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The Pacific is pretty big, so let's narrow it down. We're close to the equator. 3,000 miles one way lies Ecuador. 7,000 miles the other way, Papua New Guinea. Your nearest land is a small volcano in what's now French Polynesia. When I say nearest, I'm talking 1,500 miles. You get the idea. We're a very long way from anywhere.
Twenty men are on a wooden ship perched at the top of the mast. One man is scanning the horizon for the telltale spout of water from a whale's blowhole. When he spots one, he'll shout, "There she blows!" The men will split up into smaller, lighter boats and row towards the whales. They'll throw a harpoon, a kind of barbed spear attached to a rope.
The harpooned whale will thrash or dive or swim away, dragging the boat behind it. The men will keep hold of the rope until the whale exhausts itself. Then they'll stab the whale to death and take its body back to the ship, where they'll strip it of its blubber. That gets boiled down to make oil, which is used in lamps. Whaling is big business, one of the largest sectors of the US economy.
There she blows! Whales! A whole pod of them. The men got into the smaller boats. They rode closer. First mate, Owen Chase, threw his harpoon at one of the whales. In agony, he later described, the whale threw himself up over towards the boat.
The whale's thrashing tail knocked a hole in the little wooden boat. As water gushed in, Chase quickly cut the rope. He didn't want to be dragged away. One man bailed out water as the others rowed back to the ship. They climbed on board and hoisted up their damaged boat. Chase and the men were starting to repair it.
when I observed a very large whale about 85 feet in length. He spouted two or three times and then made directly for us with full speed and struck the ship with his head. The men had never known anything like it. They looked at each other, Chase said, with perfect amazement. The whale swam away, then stopped.
I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury. The whale turned around and came straight back at them. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales About Whales. 1983, off the coast of Iceland.
Another boat is hunting whales, though not, this time, to make oil for lamps. They want to make money from them in another way. The aim is to grab young whales that can be trained to perform for tourists in marine amusement parks. They capture a two-year-old orca, also known as a killer whale, the black and white ones. The captured whale is transported to Sealand in Victoria, Canada.
He's given the name Tilikum. Tilikum's story is told in the 2013 documentary Blackfish. Marine park trainers who used to work with orcas describe how intelligent they are. When you look into their eyes, says one, you know somebody is home. The filmmakers talk to one man who recalls what happened when he was hired to work on a boat that captured orcas like Tilikum.
A plane flew above them, keeping track of the whales and directing the hunt. They used explosives to herd the whales into a bay where they could enclose them in a net. They picked out the baby orcas and hoisted them up out of the water. Then they took away the net so the other whales could leave. But the other whales didn't leave. They stayed, making loud noises.
The boatman had a vivid sense of the almost human pain he witnessed. You understand then what you're doing, you know. I lost it. I mean, I just started crying, you know. I just couldn't handle it. It's like kidnapping a little kid away from a mother. You know, I can't think of anything worse than that. At Sealand...
The young orca Tilikum is paired for training with an older whale who's an experienced performer. If either whale does something wrong, both whales are punished. They don't get fed. The older whale responds by raking Tilikum with her teeth and Tilikum learns to perform. You know the kind of performance. Waving at the crowd with a fin.
giving a trainer in a wetsuit a ride around the pool, jumping up to make a big splash that soaks all the squealing children sitting at the front. At night, the whales are shut away in a small, dark steel tank. 20-year-old Kelty Lee Byrne is a student and championship swimmer who has a part-time job at Sealand. After a show, Kelty slips and falls into the pool.
The whales grab Kelty by the foot and drag her under the water. They bring her back to the surface. Help me, Kelty yells, before the whales drag her down again and again. I don't want to die. But she does die. The killer whales keep her down for too long and she drowns. After the death, Sealand closes down. Tilikum is sold to SeaWorld, another marine amusement park in Orlando, Florida.
When Tilikum arrives at SeaWorld, he's attacked by the other whales, so he has to be kept apart from them. In the movie Blackfish, a former trainer recalls, "He was always happy to see you in the morning. Maybe because he was alone. Maybe because he was hungry. Maybe because he just liked you. Who knows what was going on in his head? Who knows what was going on in his head?" In 2010, trainer Dawn Brancheau is bringing the show to a close.
Dawn is 40 years old. She's one of SeaWorld's most experienced orca handlers. She's lying down at the edge of the pool, giving Tilikum a pat on the head. But what is going on in Tilikum's head? In Blackfish, some former SeaWorld trainers analyse the video of Dawn's last show.
To start with, they say, all seems well. Tilikum's doing just what Dawn asks him. He rises out of the water and twirls around. As Dawn, standing by the side of the pool, twirls around in synchrony. The audience coo and clap. Tilikum gets his reward. Dawn throws him a fish from a bucket. She asks him to do a perimeter peck wave.
Tilikum swims all round the edge of the pool, waving to the audience with his pectoral fin. Gawain blows a whistle. He should stop and get his fish. But he doesn't stop, perhaps because he didn't hear the whistle. He does another round of the pool, still waving his fin. But because he didn't stop at the whistle, he doesn't get his reward.
Instead, he gets what the trainers call a three-second neutral response. That wasn't what we wanted. No fish for you. I believe at this point he gets frustrated, says one of the trainers, as Dawn lies down by the side of the pool at the end of the show. Tillicham grabs her and pulls her underwater. He doesn't let go. Soon the sensational story was all over the network news.
First tonight, a six-ton killer whale has lived up to his name, killing an experienced trainer at SeaWorld Orlando today. Eyewitnesses are saying that an employee there at SeaWorld died after being attacked by one of the killer whales that are part of a show there. Tragedy at SeaWorld. It happened without warning. A killer whale grabbed a trainer who'd always dreamed of working with orcas and pulled her underwater. By the time Tillicham's done with Dawn...
Her body is savaged. It has multiple fractures and dislocations. He's ripped her scalp off. Frustration? Aggression? Did it start as play? Was it revenge for doing two perfect perimeter pec waves and not getting a single fish from a bucket? Who knows what was going on in his head.
Perhaps, as animal rights activists argued, the explanation was straightforward. If you were in a bathtub for 25 years, don't you think you'd get a little irritated, aggravated, maybe a little psychotic? Had Tilikum simply gone off the deep end? In the middle of the Pacific in 1819...
First mate Owen Chase is standing on a slowly sinking ship. The ship has just been head-butted by an 85-foot whale. It's taking in water. And now the whale is coming back for another go. He came at us, Chase says. Apparently with twice his ordinary speed. And to me at that moment it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect.
The whales smashed into the ship for a second time. Then it swam away. Chase tried to gather his wits. The ship was damaged beyond repair. They wouldn't have long before it toppled sidewards. They'd better salvage what they could. A quadrant, a compass, nautical charts, the captain's trunk.
They tossed it all into the smaller boats, then clambered in themselves. The captain himself, George Pollard, was out on a small boat chasing another whale. His voice came floating over the water. My God, where is the ship?
The men in Captain Pollard's boat rowed back to join Owen Chase and the others. Together, the crew sat in their little boats and surveyed the remains of their ship, lolling on its side in the ocean. My God, Mr Chase, what is the matter? We have been stowed by a whale. 20 men, three small rowing boats, 1,500 miles to the nearest tiny island.
Cautionary Tales will return after the break.
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In the movie Blackfish, a former trainer at SeaWorld recalls how one young orca, born in captivity, was taken away to be transported to a different park. That night, says the trainer, the mother whale... Stayed in the corner of the pool, like literally just shaking and screaming, screeching, crying. I've never seen her do anything like that. Who knows what was going on in her head?
The trainer is in no doubt. There was nothing you could call that, she says, besides grief. Not so fast, says an article on a website called awesomeocean.com, a website set up with funding from SeaWorld. The article complains that Blackfish uses anthropomorphism to manipulate viewers. The word anthropomorphism comes from the Greek for human form.
It means using human ideas to interpret the behaviour of things that aren't human. Gods, or cars, or whales. It's long been controversial among scientists who study animal behaviour. The article on awesomeocean.com points out that the documentary makers accompanied the trainers' words about grief with footage of a whale, mouth wide open, looking, well, grief-stricken.
But, "Orcas have no connection to their lungs through their mouth," the article explains. "Nor do they have vocal cords. All sound is created through the blowhole. It is physically impossible for an orca to produce sound by opening their mouth."
But it seems we find it hard not to anthropomorphise, even when we're trying. The very same article tries to reassure readers about the welfare of Tilikum. Tilikum is semi-retired, has access to several of SeaWorld's enormous pools, and spends a lot of time with his grandson, Trua, on a daily basis. Which sounds lovely.
but only if we see it through a human lens. It conjures up the pleasing mental image of a contented old man taking a small boy to the park, pushing him on the swings and buying him an ice cream. That tells us nothing, of course, about what life might be like for Tilikum. We'll come back to the article on awesomeocean.com. But what about another human emotion we tend to anthropomorphise? Vengeance.
Remember how Owen Chase described the whale that sank his boat? "I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury." We seem to love stories about terrifying sea creatures with an apparent thirst for revenge or justice. Think of the scene in the classic movie Jaws where the shark attacks the hunter's boat and eats him. Or the 1850s novel Moby Dick
about the whale and whaling ship captain who pursue each other across the seas. Moby Dick was inspired by a true story, the story told by Owen Chase. But I think there's something more we can take from hearing Chase's tale. In the middle of the Pacific, first mate Owen Chase and his captain are contemplating what remains of their whaling ship.
They have three small rowing boats with six or seven men in each. Chase is in one, Captain Pollard in another with his 18-year-old cousin. Don't worry, Pollard had told the boy's mother back at home, I'll look out for him. These boats are small and light. They're designed for chasing and harpooning whales. They're not built to traverse thousands of miles of open ocean, but that's what they're going to have to do.
The ship hasn't yet fully sunk. The men can still clamber aboard the wreckage and see what else they can salvage. They hack off the masts and make smaller masts and sails for their little boats. They find some food that's still above the sea. Hard, dried bread. Water. Some turtles.
They're useful, turtles. They survive for a long time without eating, so you can take them on your ship and kill them when you want fresh meat. Still, they only have a few. And how long is it going to take them to meet another ship or get to land? They portion up the food and water between the boats, two turtles each, and discuss their options. None of them are good.
Aim for the south, they decide, and hope to find westerly winds that will blow them towards Chile or Peru, to do some sums. With a fair wind, they might hope to reach land in a couple of months. They sleep, or try to. In the morning, they set their sails for the south. They've agreed that each man will have a daily ration of about a pound of bread and half a pint of water. Chase has a pistol.
"Try to take more than your share," he says to his boatmates, "and I'll shoot you." But nobody does. They all know they have to make their food and water last if they're to have any chance of survival. A day goes by, and another. The wind gets up, the sea swells. A wave crashes over the boat and soaks some of the bread.
When the sun comes out, they manage to dry it again. They'd better eat that bread first as it'll spoil more quickly now. It's so salty. The thirst. Half a pint of water a day they're allowed, no more. In a storm, they try to use the sail to catch some rainwater. But that doesn't work. The sails absorb so much salt from being splashed by the sea, it makes the rainwater salty too.
They decide to kill their first turtle and drink its blood. Some of the men find it too revolting to swallow, not Owen Chase. "I took it like a medicine," he said, "to relieve the extreme dryness of my palate, and stopped not to inquire whether it was anything else than a liquid." They light a fire in the turtle's shell to cook its flesh. It tastes good. Days pass.
They lose the other two boats in a storm, then find them again. A shoal of tiny flying fish soar over the boat. Some knock themselves out on the mast, and the men eat them whole, scales, wings and all. Finally, they finish the salty bread. They're glad to start again on the bread that didn't get a soaking. But then, three weeks in, the weather turns calm. The sky blue.
The ocean still. Chase says, We were exposed to the full force of a meridian sun without any covering to shield us from its burning influence or the least breath of air to cool its parching rays. The heat makes the thirst unbearable again. They try drinking their urine. It doesn't seem to help. They dangle themselves over the edge of the boat to cool their bodies in the sea and...
What's this? Clams! On the outside of the boat. Who knew they were there? They rip them off and eat them. In half an hour, they're all gone. Day after day, the sea is calm. No wind means no progress for the three small boats. They try to row, but they don't have the strength. On Chase's boat, they kill their second turtle. The bread and the water are running out too quickly.
They decide to halve their rations. What other option is there? And then, four weeks since the whale rammed their ship, a miracle, or so it seems, from one of the boats comes a shout. There is land! But what land is it? Chase and the captain look in their nautical charts. It must be one of the Pitcairns, a tiny island just six miles across.
They've sailed 1,700 miles from where their ship sank. They're still 3,000 miles from South America, but they'll worry about that later. They sail to the shore and land on the beach.
There are crabs. They eat them. There are fish. Chase knocks one out with the butt of his gun. But eating just makes them want to drink. Does this island not have any water? Such an excessive and cruel thirst was created, says Chase. The lips became cracked and swollen and a sort of glutinous saliva collected in the mouth, intolerable beyond expression.
Then they find a spring. Gallons and gallons of water. The men drink and drink. There are tropical birds on this island. They've never seen humans, so they aren't afraid. The men can walk right up and grab them. They make a fire on the beach to roast them. They're delicious. So are the birds' eggs. With food and water, they can surely live here and wait for another ship to pass. Or can they? After just a couple of days...
The men realise they've already eaten every bird on the island and every egg, so there won't be any more birds. You might ask if this is the story of humans and nature in microcosm, but for the crew of the whaling ship, there's a more urgent question. Stay and hope to be rescued or get back in the boats? Three of the men decide to take their chances on the island. The others set sail once more,
into the vast Pacific. Portionary tales will return.
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One big orca and two little orcas. The attacks were brutal, says the skipper. The two little ones shook the rudder while the big one kept running and then rammed the ship from the side with full force. The killer whales snap off the champagne's rudder, making a hole in the boat. It sinks.
And it's not the only time this has happened. In just a couple of years, the orcas near Gibraltar have slammed into hundreds of passing yachts. This is completely new behaviour. What's going on in the heads of those whales? Users of the platform, then called Twitter, put forward a theory...
It's an organised uprising. Socialist whales attacking the yacht-owning classes. They're joking, of course, but the joke has an edge. It seems that a lot of us feel so much guilt about what humans have done to nature, we like the idea of killer whales fighting back.
The new scientist felt the need to report with a straight face that experts say there is no evidence they are seeking vengeance. The Atlantic published a think piece titled, Killer whales are not our friends. Stop rooting for the orcas ramming boats. One popular tweet in response, we deserve to have our boats rammed, frankly.
Scientists who study whales have other theories. Maybe one orca was hurt once by a rudder and fought back. Orcas are social. They learn from each other. They're curious too. Maybe they've discovered that rudders are fun to play with. Or maybe it's a cultural fad. Orcas have them. Years ago, one pod in the Pacific briefly took to carrying around dead salmon on their heads, like a hat.
Or are we anthropomorphising again? Not all scientists think anthropomorphism is always a bad thing. The primatologist Franz de Waal says that what we want to avoid is anthropocentric anthropomorphism.
That's a bit of a mouthful. What he means is starting from a human viewpoint when seeing similarities between ourselves and other animals. That's the kind of thinking that gets us socialist whales attacking the rich. In contrast, says de Waal, animal-centric anthropomorphism can generate useful research ideas.
That's when we start with the animal's viewpoint. We try to put ourselves in their position as best we can and ask ourselves if our human experiences might help us understand what their life is like. We know what it means as humans to be curious and playful. It's reasonable to think that might shed some light on the whale's behaviour too. We need to find a balance. Too much anthropomorphising can lead us astray, but so can its opposite.
dogmatically refusing to see any commonality between ourselves and other animals. There was no word for that mistake, says de Waal, so he made one up. Anthropo-denial. We've already seen an example. Remember the article in AwesomeOcean.com that criticised the makers of the movie Blackfish for showing footage of an open-mouthed whale?
as a former trainer described the grief of a mother whale whose baby had been taken away. That whale wasn't crying through her mouth, says the article. All sound is created through the blowhole, which is fair enough as far as it goes. We can't conclude anything from the footage of the whale's mouth, but that doesn't take away the trainer's description.
She stayed in the corner of the pool, like literally just shaking and screaming, screeching, crying. There was nothing you could call her besides grief. The whale's reaction to her baby being taken looks very similar to how a human mother would react. Closing our minds to that parallel seems like anthropo-denial. Two weeks after the three boats leave the island, the first man dies.
They bring all three boats together and with solemn words they cast his body into the ocean. They're still very far from land. The bread's running low, so they agree to cut their rations again. Just an ounce and a half of bread per man per day. The sun is so fierce, says Chase.
We would lie down in the bottom of the boat and cover ourselves over with the sails and abandon her to the mercy of the waves. Upon attempting to rise again, the blood would rush into the head and an intoxicating blindness come over us. Another day and another. A storm. The boats get separated again. And this time, they can't find each other when the storm clears. Now, Owen Chase and his four companions...
are on their own. One day, a shark circles their boat, bumping up against it. They try to stab it, but they don't have the strength to pierce its skin. Another day brings a shoal of porpoises who frolic around them. You can't stab any of those either. One of Chase's boatmates calmly says, "'No bread for me. I've decided to die.'" And so he does, quickly and peacefully."
The others solemnly throw his body to the waves. Our sufferings were now drawing to a close. It seemed to chase. A terrible death appeared shortly to await us. Hunger became violent and outrageous. Our speech and reason were both considerably impaired. Then they hear a noise that seems to sharpen their thoughts. The thrashing of tailgates.
The spouting of blowholes. Whales! The men are gripped with fear. Has their vengeful attacker somehow tracked them down? We must row, they say, to get away. They try, but none can lift it all. When Blackfish aired on CNN in 2013, it caused a sensation. 21 million people viewed it within a month. An extraordinary figure for a documentary. Three years later...
SeaWorld announced that it would no longer breed orcas in captivity. Still, there's no international ban. Dozens of orcas still perform for tourists in theme parks around the world, including Tilikum's grandson, Trua. Grandad Tilikum himself passed away in 2017 at the age of 35.
In science, the debate about anthropomorphism rumbles on. It's clearly hard to resist the kind of lazy thinking that brings us the communist orcas in Gibraltar and the reeker of vengeance, Moby Dick. So how can we keep our anthropomorphism animal-centric? I think Owen Chase's story points us towards the answer. It shows us the power of human empathy...
Very few of us have ever experienced anything as extreme as Chase. But when we hear his story, we're there in the boat with him. We get what he went through. We need to try to extend some of the same empathy to intelligent animals such as whales. But Chase's story also shows us why we find that hard. We can sense that whales are smart. As the former trainer on Blackfish said...
When you look into their eyes, you know somebody's home. But their intelligence evolved in the vastness of the ocean, a place that's so utterly inhospitable for us. It may as well be an alien intelligence from another planet. Empathy comes easily with other humans. With other kinds of intelligence, we really have to work at it.
The passing whales had no interest in Owen Chase's boat. Why would they? For the next death on board is gruesome. It takes hours. The dying man convulsing and groaning in pain. Just three men left now, and this time none of them suggest respectfully consigning the newly dead body to the sea. We eagerly devoured the heart, Chase recalls,
and ate a few pieces of the flesh, after which we hung up the remainder, cut in thin strips about the boat to dry in the sun. The next day, the strips of human flesh are turning green. They make a fire and cook it to preserve it. Chase doesn't know it, but elsewhere on the ocean, Captain Pollard, his 18-year-old cousin, and the other two remaining men on their boat
face an even more wrenching predicament. They're all starving, but all still stubbornly alive. They agree to draw lots to decide who'll be shot so the others can eat him. Owen Chase survived, of course, to tell his story. Still hundreds of miles from the coast, their tiny boat chanced across another ship. They must have looked a piteous sight, says Chase. Our...
Cadaverous countenances, sunken eyes, the ragged remnants of clothes stuck about our sunburnt bodies. Incredibly, the captain's boat also encountered a ship. He got to go back home and test the limits of human empathy by explaining to his family how he'd come to eat his cousin.
This episode of Cautionary Tales was inspired in part by Blackfish, which is currently available on Netflix. Owen Chase's book is called The Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Litao Mollard, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com.
