In the dolphin’s wake
As a symbol of the season’s spirit, we could do much worse than Pelorus Jack, who knew a bit about goodwill towards all humankind.
As a symbol of the season’s spirit, we could do much worse than Pelorus Jack, who knew a bit about goodwill towards all humankind.
It’s Christmas Eve, 1903, and Cook Strait is a little rough at first as Bishop James Welldon sails from Wellington to Nelson. He wakes at 3am to get a glimpse of Pelorus Jack, and for the high church patriarch, the sight of the 4m-long Risso’s dolphin eclipses the great cathedrals and transcendent choirs of Christmases past and future. The bishop’s recollection of his “best Christmas” is buried in the pages of a
1927 newspaper, but it’s just one of many unrelated writings linking the dolphin to the Yuletide. If the Germans gave it the tree, the Dutch Santa Claus and the Victorians pretty much everything else, is New Zealand’s contribution to the festive season a dolphin?
A little literary seasonal sleuthing puts me on the trail of a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet. “It was Charles Barrett in his Wild Life of Australia & New Guinea/ who inspired her devotion to Pelorus Jack, the pilot dolphin of Cook Strait,” begins the poem A Christmas in the Fifties in Paul Muldoon’s book Maggot.
Muldoon was growing up in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland wheZzZn Barrett’s book on Australia was published in 1954. It contained a couple of New Zealand’s “wonder animals”, including Pelorus Jack, who escorted ships to and from the stormy French Pass between 1888 and 1912.
A Christmas in the Fifties is packed with global images that evoke the era: “The Infant Jesus now having been airlifted in a canister/to supply the rank and file/in heathen Indochina”. And there’s British athlete Roger Bannister, “doomed to rerun the four-minute mile/against not only a river that disembogues/into a gulf of which it could hitherto merely have dreamt …”
So, how did Pelorus Jack navigate his way into a festive poem about life, death, man and nature? Muldoon’s poems are difficult to decipher, and his schedule is equally impregnable. He’s on leave from Princeton University, and emails to his associates in New Jersey, New York and London don’t result in anything to trouble my inbox.
Finally, a Republican uprising in my hometown of Dublin provides the breakthrough. Someone who knows someone who knows the poet gets a message to him at a poetry festival in Toronto. A couple of days later, an email arrives from the man himself. He’s at an Easter Rising poetry event – in Ireland. As Coleridge wrote, “The common end of all narrative, nay, of all Poems is … a circular motion – the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.”
It’s one of Muldoon’s favourite Coleridge quotes – and it’s why he began and ended A Christmas in the Fifties with Pelorus Jack. He says he discovered the story of the dolphin in either Look and Learn or Finding Out – general knowledge magazines to which his mother had introduced him. “She was convinced that the comics – the Dandy, the Beano – that most kids read rotted their brains.”
“My mother was convinced that the comics – the Dandy, the Beano – that most kids read rotted their brains.”
Writers have long been fascinated by dolphins and their seemingly spiritual presence. In classical mythology, they were seen as sacred, godlike creatures, guiding sailors and helping souls pass from this world to the next. From Christianity, too, there are tales of saints being rescued by dolphins. Ngati Kuia believed Pelorus Jack was an
incarnation of a sea god that escorted their ancestors in the sounds hundreds of years ago.
On the theme of guidance, I ask Muldoon whether he feels nostalgic for an era in which the church was much more prominent. “In some sense, yes. But I’m glad the Catholic Church has so evidently shot itself in the foot. I’m a fan of what Jesus Christ has to say, but not of the Christian sects.”
He leaves us with the dark retelling of the dolphin’s betrayal, “one of those assorted rogues/having made an assassination attempt/on Pelorus Jack himself, after which the dolphin would give a wide berth/to the Penguin alone of all the ships of earth”.
One story is that a passenger on the inter-island ferry SS Penguin tried to shoot Pelorus Jack, while another suggests the dolphin was hurt after getting too close to the Penguin. Pelorus Jack abandoned the Penguin, which sank in a storm some years later with the loss of 75 lives. The 1909 shipwreck was New Zealand’s worst 20th-century maritime disaster. Strangely, there were reports of the dolphin returning to the Penguin in the weeks before the disaster – a case of forgive and forget, perhaps, or a warning of impending doom?
On Christmas Eve in 1910, Londoners read the ghoulish tale of how Pelorus Jack harboured the spirit of a Frenchman who drowned while trying to rescue a countryman. A full-page drawing of the dolphin swimming next to a steamer graced the cover of that day’s Illustrated London News.
In New Zealand, the real dolphin was taking a break. “Doubtless he has been feeling the increased strain of the summer traffic, and Christmas being near, he has decided to take his vacation at the head of Admiralty Bay in peace and quietness,” reported the Nelson Evening Mail.
It’s not known when or how Pelorus Jack crossed from this world to the next, but he disappeared for good in 1912. Some believed he had been harpooned by Norwegian whalers. Then there’s the story of the anonymous deathbed confession of a man who’d been haunted all his life after helping his father kill a dolphin stranded after a storm that they later realised was the nation’s pet.
“What has become of ‘Pelorus Jack’?
Was he a lost soul?” asked an Auckland newspaper advertisement placed by an “ex-Spiritualist medium” shortly before Christmas in 1920. A much more famous spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was in town and both men were booked to talk about all things other-worldly at the Town Hall. The Sherlock Holmes creator dismissed his rival’s audience as scanty and derisive, and wrote that he never found out the “real psychic meaning” of the dolphin.
Muldoon didn’t have one specific Christmas in mind when he revisited memories of the 50s and wrote about Pelorus Jack, but rather an “amalgam of one happy time”. Before the Victorians brought us mulled wine, family reunions and Dickens, marking Christ’s birth was a brief, austere affair. By the time Pelorus Jack appeared in the Marlborough Sounds, the commercialisation of the festive season was well under way, with wildlife an important part of the tradition. Redbreasted robins and red-nosed reindeer have long graced our cards. Isn’t it time we honoured our own Victorian symbol of the festive season?
“Doubtless Pelorus Jack has been feeling the increased strain of the summer traffic and has decided to take his vacation.”