The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may it not be on our part as well as theirs? ’Tis yet to determine where the fault lies that we understand not one another, for we understand them no more than they do us; by the same reason they may think us beasts as we think them.
Michael de Montaigne
Essays, 1693
One hundred and twenty years ago, somewhere in the world’s oceans, an unknown harpoon gunner on a small boat from an unknown whaling ship fired one of the new explosive harpoons into the neck of a bowhead whale. The weapon was basically a bomb on a stick. It was designed to penetrate the whale’s skin and blubber, then explode deep inside the whale a few seconds later. The theory was that it would die at once, or at least quickly. The whale died all right. It died off the Alaskan coast in May 2007, but only because it had been harpooned again. It was about 130 years old, or, to put it another way, in late middle age. The world’s media gasped at the discovery.
We know all this because the twenty-first-century whalers found the nineteenth-century harpoonist’s missile still embedded in the whale, in a bone between neck and shoulder. It had lodged in what they called ‘a non-lethal place’, and there it remained, and over the decades the initial pain might have dulled to a vague ache or an itch the whale couldn’t scratch. Perhaps it swam a million miles with that itch.
The discovery was both fascinating and troubling. The fascination is that the age of whales suddenly catapulted from scientific guesswork to public knowledge, and – as is so often the case when whales command our attention – our response has been to gasp in a kind of primitive wonder. The troubled nature of the fascination is that we have only acquired the new knowledge because our fingerprints were on the whale, or rather in it, lodged ‘in a non-lethal place’ between neck and shoulder. All science could date with any accuracy was the missile itself, the head of the bomb lance. Staff at an American whaling museum pinned down its manufacture to New Bedford, Massachusetts. They also know it had been in the hands of an Alaskan, because of the nature of the notches carved into the head, a system by which Alaskan whalers of the time pronounced ‘ownership of the whale’.
Science got excited, because, as the man from the whaling museum in New Bedford put it, ‘no other finding has been this precise’. I suppose precision is relative when you are dealing with things that live so much longer than we do. Yet evidence ‘this precise’ has been around for centuries, and ignored by science because it distrusts the source.
For example, I have come across something similar in studies of wolves, and found it tellingly articulated by the American nature writer Barry Lopez in his 1978 book Of Wolves and Men. He was explaining why many biologists irritated him:
The Nunamiut Eskimos, the Naskapi Indians of Labrador, the tribes of the northern plains and the North Pacific coast . . . are all, in a sense, timeless. Even those tribes we can converse with today because they happen to live in our own age are timeless; the ideas that surface in conversation with them (even inside a helicopter at two thousand feet) are ancient ideas. For the vision that guides them is not the vision that guides Western man a thousand years removed from the Age of Charlemagne. And the life they lead, you notice, tagging along behind them as they hunt, really is replete with examples of the way wolves might do things. Over thousands of years Eskimos and wolves have tended to develop the same kind of efficiency in the Arctic.
It is one of the oddities of our age that much of what Eskimos know about wolves – and speak about clearly in English, in twentieth-century terms – wildlife biologists are intent on discovering. It was this fact that made me uneasy. Later, I was made even more uneasy by how much fuller the wolf was as a creature in the mind of the modern Eskimo . . .
Meanwhile, wildlife biologists theorise about the age of a whale, explain the difficulties of assessing it scientifically, knowing in the case of this particular whale only the age of a missile lodged inside it, while Inupiat Eskimos, one of Lopez’s ‘tribes of the northern Pacific coast’, have known – ‘and spoken about clearly in English in twentieth-century terms’ – that whales have twice the lifespan of a man, so that 150 years old is common, and the oldest might live to be 200 years old.
Whales and wolves are still big species in the minds of all the tribes that inhabit the northern edge of our hemisphere. Their accumulated knowledge is handed down and refined over millennia. Lopez’s word ‘timeless’ is quite literally appropriate. They have carried it into the twenty-first century, even with helicopters and snowmobiles at their disposal, and they go on learning and refining, because – then as now – some kind of understanding of these species in particular is central to their own way of life, and because they exist within nature as one of its creatures rather than apart from it like most of the rest of us. Their knowledge was garnered and stored and passed on without computers, without radio collars, without microchips, without scientific databases. They are their own database.
People not unlike them, at least in their sensibilities, would have inhabited Britain once, for our first settlers were also coast dwellers on the rim of a continent who lived with and learned from the possibilities offered by proximity to wolf and whale, and for 5,000 years they too amassed unique knowledge. But by the time our more recent forebears built their own whaling industry, and made their wolf extinct (remarkably, at more or less the same time), the bridge to the old knowledge was broken. And after that, something ancient and unnameable only ever stirred in us when an extraordinary circumstance occurred. For example:
’Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play,
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.
William Topaz McGonagall, self-styled Poet and Tragedian, an eccentric, perambulating Victorian historical monument of Dundee streets, is still cherished by twenty-first-century Dundee, albeit with a smirk on its face. His ‘poems’ abandoned all known poetic conventions and structures in pursuit of a rhyme. They are routinely derided by pompous literary critics who miss the point: they were not poems so much as his scripts for one-man performances in the howffs and halls. His raw material was the events and the personalities of the day and set-piece episodes of history. And one of his greatest hits was ‘The Famous Tay Whale’. The fact that the poem exists is all that most people in twenty-first-century Dundee know about the whale that turned up and lingered in the Tay estuary in the winter of 1883–84, that and the fact that its skeleton has been suspended from the ceiling of the city’s main museum more or less ever since.
Even as a child growing up in Dundee, when that skeleton first haunted my young dreams, it struck me as an odd way to display a dead whale, as if it were some preposterous species of flying fish you could only admire from below. And of course I knew nothing of the nature of its death, only that it had swum up the Tay estuary to Dundee and that it had died. Well of course it died, my childhood self reasoned, anything that old would be dead, a bit like my grandfather.
But here’s a thing: if the Famous Tay Whale had been left to its own devices rather than hunted to its slow and dishonourable death in early January 1884, then paraded in death around Britain for the entertainment of vast crowds of gawping Victorians – paraded without its flesh, without its organs, without its backbone, its skin stuffed and draped over a wooden frame and stitched up again to look like a caricature of its living self – it might still be alive today.
At which thought, the twenty-first-century Inupiat shrugs in a timeless way and says:
‘Of course.’