The Sea Inside

the islands they called Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, a place shaped as much out of memory as from rock. To them, whales and dolphins were
taniwha
, shape-shifting spirits, and Jack was one in a long line of such animals to assist the human race. In the founding myth of their nation, a young man, Paikea, is nearly drowned by his jealous brother before the whale Tahoa appears and carries him on its back to Aotearoa. And while the West still saw cetaceans as monsters at the edge of the world, as living islands or spouting sea dragons, here at the real end of the world – according to occidental projections – their true nature was better known.
    As a maritime people, the M ā ori were familiar with whales and birds and their movements. Attuned to the changing colour of the water and the direction of the prevailing winds, they navigated using their bodies; men even used their swinging testicles to sense the sea’s swell. The Polynesians’ first migrations followed those of cetaceans – what their Anglo-Saxon seafaring comrades called
hwælweg
, ‘the whale’s roads’. Even their physical attributes seemed to reflect one another: the islanders’ broad, muscular bodies – so valued in the rugby players that they export – provided the power to paddle their canoes, while generous body fat sustained them, like blubber, on those long voyages.
    To ally oneself to a whale is not so strange; some might say it is perfectly reasonable. Throughout history humans have celebrated their animal affiliations. Earl Siward of Northumbria, an eleventh-century warrior who carried a raven banner and defeated Macbeth in battle, claimed descent from a polar bear; his father’s ears were said to be distinctly ursine. In my
Children’s Hereward
, a book I was presented with at primary school ‘for pleasing progress’, the flaxen-haired, handsome young Saxon hero fights a mighty white bear, ‘said to be of magic birth, and … related to the great Earl Siward himself’, which is kept caged in a courtyard along with other wild beasts. When the bear escapes, kills a dog and threatens a terrified maiden, Hereward leaps from his horse and, to his own astonishment, slays the animal. The medieval world entertained such cross-breeds: men with stags’ heads or trees growing out of their mouths, women with fishes’ tails; chimera caught between magic and science. Even evolution, in its fluidity, appeared to allow for these hybrids: witness the thylacine, or Darwin’s speculation that the fish-eating bears of the north-west Pacific coast might become entirely aquatic, ‘till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale’, although he later regretted his flight of fancy.
    The scientist was only, if unconsciously, reflecting the beliefs of Northwestern Indians, for whom the world was torn between terror and beauty and who lived on the edge of the sea because they found the land more fearful. Their carved wooden figures, preserved in Vancouver’s airy Museum of Anthropology – where totem poles reach up to the glass roof and threaten to burst out of it like redwood trees – might as well be anatomical displays in the Hunterian. Outsized otters and mash-ups of whales and wolves blur reality with unsettling amalgams of claws and coiled tails. In one fantastical carving, multiple dorsal fins poke out of one lupine body, as if there were six whales inside, trying to break out. Meanwhile, over them all hovers the trickster Raven, mating with an oyster and delighted to discover, nine months later, that it had spawned mewling men to be let loose on the world.
    The vast Pacific, which still seems so remote to the modern-day Western world, invoked such magical animal–human affinities. Its aboriginal cultures even seemed similar, as they reached from one coast to another. On a boundless, restive sea belied by its name, anything could become anything else. As Jonathan Raban wrote in
Passage to Juneau
, long before the white men arrived at the north-west Pacific shore – in journeys that connected Cook and Vancouver to the Antipodes – the native people had known what to expect from the flotsam washed up on their shores: bits of ships studded with nails that indicated an alien technology, much as if a modern beachcomber had found parts of a flying saucer.
    The M ā ori’s arrival on Aotearoa only underlined the importance of its animals, especially whales, in a land that lacked any native mammals. Like Tasmania, these were