This book arose from a fantasy that has entertained me from childhood, a dream of escape into the sea that remains with me to this day. The dream took shape when I was a young boy in the early 1950s. Very few people in Britain went abroad for holidays at that time and, like almost everyone we knew, our family would spend three weeks of the summer in a series of delightful but all too often chilly and rainy seaside resorts – Thorpeness and Aldeburgh in Suffolk, Bembridge in the Isle of Wight and West Wittering in Sussex being the favourites.
The things that delighted my brothers and I when small – crabbing, sandcastles and eating sugary clouds of candyfloss – did not really appeal as we grew into teenagers. We could not follow our father into the pub where he spent much of his time nor did we share his passion for sailing. Dad was frankly dangerous in a dinghy and we always seemed to end up in the water. At least twice I can recall being hauled from Bosham Harbour by the lifeboat.
As the annual seaside holiday lost its magic, and teenage angst took the form of rebellion against everything my parents stood for, I began to dream of escape. I would walk into the waves, swim towards the rim of the sea and magically become a seal, ever more to roam the oceans, sliding through the waves, impervious to storms and a playful spectator of passing ships.
Always in that dream I would look back at the distant shore to see my parents and brothers on the beach and feel no sense of loss at all. Indeed, it was an essential part of the fantasy to turn my back on the world I had known and swim over the horizon to whatever awaited me there.
We never saw seals on our summer holidays but visits to London Zoo had shown me sea lions, extraordinary creatures with whiskery faces, sleek wet-leather skin and big dark eyes. Above all it was the way they moved that appealed to a young imagination. They had bodies like Plasticine, bending, twisting and turning as they dived for the keeper’s fish and swam back to the large rock that former the centrepiece of the old seal enclosure. The sea lions were from California, naturally enough, and much in demand in zoos and circuses because of their ability to perform tricks such balancing balls on their snouts. Sea lions and seals are from related, but different, species but that didn’t matter to me. The sea lions of London Zoo imprinted themselves on my mind and from an early age they became my means of escape. I clung to that dream as some children to a favourite blanket or soft toy.
When I decided to turn this childhood dream into a story and create fiction from fantasy, the obvious starting point for the research was St Andrews in Scotland, which hosts the Sea Mammal Research Unit, a major centre in Britain for the study of seals and other marine creatures. It also happens to be my old university. At St Andrews, Professor Mike Fedak and Dr Tecumseh Fitch, both experts in the behaviour and history of seals (among much else I should say), gave me three crucial pieces of intelligence which shaped this book:
Firstly the high intelligence of seals has enabled them to develop a language of trills, clicks, grunts and bell like tones by which they communicate underwater with their own species across many miles of ocean. Seals are highly vocal creatures and their jaw structure is such that in at least one famous case they can mimic human speech.
Secondly, Professor Fedak explained how the history of these creatures is interwoven with that of homo-sapiens in a long, cruel relationship from which mankind benefited enormously. When early man moved north from the African landmass into the colder climes of what is now northern Europe 60,000 years ago, it was seals that made the migration possible. They were easy prey for the club-wielding hunters and provided blubber from which to make candles, skins for clothing, and musky flesh for high protein food. This is why seals figure prominently on cave drawings that can still be seen today in Scandinavia. From that time the killing of seals never stopped and by the nineteenth century it had become a major industry in Europe and America. The killing goes on today carried out by the Canadians and various Scandinavians countries driven by commerce and with the dubious justification of conserving fish stocks.
Finally, I learnt that evolution is not something that happened a long time ago. It continues to transform our own racial characteristics and those of the animals around us. Brown bears scooping salmon from the estuaries and rivers of North America are following the same path to the sea that seals took millions of years ago. The ancestors of seals roamed the land as small dog like creatures some 30 million years ago before man had evolved from his ancestors, the chimpanzee and orang-utan. They sought their food from the rich stocks of fish along river banks and coastal waters and over millions of years evolved into aquatic creatures like small otters, equally at home in land or water. Then a mere six million years ago, evolution led to them to became sea marine mammals with webbed feet and a thick coat of blubber. Seals had become the sea animals we know today about the same time that early man descended from tree life in the forests and stood upright on the African savannah. But unlike the whales, whose ancestors left land 100 million years ago, seals never fully became marine mammals. They still had to bear their young on land or, more usually, the icepack. That incomplete evolutionary cycle proved a bounteous gift to homo-sapiens as he moved north from the savannah.
What struck me most about my research in Scotland was the evidence that seals were highly complicated and intelligent creatures with almost human characteristics. Tecumseh Fitch, whose first names derives from his great, great, great grandfather, the celebrated American Civil War General, William Tecumseh Sherman (who himself was named after a famous Indian chief), believes the language of seals creates music much as humpback whales do with their singing. As with whales, the challenge is to decode the lyrical submarine conversations with which seal colonies communicate deep under the ocean.
Mike Fedak, with whom I had lunch after his final lecture before retirement, and who was suitably buoyed by celebratory champagne, talked of seals as stylish, playful and curious creatures, very much determined to do things their way. One example he gave was the way seals deal with their enemies according to circumstance: in the Galapagos islands, when in great numbers, seals will mob and confuse shark predators; but in northern waters they will defend themselves from killer whales, by hiding in the roar and tumble of the surf thus jamming the echo locating sonar of their ancient foe. That was incredible to me. The clown-like characters in the London Zoo suddenly had become the highly intelligent citizens of the oceans, survivors of a continuing slaughter that had been, and is now, driven by commercial greed.
In the mid-nineteenth century, before the invention of kerosene, the lamps of Europe and North America were lit by oil from seal blubber. About that time, the first bicycle riders rested their bottoms on saddles covered in rubbery sealskin. As the bone-jarring two-wheelers became hugely popular around the world, so the demand for seal saddle covers soared.
As I write this in the summer of 2009 Reuters News Agency reports from Toronto that hundreds of villages in Atlantic Canada are feeling a sharp economic downturn from the European Union’s ban in July on the import of seal products. Depressed prices for pelts meant that many hunters didn’t bother to take part in the annual seal cull this year so that only 72,156 harp seals were killed against a quota of 280,000 animals. What caught my eye was not the large numbers involved but a complaint by a lobbyist for the seal industry. Canada, he said, would no longer be able to meet growing European demand for Omega 3 fish oil of which seals provided a rich source. The oil that once lit the lamps of Europe was now being used as a health supplement for heart disease.
My research at St Andrews led me inevitably to Cape Cod where the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography is one of the world-leading centres for marine research. From Dr Peter Tyack, a senior scientist at the Institute, I learnt just how much we don’t know about the oceans that cover four-fifths of the world’s surface and the marine mammals that live in them. We are only scratching the surface of our knowledge about the behaviour of the animals with which we share this planet. Whether it be the extraordinary dance of the honey bees, the melodic singing of humpback whales or the rattle and clickety-click of seal talk, the science of animal behaviour is far from reaching any frontiers.
Finally it was my good fortune to meet Sophie Van Parijs and her husband Peter Corkeron who proved such enthusiastic guides to my research. Both are marine scientists and it was through them that I came to appreciate the extraordinary passion with which men and women study the behaviour of our marine mammals, seals, dolphins and whales, and the oceans in which they live.
The book is, of course, a novel but I have tried to ensure that the marine science in the story is accurate. I should say again that none of those who I have talked to is responsible for the inevitable inaccuracies or arguable interpretations of facts. Nor indeed have I drawn on any of them for the characters who were well formed in my mind before I began the book. I have, after all, had long enough to think about them.