My photo of a right whale off Puerto Madryn
It may be that I was a
whale in a previous life: such is the intensity of emotion with which I respond
to them. Deepwater pleasure at seeing them; coruscating grief at merely reading
of unfeeling slaughter or their mystifying mass strandings. I remember that
after seeing the film The Whale Rider I had to walk around the block
before I could bring myself under control again. Strange, given that I’ve not
seen them in their massive flesh all that often – mostly Southern right and
Bryde’s whales spy-holing alongside our tour boat in Algoa Bay, also breaching
off the coast of Puerto Madryn, Argentina. Now and then characteristic spouts
spotted off our southern shores.
Naturally I’ve read a fair bit.
Much of the literature is dominated by two ur-texts. The
first is of course the Biblical tale of Jonah being swallowed by a ‘big fish’ and
then, thanks be to God, disgorged again. Trying to endow this gnomic parable
with realism is futile: no whale is known ever to have spat up a human. But this
fanciful depiction of God’s beneficence has been fatal for the whale: it became
the archetypal sea-monster, the Leviathan, all but Satanic for the terror and
disgust its imagery generated in the Western and Christian world. Not, it
should be stressed, in at least some indigenous societies, such as the Inuit, which
regarded the world’s greatest mammals with suitable awe and reverence. The
historical Christian shuddering disdain for this element of the natural world
has much to answer for; it arguably laid an essential foundation for commercial
exploitation.
This is clear from the several pages of literary
quotations that preface the second ur-text, Herman Melville’s whale-sized
novel, Moby-Dick. Many of those quotations are from the Bible: these and
every single subsequent one over a millennium and a half characterise the whale
as the fearsome monster, the savage Leviathan, vengeful, revolting, even as its
oil becomes financially as attractive as gold.
Melville’s 1851 novel – a very strange palimpsest of
texts-within-texts, postmodern a century before postmodernism – is predicated
upon that monstrosity. Though little approaching compassion infects this
hunting story, it’s moot whether Melville didn’t regard his manic, possessed
protagonist Ahab as the greater devil. Moby-Dick the whale is triply
monsterised in being huge, albino, and responsible for taking Ahab’s leg. A
revenge tale, then, as well as one of overweening machoism, brave little men
tackling Leviathan with primitive equipment. Viciously obsessed, Ahab meets
with his almost inevitable fate, going down with the whale. Serves him bloody
well right.
There is nevertheless much cultural wisdom and
psychological depth in Moby-Dick. It works as a powerful foundation-text
in Darren Aronofsky’s 2022 film The Whale, for which Brendan Fraser won
a Best Actor Oscar. (The film has nothing to do with whales as such, but … I’ll
say no more: just watch it!)
Moby-Dick also powerfully underwrites one of the
few Southern African literary texts centred on whales. It’s intriguing that such
works are so sparse. Likewise, there seems to be no comprehensive history of
Southern African whaling, unless there’s some material in Norway, the
Norwegians being largely responsible for setting up the industry on our shores.
Indeed, it’s a Norwegian captain who anchors, so to speak, the whaling quest in
Laurens van der Post’s The Hunter and the Whale (1967). Arguably van der
Post’s best novel, the story also involves the hunt for an especially large
sperm whale (not the more common humpback or right whale). The van der
Post-like narrator Pete (van der Post did claim he’d been out on a whaling
expedition off Durban) promises captain Larsen access to shooting a famous
elephant tusker in return for joining the whale hunt. Like Ahab, however, Larsen
perishes in action – as does, one is left to presume, the harpooned whale.
A century after Moby-Dick, however, attitudes had evidently
shifted. Like virtually all other fauna on the subcontinent, driven to the
brink of extinction by white men’s guns, whales were becoming scarce. Van der
Post’s narrator, as well as other characters, tend to side with the whale in
the struggle, and the whale itself is described quite lovingly in a couple of
van der Post’s more lyrical passages. The whale's spouting is
a shining
poplar of pearl in a mirage of early afternoon flame before it lost its silver
stem in the dark-blue sea, to gather itself up swiftly into a cloud of mist and
dissolve with the same suddenness that it had come.
I thought it one of the most beautiful things I had ever
seen: it reminded me of Tennyson’s description of the arm clothed in white
samite which came out of the black water of Avalon to receive Arthur’s great
sword back into its waters, which I had read two years before. Even today this
whale spout holds place in my heart with the manifestations of nature that I
treasure most.
It would not be long before the economic
bottom fell out of the blubber, oil and baleen market, and the whaling stations
at Durban, Betty’s Bay, Donkergat and elsewhere were abandoned, to become the gaunt
and haunted remnants of touristic whale tours today. Our poet Douglas Livingstone wrote
of the station on Durban’s Bluff:
The old whaling station is
ship-wrecked:
corrugated roofs, zinc walls
flaking;
most of the cataracted panes
smashed;
the sea clean now, the sand still
tarry.
[...]
Intestines, hoses sliding about;
vats bubbling; the crane-chains
clattering
– all that has stilled; the
factory closed,
but always, I think, a bad prospect.
(“Beach Terminal”)
Already we’re heading
towards the kind of sacralising lament exemplified by Heathcote Williams’s Whale
Nation (1988), its photographs interspersed with poetry, and backed by a
more explanatory afterword. Though I wholly identify with Williams’s
sentiments, I find the poetry a bit on the blunt side, some resonant phrases
excepted. There is a certain numbing fascination in his listing of all the uses
to which whale-bone, baleen and blubber-oil was put by Western civilisation,
from propping up dowagers’ boobs to contributing glycerine for bombs.
A better text, though of much the same sympathy, is Philip Hoare’s Leviathan (2008). This is part personal travelogue, part Melville-centred literary criticism, part paean to the bio-society of the whale. His responses to whales appear much like mine: he gives the lie to that old monstrous imagery of Leviathan, in prose that is consistently informative and mellifluously readable.
Heathcote Williams famously also produced a parallel
text, Sacred Elephant. And yet another text that links the greatest land
and sea mammals is Lyall Watson’s Elephantoms (2003). Watson, (in)famous
for his maverick Supernature, claims to have witnessed a Knysna forest
elephant communing through infrasound with a Blue whale (the biggest species of
all but exceedingly rarely seen on our coasts). Biologists assure me that such
communication is highly improbable, the scene most likely invented. Still, the
discovery of such communications, out of normal human hearing but quite
amazing, far-reaching, mysterious, self-evidently complex yet essentially
untranslatable, has revolutionised attitudes towards the value of whales.
Interestingly, one pioneer of whale-song study was Roger Payne, as related in
his book Among Whales (1995). (See also David Rothenberg’s more recent Thousand-Mile
Song.) Roger Payne’s then wife, Katy, went on to adapt their equipment to
record elephant infrasonic conversations (see her book, Silent
Thunder).
Communion of another, also invented nature is the core of
Zakes Mda’s novel, The Whale Caller (2005). Set in Hermanus, it involves
a kind of love-affair between the human ‘whale-caller’ and a Southern right
whale named Sharisa. (There is a ‘whale caller’, apparently, though his
kelp horn serves to summons tourists, not the whale.) It’s not in my view one
of Mda’s better novels, but my colleague Wendy Woodward has made much of it as
an example of more recent trends in granting animals increasingly more dignity,
emotionality, individuality, and agency. Certainly, it shows how far we (bar
some retrograde Norwegians, Russians and Japanese, who hopefully will die out
before the whales do) have come from Moby-Dick.
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| This cover depicts killer whales, which don't actually feature in the novel |
An interesting parallel text is set in a kind of Western Australian equivalent of Hermanus, in Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984). It’s a densely textured portrayal of Angelus, a rather rough little place whose sense of community, such as it is, has historically centred on whaling. One character reads excerpts from an ancestor’s whaling journal, which is roughly contemporaneous with Melville’s account. (Moby-Dick hovers throughout.) In the novel’s present, the last of the whalers, now equipped with big diesel boats, radar and explosive harpoons, are harassed by whale-loving protestors in Greenpeace-style rubber dinghies. While different views are thereby aired, Winton is too canny a writer to portray whalers as unmitigated evil, or the do-gooders as somehow unimpeachable.
The sense of historic community – ‘Whaling is in our blood’ – is often raised as a reason to continue slaughtering animals for products we no longer need. One of the things Winton’s and the other novels highlight, however, is that communities and cultures are ever in flux, subject to vagaries of environment and economics. Moreover, because we are such inventive and mobile creatures, we can shift. Learn different jobs, inhabit different places. Whales, despite inhabiting such vast stretches of ocean, have in some ways a much, much narrower set of options and envelope of conditions within which they can live. May we ever leave them be, to sing the seas in their own unique way.
*****
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