A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
BY NATURE I am not an exhibitionist nor even very outgoing. In my private life I’m practically a recluse. I live quietly, sometimes going all day without speaking to people. I enjoy my privacy and the world of silence. That’s one of the reasons I like diving. Even when I trained Flipper, it was in silence. Most dolphin trainers use whistles, but I used hand signals for Flipper to keep down the noise while actors were saying their lines. Even Flipper was silent. That excited chattering you hear on the screen when Flipper sticks his head out of the water and bobs it back and forth was produced by Mel Blanc, who also created the voices of such characters as Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker.
But if I am so naturally quiet, what caused me to make such a noisy scene in Bimini? Pondering little else in the Bimini Jail, I realized that I was probably trying to make amends. For a long time I had been aware of my own part in the exploitation of dolphins. And as the song says, I had to speak out against the madness.
This is not so strange as it might seem. Most of the people I know who have lived closely with dolphins have been affected by them, sometimes profoundly. I don’t mean that dolphins are smarter than us and are taking over or that they’re casting spells, though I wouldn’t be too quick to deny such claims. I mean simply that, having known dolphins, having come to love and respect them and now regretting my part in their tragic encounter with us, I had no choice.
For years I lived with dolphins. I was in the water with them day in and day out, sometimes around the clock. They’re social creatures—far more than I—so I stayed with them just to keep them company, hanging out on the edge of their tank, floating in an inner tube with them or lying on a surfboard. Using scuba gear, I also spent a lot of time underwater with them, sitting or lying on the bottom and watching the dolphins. I stayed underwater with them till I ran out of air, came up and got another bottle of air, and went back down again. I never tired of being with them like that. Looking up from the bottom of the training tank while two or three dolphins circled above me against the sky, the thousand shades of blue and green fusing phantasmagorically, I could only wonder at those amazing 400-pound creatures flying around me with such power and grace.
I was underwater with the dolphins so much that the copper sulfate in the water turned my hair green. Others at the Seaquarium, who called me “the Dolphin Man,” used to tell the tourists that the only difference between me and the dolphins was that I had green hair. It was a running joke that when I did come up, it must be payday. I ate with the dolphins, I slept with them, and I read the Flipper scripts while they frolicked all around me. When they were hungry, I fed them. When they were sick or injured, I cared for them. When there was a new trick to learn, I taught them. And when they had to be moved, I perched on the edge of the box they were in, keeping them wet and reassuring them that all was well.
If I sound like a mother hen to my Flipper dolphins, that’s exactly right. That was especially true for me with Susie, the first of the TV Flippers, and of course with Kathy. Susie was a beautiful animal, her skin unblemished, her conformation perfect. She was about four feet long and weighed 100 pounds when we captured her in Biscayne Bay with her mother. We estimated that she was about one and a half years old. Soon after that, Susie’s mother, whom we never named, developed light-gray square patches on her skin, an early symptom of swine erysipelas. Caused by bacteria and dirty equipment, this dread disease has no cure. When we discovered it, we lowered the water. Dr. Bob Knowles, a veterinarian, injected them both with penicillin and streptomycin. What we needed, though, was a miracle.
I wondered what would happen to Susie. She hadn’t even been weaned yet. The next day, I tried to give Susie her first fish by hand. I was standing on the edge of her tank with a bucket of Icelandic herring, Susie was swimming up to me, saucily wheeling and swimming away. I leaned down to her.
“Come on, Susie, you little flirt. You’re going to learn how to eat what’s good.”
I tossed the herring in front of her. She swam right over it.
“No, no.” I said. I reached down and got the fish out of the water. “Look!” I put the fish to my own mouth and made a chewing motion. “It’s good. Yum-yum,” I said, smacking my lips.
The first thing dolphins must learn when they’re captured is to eat dead fish. This is not natural for them; they’re not scavengers. Sometimes it takes a while, but when they get hungry enough, they learn. And then they seem to like it. But it was doubly difficult for Susie. She was going not from live fish to dead fish but from mother’s milk to dead fish, which I don’t think had ever been done before.
Susie came up to the edge of the tank where I was kneeling down. I opened my mouth, and Susie, mimicking me, opened hers. I put one of the herrings in her mouth, head first so that the fins wouldn’t stick in her throat on the way down. I always sampled these fish myself to make sure they were good, taking some of each batch home, where I cooked and ate them myself. So I knew there was nothing wrong with this one.
Susie tasted the herring I had put in her mouth, rolled her eyes at me, and spat it out. She began lazily swimming in a circle, then stopped. “Come on, Susie,” I said. She opened her mouth in a laugh, and I put another small fish in her mouth. She held it there for a moment, eyeing me to see if I was kidding. I wasn’t, but I might as well have been. She spat it out again and swam away. I didn’t push it. In training a dolphin, the main pressure we use is hunger. To put it simply, the hungrier they are, the better they learn. If they’re not hungry, there’s no way to teach them anything. There’s more to it than that, but not much more. I had studied dolphins so closely and for so long that I could tell just how hungry they were and therefore just how much longer they could be trained or put through their paces.
Though it was taking a little longer than I thought it might to get Susie used to captivity, she was coming along fine, I thought. Maybe I was trying to rush her too much. Then, early one morning a few days later, just two months after their capture, I discovered the mother dead on the bottom of the training tank, the baby trying to nurse.
We lowered the water in the tank, pumping it out into the bay. Almost certainly, something in the water had killed the mother. We removed the body and I buried it under a coconut tree behind the dolphin tank facing Biscayne Bay. This is where most of the other animals and fish that died at the Seaquarium were buried. Death is a part of keeping animals captive, perhaps, but the death of this nameless mother seemed particularly pointless.
My thoughts turned to Susie. Now she would have to eat the dead fish. Normally, baby dolphins that were orphans and had not been weaned were force-fed a mother’s-milk concoction; they always died. I was determined to try something different: fish by hand. It had never been done before, but I wasn’t sure that it had ever been tried. If the death of her mother weighed heavily on Susie’s spirits, it didn’t show. In my logs, it’s recorded that I fed Susie three pounds of fish that first morning, two at noon, and another three that evening. When she ate the first fish by hand, I felt like a new daddy—and I was! I went all over the Seaquarium, telling everyone that Susie had eaten a fish! That she would live! The next day, she ate six pounds of fish, half smelt and half herring. And that afternoon she was leaping about five feet in the air.
I didn’t want the dolphins to feel that they were in prison, though in fact they were, and it was my job to get them to act like they enjoyed it. This was not simple, because I had the distinct impression that they understood their predicament and were trying to help. Dolphins are not little windup toys; they’re complex individuals with likes and dislikes, fears, moods and dispositions, good days and bad. In general, dolphins are a fun-loving bunch, cautious, impressionable, sensitive and intuitive, loyal to one another, highly adaptable, curious, willful and yet malleable, easily spoiled and then quite demanding, possessive and apt to throw tantrums, lovable, sensuous, mischievous, and highly intelligent. They are almost anything you might say of a human child.
They are also wild animals. With their approximately ninety-six conical (cone-shaped) teeth, they could rip your head off if they wanted to, though the teeth fit into grooves on the opposing jaw for grasping things, not chewing. And with their powerful flukes (the marine mammal’s version of a tail), they could beat you to a pulp. But they don’t. I have never even heard of a normal dolphin injuring a person. To the contrary, I have heard only of their helping people. Their friendly reputation begins at the dawn of history; stories from the most ancient times tell of dolphins befriending man.
As the dolphins we had captured tried to adjust to their strange new life, I tried to adjust to them. Sometimes, as I sat on the bottom of their pool, the bubbles streaming upward to the surface while they circled above me, I wondered what they must think of this strange new world they were in and of the humans who had put them here. For 60 million years, these dolphins had adapted to the sea. Except for sharks and killer whales, they had no enemies in nature. As mammals in a world of fish, the ocean must have been a Garden of Eden to them, the water pure, the seas running thick with schools of small fish to be herded together and eaten—alive!
Now they were here, in what must have seemed a teacup to them. They swam in a circle, which bent their dorsal fins. Even worse must have been their psychological distortion. We can only guess at this, but if sonar is the dolphin’s main sensory equipment, what must it have seemed like in a steel tank where every shot ricochets crazily back at them like a pool of Babel? I can think only that the tank they were in was to them like a house of mirrors would be to us. And I blush at what they must have thought of us. We made them do such inane little tricks, wearing funny hats and whirling hula hoops, rewarding them with dead fish, and gawking at them endlessly. No wonder most of them had ulcers!
Although I was a part of that, I was also their friend. Or I tried to be. To them I was necessarily one of the enemy, but at least a friendly enemy. I tried to understand them—their physical needs, their feelings and fears—and to intercede for them. I studied the dolphins. I knew what they liked and didn’t like. I wanted to be one of them. That’s why I spent so much time with them. But, as I knew, my benevolence was rooted in my own benefit. It was my job to get their trust. Without Flipper’s trusting someone, there would have been no TV show. So I did what I had to do to get their trust; and to maintain that trust, I was prepared to go to any extreme—even deception.
For example, when we needed to fly Kathy from the Seaquarium to the Bahamas for underwater scenes, we had to catch her in a net first. This was always traumatic. Dolphins associate nets with the time they were captured and both fear and hate them. It might seem simpler to shoot them with tranquilizers. That’s done with lions, bears, and gorillas. But not dolphins. At least five dolphins have been sacrificed trying to find the proper dose to put them under safely. In 1955, neurologists, attempting to map the dolphin brain, administered Nembutal and paraldehyde (anesthetics that humans tolerate with ease) to five dolphins and watched in horror as the breathing of each of them became disorganized, and as they gasped and died of asphyxiation. We learned the hard way that there is no proper dose, that dolphins breathe deliberately, not automatically as we and other mammals do, and that dolphins are always conscious. Even when they seem to be sleeping, bobbing just below the surface, their blowholes above water, and breathing about three times a minute, they’re just catnapping; they never really sleep. If they lose consciousness, they stop breathing and die. That’s why Kathy was always caught in a net.
But not by me. Oh, no. I was never a part of that. If I had helped to catch Kathy in a net, she might never trust me again. She thought that I was really something special, that I had clout with my fellow humans. This was an impression I went to great lengths to maintain, for it gave me the control I needed over her. When Kathy had to be caught in a net, I wasn’t there. Or so she thought. Actually, I would lurk to one side while others strung the net across the lake. When they drew the net around her and she was frantically trying to get away, I would sneak into the water to be “captured” with her and pulled up just like another dolphin.
We would swing there together in the net above the water, Kathy and I, packed like sardines. “Easy, Kathy,” I would say, my voice low and gentle. “Take it easy now.” She would become calm. As the net lifted us out of the water over to the special dolphin box for her, we looked into each other’s eyes. Dolphins have horseshoe pupils, like a U. I would put my arm around her and rub her dorsal fin. I could feel the tension. “Don’t be afraid,” I would say softly. “I’m here, and I’ll take care of you.”
Yes, we were very close, my dolphins and I, and when something went wrong, I took it very personally. Years later, when Kathy died in my arms, something of myself died, too. She played the role of Flipper, she and the others, though in large part they were doing only what they had to do to be tossed a fish. If there was a Flipper, it was I more than any of them, but actually we were all in it together.
Exactly when I began having these strong feelings for my dolphins, I don’t know. As I sat in the Bimini Jail and went over and over what had happened, I returned to the summer of 1944, a time of innocence when I was growing up in Miami Beach and before I knew anything about dolphins.
Toward the climax of World War II, we on the Beach felt ourselves involved in the war more than most other Americans. Miami Beach, like the rest of the East Coast, was blacked out. No lights were allowed at night because a favorite trick of the German subs, which patrolled the Gulf Stream in what they called wolf packs, was to zero in on a tanker at night against the haze of Miami’s nightlife. Then as now, the Beach had an international flavor, but it was different from what it is today. Russian troops were trained at Government Cut, and from my bedroom window I could see them climb up cargo nets and jump off into the water for abandonship exercises. Japanese prisoners were held in nearby camps. They were a common sight cutting grass along the causeway between Miami and Miami Beach. And German submarines would drop off spies on lonely stretches of Florida’s coast. This last was what all of us living there were intensely trying to prevent.
South Miami Beach was beautiful then. Except for oil slicks and a tarlike sludge on the beach at times, caused probably by torpedoed tankers, the ocean was as sparkling clear then as Bahamian water is now. Despite the war, those were the best of times because our cause was just and we knew somehow that we would win.
My parents owned the Biscayne Restaurant, next to Joe’s Stone Crab, which is at the south end of where the Art Deco section is now, and one day that summer when I was five years old, I was playing on the beach. The water has always held a fascination for me. I can’t explain it, but it’s always made me feel happy inside. That day on the beach, I found a one-dollar bill. That was a lot of money in those days and it was the first money I ever had. I went running home. “Look!” I yelled, waving the money at my brother, Jack. “Look what I’ve got!”
Jack was a year older than I. His eyes were as large as saucers. “Where did you get that?”
“I found it! On the beach! It’s mine!”
Jack grinned. “Let’s buy a ball with it,” he said. “We can play catch.”
“A ball? No. I already know what I’m going to buy.”
I bought a pair of underwater goggles. They were new in those days. I ran all the way to the sports store, bought the goggles, then ran all the way back to the beach. I put them on and stuck my head in the water and looked around. It was another world. A beautiful world. It was quiet. Like a dream. And it was all mine.
I was a little older when I got the rest of my underwater equipment: my first fins, a snorkel with a Ping-Pong ball that was supposed to keep the water out, and a spear. There was no scuba diving then. Scuba (the word is an acronym for “Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus”) gear came much later from France and Italy. My spear had three prongs, like Neptune’s trident, and was propelled through a metal tube by a strong rubber band at the back, like a slingshot. At the end of the spear was a ten-foot line so that whatever I shot could be hauled in.
My first target was a 2½-foot stingray sleeping on the bottom and partly covered by sand. The stingray is a flat sea creature with eyes on the top, who goes through the water by flapping his wings. He’s a cousin of the shark. My heart pounding, I eased up to about four feet away, drew back the rubber sling, and, holding my breath till I had my quarry lined up just right, let it fly. I was as surprised as the stingray was when the spear hit. As I watched in amazement, the stingray went straight up, then flapped his wings and took off like a bat—with my spear! I took off in the opposite direction.
Later, when I had gotten another spear, I hit another stingray off the reefs of Virginia Key, which is just south of Miami and where the water was as pure as crystal. I dragged the stingray ashore and was cutting the tail off as a trophy when the stingray flopped one last time and his stinger, a sharp, barbed weapon just above the long tail, jabbed into the index finger of my right hand. I had never felt such pain before. I couldn’t get it loose. I was scared, my finger was bleeding, and it burned like fire and my whole hand was turning numb all at once.
I was crying, and I didn’t know what to do, so I picked the stingray up, cradling it in my arms, kicked off my fins, and walked up to the road, bawling my eyes out. Stingray barbs are covered with a poisonous mucous. Most people stabbed by them take weeks to recover. A car came along, and the driver saw in an instant what had happened, picked me up, and drove me down to the toll gate, where the uniformed guard, a short man with a big beer belly, matter-of-factly took out a pocket knife and cut off the tail. It was still attached to the stinger, which was so deep in my finger that he didn’t dare try to pull it out. He called my parents on the phone and they came and took me to a hospital in Coconut Grove.
The doctor took one look at it. “This is going to hurt a little,” he said. But he was wrong. It hurt a lot. He couldn’t pull it out because of the barbs, so he pushed it all the way through. I still have the scar of that first battle. And I decided that from then on, I would leave stingrays alone. Looking back on it, I think that stingray may also have taught me something about the sea: for all its beauty and mystery, the sea is also dangerous.
For a long time, my prime target was the parrot fish that lurked along the sea walls. The parrot fish, so named for its brilliant colors, eats coral, which can cause ciguatera poisoning in anyone who eats one. You can also be poisoned by eating any fish that eats the parrot fish, such as the barracuda.
Later, when I had joined the Miami Seaquarium, I discovered that a mucus like that of the stingray also covers the bills of sawfish. I’d been hit accidentally on the ankles by sawfish more than once while feeding them in the tank. Like hungry puppies, they got excited going after the fish I was handing out and swung those bills around with abandon, not realizing or caring about the pain they might inflict. Being hit by the bill of a sawfish hurts as much as being stuck by a stingray, though, and I always took care to feed them first to get rid of them. Mucus of a similar sort also covers the green moray eel. Without the yellow coating, he’s dull blue or slate colored.
My career in diving began in the U.S. Navy. I joined in 1955, when the Korean War was winding down. I was sixteen, and, though I looked even younger, I lied about my age. I wanted to become a member of the UDT (Underwater Demolition Team) and was disappointed to learn, after I had already joined the navy, that you must be twenty-one. I knew they wouldn’t bend the rules for me—that’s not how the navy works—and in fact I didn’t dare try to get them to, for fear they would find out I was too young even to be enlisted. If I was to become a diver, I decided, I would have to learn it on my own. I had a number of navy assignments, the first aboard the U.S.S. Tripoli, an aircraft carrier, which crossed the Atlantic forty times in twenty-two months. Then, for a year, I was at the navy base at Dam Neck, Virginia, a gunnery and guided-missile school where the training is top secret. For the final year of my five-year hitch, I was aboard the U.S.S. Furse, a destroyer in the Sixth Fleet, stationed in the Mediterranean.
It was on the Furse that I really got started diving. I was chipping paint belowdecks when I discovered a Jack Brown commercial mask with two fifty-foot lengths of hose. The Jack Brown, now called the Desco, was named for its inventor, whom I met some years later. Standard equipment on all navy vessels, the Jack Brown was a full-face mask with a constant air flow. It replaced the old Miller-Dunn Shallow Water Helmet, which looks a little like a space helmet. The Miller-Dunn worked well as long as the diver stood upright, but if he bent over to look down, the helmet would fill with water. Nevertheless, it’s a great-looking diving helmet, which is why it’s still used by divers at the Miami Seaquarium. Scuba gear later became the navy standard.
I sent off for the U.S. Navy Diving Manual and studied it on my own. I knew it practically by heart. It was my Bible. Several of us used to scuba dive off Italy, Monaco and France, Gibraltar, the Azore Islands, Spain, and Cuba. One day, the executive officer of the Furse called me to his office. “I hear you’re a diver,” he said. He was a businesslike, humorless sort of man and ordinarily very solemn, but now he had a conniving gleam in his eye.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “You heard right.”
The U.S.S. Furse and several other destroyers in an antisubmarine hunter-killer group were tied up together with the submarine Atule off Palma, Spain. These ships and the U-boat used to train together. We held war games, destroyers against the sub. But if one of us had a problem, we all had a problem. This was especially true because we were getting ready to head back home to the States. “Homeward bound”—if you’ve never been at sea for any length of time, you can’t know what that means to a sailor. Like being in love, it was the only thing anyone could think about.
“We’ve got a little problem on the Atule,” the executive officer said. He frowned. “A crewman was cleaning the starboard running light and—”
“Don’t tell me, sir,” I said. “It fell in?”
He nodded. He didn’t have to add that we would be stuck there till it was found. Our group didn’t have an authorized diver. If we were to go by the book we would have to request a diver from Sixth Fleet’s submarine-tender ship or the U.S.S. Everglades, which was the destroyer tender that traveled with us. Requisitions, explanations, reports, clarifications, perhaps reprimands and rule changes—it could take weeks of paperwork—paperwork that would follow the fleet forever, resting finally as a statistic in the official history of the U.S. Navy.
“If it’s down there, sir, I’ll find it.”
“It’s down there, O’Barry. Go to it.”
My sidekick on diving expeditions was Seaman Roger Loomis, a baker. We got the Jack Brown mask, the wet suit, the lines, and all the rest of it, then over I went, down to the bottom, thirty-five feet below. That’s as deep as a three-story building is tall, but it’s shallow-water diving; anything under 100 feet is considered shallow. I had no underwater light, and the water was as black as pitch. I was literally feeling my way along the murky bottom in what must have been a thousand-year-old garbage dump. We were at anchor, and both ships would swing around in a circle perhaps as much as a hundred yards as we drifted with the tide and wind. The running light was about the size of a basketball, which meant that I could have stumbled around for a week looking for it. But luckily I found the running light—I felt the wires that stuck out from it—after only a few hours of my first dive. I hooked the line to the running light and signaled for Roger to pull it up. When I came up a few minutes later, at least a hundred sailors lined the Furse and Atule, watching. They knew that we would be going home now. They were grinning. When I broke the surface, they gave me a rousing cheer, and soon we were underway.
A few days later, the ship’s company was called to full-dress inspection, and much to my surprise, I was ordered front and center by Captain B. T. Stephens. I thought I might be in big trouble. In port, while the watch conveniently looked the other way, I had been swimming to shore commando-style almost nightly when we had Cinderella liberty (when you must be back on the ship by midnight). But it wasn’t that. Instead of a reprimand, I was presented a commendation. It was for finding the Atule’s running light and for several other diving jobs, including untangling a net from propellers in 50 feet of water at La Spezia, Italy; repairing a sonar transducer at 25 feet off Sardinia; instructing scuba divers at 120 feet off St. Raphael, France; and recovering gear dropped over the side at 70 feet in both Pollencia Bay and Monaco.
Part of the commendation read, “and volunteered to perform these acts solely because of your personal interest in diving.”
Personal interest? Yes, that’s true, but an understatement. I loved diving. Hurricane Donna, the most destructive storm to hit Florida since 1926, swept through the Keys in 1960. A Category 4 hurricane with winds of more than 131 miles an hour, Donna roared across the state from the Gulf of Mexico and curved out to sea, catching the U.S. Sixth Fleet off Charleston as we were heading in. That was my last voyage as a navy man. And for a while I thought it might be my last voyage of any kind. We pitched and rolled so much we had to strap ourselves into our bunks.
When we tied up in Charleston, I still had the Jack Brown mask and other diving gear. I asked the executive officer, “Where do you want me to stow this?”
He looked at the equipment, then at me. “Do you want that gear, O’Barry?”
“Do I want it? Yes, sir, I want it. I’ll even pay the navy for it.”
He made a frown. “Forget it. We’ll need a new one anyway. Take it. It’s yours.”
Even then, I didn’t know where I would go or what I would do as a civilian. I called a family friend, a man who had been my boyhood idol: Art McKee, diver and treasure hunter. Growing up over the years, I had read about him in books and magazines. He owned and operated the McKee’s Museum of Sunken Treasure on Plantation Key, which is just south of Key Largo. When I called, Art told me that he had lost both of his forty-foot work boats in the hurricane. The Treasure Princess sank at the dock in about twenty feet of water, and the Jolly Roger was picked up and tossed across U.S. 1 into the mangrove swamps. I asked him if he could use a hand to help him with the salvage.
“Sure,” he said. “I can always use a good hand. Come on down.”