Whales Quotes

“In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Nate had been born and raised in British Columbia, and Canadians hate, above all things, to offend. It was part of the national consciousness. "Be polite" was an unwritten, unspoken rule, but ingrained into the psyche of an entire country. (Of course, as with any rule, there were exceptions: parts of Quebec, where people maintained the "dismissive to the point of confrontation, with subsequent surrender" mind-set of the French; and hockey, in which any Canadian may, with impunity, slam, pummel, elbow, smack, punch, body-check, and beat the shit out of, with sticks, any other human being, punctuated by profanities, name-calling, questioning parentage, and accusations of bestiality, usually-coincidentally- in French.)”
― Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“I couldn't help wondering where porpoises had learned this game of running on the bows of ships. Porpoises have been swimming in the oceans for seven to ten million years, but they've had human ships to play with for only the last few thousand. Yet nearly all porpoises, in every ocean, catch rides for fun from passing ships; and they were doing it on the bows of Greek triremes and prehistoric Tahitian canoes, as soon as those seacraft appeared. What did they do for fun before ships were invented?
Ken Norris made a field observation one day that suggests the answer. He saw a humpback whale hurrying along the coast of the island of Hawaii, unavoidably making a wave in front of itself; playing in that bow wave was a flock of bottlenose porpoises. The whale didn't seem to be enjoying it much: Ken said it looked like a horse being bothered by flies around its head; however, there was nothing much the whale could do about it, and the porpoises were having a fun time. ”
― Karen Pryor, Lads Before the Wind: Diary of a Dolphin Trainer

“No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while."

"So you don't really have a theory?"

"Clueless."

"You lying bag of fish heads."

"I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?"

"I'm not getting paid."

"See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact.”
― Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.”
― Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America

“Whales are silly once every two years. The young are called short-heads or baby blimps. Many whale romances begin in Baffin's bay and end in Procter and Gamble's factory, Staten Island.”
― Will Cuppy, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes

“American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtightening
and chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale’s bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold.”
― Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America

“In the November 2006 issue of Science, a report by an international team of scientists studying a vast amount of data gathered between 1950 and 2003 declared that if current trends of fishing and pollution continue, every fishery in the world's oceans will collapse by 2048...The oceans as an ecosystem would completely collapse.”
― Peter Heller, The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet's Largest Mammals

“From the slope of Haleakala, the Old Broad watched the activity in the channel with a two-hundred-power celestial telescope and a pair of "big eyes" binoculars that looked like stereo bazookas on precision mounts that were anchored into a ton of concrete.”
― Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked. Nate could hear her tapping a pencil on her desk. She took notes during their conversations. He didn't know what she did with the notes, but it bothered him.
"I have a lecture at the sanctuary in four days." Why, why had he told her? Why? Now she'd rattle down the mountain in her ancient Mercedes that looked like a Nazi staff car, sit in the audience, and ask all the questions that she knew in advance he couldn't answer.”
― Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

“Yet if a young bowhead made it to adulthood, it could easily outlive the whaler who had tried to kill it as a calf – and then bury his son and his grandson as well.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“Although the Old Bering Sea cultures generally did not bother with burials, Thule whalers were interred in whalebone graves: whale mandibles and scapulae were used to frame the corpse, perhaps to protect the whaler on his journey after death, a funereal swallow motif.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The sandy, almost barren island provided little sustenance, and, although the islanders were mostly Quakers, professing a pure doctrine of non-violence, they were quick studies, soon embracing killing of whales. To Melville, these Nantucketers were ‘Quakers with a vengeance’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“According to Herman Melville, the quest for oil and bone resulted in open battle. Nantucket whalers ‘in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“So what drew them to whaling? Some might have been lured by what Baudelaire called the ‘profound and mysterious charm that arises from looking at a ship’; others, as Elizabeth Hardwick noted in her biography of Melville, ‘have come sulking away, address unknown, from howling creditors, accusing wives, alert policemen, beggary on shore’. Many greenhands were from farming families, some awaiting their inheritance, others, as younger sons, unlikely to come into anything. Runaway slaves were not uncommon aboard Yankee whalers: Nantucket’s Quaker population helped to secure berths for those in danger of being recaptured by bounty hunters.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The greenhands, by necessity, were taught the ropes at sea. The captain distributed them among the boats, so as not to slow its progress when they inevitably caught a crab with their oars, breaking the rhythm of the boat. From the stern, the mate called out ‘Break your backs!’ as each took an oar. It was best to be quick, for the ‘iron-fisted and iron-hearted officers’ often ‘beat their information in with anything that came to hand’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“After his ship had struck a right whale, Enoch Cloud wrote: she quickly ‘slued’ around, raised her enormous head out of the water, fixed her eyes on the boat, and then bellowing commenced, slowly, ‘sterning off!’ It was the most terrible sight I ever witnessed . . . It is painful to witness the death of the smallest of God’s created beings, much more one in which life is so vigorously maintained as the Whale! And when I saw this, the largest and most terrible of all created animals bleeding, quivering, dying a victim to the cunning of man, my feelings were indeed peculiar!

Whalers may not have expressed much sympathy with their quarry, but the death of a mother with calf could break even the toughest façade: ‘That’s when you feel it’, said one whaler, ‘when we killed the mother the milk made the ocean white all around us’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill reluctantly acknowledged that whales could be considered mammals from a zoological perspective, but he insisted that they were fish for commercial purposes.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“In the Caribbean, humpback cow-calf pairs were the prey of choice for traditional and modern whalers. In the search for right whales, the whale biologist E. A. Wilson noted in 1907: ‘the hunt began with the destruction of the calf, because it was known that the mother would then become easy prey, as she would not leave the bay without her suckling’. This type of whaling was perhaps ‘the most complete and rapid method of exterminating an animal that has ever been adopted’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“When threatened, sperm whales often gather in a circle, thrashing their flukes on the outer edge of the ring. This defence, which one Japanese researcher described as a marguerite flower or daisy, might work against orcas, but modern whalers intentionally harpooned the largest whale in a group, hoping to prompt the formation of a marguerite. The hunters then plucked the whales from the sea, petal by petal.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The very breath of a whale could put it in the way of a harpoon.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“Enticed by the riches that would come from vanquishing the whales, man disturbed the peace of their vast wilderness, violated their haven, wiped out all those unable to steal away to the inaccessible wasteland of icy polar seas. And so, the giant of giants fell prey to his weaponry. Since man shall never change, only when they cease to exist will these enormous species cease to be the victims of his self-interest. They flee before him, but it is no use; man’s resourcefulness transports him to the ends of the earth. Death is their only refuge now.”
― Bernard Germain de Lacépède

“Marble would not be good enough to lay this corpse upon; for the sight – discard the blemishes – is wonder. This is the sordid remnant, yet the eye may even now replace what has been lost. Where went that spirit, which played in the magnificence – which made this mountain leap and sport, quickened the eye, retracted that balloon of a tongue, lifted that fallen jaw? This was a lump which solved some wild equation of the elements. This monstrous form and painted shapeliness has burned its way through phosphorescent waves in summer, the black night lighted by luminous clouds of its own breathing; and sinking with an easy silence, it has spiralled to unseen depths, upon unknown desires. It is more lovely and more startling than the Sphinx.”
― F. V. Morley

“The inability of the IWC to enforce its own regulations was perhaps most blatantly exposed by the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis. He fitted out a whaling fleet trained by Norwegians with a German crew, which operated under several flags, including Panama’s. Although the Central American nation was an IWC member, it was incapable of exerting control over the shipping magnate. According to Ellis, Onassis’s Olympic Challenger ‘took endangered blue whales, female humpbacks and calves, and sperm whales so small that they had not developed teeth’. In a sense, Onassis’s flagrant violations helped the conservationist cause. Here was a fantastically wealthy man bent on the destruction of whales for no apparent reason – he hardly needed the money. Onassis did not bow to international pressure, and he would not abide by treaties. For the IWC , and for whalers who claimed that their industry was strictly controlled and essential to the growing human population, he was a public-relations nightmare. Onassis seemed to relish the role of international renegade: he invited American businessmen and socialites to watch whaling aboard the Challenger. The bar stools on his yacht were covered with the skin of sperm-whale penises, and whale teeth were used as footrests.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“For most of the twentieth century, scientists were allied with whalers; much of their research was done either on the flensing deck or on the occasional stranded whale. Taxes levied on whale oil from the lucrative British Antarctic Territory financed extensive research in the Southern Ocean, including the natural history voyages of the RRS Discovery, the explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic vessel. Until the 1970s the expressed intent of this research was to gather biological knowledge to help the hunt. In some cases, the studies were intended to increase efficiency.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“In 1960 an independent committee of scientists was appointed to investigate whale stocks. The Committee of Three, Douglas Chapman of the US , K. Radway Allen of New Zealand and the British biologist Sidney Holt representing the UN , analysed whale populations in the Southern Hemisphere, and their findings were tragic. There were fewer than 1,000 blue whales left in the world. Humpback populations were so low that scientists suggested that it would probably take 80 years of protection to restore their numbers. Yet the killing continued: in the whaling season of 1960–61, two Soviet factory ships removed almost 13,000 humpbacks from the waters south of Australia and New Zealand. Two-hundred-and-fifty blues were killed during the whaling season of 1962–3.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“Farley Mowat recorded the words of a Newfoundland fisherman, Arthur Pink: They was t’ousands of the big whales on the coast them times. So long as they was on the fishing grounds along of we, I never was afeared of anything; no, nor never felt lonely neither. But after times, when the whales was all done to death, I’d be on the Penguin grounds with nothing livin’ to be seen and I’d get a feeling in me belly, like the world was empty. Yiss, me son, I missed them whales when they was gone. ’Tis strange. Some folks says as whales is only fish. No, bye! They’s too smart for fish.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The rhythms of humpbacks are similar to those of human music. Their songs last longer than our ballads but are shorter than most symphonies. Do they have an attention span like our own? Do they use similar techniques, repeating refrains that form rhymes, to remember songs? Payne and colleagues suggest that this is so. Our evolutionary path has been separated from whales for 60 million years. Perhaps we are latecomers to music, not the inventors of song.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“In 1970 Capitol Records and National Geographic released Songs of the Humpback Whale. Payne’s recordings became a smash hit, fascinating listeners around the globe; humpbacks soon became known as ‘opera stars of the deep’. Thirty years later, as I listened to the songs on a reissued CD , the hair stood up on my neck. With the eerie attraction of wolf calls, the recordings have lost none of their haunting novelty. At the same time, the high-pitched squeals and moans evoked a vulnerability surprising in so large a creature. One Australian whaler declared that, had he heard those songs, he never would have ‘fired a shot at a whale’. The historian Barthelmess, on the other hand, recalled that he and the crew listened to Payne’s recordings on the bridge of an Icelandic whaler while they were steaming out to the whaling grounds. ‘It’s a matter’, he insisted, ‘of culturization’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“Yesterday I learned that the breathing of whales is as crucial to our own breathing in the carbon cycle of the planet as are the forests of the world. Researchers say, if whales returned to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, their gigantic breathing would store as much carbon is 110,000 hectares of forest, or a forest the size of Rocky Mountain National Park.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals Emergent Strategy Series