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Passion is contagious, and that's why Andrew Darby's Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling (Da Capo Press) is so enlightening and entertaining, despite its scholarly style. At least since the time of Melville and his masterpiece—Moby Dick was a quest for a sperm whale, by the way—the sheer size of whales, their majesty and their near invisibility, give them a mythic aura: not only larger than life, but larger, much larger, than our separate lives.
Darby's book is important because, along with its mother-lode of information on various kinds of whales, it is both lament and warning. We kill them in a way—with the harpoon—that may not at all be as painless to its victims as some whale stalkers would claim. But we also kill them with a brazen, loudly egotistic disregard for their number and their future on this planet they happen to be unlucky enough to inhabit with Homo sapiens.
Is Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling yet another cautionary tale of man's abuse and cruelty to animals? Yes, it is. Do we need yet another one of those? Yes, we do.
Andrew Darby, free of polemic, has done us all a great service, and best we listen now before it's too late. At once, Darby takes us on an oceanic dig, of sorts: we learn the truth and lore about five species of whale: Right, Blue, Sperm, Minke, and Humpback. And we also learn of the threats to their survival either by outlaw or law-skirting fishermen who go whaling of course for money, but for, cruelly, the symbolism or nostalgia of it, and thus rob us of a majesty we can claim simply by coexisting with such a great and varied creature.
At heart, that's what this book is about: not whales, but whaling. As Darby says, "The control of whaling [in the twentieth century] became what it remains today: a struggle between the best and worst of human nature. Great hopes, held out when the International Whaling Commission was founded, were gradually crushed. Rules offered in optimism, in practice, encouraged cheating."
The Whaling Commission, or IWC as it's known, is essentially the bad guy here. Says Darby, "The IWC today is colored by the cold calculations of international politics among nations with little or no knowledge of whales." Here we go again: another multi-national body, this being the IWC, which was begun with noble intentions, but not so any longer, subject as it is to cajole and manipulation by involved countries, notably Japan and Russia.
The IWC introduced a six-year cease and desist on all commercial whaling in the late 1980's. It has since been extended to current times. For various reasons Darby points out, to the extent that he can get into the machinations of the IWC, exceptions to this moratorium nonetheless exist. Japan, Siberia, Norway, Iceland—these countries are not subject, or at least they do not interpret themselves as being subject, to this cessation ruling.
Darby's passion is in introducing us to these whale species, especially the Humpback, which has enjoyed greater protection over the years than its relatives. It's the Humpback that we see when we go whale watching, and it's the Humpback that occupies our imaginations: "When whales rise into the air it defies logic... It's thought to be the single most powerful act by an animal, equivalent to lifting hundreds of people at once. The breach is the great explosion of energy, the behavioral 'look at me,' the money shot for watchers, extravagant proof of whales' power. None has more enthusiasm for it than the Humpback."
It is a spectacle both awe-inspiring and scientifically without easy explanation. That's good: creatures as noble as these should defy easy description or understanding. They are mythical and myth has about it the underpinnings of mountains and mountains of anecdote that no one, not the fabulist, certainly not the scientist, can fully excavate.
I urge you to read Darby's book. It will tell you a lot about whales but—and this may be what makes it stand out—also a lot about you and your international neighbors and how we've allowed our collective hubris to attempt to diminish the great whales of the world's great oceans.
Reading Darby's book, you will take solace in, and derive hope from, this: the whale engulfs us metaphorically, and our imagination of the whale can never capture or fully contain this great, unfathomable creature of the deep. We all have some Captain Ahab in us, and we're better for it.
Let's hope, for the sake of Darby's book and other whale-centric movements in the world, that this magnificent creature will continue to exist for us to know, tangibly—and not only through history and generational recollection.
Darby, in Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling, offers up a significant contribution to the whale as mystery and marvel, while sounding a measured, but plaintive, alarm for dangers that may lie in the path of so magisterial an animal.
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