Whaling, Whales and the Human Imagination

by Bernard Unti

	Today's thrills come from watching the great creatures, not hunting them.

In the age of industrial factory ships like Japan’s Nisshin Maru, it is difficult to connect to whaling as something that once fired the human imagination. Yet it did. Herman Melville, who had gone to sea as a whaler, made it the context for an epic work of 19th century American literature, Moby Dick. Even Walt Whitman (who perhaps should have known better) celebrated its exhilaration and manliness in a poem. “I feel the ship’s motion under me, I feel the Atlantic breezes fanning me, I hear the cry again sent down from the mast-head, There—she blows,” Whitman wrote, “I see the harpooner standing up, I see the weapon dart from his vigorous arm.”

Whaling has not been unproblematic for some time, however, and even in the 19th century it attracted the skepticism and wit of distinguished critics. “Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whale-bone and whale oil,” Henry David Thoreau asked, “be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Every creature is better alive than dead… and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.” The journalist Charles Nordhoff was less subtle, calling whaling “an enormous filthy humbug.”

Whatever it meant to the 19th century mind, there is nothing Romantic, nothing poetic about 21st century commercial whaling. Surely Melville would have recoiled at the mean efficiency of the modern whaling apparatus, and Thoreau would have scorned the routinized and outmoded detail of Japan’s annual “scientific” whaling presentation at IWC, with its calibrated measurements, age reckoning, and foetus counts.

No, 21st century commercial whaling is, unfortunately, a case of the worst human instincts, applied to some of the very best manifestations of non-human life on Earth. As the worldwide disapprobation of what Japan, Norway, and Iceland are doing to the world’s whales makes plain, this kind of whaling doesn’t inspire contemporary passions. It inflames them.

Watching, and Waiting

Whale watching is something else. In Madeira, not far from the great Atlantic hunting grounds that once attracted the whaling fleets that filled demand for lamp oil, corset hoops, and more, a different, a burgeoning industry beckons. In the harbor, day after day, hopeful tourists plunk their Euros down for a chance to sail, to look, and to see the marvelous creatures who dwell in these waters.

Among them, we veterans of the now-closed IWC 61 rush to the docks and the catamaran. We are taking to the waters to hunt, too. An early end to the meeting has left us a prospect of finding and seeing the whales and dolphins whose fate rests, we dare to think, with our efforts at IWC and elsewhere. But now—today—there will be no more resolutions, interventions, parleys, or subcommittee reports. We sail out in search of what’s real—a sea alive with life, alive with them.

On this whaling mission, we are all lookouts, and it is not long before someone sings out, “A dolphin.” “Another.” And we watch their movements, flanking ours, pushing alongside of us. They are at play, and so are we.

Then, much later, as we are all worrying aloud that we’ll have to head back to port without seeing one, someone else shouts, “A whale.” It is a Bryde’s whale, and I look. But I also smell her as she spouts, her breath announcing her presence just as surely as her rising body tens of yards away from the boat. We have found our whale, and we are taking her in.

The new passion is for preservation. The new cargo is one of memories. The new bounty is one of the eyes, and of the senses.

Bernard Unti, Ph.D. is senior policy adviser and special assistant to the CEO of The Humane Society of the United States (The HSUS). He is the author of Protecting All Animals, a history of The HSUS, and is currently writing a book on the 19th century animal protection movement.