Leviathan or The Whale

ecological attack, as if their own sonar were detecting destruction. Ishmael’s cetacean utopia looks further away than ever. Stressed and pressurized by our relentless encroaching on its environment, the whale can ill afford to suffer further sustained periods of active pursuit, although that is exactly what it faces. Since 1987, when the international moratorium eventually took effect (with exceptions for aboriginal subsistence hunts for Inuit populations in Greenland, Russia and Alaska, Makah native peoples in Washington state, and the Caribbean residents of St Vincent and the Grenadines), an estimated twenty-five thousand great whales have died. Japan alone has killed, under its Antarctic Research Programme, JARPA, and its North Pacific equivalent, JARPN, 7,900 minke whales, 243 Bryde’s whales and 140 sei whales, as well as 38 sperm whales, which it resumed hunting in 2000. In 2006 JARPA II took 1,073 minke whales–known to their hunters as ‘cockroaches of the sea’–and added fifty fin whales to the tally. Each year Japan kills twenty thousand smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises not covered by the moratorium.
    Although this meat appears on open sale in Japanese markets, conservationists claim that much of it is stockpiled due to diminishing public taste, or ends up as pet food. Some is sold as meat from baleen whales, which are less susceptible than toothed whales to contamination in the food chain, although in fact it is from odontocetes. The value of JARPA’s research is challenged by other scientists, who consider that it has produced no data that could not have been gathered from non-lethal methods. As with Norway and Iceland, which hunt minke whales quite openly, other, cultural motives are at work. Like Europe, Japan claims whaling as part of its heritage for thousands of years–historically encouraged by rulers who forbade the eating of land animals.
    Japan also points out that aboriginal whale hunts take place in American waters every year; what is the difference between that and their own claim to cultural precedence in coastal towns? Humpbacks are still hunted on the Caribbean island of Bequia, to techniques learned by a Bequian fisherman engaged by a Provincetown whaler in the 1870s. In 1977 it was said that the United States was ‘embarrassed’ by the continuing Inuit hunt of bowheads, of which fewer than two thousand survived. ‘They push vigorously for smaller quotas every year, and nag the Japanese and Russians…remorselessly. Unfortunately, one of the whales closest to extinction, the bowhead, is hunted exclusively by Americans.’ While the Inuit had long traditions of sustenance and religion associated with the whales, now that they were ‘rich enough in oil money to buy motor boats, powerful rifles and explosive harpoons’, whale hunting ‘has ceased being a ritual or a means of survival, and has become a sport’.
    Since Japan was encouraged and even assisted in post-war whaling by the west–whale meat was served in school lunches until the 1970s–it irks to be lectured on the subject. ‘It’s not because Japanese want to eat whale meat,’ Ayako Okubo told the
New York Times
. ‘It’s because they don’t like being told not to eat it by foreigners.’ Some contest that it was actually America’s overuse of pressure on the Japanese–and the moral weight of the environmental lobby–that pushed Japan into its intransigent position. Indeed, although America was highly vocal in the anti-whaling campaign of the 1970s (presenting a proposal to a 1972
    United Nations conference on the environment to ban all whaling for ten years), things might have been very different if, like Russia, Norway and Japan, the US had maintained a whaling presence in the post-war years. If its industry had not failed in the late nineteenth century, there might not have been the political impetus to ban international whaling. Perhaps this is the true legacy of
Moby-Dick
.
    It is true that stocks are recovering from the nadir of the mid-twentieth century. Numbers of humpback and minke whales are increasing in southern and northern oceans, and the southern right whale,
Eubalæna australis
, is breeding successfully off the coasts of South Africa and South America, raising hopes that its genes may reinvigorate its cousin, the North Atlantic right whale. As Richard Sabin and field researchers such as Colin Speedie note, fin whales are seen in greater numbers in the Bay of Biscay and off the coast