Chapter 15

Up Close and Very Personal

He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of them.

Herman Melville

Moby Dick, 1851

. . . what captivates me most about them is their songs. During their breeding season, humpback whales produce long, complex sequences of sounds that can be heard by listening through a hydrophone . . . These songs are much longer than birdsongs and can last up to thirty minutes, though fifteen is nearer the norm. They are divided into repeating phrases called themes. When the phrase is heard to change (usually after a few minutes), it heralds the start of a new theme. Songs contain from two to nine themes and are strung together without pauses so that a long singing session is an exuberant, uninterrupted river of sound that can flow on for twenty-four hours or longer.

Roger Payne

Among Whales

And I have heard the humpback sing. The boat engine had been cut and the babble of voices, edgy with adrenalin, had hushed. Suddenly there were only sea sounds, wave-slap, kittiwake cry, an easy breeze that made the flag flap. We were in among the whales and the hydrophone went over the side. The old hands had told us what to expect; the novices, the first-timers, of which I was one, found that the voices of the old hands had too much of the seen-it-all-before to be helpful. I had tried not to listen. I wanted silence, and I wanted the thing, whatever it was, however it sounded, to come at me in its own time out of the silence, out of wherever it came from, however it came. I had thought it might sound a little like jazz: Ellington always had the most animal-like soloists – Harry Carney (baritone sax); Cootie Williams (trumpet); Coleman Hawkins (tenor sax) playing ‘Solitude’ unaccompanied is the breath of a dark creature at night that might as easily be a whale. Or Sibelius – the wandering clarinet that introduces the first symphony or the throbbing cellos that introduce the sixth, or the pounding figure at the end of the fifth that symbolises swans’ wings, but might as easily be whale song set to an ocean rhythm. So I listened, we all listened, and the boat filled up with gales of silence.

A few hours before, my host’s car had climbed a steep hill and leaned into a tight bend at the top. Suddenly there was water everywhere far below us, but it was water hemmed in by forested mountains of improbable height and steepness, and every shore was an inlet or a bay or a creek or the end of a glacier. It was not what I had expected of the Pacific Ocean. The car nosed to a standstill and I looked down to where a wide circle of white water suddenly bloomed, and a whale surfaced in its midst. I yelled, I really yelled:

‘LOOK! A WHALE!’

My host, who really had seen it all before because he lived here, grimaced at the sound of my voice, then said:

‘Yep, we got cheap thrills here, Jim.’

‘Here’ meant Gustavus, a tiny town a stone’s throw from Glacier Bay in the south-east of Alaska. It was ten years after St Kilda, ten years after the first whale, and I was embarked on the second life-changing adventure of my writing life, and I had just seen my second whale, and it was a humpback. I was in Alaska to make two radio programmes for the BBC Natural History Unit, programmes about the relationship between people and wilderness, and one of the reasons I was in Gustavus was to see whales. It was a preposterous notion, the idea that you could pick up a phone in Bristol (which is where the NHU is based) and make arrangements to see whales 4,000 miles away in Glacier Bay, Alaska, but that was more or less what my producer had done. I also saw grizzly bears on Kodiak Island, trumpeter swans in the Yukon Territory, sea otters, moose and (very nearly) wolves on the same basis. I was there for three weeks, during which time I travelled constantly, mostly by bush plane, and didn’t quite scratch the surface of the surface of Alaska, but it put the taste of northern wilderness in the back of my throat, and a hazy notion between my ears of what Scotland might have looked like and felt like a thousand years ago. And for ten years I have gone back to Alaska in my mind at least once a week.

So the car had stopped, a fragmented corner of the Pacific Ocean had unrolled, and a humpback whale swam in its own maelstrom of white water. From above it seemed to skate over the surface, yet, because the water was so clear, and because I was so high above it, I could see the submerged parts of the animal too, and I saw the tail hoisted from below the surface, saw it burst into the sunlight with water pouring in a brilliant white wall over its trailing edge, saw it hold high and level for a few seconds, saw the whale dive and the tail follow, saw the whale grow dim, and vanish.

So hurrah! for the mighty monster whale

That has 17 feet 4 inches from tip to tip of a tail . . .

I measured the room where I am writing this, and it is 16 feet from wall to wall. The tail of a humpback would simply have filled the room and curled round at the edges. It is an absurd observation, except that this is my working environment, and the Pacific Ocean was the working environment of my first humpback, the Pacific and the Atlantic and all the world’s other oceans. I know, I have that other working environment beyond the window where I find my raw material and bring it back to the desk in some shape or form, but in 20 years of writing about the natural world for a living, I never crossed the path of a creature with a room-sized tail before or since.

‘Ready?’

My host was eager to be moving. There was a boat to catch. I made one last sweep of the water with binoculars, turned back to the car, nodded, climbed in and sat in a kind of stupefied silence.

‘Don’t worry. There will be other humpbacks. And if you’re lucky they’ll come to you.’

The boat was an open launch with a wheelhouse and room for about a dozen people to sit, and it was full, and it was full of chatter about whales. We were cautioned against high expectations – not everyone saw whales every day. But they were definitely around and it had been a good week. It was an astounding day of late August, warm (for Alaska), the water calm and fringed with a haze of mountains and forests at almost every compass point, so it felt as if we sailed on an inland sea, rather than an arm of the Pacific.

There was a tension among us that I didn’t like, although I undoubtedly contributed to it. A boatful of rising voices, my barely suppressed irritation rising with them, struck me as an unseemly basis on which to go forth and negotiate with whales. Didn’t I remember reading something about the old skippers reaching a pact in the early days of the steam whalers to cut their engines and proceed under sail when they were among the whales so that the whales stayed calm and every whaling crew had a chance? Besides, I am instinctively quieter than this, and this small herd of people corralled on a wee boat was taking me over. Then a whale blew.

A thin column of white water rose with a sound like the gust of a fast wind going through tall trees. It was a quarter of a mile away, it rose perhaps a dozen feet in the air then drifted into shapelessness on the breeze. Something like the overturned hull of a longboat appeared on the surface, and two-thirds of the way along it there was a short, backwards-leaning fin. More of the hull appeared, and over a minute it transformed from hull to something distinctly whale-shaped. The boat could not contain itself. Instant cameras craned, automatic flashes popped, and the resultant pictures would show a blurred whale the size of a fly on a bleached ocean. Some serious telephoto lenses were unfurled, but the press of bodies didn’t bode well for their possibilities either.

The first difference I noticed between that humpback and my memory of the St Kilda killer was that the humpback did not appear to be going anywhere. It was idling on the surface. The boat inched closer, engines throttled right back. Then there were two whales. Then three. Then six. They loafed close together on the surface. And they did nothing much. Then one turned and lifted its tail clear of the water and my stomach turned over. The tail was black and it shone in the sun and the water poured from it, then the whale went under and the tail slid in without a sound. And the boat said, ‘OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH-HH!!!!!!!!!!!’

Then there was a pent-up lull. Then the ocean parted. From the space it had made for itself, it threw a whale at the sky. The whale did not get very close to the sky, in fact its tail did not clear the water completely, and at an angle of about 70 degrees it twisted in the air so that its back, which had been facing the sky, now faced the sea. This happened less than 200 yards away. But then there was the most affecting gesture of all. The whale waved. No one had told me about the possibility that the whale might wave to me. No one had mentioned that the humpback’s flippers can be anything up to 14 feet long, or that when the ocean threw it at the sky, it would take the time in its brief flight to raise one and wave it at me, a personal salutation, a greeting that consummated our meeting, and that said quite unambiguously how grateful the whale was that I should travel 4,000 miles for the privilege of witnessing that moment. That was what I felt. That was what Roger Payne had in mind when he said that the arrival of a whale along your coast sent a message ‘that speaks directly – one capable of setting up waves that propagate right into the core of your very being’. At that moment, with the head and body of the whale poised somewhere between the ocean and the sky, the whale upside-down in the air, and one flipper raised in greeting, the propagating waves had reached so far into the core of my very being that I was having trouble breathing out. Then the whale started to descend, back towards the ocean that had thrown it. The ocean duly caught it. The splashdown was a thunderclap, and where there had been a mid-air whale there was now a geyser, and I felt briefly overwhelmed by this simple show of natural forces. And the boat said, ‘OOOOHHHHHWOOOOOOO-WWW!!!!!!!!!’

At every breach and every blow, the boat hurled exclamations at Alaska, and I have no doubt at all that I made my share. It was impossible not to react, not to be as caught in the whales’ spell as a herring in a net. The whales drifted closer to the boat in one of their lulls, and they were lazing, and you would have said that they were enjoying the quiet afternoon hour by relaxing at the surface, enjoying the company of other whales, except that you have no more idea what they are doing than the next man, and he is no wiser than you. During the longest lull, I tried to step back and see the whole thing from afar. I tried to be an eagle crossing Glacier Bay a few thousand feet up and looking down. From there I would see the ocean beyond the entrance to the bay, the unfettered Pacific. From there I would see the mountains of Alaska and Canada and the north-western United States, the unfettered scope of mountains that dismissed notions of national boundaries and recognised only the authority of the ocean as having similar rank to themselves. From there I would see that fringe of ocean and mountain where the creatures of ocean and land met in unequal circumstances, and I was a piece of plankton in the jaws of the world, and that nearest whale was an ambassador for that world-travelling ocean that held the continents together and kept the whole thing round. A whale, when you have time to linger over it and think about what you are seeing, when you have time to hear what it says when it speaks directly and propagates right into the core of your very being, has the capacity to make you rethink yourself and your world. It may be that whales will eventually save the world, even as the world thinks it is trying to save the whales.

Then a whale breached 30 yards away, and no one had seen it coming. This creature, the size of a house and with a tail the size of a room, came from just off the stern on the port side and the sound it made was the sound of the ocean throwing it at the sky, and I could not swear, even now, whether the predominant sound was one of moving water or moving air. Briefly, the whale towered, then it twisted so that its belly glowed white in the sun, and I thought: ‘Moby Dick’ (and Moby Dick was an albino humpback so it was of a humpback that Melville wrote, ‘He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally’), and it gate-crashed the ocean on its black back and the boat rocked. And the boat said, ‘OOOOHHHHMMMMYYYYY-GAAAAAAHHHHDD!!!!!!’

They came round the boat then, at least four of them, and their proximity hushed the boat and commanded it to speak in whispers, which it did.

I was leaning over the gunwale and a humpback whale slid into place alongside, and it snorted from the blowhole that was not ten feet below me. I looked straight down into it, and the smell of its exhaled breath washed over my face. I cannot pretend that it was a pleasant smell, but I remember my response to it was to breathe out forcefully into it, and I can never forget that my breath and the breath of a wild humpback whale commingled. I wondered why a whale would come alongside the boat apparently inspecting what it found there, considering what men in boats had done to the species over the centuries, and I wondered if it picked up the positive energy that overflows the gunwales in any whale-watching boat, or if all whales are simply curious about all boats. Canadian nature writer Farley Mowat wrote in his 1972 book, A Whale for the Killing, of his old Uncle Art recalling childhood fishing trips off Newfoundland when ‘they was t’ousands of the big whales on the coast them times . . . Many’s the toime a right girt bull, five times the length of our dory, would spout so close alongside you could have spit baccy down his vent. My old Dad claimed they’d do it a-purpose; a kind of joke you understand . . .’

Then the whale slid slowly forward and I was looking into its eye, and its eye, which was about four inches across, looked so blatantly, so directly at my eyes that I felt sought out, chosen, the subject of a predestined moment. Much later, back on land, I would raise the notion with a couple of fellow passengers. They had each felt exactly the same thing.

The skipper’s voice:

‘We are in among a pod of seven or eight humpback whales. They’re all around and below the boat. We’re going to put a hydrophone over the side, and hopefully we’ll hear them sing. So please stay quiet for a while.’

So the hydrophone had gone over the side. A tannoy speaker gurgled into life making underwater sounds and the boat filled up with gales of silence, and I waited to hear Ellingtonian jazz or Sibelius . . . then it began and it discarded at once my every preconceived musical reference point. It began like wolves, sliding from high to a mid-register note, but then it stopped abruptly, which is not the wolf’s way. Then a second voice (I thought it was a second voice, but now I can’t justify why), a squeak, higher and less tonally rounded than the first utterance, but also cut off abruptly, as though its function was percussive. Then a bass sound so low that it warbled uncertainly among the limits of any discernible notes. Oscar Peterson used that terrain on a piano keyboard that he had extended by several notes. They could be covered with a flap so that they didn’t confuse other players unaccustomed to their presence. Their purpose was also percussive up to a point, but they also allowed him to cascade from known registers into unfamiliar depths. The new whale voice inhabited unfamiliar depths, but then rose as a second and then a third voice overlaid it, and suddenly I had restored to me the notion of Harry Carney’s baritone underscoring the Ellington saxes. Then silence, water sounds.

Then something remarkably similar to what had gone before, remembered phrases. I am a part-time musician, but I have a full-time musician’s ear that hears pitches and phrases in all manner of everyday sounds, and I bent my ear to what was going on. I looked for patterns. I became aware of a rhythm, profoundly slow, but more or less constant. Roger Payne, who made the scientific discovery that humpback whale voices were in fact songs in 1967, and who has studied them for 40 years, believes that ocean swells may determine the rhythm. Whales, he said, give the ocean its voice.

That voice has a range of seven octaves (exceptional human voices, like, say, Cleo Laine’s, can encompass four octaves, my unexceptional voice can handle two and a bit), but like human singers, it moves among small intervals, and more remarkably, it also rhymes; the whale is also the ocean’s poet. So I sat spellbound on a gently rocking boat in Glacier Bay, Alaska, listening to the ocean give voice.

Who taught you, Poet?

Who first caught your up-craning eye

and thought you fit to try out

a world-travelling song,

knowing your ways, bestowing

the pacific demeanour with which to navigate

between Alaska and the Tay?

And if I give you my most respectful silence,

my musician’s ear and my writer’s best endeavour,

can you reach me, teach me

themes and variations, cadence and nuance,

so that if I were to travel the earth

as you travel the girth of the ocean – singing –

I could be your tradition-bearer,

marry my voice to your singular song

and carry its worldly wisdom,

rhymes and all, to landlocked tribes

beyond the ocean’s thrall?

One last dip into Roger Payne’s exploration of humpback songs (with one last grateful nod and unreserved endorsement of his exceptionally accomplished book, Among Whales): he acknowledges that their meaning remains a mystery (‘They guard their secrets as effortlessly, as enigmatically as they always did’), as does their technique (‘We don’t even know where in their bodies to look for the sound-making apparatus. It seems reasonable to assume that humpbacks must use air to make sounds, yet they release no air while singing . . .’) Perhaps they just hum.

Yet the whale song on the boat’s tannoy in Glacier Bay did not sound like humming. Instead, as I started to tune in to what was going on, it reminded me again of wolves, not in the manner of the song’s construction but something in the nature of its projection edged my ear that way. So I began to wonder in a fumbling, inexpert way if the whale song was at least in part a collective anthem in the same way wolves howl, advertising territory, location, strength, numbers, mood, asking and answering questions of the nearest pack, the nearest pod, or the nearest lone wanderers of the tribe. And lone wolves howl looking for other wolves, for company. The sound of a wolf pack’s howl can travel five miles. In coastal packs, in places like Alaska, is it possible that wolves hear whales, and whales hear wolves? Given the much greater range of frequencies in the humpback’s repertoire, and the capacity of oceans to transmit sound waves many times further than air, and the huge distances whales travel compared to wolves, it is reasonable to expect that their communication skills would be much more sophisticated. Yet as with wolves, the natural habitat of the humpback whale is travel. And as with whales, the wolf – whether in a pack or alone – travels its portion of the world singing.

Getting up close and very personal with wild whales has just this kind of effect on a susceptible human mind: the encounter compels you to engage with its mystery. This creature, so massive, so elementally beautiful, and so close that I could only engage with part of it at any one time, ‘so close alongside you could have spit baccy down his vent’, was at the same moment so untouchably distant and quite beyond comprehension. So you fall back on some facet of your own known world, relate it to that and see where that takes you, see what kind of light or understanding it might shed, bearing in mind that you start from the unhelpful position of a member of that species that set its face against nature in general and whales in particular a long time ago. It is not just biology that stands in the path of enlightenment.

The truly extraordinary aspect of that encounter with humpbacks was that the lasting enlightenment was shed not on the humpbacks by my own endeavours, but on my own place on the map – and therefore on me – by the humpbacks. It would take ten more years, but the witness I bore that day has illuminated in the most unimaginable way the events of 1883–84. It brought the Winter Whale back to life.

‘Don’t worry,’ my host had told me. ‘There will be other whales, and if you’re lucky, they’ll come to you.’ It is my preferred way of working. I was lucky, again.