The Call of Whales

Word that whales had been spotted off Amagansett and East Hampton earlier this week sent those who felt the magic to the beach. At Indian Wells shortly after dawn on Tuesday, cloudlike spouts could just be seen near the horizon. Sphere-shaped, the exhaled blows lingered in the air from a group of humpbacks, at least by one estimation. 

Adding to the mysteries of the ocean, what seems to have been a great white shark was observed attacking a large seal very near the shore in Montauk on Monday. This is something that plenty of surfers and others had assumed would eventually happen off Long Island, and a ripple of anxiety shuddered through that particular tribe. 

Thing is, great whites have been feeding for some time on seals along Cape Cod, so this should come as no surprise. Experts say that it should be seen as a sign of a healthy ecosystem: Were there not forage fish enough, the seals would not be here at all. Were there not seals, the “men in the gray suits,” as an old friend used to call them, would ply their trade elsewhere.

Time was that the people of East Hampton kept regular watch over the ocean for whales. When one was sighted, a flag went up and the villagers rallied to the beach, some to see, others to row out in small, fast boats with hope for a lucrative payday. Debts could be settled in whalebone or oil; the minister in the early colony might be paid that way, if providence shone. In 1675, the town fathers decided to suspend school during the whaling season, from January to April, so that every able-bodied hand was available to help with the trying-out of the oil.

Whaling here ended for good in 1918. The last one taken, a right whale, turned out to be of little commercial value. Now, although humpbacks seem in fine form, right whales are dwindling away, with around 400 individuals remaining in the North Atlantic. 

The scarcity of whales, combined with their size, make them a compelling curiosity when they are sighted. Herman Melville, among their greatest chroniclers, understood they signified something more. 

“ . . . [L]ulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.”

As Melville knew, whales are symbols of the immensity of things we think exist but know almost nothing of and cannot explain. For a moment, sitting in our warm cars at the beach in winter, we, too, may get a glimpse of this truth.