The Sea Inside

whale swam up the Hudson as far as 57th Street. It seemed to Ihimaera to have come up ‘that dirty big black primordial river’ to see him, as one emissary to another. ‘I have never believed that the M ā ori world stops when you leave the country,’ he told me, ‘nor have I ever believed that the interconnectedness – that interface as you call it – stops simply because it’s dysfunctional now on the human side. Do whales have ancient memories? Sure they do.’ The New York whale represented all the whales that had been so important to his people; it was a symbol of the ineluctable past, the present and the future.
    Orphan or guardian, Pelorus Jack was last seen in 1912, and probably died that year of old age, although some suspected that a visiting fleet of Norwegian whalers had harpooned him. Nowadays his legend is reduced to a company logo for the ferry line, a cute dolphin leaping over a wave in the shape of the national fern leaf. There is no need for cetacean guides now. As our ship reaches the narrow fjords of South Island, where a Nordic whaler would feel at home, it steers to signals bounced from unseen satellites. The tree-clad slopes plunge straight into the sea. It might almost be a pretty scene, with its fluttering yachts, were it not for the sense that the cliffs are closing in, as if to squeeze us in their grasp.
    From the deck below me, I hear sheep bleating, caged in a truck.
    At the end of Queen Charlotte Sound stands the town of Picton, itself a former whaling port. The ferry inches into dock, and I step out onto the street and walk over to the railway platform. The rackety train leaves on the dot of one, rattling through green valleys studded with vineyards. The last carriage is an open-sided observation car; I feel like a character from the Wild West as I lean out into the wind. We pass salt flats blushed pink by algae and sheep grazing in fertile pastures, negotiating the narrow corridor formed by the Southern Alps to the west, and the open Pacific to the east. Forced ever further south by their twin wildernesses, we arrive at Kaikoura. This former railway town was once busy processing sheep. Now it advertises its new fortune in a punning sign over the old ticket office: the Whale Way Station. But a wobbly horizon says no more boats today.
    In a bar on the town’s main street at what he calls beertime, I meet Bill Morris, who has driven all the way from Dunedin to talk whales. He’s tall, in his twenties; his hair stands up in tufts from sleeping in his camper van. We climb into the front seats, with his clothes and guitars piled in the back, and drive down to the headland.
    The landscape is so sharp and bright and brutal that it’s as if I’d administered eyedrops. At low tide, the plateau of rock is covered with seaweed of every shape and colour, a vivid herbaceous border of bladder-wrack and coral-like fans. Bill and I walk out to the water’s edge, through swathes of bull kelp laid flat like a felled forest. New Zealand fur seals loll, their flashing eyes daring us to get closer. Their name,
Arctocephalus forsteri
, commem-orates Georg Forster, who with his father Johann Reinhold Forster took Banks’s place as naturalists on Cook’s second voyage in the 1770s. Georg Forster brought back a sketch of what he called sea bears, an augury of Darwin’s confusion, as if they’d fused their paws into flippers and taken the plunge into the sea. By naming the beast Forster laid it open to its fate, as Paterson had done for the thylacine, as the
Discovery
scientists would do for the whales of the Southern Ocean. In just one season in 1824, eighty thousand fur seal pelts were taken from South Island. Their numbers remain a fraction of what they once were.
    Back on dry land Bill shows me a lonely, pink-painted wooden hut with a tin roof. Whale ribs are scattered around its stoop; its foundations stand on vertebrae. Just as whales brought its first people here, this country’s foundation, as far as the West was concerned, lay in whaling. This tiny cottage was once part of the station established here in 1842 by Robert Fyffe. He and other whalers took up to fourteen thousand southern rights each year; to them the stink of rotting carcases was ‘the smell of money’. By the 1920s, ninety-nine per cent of the Southern Hemisphere’s right whales had been killed. All that remains of the factory is a single fireplace, standing like a wayside shrine on the shore, as if everything else had