We're having a whale of a time!

4th September. 11. AM.

Things are looking up. Most of the sickies on board (of which I count myself one) are now starting to ripen into a pale shade of normal, except poor old Ester, the dutch camera-operator, who is still feeling terrible. I’m not sure if her current assignment, to film an item on sea-sickness, was itself a sick joke or not ….Lex?

Outside the sun in shining, which boosts all our spirits, and the wind blows us along at a steady 9 knots. The ship is in full sail.

Now comes an announcement in Dutch over the seldom used intercom. As I look up everyone rushes from their seats and disappears out of the long room at full speed. Is there a problem? an escape drill? Someone overboard?

I also rush outside, a little behind. People are crowded on the starboard side, peering into the horizon excitedly. A whale has been spotted shooting its load of sea water 20 feet high in to air. It is too far away to see its body, but the excitement on people’s faces was almost as good.

Whales are descended from hippopotamus-like ancestors which once roamed the land, about 50 million years ago. Some of them returned to the seas, their nostrils gradually migrating over the generations up their faces to become blowholes. Meanwhile their legs were lost in a process of evolutionary tidying up, now redundant for creatures that swim in the gravity lean environment of the seas.

Giant eagles, top predators of the Eocene period, are thought to have provided the motive, chasing these creatures that took refuge in the seas. Gradually evolution rewarded those best adapted to the safer environment, so that today, millions of years later, we share the world with whales.

When Darwin’s set off on his Beagle voyage (1831) whale hunting was just starting to become big business. Huge fleets set out from ports such as Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast, pioneered by entrepreneurs like The Rev William Scoresby the Younger (1789 - 1857), whose theology compelled him to hunt this animal to fulfill God’s purpose…

“Like the rest of the lower animals, the whale was designed by Him who “created great whales and every living creature that moveth” to be subject to man: and therefore when attacked by him it perishes by its simplicity. Instead of repelling his attacks it generally dives at once to an immense depth, where …. it becomes so exhausted that, on its return to the surface of the sea, it becomes an easy prey."

Hunting whales made men like Scoresby very rich. Every aspect of a whale’s anatomy seemed purpose built for use by humans – from the bones that were of an ideal elasticity for making women’s corsets to the waxy-white-jelly like substance found in a sperm whale’s head used for making soap and cosmetics. So sought after were these magnificent creatures that by 1880, thanks to the success of British and American whaling fleets, as many as 300,000 sperm whales had been slaughtered, more than 25% of all stocks estimated to be in the sea.

But Darwin’s revelations concerning the origin of species suggested that other creatures were not expressly put on the Earth by God for exploitation by man. Rather, humans have themselves evolved out of other lineages from species that come and go as environments change.
His theory has triggered a most powerful change of mind-sets in a relatively short space of time.

So revolutionary was this new philosophical framework that nowadays people’s admiration for the whale, as demonstrated by the rush to the deck by all those on board the Stad Amsterdam only a few minutes ago, has changed almost completely from subjugation to admiration.
Today’s final word goes to the leader of an Eskimo tribe in Siberia, a culture that has learned over time to live sustainably side by side with the glorious whale.

“There are many wonderful animals, but whales are best of all. As they pass by your skin boat, great and quiet, you immediately come to understand your place on the Earth, and you become warm inside."

Nikolai Gal Gaugye, Sireniki, (1994)