The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
by Philip Hoare
Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY. $27.99, hardcover, 464 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-197621-6 (2010).
Reviewed by Lee Bumsted
What is it about whales that fascinates us so? What inspires us to travel well offshore in small boats in hopes of spotting them, or getting close enough to smell their exhalations and get a sense of their sheer enormity?
British biographer Philip Hoare became entranced by a pod of humpbacks during a boat trip off Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2001. This first experience of being in the presence of whales recalled for him a childhood zeal for everything cetacean. It also set him on a path to becoming a self-professed “whalehead.”
The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea is Hoare’s multifaceted look at the world’s largest mammals. In this book, he moves between their natural history and the history of human-whale interactions (in which whales generally come out the losers). He folds in many literary references and tales of his time spent getting closer to these hard-to-study creatures. Numerous photos and historical illustrations nicely complement his narrative.
“It is difficult not to address whales in romantic terms,” writes Hoare. “Nothing else represents life on such a scale.”
“Whales exist beyond the normal, beyond what we expect to see in our daily lives,” he continues. “They are not so much animal as geographical; if they did not move, it would be difficult to believe they were alive at all.”
Hoare enthusiastically and sometimes humorously recalls his own whale sightings. He shares the acrobatic breach of a humpback and the unlikely, blocky shape of a sperm whale. A right whale moved ahead of his boat “like a lawnmower, purposefully harvesting the now plankton-rich waters.” His observations will have those of us who have seen whales before remembering our experiences with pleasure; they will have others checking for upcoming whale-watch tour departures.
Among the natural history discussions is one on the longevity of whales. Hoare reports that bowheads may be the most long-lived mammals. A lance tip from the 1890s was recently found in a bowhead caught off Alaska, and eye tissue dating of other bowheads yielded four aged between 135 and 180 years old and another 211 years old.
The impact of whales on human history is carefully detailed. This ranges from how cities such as Provincetown and New Bedford, Massachusetts, grew up around the whaling industry to current-day political struggles over continued harvesting by boats from Japan.
While whales were famously hunted for their oil and baleen through the 19th century, less well known are the products more recently derived from whales and the pressure that put on whale populations. Hoare recounts how Europeans hunted whales in Antarctica early in the 20th century for use in manufacturing nitroglycerine. After World War II, whale meat was used to supplement rationed food in Great Britain. Russians fed whale meat to livestock and turned whale hide into shoe soles in the 1950s. Examples of modern products include NASA’s use of whale oil as a lubricant in rockets, lunar rovers, and the Hubble Space Telescope.
In examining our attraction to whales, Hoare frequently cites passages from Moby-Dick, by the 19th century American writer Herman Melville. He also provides quite a bit of biographical information on Melville. Whether readers find this interesting or tedious may depend on whether they’ve read Moby-Dick.
Some of the most fascinating material comes at the end of the book, when Hoare describes his visit to the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There he has the remarkable opportunity to swim with sperm whales.
“Ahead, taking shape out of the darkness, was an outline familiar from words and pictures and books and films but which had never seemed real; an image I might have invented out of my childhood nightmares, a recollection of something impossible. Something so huge I could not see it, yet which now resolved itself into reality,” he writes of his first in-water encounter. “Its great grey head turned toward me, looking like an upright block of granite, overwhelmingly monumental. Its entirety was my own.”
Philip Hoare captures the glory of whales in his book, which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. He reinforces the devotion of whale fans and is sure to inspire others to join our ranks.
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