“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation… There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”
Herman Melville first published his epic American novel under the title The Whale, in London in October of 1851. A month later, with several hundred changes and revisions, the book I know and love was published in New York under the title Moby Dick.
I have often contemplated my own personal passion towards the sea and the creatures that live on and within it. As a young man I was captured by such stories of daring, of exotic peoples working and living together with the sole purpose of chasing the ever-elusive leviathan. In my imagination, a Nantucket sleigh-ride would have to be one of the wildest rides a man could possibly experience. I heard the call of the sea early in my living, and of course it would follow that my love of whales was born from that call.
Later reading brought me to authors like Charles Melville Scammon, who wrote about the wild and wily California gray whale, known in his day as the “devil-fish”. In 1874 his book Marine Mammal of the North-western coast of North America was published. Like Moby Dick, the book was a complete financial failure, and both books came to be known as the amazing works they were only long after their author’s deaths.
Scammon was the first whaling captain to exploit California gray whales in Ojo de Liebre Lagoon (also known as Scammon’s Lagoon). In 1857 he brought the brig Boston into the lagoon and caught, killed, and processed 20 California gray whales. In the 1859-60 whaling season he was the first to exploit gray whales in San Ignacio Lagoon, the very lagoon that we find ourselves whale watching in today. In a matter of only a few short years the California gray whale was commercially extinct, and on the brink of physical extinction. Only the intervention of the Civil War gave these majestic whales some respite from human exploitation.
Ironically Scammon was also a keen observer and great naturalist, and was amongst the very first people to predict the demise, and possible extinction, of whales all over this watery world. In a great twist of fate, the whale louse that lives and breeds only on the California gray whale bears his name in its scientific designation; Cyamus scammoni!
All of this history was floating about in my head this morning, as I had the distinct pleasure and privilege to be amongst these great animals. Time and perhaps a little wisdom has allowed most of humankind to come to realize the magnificence of the living creature, as opposed to the commercial value of the dead carcass. As I watched my fellow shipmates scream, laugh, and cry out loud whenever a mother whale would bring her calf near us, I sang quietly to the wind that evermore it should be so. The lives of every soul on board the National Geographic Sea Lion have been made richer in the presence of gray whales, and how much poorer the entire world would be should we ever lose sight of that beauty and allow it to be extinguished.
As for the whales themselves, whether they have chosen to forget or to forgive our human trespasses against them is something worth contemplating…
