Strange Seas: Research

A whale-skeleton looks like the framework for some kind of gigantic muppet, all head, little body, and no feet. Last month I visited the reassembled bones of a 66 foot blue whale were washed up on a Massachusetts beach, now suspended in a large chamber of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, alongside the much smaller skeleton (of a humpback, I think it is). This was on a visit to the east coast between two conventions on successive weekends.

I went to the museum because I've got this weird whale book coming out (Strange Seas). The cons were good cons lots of neat, smart people who read books and write them, lots of stimulating talk and too much food — but the museum was something special. I was happy to see that the place was full of schoolkids, many of them poring over the exhibit of news stories tracing the finding, preserving, and mounting of the big skeleton in its present home.

So here's this immense jaw jutting forward from a graceful curve of spine that tapers off to the most delicate little vertebrae. Without any of the soft tissue there's so much less of the animal from the jaw joint back that the creature looks like something that would be dragged down to the sea-bottom by the sheer weight of its skull, trailing its puny body helplessly after. The head looks weirdly bird-like, the long, pointed jaw resembling a vast beak.

The museum itself offers a grand commitment to a scale of things commensurate with the subject: the front room, a high-roofed hall, was built to house a half-scale model of a whaling ship, big enough to climb aboard and look around. There's a whale-boat next to it, a shallow shell that men got into to chase down their prey once it was sighted (the harpoon itself, mounted on a thick wooden pole, looks so heavy that you get a new understanding of what kind of human muscle it took to "dart the iron").

The surrounding walls of this room sport items and documents from the 19th century whaling life in New Bedford. A mild flavor of apology informs in some of the posted commentary — in particular a note to the effect that given the great number of items made of whale products in those days (primarily fuel and machine oils, and small objects that nowadays would be made of plastic), whalemen did not see themselves and were not seen as sea-going butchers of a noble and endangered species but as hard workers in a dirty, perilous, but essential business.

Watching the musuem's film of one of the last whaling expeditions out of New Bedford (in 1927), a person with a modern sensibility can't help but cringe. At least the whalers in the film used a muscle-powered harpoon, not an explosive weapon to take their quarry.

There's a small library that I had no time to explore, but by then I had realized that there's very little information about whales themselves. Most of what's on offer is about whalemen and whaling; not surprisingly, since the job was to kill and render whales into raw materials, not to study them. Besides, there was not yet much of the kind of technology around to make possible the study of cetaceans in their own world.

Not so different from today, really; we have more technology, but the sheer physical barriers still seem to prevent much beyond autopsies of the dead and dying, and necessarily patchy efforts to eavesdrop and track the living at the arms' length of various instruments and computers. The paucity of information about the whales beyond various measurements is disappointing — no possible cross-check to any of the material in my book — but at the same time reassuring to me.

If I'm not just crazy, or a credulous jerk, my book will scoop those scientists who will one day break the communications barrier and get all this stuff and more for themselves. You get a hell of a buzz from pioneering, especially when there's the spice of being seen by most folks to be making a complete and utter idiot of yourself. Once Strange Seas is out, I betcha the people at the whaling museum (and every scientific institution that deals with cetaceans) won't even let me inside. Well, it's too late in this life to become a scientist anyway, and I wouldn't give up the wonder, the surprises, and the sheer fun of the work I did for this book for anything.

--SMC
August 9, 2000

Update: Strange Seas Now Available

Copyright © 2000 by Suzy McKee Charnas