Friends of mine saw whales from shore on the Vineyard last summer, but I didn’t. A few years before that, ninety right whales showed up between Aquinnah and Block Island, but I didn’t see those, either. I’ve been lucky enough to see whales off of Cape Cod and California. But other than a sideways glimpse of something mammalian and unidentifiable in the middle of Vineyard Sound on a day I shouldn’t have been out paddling, I’ve never had the pleasure locally of that sudden thrill – the caught breath and skipped heartbeat – that comes with an initial sighting of an honest-to-god, not-to-be denied leviathan.
It wasn’t always that way in these waters. Many of the first European explorers of the region mention great schools of whales, and the first English visitors, those who renamed the place Martha’s Vineyard in 1602, noted that “On the North side of this Island we found many huge bones and ribbes of Whales.” Whales were common enough that lookouts on the coast constantly kept an eye out for spouts.
Today there are vestiges of whales everywhere on the Island, and not only on the pastel belts of a certain sub-tribe of Edgartonians. Whale money built the fine Greek Revival homes in Vineyard Haven and Edgartown, and of course the Old Whaling Church. Less obviously, whale oil lubricated the mills beside the little up-Island dams, and the windmills, and lit the lamps in the lighthouses. Whale money funded the original infrastructure of the tourism industry. The Martha’s Vineyard Museum is full of wondrous things brought back from around the world by Island whalers.
The price of it all, however, was paid in blood. The last surviving whaleship from the age of sail is visiting the Vineyard this June and a sizable amount of this magazine is devoted to celebrating the tradition of whaling on the Island. But it’s worth remembering that by the time Benjamin Cleveland of West Tisbury – the last of six Islanders to command the ship during its eighty-year active career – sailed out of New Bedford in 1916, he didn’t look for whales near home as Islanders did in the 1600s. Or near the edge of the Gulf Stream as they did in the 1700s. Or in the Pacific as they did in the 1800s. He went to the farthest reaches of the southern Indian Ocean, and even there he was looking not for whales but for elephant seals.
It’s traditional and appropriate to say that the past was a different time, with a different understanding and a different compass. But by the time whalers were searching north of Alaska for whales that their great-grandfathers would have found almost within sight of the Vineyard, I’m fairly certain they were not fantasizing about “cyclical declines.” Just as I know that in two decades of recreational boating and fishing on the Vineyard, I have caught only one slender weakfish, a species once commonplace enough to have been in the fall derby. Nor have I laid eyes on a live swordfish, though there’s a statue of one in Menemsha to bookend the handsome whale statue near the Chappy ferry. What of the missing cod and AWOL haddock, flounder, hake, and hale? What of the ghosts of the commercial fishing fleet that once derived a living from them?
Where are those pickup trucks full of lunker shore bass I’ve seen pictures of?
It would be more comforting to imagine the past as a place with a different compass if it seemed that our newfangled GPS was taking us in a different direction. Still, there is some comfort, I suppose, in the hope that we might likewise be given a pass by the future. And comfort as well from knowing there are occasionally whales again in local waters. My own friends have seen them, friends I trust. And so I, too, always keep a sharp eye out when on the water or above it on high ground.
