The Mast-Head: A Powerful Sight
The dead whale that fetched up in the bay near our house at some point during the past weekend has drawn considerable attention, as dead whales do.
I had first heard about it from Harvey Bennett, who left a phone message after spotting the floating carcass from across the bay. Baymen like Harvey know to watch for the workings of gulls, which are clues, if one knows how to read them, about what is happening beneath the surface.
From our staircase down to Gardiner’s Bay and through an old pair of binoculars, it was obvious that something big was out there, off toward Promised Land. Evvy, our 11-year-old, and I got in the car for a closer look. From the beach about a quarter mile east, we could confirm that the object was indeed a whale. Gulls stood on its exposed belly, probing for soft spots where they might find an easy meal.
It is difficult to say exactly what the fascination is, but my guess is that we humans are amazed by the sheer improbability of whales, their size, that they can live scores of years, that they can exist at all. Aside from the creatures that can be visited at aquariums, very few of us will ever have a chance to see a whale up close, unless it is dead and washed by the wind to a shore.
The arrival of an almost next-door whale provides an opportunity for me to point out that the body of water in which it rested is Gardiner’s Bay. Steve Russell Boerner, a part-time archivist at the East Hampton Library, and I have been preparing documentation for the United States Board on Geographic Place Names to correct what we see a misconception stemming from a 1956 fieldwork error, which has been repeated and now popularized by Google and other online mapping services. Napeague Bay, by which this section of water is frequently identified, begins a good distance off to the east.
According to the best sources that Steve and I have been able to assemble, Gardiner’s Bay ends at a line that can be imagined running from Goff Point roughly north-northwest to Cartwright Shoal on the southern tip of Gardiner’s Island. One interesting bit of evidence we have found is a resolution by the East Hampton Town Trustees in the late 19th century to hire a lawyer to deal with squatters on Hicks Island, which, as the record indicates, was said at the time to divide Gardiner’s Bay from Napeague Harbor. Today’s town officials concur, and we await the final decision of the place-names board.
Promised Land, where the whale was stuck aground early this week, is squarely in Gardiner’s Bay. My father, his grandfather Everett J. Edwards, and his great-grandfather Joshua Bennett Edwards would have known this. E.J. and Josh were whaling men and would have made quick work of the whale, I’d guess. Today, it is mostly a curiosity, if one that makes us think for a minute about things bigger and far more mysterious than ourselves.