What kind of monsters are these?
CHAPTER ONE
THE SEA BEAST
“Most whales, dolphins and porpoises are peaceful creatures. They have to eat to live, but otherwise they harm neither their oceanic neighbours nor man, unless bothered or injured. How different the orca, which seems to be filled with a burning hatred! Nothing that lives or moves in or on the water is safe from its assaults. Its size, power, speed, agility and disposition have made this black monster greatly feared wherever it is known. As the name Orcinus orca implies, it belongs to ‘the kingdom of the dead.’”
JOSEPH J. COOK AND WILLIAM L. WISNER, KILLER WHALE!
WHEN SAMUEL BURICH fired his harpoon, everyone knew killer whales were monsters. The bad press for the species started with the Old Testament’s scariest sermon—Jonah and the whale. In the first century, Roman historian Pliny the Elder described killer whales as “loathsome, pig-eyed assassins,” and warned that “a killer whale cannot be properly depicted or described except as an enormous mass of flesh armed with savage teeth.”
In 1758, Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who developed taxonomy, dubbed the creatures Orcinus orca in his Systema Naturae. The origin of the name depends on whether you believe the root comes from Orcus (Rome’s god of death or the underworld) or ork (from the French term orque, which was used to describe sea monsters long before it became the name of the villains in The Lord of the Rings). Whichever version you prefer, the Latin translates as “of or belonging to the kingdom of the dead,” “bringer of death,” or “devil whale.”
In 1874, American naturalist Captain Charles Scammon warned that “in whatever quarter of the world [killer whales] are found, they seem always intent upon seeking something to destroy or devour.”
The Haida people of British Columbia dubbed killer whales skana, which translates as “killer demon—supernatural power.” Alaska’s Aleut called them polossatik—“the feared one.” First Nations opinions about killer whales varied, probably based on which whales they encountered, but whether they viewed the creatures as potentially dangerous spirits (as the Haida did) or reincarnations of their ancestors (like the Nuu-chah-nulth), the First Nations in North America respected them as intelligent beings who ruled the ocean just as humans ruled the land.
The German term Mörderwal translates as “whale-murderer.” Basque fishermen called the creature ballena asesina—“assassin whale,” which may be the origin of the name killer whale. Both names were inspired by the orca’s penchant for hunting and feasting on other whales. All the names in every language conveyed the same warning—these creatures were deadly.
On Captain Robert F. Scott’s final Antarctic expedition, in 1912, his men twice found themselves surrounded by killer whales and were convinced they were doomed. Scott’s photographer, Herbert Ponting, was on an ice floe with a team of “Eskimo dogs” when a group of whales began circling. He could see their tall triangular black fins and hear their breath through their blowholes—a sound he knew meant danger. For a photographer in love with the natural world, the scene must have been magical—until the attack.
The snow under Ponting’s feet began shaking, rocking, and cracking. The booming sound of the creatures ramming the ice floe beneath Ponting and his dog team filled the air. “Whale after whale rose under the ice, setting it rocking fiercely,” wrote Scott. “One after another their huge hideous heads shot vertically into the air through the cracks which they had made. As they reared them to a height of 6 or 8 feet it was possible to see their tawny head markings, their small glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth—by far the largest and most terrifying in the world.”
As the whales set their small glistening eyes on Ponting, he knew it was all over. But after surveying the man and his dogs, the whales vanished beneath the surface and swam off to look for their standard fare, probably seals.
The whales’ ingenious, methodical approach to hunting haunted Scott. “Of course, we have known well that killer whales continually skirt the edge of the floes and that they would undoubtedly snap up anyone who was unfortunate enough to fall into the water; but the facts that they could display such deliberate cunning, that they were able to break ice of such thickness (at least 2 ½ feet), and that they could act in unison, were a revelation to us.” It was a revelation he shared with the world.
Whales of all types became especially infamous courtesy of American author and whaler Herman Melville. His novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was released in 1851 to tepid and sometimes savage reviews and less than titanic sales. During Melville’s lifetime, Moby-Dick sold only 3,200 copies. It was the least successful of his six novels. But in the 1920s, thirty years after Melville’s death, Moby-Dick became a pop culture phenomenon, an icon and a synonym for whales and monsters after America’s silver screen heartthrob John Barrymore starred as a heroic Ahab in the 1926 silent movie The Sea Beast. The movie was such a hit that Barrymore revisited the role in a talkie version four years later that kept Melville’s name, Moby Dick.
Since the 1920s, Moby-Dick has been adapted and reinvented for every medium and almost every genre, making a splash on stage, radio, and screen. An epic exploration of obsession and madness, Moby-Dick is also a horror story about a savage, unpredictable, unstoppable force of nature. Courtesy of all the adaptations—and there are hundreds, ranging from comic books to sci-fi space operas—Moby-Dick did for whales what Jaws did for sharks almost a century later.
At the same time that Barrymore was battling the great white whale on-screen, American author Zane Grey wrote about the terror of seeing a killer whale up close. “The fact that my hands shook attested to the knowledge that I had acquired of peril on the sea. Even the veteran whale-hunters are afraid of orca.” Best known today as a prolific author of Western pulp fiction, Grey wrote more than a dozen books on fishing and warned his readers that “orca kill for the sake of killing. No doubt the Creator created them, the same as the sharks, to preserve a balance in the species of the Seven Seas—to teach all the larger fish and dolphin, seals, porpoises, that the price of life was eternal vigilance.” Grey also cautioned that “orca are the most ferocious and terrible of all the wolves of the sea. They are equally dangerous to man.”
The word “whale” was almost always synonymous with monster and interchangeable with giant. Many scientists say the killer isn’t technically a whale—it’s the largest member of the dolphin family (Delphinidae); pilot whales are the second largest—but the distinction isn’t that clear cut. Some experts on cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) flip the equation and don’t just group killers and pilots with the rest of the species but wonder if the porpoise should actually qualify as a small whale.
IN 1963, JUST before the Vancouver Aquarium’s expedition, a book entitled Killer Whale! presented the most up-to-date information on the creature Burich and Bauer were hired to hunt. The introduction by Dr. Ross F. Nigrelli, pathologist at the New York Aquarium, warns readers that “the fiercest, most terrifying animal in all the world lives in the sea, not on land. Lions, tigers and great bears are considered savage animals, but many times more powerful and far more vicious than any of these is the killer whale.”
Authors Joseph J. Cook and William L. Wisner explain that “from the beginning of time the killer whale has been feared wherever man has depended upon the ocean for food. To the Eskimo, the orca was the wolf of the sea because of its habit of hunting in packs. To the Pacific Northwest Indian, it was the fierce and fearless hunter of the open waters.”
The authors offer a collection of terrifying tales about ornery orcas, describing an attack in the Antarctic where several boats were pursued by “a pack of killer whales.” The writers report that “the men were able to reach the edge of a nearby ice floe, abandon their craft, and flee to safety on foot. There probably have been many instances where men were not so fortunate. No doubt seal hunters, Eskimos and others traveling alone on