Sounding with ocean giants
‘‘I know him not, and I never will,’’ says the narrator in Moby-Dick, lamenting his inability to understand the great white whale. Acclaimed English writer and whale obsessive Philip Hoare opened his Nelson talk, as a guest of the Cawthron Foundation, with those words from ‘‘the greatest book ever written’’.
For the next two hours in the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts on Monday, Hoare gave the 300-strong audience a passionate account of his own journey to grasp the mystery and paradox of the giants of the sea – intelligent, social mammals so close to humans, but with their vast bulk largely hidden in the world’s oceans.
Hoare said a childhood experience of seeing dolphins and an orca doing circus tricks in a concrete aquarium outside London was ultimately a distressing affair.
But a snap decision to go on a whale watching boat at Cape Cod in the United States in 2000 ignited his passion.
A humpback whale breached metres away as he stood on the prow of the boat, ‘‘hanging there as if someone pressed a pause button on nature’’.
As a practised writer, he said, he found a way to express the moment: ‘‘F... – that reconnected me to the sea, to the natural world.’’
Hoare has spent the last 18 years taking that connection to extraordinary limits.
He spoke of his first thrilling and terrifying encounter off the Azores in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, where he stared into the melon-sized eye of a female sperm whale that had echolocated him, a sensation he described as like an MRI scan.
‘‘I couldn’t sleep for three days because every time I closed my eyes, she floated into my head,’’ he said.
He also showed a short film of an encounter with a group of 150 sperm whales off Sri Lanka, herded protectively to ward off hunting packs of orca.
The predators then turned their attention to Hoare’s vessel and crew, with a co-ordinated attempt to create a pressure wave to try to sink their boat.
Hoare says joy is his main emotion when getting up close and personal with cetaceans. His New Zealand trip, for the WORD festival in Christchurch, included a whale watching trip at Kaikoura, where the boat got close to resident sperm whale Tiake.
He said that although whaling had decimated the mammals’ numbers, and there were continuing threats from plastic and sound pollution, the voluntary whaling ban in 1986 had seen a recovery in some species, including sperm and humpback whales.
Hoare contended that the discovery of the humpback whales’ song by American biologist Roger Payne in 1967 – later turned into a top-selling record – had saved the creatures, raising an awareness of their complex social structures and turning them into an emblem of conservation.
It’s one he is committed to doing as much as he can to enhance, through his writing and public appearances. Yesterday, in a visit organised by the Cawthron Foundation, he spoke to a Nelson College biology class to help inspire a new generation of conservationists.
[A whale] reconnected me to the sea, to the natural world.’’
Philip Hoare