They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
Psalms 107: 23, 24
I HAD BEEN a member of the Miami Seaquarium Collecting Team for about three months when we went on a collecting expedition I will never forget. We headed the yacht Seaquarium to St. Helena Sound off Beaufort, South Carolina, to capture the only known albino dolphin in the world. This expedition was carried out like a secret military mission. I didn’t know where we were going until we were under way. Later, I realized why the secrecy was so necessary.
Captain William Gray was the Frank Buck of the sea, the best in the world at bringing fish and sea mammals of all kinds back alive. But twice before, he had tried and failed to capture the white dolphin off Beaufort. It’s tempting to speak of Gray’s quest for the white dolphin in terms reminiscent of Ahab and Moby Dick. But there wasn’t a mystical bone in Captain Gray’s body. Although there was more than a little professional pride involved, our main interest was commercial. The white dolphin was one of a kind, the single most valuable water creature in the world and certainly the most important quarry Captain Gray had ever sought. Theoretically, the albino was worth whatever it took to capture her. In fact, though, there are limits. Wometco Enterprises, Inc., which owned the Miami Seaquarium, decided to give Gray one more shot. Either way, Wometco officials told the good gray captain, after this trip he must hang it up. He would be expected to spend his time in the front office, a figurehead, meeting and greeting visiting dignitaries.
He loathed that prospect, and when they finally beached him, he used to steal away from his office and hang out with me and the dolphins at Flipper’s Lake. He would sit in the shade of the coconut palms, skipping stones across the surface of the lake. He liked to work on nets, too, which were always in need of repair. At times when we were there together, they would page him over the public-address system. He would shake his head mournfully, haul himself to his feet, and brush the sand off his suit. He would stand there a moment, pull out his big, heavy gold pocket watch, and check the time, then trudge back to his office.
The Vanderbilts had given him the watch when, as a young man, he captained their schooner Pioneer and led them on fishing expeditions around the world. The watch was magnificently ornate, engraved with mermaids and anchors. He once showed me the solid gold anchor chain that went with it. The chain was a little much, though, so he had replaced it with a simple monofilament fishing leader. After he had been beached and I had become Flipper’s trainer, he used to bring special visitors back where I was working and tell them that this was where the Flipper films were made. Invariably they would look eagerly across the lake and ask, “But where’s Flipper?”
Captain Gray would grin. It was the opening line of his standing joke. I knew what was coming, so I looked up and grinned back. “That’s Flipper, right there,” he said, pointing his big, square hand at me. “He’s the real Flipper.”
Capturing dolphins was just part of my job as diver aboard the yacht Seaquarium. We worked our tails off in the hot subtropic sun, setting the nets and pulling them in. It was not as hard or as frustrating as diving for sunken treasure, but it was backbreaking work nonetheless, the kind of work that turns your hands into big, strong lobster claws like Captain Gray’s.
I had wanted to work at the Miami Seaquarium from the first time I saw it. That was during the Christmas holidays of 1955, just a few months after it opened. Home on my first fourteen-day leave from boot camp, I took my mother and my two brothers, Jack and Terry, there, and it made an indelible impression on me. When I saw the diver in his Miller-Dunn helmet striding slowly around on the bottom as in a dream and feeding huge, dangerous, exotic fishes, I said to myself, “That’s it.” How we’re supposed to pick out the goal for our whole life, I don’t know, but from that moment on, my life had a goal. A few years later, when I was actually working at the Seaquarium, it amused me that they should pay me for doing what was so much fun.
The biggest problem I had as a diver was feeding the sawfish without getting cut up. The sawfish, a strange creature, grows to the enormous size of 900 pounds and up to sixteen feet. A member of the ray family, the sawfish has a cartilaginous snout with twenty-five to thirty-two pairs of teeth. But it’s the very sharp “teeth” on its long, flat bill that make this fish so dangerous. They’re coated with poisonous mucous like that of the stingray’s stinger. The sawfish’s feeding style is to rake the bottom with its bill, stirring up anything that lives there as a potential meal, and to swim into a school of fish, swinging its bill back and forth like a chain saw. Oddly enough, one of the safest places to be is at the sawfish’s mouth. When the bill swings, the mouth, which is at the base of the bill, stays relatively still. To feed the sawfish and keep away from its menacing bill at the same time, I almost had to be a contortionist. I straddled the sawfish, facing the same direction it was facing, and got the food to its mouth by thrusting it between my legs from the back. And by feel, too, because if you look down wearing a Miller-Dunn helmet, it fills up with water.
Feeding the fish was quite a show for the spectators. It was one of the many shows we staged at the Seaquarium. The Seaquarium offers educational entertainment of the best sort, a circus sideshow and a college education rolled into one. The specimens we collected sometimes served in medical research, especially anatomical studies, and in research on underwater sound techniques. Some specimens were also used in research to develop shark repellents.
Our quest for the albino of South Carolina was notable because for the first time, we were the bad guys. The South Carolina state legislature had passed a law against “netting, trapping, harpooning, lassoing, or molesting genus Delphinus or genus Tursiops in the waters of Beaufort County.” There have been marine-mammal protection laws on the books for many years, going back at least to New Zealand in 1904 and 1956, and even to Russia in 1966. But this was one of the first marine-mammal protection laws on the books in this country—and it was aimed directly at us!
We were the best dolphin hunters in the world—and proud of it. But the albino was smart. She knew all the tricks. And she was lucky. She eluded us at every turn. Frustration at sea becomes mysticism if you let it, and I began to think we had met our match. Could she be, I wondered, the dolphin who couldn’t be caught?
The public hue and cry against us didn’t help. Later, I was to join them in committing myself to the welfare of dolphins and other whales, but then I thought that the people who were criticizing us were weirdos. They acted like they owned the albino. I couldn’t understand it. We weren’t going to eat the damned dolphin; we were trying to catch her and put her in a show where millions of people could enjoy seeing her. And what was wrong with that? The funny part was that most of the people who were objecting to us had never even seen the albino.
Their criticism stung, nevertheless, and we kept a low profile. We never went ashore, and we never talked to others about our mission. There was a lot of talk on the shortwave radio, though, and we knew how hot they felt about us. We hung around, waiting in the waters of the adjoining county, where it would be legal to capture the albino. One group of protestors came out in boats and hoisted a sign that said,
LEAVE OUR WHITE PORPOISE ALONE!
And from another boat, this one:
SOUTH CAROLINA’S WHITE PORPOISE, YES!
They wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper, and they vented their feelings on radio talk shows. Some of them followed us in boats, and on the CB wavelength, we could hear them reporting our position and heading. They planned to get in our way when we set the net.
Not everyone was against us, though. A few of the commercial fishermen, who dreaded pulling in their nets one day and finding the beautiful white dolphin dead, were on our side.
To understand the difficulties of capturing the albino, consider first how we usually went about our job. The yacht Seaquarium, which we called the collecting boat, was designed by Captain Gray himself. Fifty-five feet long, the steel-hulled craft was powered by two 892-horsepower General Motors diesels and had a top speed of ten knots.
What made it special was its live well. A live well, which is open to the sea, is where you put fish you’ve caught so that they will stay alive and fresh. In our case, the well kept specimens alive so that they could be put in the Seaquarium. It measured eight feet by twenty-one feet and was three feet deep. The well was open to the sea not amidships, as most live wells are, but at the stern. This allowed us to haul in huge specimens, like small whales and large sharks. For collecting smaller specimens, which was more usual, the well could be partitioned by three sliding panels, including one at the stern of the boat.
Though Gray designed the Seaquarium to his special requirements, I never thought he felt comfortable on it. He liked the Sea Horse and the Sea Cow, smaller but more easily handled work boats that the yacht had replaced.
Most of our collecting trips were to stock the twenty-six corridor tanks along the walls at the Seaquarium and the 235,000-gallon reef tank. The reef tank, our favorite, reproduced a Bahamian reef complete with most of the species that live there. Fifty feet across and seventeen feet deep, the reef tank holds hundreds of species of tropical fish—thousands of individuals. We also supplied other large oceanariums around the world.
Usually, there were only three of us aboard the collecting boat: Captain Gray; Captain Emil Hanson, his old friend but some years his junior, who was gradually taking over from him; and me. We had two main collecting areas: the Bahamas, especially around Turtle Rocks and the Berry Islands, south of Bimini, and Miami’s Biscayne Bay, which was in the Seaquarium’s back yard. We went on all sorts of collecting trips for certain species like green turtles, jewfish and grouper, sea cows, snapper, and snook and moray eels, or we trawled for sea horses and set lines for sharks.
Our trips ranged from excursions of half a day to, occasionally, a month. Some of our one- or two-week collecting trips to the Bahamas were scheduled, I suspect, simply because Captain Gray needed to get out on the water again.
Collecting in the Bahamas usually took two or three weeks. Captains Gray and Hanson both had an uncanny feel for finding fish. Usually, they needed only a glance at the water, but sometimes they would study the water through glass-bottom buckets for hours, searching for exactly the right spot to lay a trap or to string a shark line. I learned a great deal from both of them.
Hunting reef fish in the Bahamas, we often baited the traps with conch, a delicacy for fish and man alike. When we spotted a field of conchs, sometimes thousands of big, pink-shelled creatures crawling at glacial speed, I would go over the side with my face plate and fins. Captain Gray would cast off in the thirteen-foot skiff and drift across the grassy flats, his net on a six-foot pole held casually over the side. I’d swim down to the bottom, ten or fifteen feet below, gather an armload of conchs, and bring them up. Captain Gray would extend the net over to me, and I would put the conchs in the net. He would empty them in the dinghy, and then down I would go again. Usually, we filled the dinghy almost to the gunwales with conchs in an hour or so. Hundreds of conchs. Later, back on the collecting boat, we would knock off the heads of the shells with a hammer. Then we’d dig the conchs out with a rigging knife and put most of them on ice. We never wasted the conchs. Those we didn’t use for bait, we ate ourselves. Conch fritters, conch chowder, conch salad, cracked conch, and even live conch, or Bahamian sushi. Conch is widely known as an aphrodisiac, too, and recipes for it are legion.
The wire-screen traps we used for tropical fish were about three by two feet and had a funnel entrance. It was easy for fish to get in, but virtually impossible for them to get out. Besides conch, we used various other things for bait, sometimes a fish head or octopus (which we also caught on the reefs) or just a can of sardines with a few ice pick holes in it. A few days later, we came back and pulled up the traps. If we had caught anything we wanted, we dumped it in the live well. If not, we dumped it over the side.
We also used a fine-meshed net to catch tropical fish, and sometimes, for special species, I swam down with a Slurp Gun. This is like a large syringe with a clear plastic barrel. Many of the fish we most wanted lived in tiny crevices in the coral. The yellowhead jawfish, for instance, is only four inches long and swims through the water like an apparition, fins and tail of gossamer blue on a pale white body topped by a blunt yellow head with big, black, round eyes. Another was the threespot damselfish, which is full grown at only three inches. This petite golden fish has vertical stripes from top to bottom behind the gills, and a large blob of black at the tail, designed to look like the eye of a larger fish. At the threespot’s other end is an amazed expression. The little royal gramma is a vividly colored red and yellow fish with a purple head. As rare as he is beautiful, he sold for more than fifty dollars apiece then. The spotfin butterfly fish, which is eight inches long at maturity, has a stripe cutting deceptively through his eyes and a large black dot at the other end, no doubt designed to make him appear to be going the other way. Other reef fish include the crested goby, the darting brown chromis, the grunt, and the angelfish.
When they saw me—swoosh! They were gone. They disappeared into their holes, where they were safe.
Or so they thought. I would swim over to their lair, put the butt of the Slurp Gun over the hole, and pull the handle back, sucking the little creatures out. Then I carefully transferred them to our floating holding tank.
Sometimes I took down an injector of ammonia. It works like tear gas. When I came to a likely crevice in the rocks, I squirted it with ammonia, and whatever was in there would come swimming out—mad as hell, usually—and into my net.
Unfortunately, many of the fish we caught died. Nobody kept close tabs on the actual numbers, but I would guess that about one out of ten survived. If we captured a thousand fish on the Bahamian reefs, for example, 450 of them would die before we could get them back to port. The 550 that survived to this point would be transferred to the corridor tanks of the Seaquarium. Despite all our efforts, most of those would be dead by the end of the first week. Perhaps 100 of the original 1,000 would survive the ordeal of capture and go on living—sometimes for years—in the reef tank, making it their home.
I don’t know how much the mortality rate could have been improved. One out of ten is probably pretty good. We tried to keep them all alive, of course, but I’m sure that if that priority had been higher, we could have tried a little harder. Keeping wild fish alive in captivity is not easy, especially for salt-water fish. They are such fragile creatures. Even the stress of being captured can kill them. So can even the slightest environmental change. Though the Seaquarium water is filtered at a rate of 3,000 gallons a minute and chemicals are used to fight harmful bacteria, the water is never as good from a fish’s viewpoint as the water it was born and reared in.
If we lost nine out of ten fish we captured, we saved nine out of ten dolphins. We were more selective in capturing dolphins. We captured young females, usually. Being young, they were more tractable; being female, they were less inclined to be aggressive. And, as a kind of bonus, they reproduced themselves.
The dolphins we caught in Biscayne Bay and didn’t want—the males, the older females, and any of them with scars of shark bites—we turned loose. It got to the point where we caught some of them rather regularly. It was as if they thought getting caught was a game.
Sometimes when we went after dolphins we came away empty-handed, but that was rare. Usually, we caught four or five at a time. Once we caught ten. We tried to be gentle with them and to keep them from thrashing about so much that they might hurt themselves. They were valuable animals; a young female was worth up to $400. A trained dolphin like Susie or Kathy, by contrast, was priceless. But that was then. Now, because of the change in the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, you can hardly find a dolphin to buy, and if you can, it will cost you around $20,000.
The dolphins we collected went not only to Miami Seaquarium but also to similar marine aquariums allover the world. They all wanted their own “Flipper.” The dolphins ended up in all sorts of places: sideshows, carnivals, state fairs, zoos, scientific labs, and traveling circuses. They fell in with sharp promoters who used them to attract crowds at shopping centers or featured them in little sideshows at gas stations or to serve in a tiny, collapsible pool as the mascot of a football team. Susie was finally sold to a European promoter who carted her around in a trailer and showed her off at political gatherings. Some dolphins would also live, however briefly, as so-called pets in the chlorinated horror of someone’s swimming pool.
The Miami Seaquarium Collecting Teams caught a great many dolphins, usually in Biscayne Bay just off Mercy Hospital. By collecting mostly females, which give birth only once a year, we were burning our bridges ahead of us, reducing the supply of dolphins that we would depend on in the future. But who thinks of the future when you’re having the time of your life? The supply of dolphins seemed endless. If I had bothered to think about it at all, I would have assumed that someone else had already decided that it was OK to do this.
Catching a dolphin is like catching no other animal in the world, because the dolphin is the only animal in the world that rides the bow wave of a boat. When we saw a pod of dolphins, five to fifteen individuals swimming as a group, in Biscayne Bay, we headed over in the collecting boat, and before long they were riding the V of our bow wave. They probably do this because it’s fun and they love games. Dolphins play very much like kittens and puppies. When they find a steady bow wave, they ride it. All day. When the boat changes speed or direction abruptly, however, they drop off.
Riding the bow wave of the collecting boat, they have no idea that they’re about to fall into a trap. We used half a dozen or so kinds of nets to collect various specimens, sometimes making up special nets on the spot to fit the situation: the tide and wind, the depth of the water, and the condition of the bottom. Our dolphin net was made of nylon, twenty feet deep and a mile long. The top of the net was lined with cork so that it floated; the bottom had lead weights. One end was attached to the mother ship, the so-called bitter end, and most of the net was carefully piled up on the stern. I was in the dinghy with the running end of the net, and when Captain Gray, who was watching the dolphins line up on the bow wave, gave me the signal—a chopping motion of his hand—I cut loose from the yacht and took off, dragging the net off in a wide circle. At the same time, the yacht began making a big, slow turn. When the boat turned, the dolphins on that side of the bow were caught. By the time the collecting boat had made its turn, the dolphins on the inside began to realize that they were trapped. They fell off the bow wave and raced around, confused, or gathered in the middle.
You might wonder why the dolphins didn’t leap over the net to freedom. And so did I. They could have. But they never did. Dolphins do jump in the wild, of course. In swimming, they leap forward out of the water all the time. The spinner dolphin (Stenella longirostris) even jumps and spins at the same time. Captain Gray, in his book Creatures of the Sea, noted that when a pod of dolphins is surrounded and discovers that it can’t break through the net, one of them throws himself on top of the net, pushing it down and letting the others escape. We saw this occasionally, but whether it was done deliberately is another question.
As the net drew more tightly around this pod, and as the full implication of their plight became apparent, they swam more and more frantically, not knowing what to do. All of them were almost certainly shooting out sonar signals, reading them or trying to read them when they came bouncing back in a garble of noise from the net, from their fellow dolphins, and from the collecting boat. If they happened to hit the net, they struggled, twisting and turning.
If we lost one dolphin out of ten during a capture, this was how it happened. They charged the net and thrashed around in panic, becoming entangled underwater and drowning. I watched for that when hauling in the net. When dolphins got snagged by the net, I pulled them over to untangle them or I leaped in if necessary and freed them—even if it meant cutting the net.
This happened while hunting the albino off the coast of South Carolina. We were having problems with the bottom. It was covered with oyster shells, which snagged the net. A number of streams or rivulets emptied into the sound, making gullies at the bottom and gaps under the net.
The water of St. Helena Sound was as dark as coffee. We had spotted the albino swimming in unprotected water with several other dolphins. She was following one of the shrimp boats, and we had laid the net but had missed her. The albino saw what we were up to and scooted off with her baby. We spent the rest of the day pulling in the net. Halfway in, I saw a dolphin tangled in the net, belly up. He was dead. Captains Gray and Hanson saw it about the same time. We all stopped. Catching dolphins is not easy even when you know how. Catching them in strange waters is doubly hard. And trying to catch a particular dolphin in strange waters is—well, you’ve got to be lucky. Besides that, we were running out of time. The local people who had organized against us were getting on everybody’s nerves. And if that dead dolphin washed up on shore, it would add fuel to the fire.
On a ship, the lines of authority are well established. Nobody wonders what to do. When I saw the dead dolphin, it was obvious what had to be done and who had to do it. I leaped in the water—clothes and all—and swam back to the dolphin. He was almost full grown. Probably five years old, 300 pounds. He had got caught in the net and drowned. I cut the net away with my rigging knife and cradled him in my left arm. Then I ripped open the gullet from below his chin to the belly, aiming for the air sac. There was lots of blood. Blood in such dark water is not red. Depending on the light, it is some shade of dark blue or black. Because the blood is warm, it rises, and when it touches the surface it becomes bright red. The dolphin’s blood hit the surface like a surrealistic red splash and almost covered me. I let the dolphin go. It sank like a rock. Then I swam back to the dinghy, climbed aboard, and continued pulling in the net. The whole thing happened swiftly and without a word.
I didn’t think much about it at the time; there was no time for thinking. Besides, I wanted to prove that sinking the dolphin meant no more to me than cutting up a mullet for bait. But there was more to it than that. I dreamed about that moment, the black blood curling up from the dead dolphin, becoming bright red and covering me. I still dream about it.
Before Captain Gray became a collector of fish, he had been a fisherman, once having caught a world-record marlin. Fishermen liked Gray. They felt comfortable with him. And like all seamen, they told tales, including the one about the albino.
Fishermen know dolphins well because dolphins follow the trawlers and eat the fish that fishermen don’t want and toss back into the water. They also eat the fish that fishermen do want. They dive into the nets for a fish and dive out again before they can be caught. Some of them do get caught, though, and sometimes they drown—hundreds of thousands of them. Fishermen of ancient Rome called dolphins “pig fish” because, or so the speculation goes, either their beak of a nose is like that of a pig or because they ate too many fish that fishermen thought should have been their own. The Latin term for “pig fish” was corrupted to porpoise, the term that many people still use. Captain Gray always called them that. And in Europe that’s their name.
The shrimpers and fishermen of Beaufort for years had watched the albino dive into their nets for fish and shrimp. One day, they knew, the albino would dive in for a fish and not come out again. Then the criticism directed now at the Miami Seaquarium would be directed at them. Quietly, therefore, some of them helped us. Beaufort County was off limits. But St. Helena Sound lay in both Beaufort and Colleton counties. It was only a matter of time before the albino would follow a shrimper across the line into Colleton.
That happened on August 4, 1962, the sixteenth day of our trip. We got a message from Sonny Gaye, one of the fishermen:
“Yacht Seaquarium. She’s right behind me to starboard.”
Captain Gray smiled and nodded. Captain Hanson was at the wheel. Our ship picked up speed and turned slowly, heading toward the trawler, which was a few miles away.
Another message: “She’s got her baby with her.”
We eased into position behind the trawler; the albino was now on our bow wave. I slipped back to the Boston Whaler, where the net was. I could see the white dolphin, her pup swimming easily alongside. My heart was beating very fast. Suddenly, Gray signaled me, the chopping motion of his hand. I dropped off and gunned the motor in reverse. The net spilled out. The Seaquarium made its big, slow turn. I looked for the albino. Already, she had fallen off the bow wave and was trying to make her way to freedom. But she didn’t know about me and my net. She hit the net and backed off. I closed the circle. She raced off to starboard, her baby right beside her. There was a gap there. I gunned the motor and closed it off. We had her. She hit the net and thrashed around. I leaped in and grabbed her; she was caught! Captain Gray beamed with delight. None of us had ever seen such a dolphin before. She was nearly eight feet long, about 375 pounds, pure white with pink eyes, a pink mouth—and black teeth! Like ebony. Her only flaw was a shark bite on her dorsal fin.
In all, it had taken Captain Gray fifty-eight days of actual pursuit over ten months to capture the albino—his last expedition. She was named Carolina Snowball. A $100,000 tank with a picture window was built for her and her baby, who was named Sonny Boy in honor of Sonny Gaye, the South Carolina fisherman who had led her into our trap.
Carolina Snowball’s trainer was Adolph Frohn, but she proved to be an intractable sort, learning only one rather simple stunt: swimming in synchronization with Gay Idema Ingram, who still lives in Coconut Grove. Despite her refusal to learn tricks, which I secretly admired, Carolina Snowball was the Miami Seaquarium’s star attraction, drawing millions of people from around the world to see and admire her.
Three years later, she developed an infection at the base of her tail. She began swimming erratically one day and, to the horror of tourists watching, she veered into the picture window with a sickening thud. Despite the heroic efforts of Robert Baldwin, director of operations at Miami Seaquarium, she died.
In an autopsy, doctors discovered all sorts of problems. She had a tumor of the stomach as large as a tennis ball, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, cysts embedded in several organs, and muscles full of parasites. Nothing could have been done for any of this.
To mark the delight she brought to so many people who came to see her, Carolina Snowball was mounted in a playful pose at the entrance of the Main Tank of the Miami Seaquarium. She’s in a place of honor on the wall near the popcorn stand.