The morning’s warm air over the cool ocean waters off Cape Cod in late May had created a heavy fog that hovered just over the sea. The sunlight slipping through the haze reflected tantalizing off the waves and created a numinous silvery sheen with a blinding effect. Dazzled by the glare, I stared into the dark waters, then gasped. A great eye, smoky gray and opaque, the size of a dinner plate, stared at me as it ascended from the ocean’s depths. It was curious, not a hint of malevolence. When its rostrum broke the surface, the scores of ivory-colored barnacles peppering its head resolved themselves, and elicited a moment of deep sympathy. The rising mass created a swirling eddy, and from the murky waters its two great white-edged flippers materialized, each fifteen feet long and also barnacle-encrusted. This humpback whale, near enough to touch, was my first great cetacean so close at hand. Its was mesmerizing both for its colossal size and for immediately imparting an impression of curiosity. The whale’s gaze took in our ship and the people lining the rails. The eye flickered, distracted, then it tracked the movements of a photographer shifting along the rail for a better shot. Then its gaze came back to me, probing; I felt it questioning my intent. There was a connection then, as one would nod to a close friend across a crowded room, and a powerful wash of affinity enveloped me. Then, with a slow blink, the whites of its eye showing, and perhaps satisfied with my innocence, the whale lowered its massive head, raised its flukes high in the air, and slid silently back into the deep.

The trip to Stellwagen Bank opened my eyes to many facets of a whale’s life, some I probably did not explicitly recognize at the time. Before then, I hadn’t really thought much about their intelligence or mammalian empathy, and certainly not that they might have a “culture.” Defined as the cognitive ability to acquire and transfer knowledge through observation and communication, culture is the conscious passing of information within a population instead of a genetic transfer. We had watched humpback whales dive below schools of sand eels, then swim in a spiral beneath them, slowly releasing air to encircle them in a curtain of bubbles. I did not know this was a learned behavior. Subsequently, marine scientists documented that at the time of my visit to Stellwagen Bank, bubble curtains were a new behavior, and one that was just beginning to spread. 1 Humpbacks were also just learning that if they used their tail fluke to smash the rising school of sand eels consolidated by the bubbles, this further disoriented them and made it easier for the whale rising from below to swallow more in one bite. These cooperative behaviors were first observed in the area in the mid-1980s, but shortly after they began to be passed along more broadly and are now employed by most of the humpbacks found in the Western Atlantic. Not then, but now it is fairly common knowledge that other whale species have cultures defined by distinct dietary preferences, foraging behaviors, communication, and kin care. For example, besides the humpback’s feeding techniques, killer whales are well known for population-specific prey selection. Some killer whale groups specialize in salmon, others in marine mammals, and some in sharks and rays. Similarly, sperm whales pass along an array of behaviors related to childcare, and in some groups, only closely related females will guard and suckle young, while in other groups a broader array of kin will share these tasks. 2 Bottlenose dolphins are known to pass along insights in tool use. Perhaps most beguiling, humpback societies are delineated by their complex songs. Males craft songs that are a set of notes woven into melodic rhythms. Sometimes a song lasts for only a few minutes, but more typically a half hour or more. Not to cast pedagogic aspersion among whale species, but while the simpler songs

1 Stellwagen Bank bubble feeding informed by: Wiley, David, Colin Ware, Alessandro Bocconcelli, Danielle Cholewiak, Ari Friedlaender, Michael Thompson, and Mason Weinrich. 2011. “Underwater Components of Humpback Whale Bubble-net Feeding Behaviour.” Behaviour, vol. 148, no. 5/6:575–602; Allen, Jenny, and Mason Weinrich, Will Hoppitt, and Luke R. 2013. “Network-Based Diffusion Analysis Reveals Cultural Transmission of Lobtail Feeding in Humpback Whales.” Science, vol. 340:485–488; Norris, Scott. 2002. “Creatures of Culture? Making the Case for Cultural Systems in Whales and Dolphins.” BioScience, vol. 52, no. 1:9–14; and Schmicker, Kristen M. 2015. “Humpback Whale Distribution on Stellwagen Bank.” Journal of Aquaculture & Marine Biology, vol. 2, no. 1:00014. DOI: 10.15406/jamb.2015.02.00014. 2 Whitehead, Hal, M. Dillon, S. Dufault, L. Weilgart, and J. Wright. 1998. “Non-Geographically Based Population Structure of South Pacific Sperm Whales; Dialects, Fluke-markings and Genetics.” Journal of Animal Ecology 67:253–262; and Whitehead, Hal, and L. Rendell. 2004. “Movements, Habitat Use and Feeding Success of Cultural Clans of South Pacific Sperm Whales.” Journal of Animal Ecology 73:190–196.

of blue and fin whales appear to persist unchanged within a population for decades, the more complicated humpback songs evolve rather rapidly in time. A recent study of humpback songs in the South Pacific showed new songs were passed from whales off Eastern Australia to groups around French Polynesia in just two years. 3

The Smyrna spent two weeks in the archipelago, and as I explored the world of whaling, I shuddered when I later realized how they assuredly spent their time. The crew of the Smyrna likely joined thousands of other whalers of the era in their own descent into barbarity as they captured and savagely slaughtered the archipelago’s most renown inhabitants. Prior to the whalers, the great lumbering tortoises dominated the islands. Even as late as the 1860s, an old whaler recollected that the older skippers of his day often said there were thousands of them even on the smaller islands in the [eighteen] thirties and forties. Some of them were of enormous size. He had heard of two or three up in the mountains of Albemarle Island too big to be moved, but instead had dates cut on their shells as far back as sixty or seventy years. The whalers who had seen them thought they might weigh seven or eight hundred pounds. 4 It was with horror that I came to understand the role whalers played in Darwin’s crucible of evolution. Ships like the Smyrna and Isaac Howland did cruise the islands for whales in the mid-nineteenth century, but they primarily visited the Galapagos to gather information from others and re-victual, that is, to collect fresh water and meat before sailing west “along the line,” the equator. Nearly every whaler visiting the islands partook in the rapacious behavior of “tortoising.”

3 Garland, Ellen C., Luke Rendell, Luca Lamoni, M. Michael Poole, and Michael J. Noad. 2017. “Song Hybridization Events during Revolutionary Song Change Provide Insights into Cultural Transmission in Humpback Whales.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 114, no. 30 (July 25, 2017), pp. 7822–7829. 4 Townsend, Charles H. 1925. “The Whaler and the Tortoise.” Scientific Monthly, vol. 21, no. 2:166–172.

Ecologically the Galapagos tortoises are what is known as a keystone species, one intrinsically important to the archipelago’s biology. While they may look like innocuous and lost wanderers on the parched islands, over millions of years they have become an essential link in the islands’ food webs. The tortoises’ selective herbivory helps maintain a mosaic of vegetation, and their castings during their slow and arbitrary wanderings are critical to broad seed dispersal on the islands. Regardless, without remorse whalers lashed thousands of tortoises to oars and carried them from the hills, completely unappreciative of their role in Darwin’s epiphany on evolution or in the islands’ ecology. Every day they were flipped onto their backs and with ropes dragged to different ships to be confined, starved, kept as an object of amusement, and ultimately killed. Indeed even Darwin’s ship the Beagle took aboard thirty tortoises from Chatham Island for their consumption. Others took more. Capt. Benjamin Morrell, a sealer visiting the islands in 1825, wrote: “I have known whale-ships to take from six to nine hundred of the smallest size of these tortoises on board when leaving the islands for their cruising grounds; thus providing themselves with provisions for six or eight months, and securing the men against the scurvy. I have had these animals on board my own vessels from five to six months without their once taking food or water.” 5 In the 1920s, a scientist from the New York Zoological Society, Charles Townsend, studied whalers’ records and found of “seventy-nine vessels that had visited the Galapagos at various times between 1831 and 1868 and [they] had carried off thirteen thousand tortoises.” 6 Extrapolating from such numbers, and multiplying by the fleet size, divided by the probability of stopping in once every four or five years, a reasonable guess is that between five hundred thousand and a million tortoises were hauled off for food and oil between the 1820s and 1959, when the Galapagos were finally declared a national park.

5 Bauer, G. 1889. “The Gigantic Land Tortoises of the Galapagos Islands.” The American Naturalist, vol. 23, no. 276:1039–1057. 6 Townsend, Charles H. 1925. “The Whaler and the Tortoise.” Scientific Monthly, vol. 21, no. 2:166–172; and Townsend, Charles Haskins. 1926. “The Galapagos Tortoises in their Relation to the Whaling Industry.” Zoologica, vol. IV, no. 3. The New York Aquarium Nature Series, New York Zoological Society. New York, N.Y. 137 pgs. [https://mysite.du.edu/~ttyler/ploughboy/townsendgaltort.htm]

In visiting New Zealand, one hundred and sixty years after Rob had left….. “at last I came to Lake Waikaremoana. There I took a break and some Motrin to ease the tension that gripped my back and neck and had left me with white knuckles. I hiked for a couple of miles on a well-maintained gravel trail to Lake Whakamarino, a smaller lake that feeds the great one. As I hiked along, my being relaxed, zen returned. Soon I realized that every other arboreal giant seemed to have a bellbird lurking in its midst calling out to the world. Shining cuckoos, newly returned from their winter home in the Solomon Islands and resplendent in their emerald coats, were quarrelling with each other for territories. I paused frequently along the trail to gaze up in admiration at the spectacular dripping verdant canopy Flashing fantails, a small warbler-sized bird with a spectacular tail, displayed and entertained me. Supported by massive trunks, the forest giants formed an ancient ecological temple. I was captivated by the sheer beauty of the forest; and struck by the ironic contrast that it was the very type of forest that Rob dedicated several years of his life to cutting down. “

Cape Horn with its legendary waters, which Rob rounded twice, has also long enticed explorers and ornithologists. More than eighty scientific expeditions ventured to the area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among those who visited were James Cook on the Endeavour in 1769, Charles Darwin on the Beagle in 1832, and Sir James Ross on the Erebus in late 1842. The last visits were just a few scant years before Rob first went ’round on the Smyrna in 1849. As an ornithologist, I avidly contemplated each mention of a bird in Rob’s tale, and I mythically projected myself into his journey. As the Smyrna first sailed south, leaving New Bedford in winter, immediately offshore Rob would have seen alcids, a family of birds including razorbills, murres, and dovekies. These are northern convergent evolutionary equivalents of the penguins. He probably wouldn’t have seen the first gannets, shearwaters, and petrels until farther south, off Cape Hatteras. Crossing the equator, the diversity would have increased, and east of Rio de Janeiro they likely would have encountered the first mollymawks, the smaller albatrosses. At that point, if he had known, Rob would have joined with Robert Cushman Murphy when he exalted, “I now belong to a higher cult of mortals, for I have seen the albatross!” 7 Offshore Buenos Aires, the Smyrna’s crew would’ve begun seeing giant petrels and new and different shearwaters, but not until they were off the coast of Patagonia would they have likely spied the consummate South Atlantic species, the great wandering albatross, the larger storm-petrels, prions, and penguins.

Sometimes now, I close my eyes and think of Rob’s, and then my, trip around Cape Horn and my subsequent journey to the Southern Galapagos off New Zealand. I imagine surging cerulean rollers, hear howling winds, and envision soaring seabirds set against a horizon as atmospheric as William Turner’s impasto might beget. I merge the times and images and visualize Rob braced against the stays in the “Ship Followers,” while looking out for a flight of whalebirds. In parallel I recollect leaning over the polished rail of my ship to watch the Cape petrels rising from Antarctica’s mists to grace my journey. Perhaps after all this reflection, on family history and the fate of our planet, I am in too deep. Perhaps my wishful green ethos has pulled me from the boundaries of our human reality. Absorbed in a swirl of melancholy thoughts regarding our future, I wonder if we humans are in our twilight, or can we yet find a way to a new dawn in human ecology. For the moment, the wandering albatross still soar in great arcs across the boisterous seas of Drake Passage, prions flit around the Snares, and sperm whales slide under the cobalt waves that roll north with the Humboldt Current. Our cetaceans and tubenosed birds remain some of the most tangible biotic markers of our planet. For those lucky enough to see whales in the wild today, it’s awe-inspiring to watch their colossal bodies course through the seas with fluid grace, breaching, or surging to the surface with their jaws agape. We are fortunate now that with fifty years of respite from man’s savage hand, if you journey to places such as Stellwagen Bank off Cape Cod, Monterey Bay in California, or off the coasts of Alaska and Maui, you may see them rise near your boat, blow, and then ease back into the deep. Majestic and knowing, they are magnificent creatures. So too, are the great wandering albatrosses, prions, and all the other

7 Murphy, Rob Cushman. 1947. Logbook for Grace; Whaling Brig Daisy 1912–1913. MacMillan Co. Reprinted 1965. Time Reading Program, Special Edition. Time Life Books. New York, N.Y. 372 pgs.

pelagics that soar on the oceans’ winds, nest on the few remaining uninhabited islands, and snatch krill or squid from the sea’s mercurial surface. Yet, I think we all recognize that human society now stands on the edge; a precipice that will determine our, and our planet’s future. Collectively, we are at the point where we must intellectually and ethically grapple with our relationship with other life-forms on earth. We must appraise ourselves, our future needs, and candidly evaluate our capabilities in managing the planet’s ecology. We need to assess the planet’s carrying capacity, and our interactions with our biological partners on this our one and only home, Earth. Herman Melville understood this more than 170 years ago when, in Moby Dick, he wondered “whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.” 8 Robert Cushman Murphy, in pushing to open the Whitney Hall of Oceanic Birds in the heart of New York City just seventy years ago, recognized the soaring albatross was deeply symbolic of clean oceans and still-wild places. It is now time that we, Hominids of the Holocene, must face up to our apparently unquenchable appetite to dominate the planet and monopolize every resource. We must recognize that even our current self-appraisals are skewed by modern technology and twisted by imbedded historical anthropocentrism, and that the clock is ticking on our fate.

8 Melville, Herman. 1851 (Reprinted 2016). Moby Dick. MacMillan’s Collector Library. 768 pgs.