense of the word. Other incredibly complex combinations of high-frequency clicks and whistling sounds are uncommonly like high-speed communication codes. It may be a long time before we crack these codes, if indeed we ever do. In the meantime, anybody with an open mind who listens to underwater recordings of the humpback whale, for instance, will find it extraordinarily difficult to resist the conclusion that these rorquals can and
do
communicate with each other on levels of content and efficiency which we may have reason to envy.* As to
what
they have to say to each other, we have only the faintest of clues. Still, we can be reasonably confident that they are not just talking for the sake of hearing the sound of their own voices. They seem far too intelligent for that.

* Songs of the Humpback Whale, recorded by Dr. Roger S. Payne, is available on Capital Records.

Whale talk needs no electronic aids in order to span great distances. Water is a much better conductor of sound than is air, and even with our relatively inefficient hearing, we can listen in to fin whales talking underwater, with their low-frequency ranges, at distances of up to thirty-five miles! There is strong reason to believe that some of the great whales can communicate with each other when they are many hundreds of miles apart, and I know one scientist who suspects that whale “talk” may be transmitted right across ocean basins through peculiar “carrier corridors” of water deep in the oceans. The exotic properties of these corridors have only recently been discovered by men, and they are now being exploited for military purposes so that not much has been said about the matter publicly. My friend, who occasionally works for the U.S. Navy, is convinced that whales know about these global communication channels, and may use them for “long distance” calls, free of any tolls.