Leviathan or The Whale

determined to free him’. It was reported that Namu’s family had come to visit him, and that he could recognize them by their markings and scars.
    Through individual animals such as Namu, whales became emblems of a new age. In the 1960s the American scientist Dr John C. Lilly made controversial claims about cetacean intelligence which led him to an equally extraordinary declaration. ‘We need a new ethic,’ he wrote,
    new laws based on those ethics which punish human beings for encroachment on the life-styles and the territory of other species with brains comparable to and larger than ours. We need modifications of our laws so that the Cetacea can no longer become the property of individuals, corporations, or governments. Even as respect for human individuals is growing in our law, so must the respect for individual whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

    Dr Lilly, whose plea echoed Henry Beston’s of the 1920s as well as the new age ethos of his own time, went so far as to state that dolphins were ‘probably quite as intelligent as man but in a strange and alien way, as a consequence of their life in the sea’, and that whales had ‘a complex inner reality or mental life’. However, his fellow scientists regarded his investigations with a degree of scepticism, not least because Dr Lilly was also experimenting with LSD in his researches into human consciousness. He also went on to advise on the making of the 1973 film,
Flipper
.
    With growing awareness of the whales’ plight and the apparent ineptitude of the International Whaling Commission, conservationists began to insist that they were entitled to comment ‘on the workings of a group that seemed to have decided that the world’s whales were theirs to parcel out’. Yet by the time the horror of whaling truly came to the public’s attention–their eyes opened by organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and acrimonious protests such as the throwing of blood over Japanese delegates to the IWC as well as direct action on the ocean itself–it was too late. The cetacean population of the world had been hunted, harpooned, blown up, butchered, ground down and consumed in a manner unrivalled by any other exploitation of the earth’s living resources.
    The industry itself had long since ground to a halt by the time the eco-warriors had won their battle; a truly Pyrrhic victory, despite the piecemeal protection of the species: in 1966 all humpback whaling was banned; in 1976 fin whales, and in 1978 sei whales were similarly protected. In the last decades of unrestricted whaling, the Russians and Japanese–who had been forced to turn on the smallest rorqual, the minke whale–resumed sperm whale hunting in the North Pacific, where, from 1964 to 1974, they managed to kill a quarter of a million animals. It was as if, in advance of the end they knew must come, they exerted themselves all the more in the effort.
    It was in 1982, in the unlikely setting of the Metropole Hotel in Brighton–a few hundred yards from the town’s Aquarium and its performing dolphins–that the IWC instituted its worldwide moratorium, delayed to allow the whaling nations time to comply. Yet the whale remained a victim of international politics, for all its statelessness: threatened by deafening noise pollution which causes ear damage, fatally undermining a sperm whale’s most important sense; infected by chemical pollution which generations pass on through mothers’ milk to their calves; snared by fishing lines in a frantic, drowning death as bycatch kills three hundred thousand cetaceans every year.
    Whales swallow plastic debris by mistake; the thinning ozone layer induces skin cancer; warming oceans have sent their food sources in retreat; climate change has overtaken their ancient knowledge of their environment and its resources. All the while, they move from territory to territory, in and out of legislative areas and through high seas beyond any conserving principle or responsibility, yet forever subject to human activity, wherever they go (even as my own transatlantic movements scar the sky, sign-writing my environmental sins in the air).
    There is no escape. Sometimes it seems whales are almost pathetically condemned to victimhood. Once they were scared into submission as the harpoon was applied; fed the furnaces with their own scraps; even supplied their own oil to clean up afterwards, as if to apologise for the mess. Now they are early warning systems of