Leviathan or The Whale

have religion, do they believe in us? In Melville’s counter-bible, Ahab’s blasphemous pursuit of Moby Dick ends in an apocalyptic, three-day chase. Driven to the edge of his mania, he plunges his harpoon into the animal’s side–‘
Thus
, I give up the spear!’–only for the rope to loop around his neck, ‘and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone’. Ahab is last seen lashed to the whale’s white side, as if crucified, his lifeless arm beckoning to the rest to follow him into watery oblivion. Then the animal turns on the
Pequod
and stoves in the ship, sinking her and all her crew. The entire human cargo of Melville’s story disappears, leaving the surface as if man had never existed, ‘and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago’. Ishmael alone survives–clinging to a coffin made for Queequeg–to be picked up by a passing whale-ship, ‘that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan’.
    But what most commentators neglect to note is that there is another survivor from Melville’s book: the whale itself. And if any animal were to evolve its own religion, what better animal than one that, for all its trials and tribulations, remains an immortal, omniscient power, a lingering shape in the ocean, beyond all human comprehension and physical dimension, forever spinning into space.

XIII
The Whale Watch

    Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
    Henry David Thoreau,
Walden

    At Macmillan Wharf, the boat is ready for her first whale watch of the day. Dennis Minsky, the naturalist, is looking over yesterday’s survey, photocopied forms clipped to a board. He brushes his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair and smooths his moustache. Today he will compile another sheaf of data to be duly processed, pieces in a jigsaw that will never be completed.
    Captain Mark Delumba stubs out his cigarette in a used coffee cup, then sets a course that is always the same but ever changing. As we lose sight of the Pilgrim Monument to thick mist, the sun disappears; all sound is muffled as the land falls away to the sound of a foghorn. We are the pioneers of the day; in our watery tracks the other boats will follow, bearing a mixture of children and parents, lovers and loners, the lost and the found, all looking for something.

    It is a familiar sequence: the guano-spotted breakwater surmounted by heraldic cormorants and a lounging harbour seal, followed by a procession of lighthouses which mark our leaving of land’s end: Long Point, where the sandy spit drops abruptly to one hundred and forty feet; Wood End, where a satellite of Provincetown once stood; and Race Point, where the water turns rough close to the deceptive green shallows of the shore. Vessels are often turned back here; to make it this far is an achievement. In the bay, the sea may be merely ruffled by the wind. Beyond the point, it can throw our hundred-foot boat about like a baby’s bath-time toy.
    The wind picks up as we pass into the open ocean. The depth gauge falls to eighty, seventy, sixty feet, indicating the rising presence of Stellwagen Bank below us, its shape a submerged echo of the Cape. This underwater plateau, an Atlantic Serengeti, is the epicentre of the food cycle that summons the whales, animals as migratory as any bird in your garden, Dennis tells the passengers.
    It is a striking comparison: the airy bones of a flock of swallows, and the oil-rich bodies of a school of whales. Both travel equally vast distances, and this summer the returning whales are doing well. Sixty-eight cow-calf pairs have been identified, adding to some two thousand known individual humpbacks, testament to the wealth of these waters. None the less, they remain endangered: these animals’ own ancestors were harpooned by whaling ships in the last century, and some may yet become targets themselves.
    As the sea-bed is warmed by the sun, sand eels or lances wriggle out of their burrows towards the light. On the upper deck, Dennis shows his audience a rubber version of the same fish while his assistant holds up a series of instructive but rather heavy boards showing them what they might expect to see. The children squeal as Dennis passes the fish around, followed by a tiny specimen jar of sea water containing countless minute copepods. His final exhibit is an ancient