War of the Whales (36 page)

Orca from L Pod breaching in Smuggler’s Cove, San Juan Island, Washington.

For the first time in a month, Balcomb felt like he could finally clear his head of all the turmoil back in the Bahamas. Smugglers Cove was his home port, the safe harbor he returned to each summer to continue his survey of the Southern Resident Community of orcas. His house, perched on the bluff above the beach, was the repository of his most prized possessions. Whale skulls adorned the walls. Bones and fossils lined the shelves. His photo archive of slides and prints going back decades filled a wall of cabinets on the lower floor. And outside, stashed in sheds around the yards, were a half dozen antique cars he’ d collected since his teens.

Balcomb had arrived the day before to open up the house and flush out the boat engines in advance of the summer orca survey. No one else was up here yet—not the summer interns or staff, not the Earthwatch volunteers, not even the whale-watching boats that would be clogging the inland strait between San Juan Island and Victoria, Canada, by early summer. For a few more days, before he returned to Abaco to help Claridge shut down their winter station, it would be just him and J Pod.

The archipelago of the San Juan Islands, tucked into the extreme northwest corner of the country, was the perfect antipode to the Bahamas. Unlike the flat, dry, and ceaselessly sunny Caribbean, the San Juans were wet, green, and lush, their rocky shorelines swathed in cool clouds and fog. While the beaked whales were elusive deep divers, orcas hunted near the surface and close to shore, making them much easier to observe and photograph. And they had undeniable magnetism, drawing tens of thousands of whale watchers to the Pacific Northwest each summer. Balcomb’s various wives and girlfriends had come and gone over the many summers, along with the research assistants, the volunteers, and the project funders. But the orcas always came back. And they were always spectacular.

•  •  •

In 1976, following his Navy undercover assignment in Japan, Balcomb returned with Camille to the Northwest. They arrived on the scene just as an aroused public was rallying to the defense of the orcas of Puget Sound. A decadelong spree of wild captures—some of them grossly illegal and highly publicized—had depleted the local population of orcas. When the regional office of Fisheries solicited proposals for a census of the local whale community to assess its sustainability, as it was required to do under the recently passed Marine Mammal Protection Act, Balcomb applied for the contract.

The contagion of orca captures had begun, by accident, in 1964. The Vancouver Aquarium considered orcas too violent to display alongside its dolphins and performing seals. But it wanted to acknowledge their central importance to indigenous cultures. So the aquarium director, Dr. Murray Newman, commissioned a local sculptor to collect an orca specimen as a model for a life-sized courtyard sculpture. Whatever his talents as an artist, the sculptor was a lousy gunner. He set up a harpoon gun on Saturna Island, south of Vancouver, and managed to shoot a young orca at the base of its dorsal fin. He reeled in his catch and tried to finish it off with several rounds of rifle shots. But the animal wouldn’t die. Dr. Newman ordered the wounded animal towed back to the aquarium, using the line attached to the harpoon as a towline. He housed the animal in a concrete tank and named the first-ever captive orca “Moby Doll,” a revealing hybrid of Melville’s feared white whale and a child’s plaything.

Moby Doll became an instant celebrity, drawing thousands of visitors and dozens of researchers to the aquarium. William Schevill and Bill Watkins flew in from Woods Hole to record her vocalizations for their catalogue of biological sounds and to confirm that she echolocated like her dolphin relatives. What confounded marine biologists was Moby Doll’s docile, even playful disposition. Where was the storied ferocity of the bloodthirsty man killer?

Until the 1960s, the public perception of orcas was based on an amalgam of misinformation, myth, and legend. In the first century, Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder observed, “A killer whale cannot be properly depicted or described except as an enormous mass of flesh armed with savage teeth.” Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus—the father of taxonomy—classified the two kingdoms of plants and animals into groups according to their form. In the tenth edition of his
Systema Naturae
, published in 1758, he named the species
Orcinus orca
, Latin for “Belonging to the realms of the dead.” And a century later, retired whaling captain Charles Scammon would write, “Whatever quarter of the world Killer Whales are found, they seem always intent upon seeking something to destroy or devour.” As recently as the mid-1970s, a US Navy diving manual warned that a killer whale will “attack human beings at every opportunity.” And yet, paradoxically, no one had ever observed an orca attack a human.

There is good reason why orcas are also known as killer whales.
^*
Though properly classified as dolphins—the largest species of the family Delphinidae—orcas are among the world’s most voracious carnivores. In the Pacific Northwest, “resident” pods feast on Chinook salmon, with each three- to five-ton orca devouring hundreds of pounds of fish a day. The biologically distinct “transient” pods of orcas prey on seals, sea lions, dolphins, porpoises, and other cetaceans. Hunting in packs like wolves, they can wear down and overtake whales many times their own size, including blue whales. Their two interlocking rows of conical-shaped teeth can grab seal pups off beaches or rays out from under rocks on the ocean bottom. Cunning and specialized hunters, orcas have been videotaped ramming great white sharks with their rostrums and then devouring them.

Top predators such as sharks, wolves, and orcas have always aroused fear and hatred among humans altogether out of proportion to any direct threat they pose. Unlike dolphins, which are plentiful around the world, orca populations are small and besieged by their only predator: man. Though they never had enough oil or blubber to interest whalers, orcas have often competed with humans for food in coastal regions, which made them perennial targets of retribution; sometimes even prompting a military response. In 1956, for instance, the Icelandic government asked the US Navy to attack killer whales that competed with its herring fishery. The United States dispatched an antisubmarine air squadron to target the Icelandic orcas with 50-caliber machine guns, aircraft rockets, and depth charges. During that same decade, salmon fishermen in British Columbia lobbied their government to mount heavy artillery guns on hillsides overlooking the inland straits frequented by orcas. In the absence of direct military intervention, and with the tacit encouragement of their governments, fishermen on both sides of the Canadian border routinely fired on orcas from boats and the shoreline.

Moby Doll’s winning personality was chronicled in
Life
magazine and
Reader’s Digest
. When she died after three months of captivity from a skin disease she’ d contracted in her tank, she was eulogized in newspapers around the world—even after a postmortem exam revealed that Moby Doll was a juvenile male. Aquarium director Newman sought to tamp down the public’s effusive killer-whale hugging. “I worry about this sentimentalizing,” he told a reporter from the Vancouver
Province
. “It was a nice whale but still a predatory, carnivorous creature. It could swallow you alive.” But Moby Doll’s friendliness to humans turned out to be typical, not aberrant, orca behavior.

•  •  •

Given our primal reaction to killer whales, it was perhaps inevitable that we’ d demonstrate our dominance by training orcas as entertainers. Displaying exotic marine mammals to a ticket-buying public was nothing new. A century earlier, in 1861, showman P. T. Barnum captured two beluga whales in Newfoundland, packed them inside seaweed-lined crates, and shipped them by railcar to his American Museum in lower Manhattan. They both died after just two days of display inside a freshwater tank, but the enthusiastic response of New Yorkers foretold the future popularity of marine mammal acts at aquariums and marine parks around the world. A century after Barnum debuted his belugas, orcas were poised to step up in social class from abhorred “blackfish” to adored matinee idols.

Moby Doll’s runaway success at the Vancouver Acquarium box office spurred a killer-whale grab that soon spread across the Canadian border and around the world. The head of the Seattle Aquarium, Ted Griffin, was particularly avid to have one. But he soon discovered how hard it was to snare an orca without recourse to harpoons and rifles. And he had competition. When he hopped into a powerboat and tracked the local community of killer whales in Puget Sound, hoping to lasso one by the tail, he kept crossing paths with another orca hunter, Don Goldsberry, who was stalking the same pod from a helicopter.

Griffin’s big break came in 1965 when a 24-foot, five-ton orca became entangled in nets near the fishing town of Namu, British Columbia. Griffin recruited his rival, Goldsberry, to help him bring the whale home alive. They built a 40-by-64-foot floating cage to enclose Namu—named for his place of capture—during his 450-mile swim to Seattle. When they returned home a month later, the docks were lined with cheering spectators and journalists. Five thousand visitors paid to view Namu his first day at the aquarium.

Griffin didn’t just display his prize catch. He swam with him and trained him to perform the tricks he’ d taught his dolphins, only with a much bigger splash. Namu proved to be a gentle and intuitive playmate. During Namu’s year in captivity, 120,000 paying customers lined up to behold “The Killer Turned Tame!” as Griffin billed him.

After 334 days of twice-daily shows at the Seattle Aquarium, Namu contracted a bacterial infection that soon drove him to delirium. He repeatedly crashed into the walls of his tank for two days, and then sank to the bottom and drowned. A necropsy found a decade-old .30-06 Springfield rifle slug nested in his flank. Fully a quarter of killer whales captured in Puget Sound during the late sixties and early seventies had visible bullet wounds.

Before Namu died, he was immortalized in the movie
Namu the Killer Whale
, starring Namu in a fictionalized account of his relationship with Griffin. Released in 1966, it introduced the world to a bigger and better icon of interspecies friendship than Flipper, the dolphin pop star. “Make room in your heart for a six-ton pet! He’s the biggest hero in the whole wide world of adventure!” the movie poster exalted.

Marine parks around the world took note of Namu’s charisma, trainability, and box-office magnetism. SeaWorld in San Diego was looking for a headliner for its performing dolphin and seal acts. So Griffin and Goldsberry incorporated their partnership as Namu Inc. and went orca hunting. After harpooning a mother orca from a helicopter, they captured her calf, which would be easier to transport to San Diego than its full-grown parent. Griffin refused to sell the rights to the name Namu, so SeaWorld called its female orca Shamu, a contraction of “She” and “Namu.” Shamu was such a big hit for SeaWorld that it institutionalized “Shamu” as the stage name for all the killer whales it subsequently acquired for its various marine parks. When one Shamu died, a successor Shamu was slotted seamlessly into the Shamu Show.

By the time the original Shamu died in San Diego, SeaWorld had purchased ten more orcas for its new marine parks, SeaWorld Ohio and SeaWorld Orlando. Meanwhile, Griffin and Goldsberry had grown their capture operation into a highly profitable enterprise. They refined a technique of herding whole pods of orcas into inlets, closing off the cove with seine nets, and then culling the juveniles and calves for sale to SeaWorld and other marine parks around the world. Over their ten-year hunting partnership, Griffin and Goldsberry captured 262 whales in Puget Sound, released the adults, and culled 50 juveniles for transport to marine parks in the United States, Canada, Japan, France, and Argentina. More than a dozen orcas died during capture operations, mostly by drowning in nets. Sixteen of the 50 whales they captured died during their first year of captivity.

The dark side of Namu Inc. remained hidden from public view until a 1970 roundup in Washington State’s Penn Cove. A flotilla of small boats, backed by helicopters dropping explosives into the water, chased the entire population of Southern Resident orcas into Penn Cove. Among the 80 corralled, Griffin and Goldsberry chose seven juveniles to fulfill orders from SeaWorld and other marine parks. One adult and four juveniles died during the capture. Hoping to anchor the evidence at the bottom of Puget Sound, Griffin and Goldsberry slit open the bellies of the four juveniles, stuffed them with stones, and wrapped them in steel chains. When a fishing trawler accidentally raised the four dead whales in its nets a few weeks later, it created a furor among the public and local politicians.

Namu Inc. was finished. Griffin retired from the business, and Goldsberry became SeaWorld’s corporate director of collections. By the mid-1970s, orcas were inextricably linked to SeaWorld’s brand and entertainment offerings. In honor of the US Bicentennial in 1976, SeaWorld trained its Shamus to reenact scenes of the founding fathers, complete with George Washington wigs and tricornered hats. SeaWorld’s logo featured a breaching orca, and orca-themed paraphernalia was the top seller in its gift shops.

Meanwhile, the purchase price of a wild-captured orca had spiked from $20,000 a decade earlier to $150,000. After the passage of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, any marine park that wanted to collect an orca from the wild needed a capture permit from Fisheries, which was now charged with monitoring and sustaining populations of orcas and other marine mammals. But SeaWorld was committed to keeping its theme parks stocked with orcas, and its captive breeding efforts had failed to produce new generations of performers.

In February 1976 Goldsberry was hunting orcas for SeaWorld under a Fisheries-issued permit. When he was caught using seal bombs and buzzing aircraft to herd six orcas into Budd Inlet, the Washington State attorney general sued Goldsberry for violating his permit. Eventually the charges were dropped when Goldsberry and SeaWorld agreed to never again capture whales in Puget Sound.
¹
Public outrage over the Budd Inlet incident prompted Fisheries to conduct a census of the orcas of greater Puget Sound to establish how significantly wild captures had depleted the population.