Simon Barnes: “I wanted to drop to my knees, sing hallelujahs, fling myself into the ocean…”

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I believe Simon Barnes is one of Britain’s best nature writers. (He’s also, as chief sports writer for The Times, not just one of, but the best sports writer working in Britain today. The 2008 winner of the Sports Journalists’ Association’s ‘Sports Columnist of the Year’ award, his columns can turn even the most faithless and shrill sporting naysayer into a true believer.) Ever since publishing Tiger! In 1994 he’s been exquisitely articulating the feelings of the human connection with nature in a way that is instantly recognisable but which many of us find difficult to express. Sometimes intense, sometimes funny, sometimes mesmeric but always accurate, his books offer some of the best explorations of our relationship with the natural world and include How to be Wild and How to be a Bad Birdwatcher. Exclusively for WhaleFest, Simon has kindly adapted a section of his book My Natural History, published by Shortbooks in 2010.

All along, it was Saturday I was looking forward to. The game, (the 1988 Super Bowl in San Diego) I should point out, was Sunday. I had walked up and down the waterfront at San Diego every day, for sunlight in winter is a rare and precious thing for an English soul. And there I found what I was looking for, and so I paid my money – five bucks? Ten bucks? Maybe even 20? – no matter, it was a wonderful investment. Saturday morning came, and I made my way out for the treat with all the other tourists, as if we were making a journey to the light-house rather than a pilgrimage towards ultimate truth. Most of my fellow-passengers, my fellow-Ishmaels were people in town for the big game, some wearing grotesque colours to show their scarlet or orange affiliations, others wearing the curious clothes Americans wear for lee-zhurr, most with children, because we all know that the wild world is a thing for children, rather than grown-ups. There were even a couple of my colleagues: I had obtained tickets for them at their request, for they showed unexpected enthusiasm when I mentioned my plan, and I was, even then, not without an evangelical streak. One of them, Simon Kelner, went on to edit The Independent, and under his leadership, the paper became notable for the prominence given to stories on wildlife and the environment. 

But on with the trip. A slow trudge out to sea, cheerful yammering of families on a day out, endlessly taking pictures of the boat and each other, other vessels around us, some following us to steal the captain’s knowledge and expertise and gain a free look at the treasures we were tracking.

And we found them. We found them all right. A pod of three grey whales: I simply couldn’t believe it. I mean that quite literally: this was not a thing that made for easy credibility. It was, unlike the Super Bowl press conferences, quite evidently real, but something in the mind rejected the evidence of the senses. This couldn’t be, could it? These things, so uncompromisingly, so bewilderingly huge: they couldn’t exist just like that, could they? It didn’t make any sense to our human, our land-locked, our city-locked gaze. I stared at the three plumes of spume, each one holding a distinct shape for a couple of seconds before being whipped away in the sprightly breezes of the ocean. A back, breaking the surface, then rolling, siphoning past us, also like an endless loop, on and on, more and more and more of it, yard after yard after yard. Then a pause and then again the breaking, the echoing sigh of the triple breaths: the grey whales southing their way towards the breeding lagoons of Baja California.

That breathing is the most colossally intimate thing: the vast noise  — grey whales are noted for the din of their blow — the least subtle way possible of reminding us that whales are mammals, just like us, that they breathe, just like us, and for that matter, they drown, just like us. Some scientists suggest that the whales that get beached are sick animals, returning to land in dread of death by drowning. To see a whale is to experience not differences but similarities: not what divides us but what we share.

After that, the sounding. A deeper sigh, a more explosive exhalation/inhalation, the body siphons past, perhaps a shade more quickly, and certainly there is more of it than before, for it takes longer to go past and then – oh, like Roman candle bursting, the flukes break the surface and the great grey Y is silhouetted against the sky, dripping, wonderfully elegant in shape and conception, and then soundlessly it has vanished. Who could restrain a gasp, an oath, a tear? I wanted to drop to my knees, sing hallelujahs, fling myself into the ocean, kiss all the prettiest girls on the boat, the plain ones too, utter broken thanks to the skipper, be forever a better, a humbler, a wiser person.

When the flukes break the surface –that’s when the differences come crashing home, the extraordinary fact that these creatures are so much bigger than us, for all their likeness so unlike, for all the received wisdom of their near-human intelligence, so fundamentally at odds with any way of thinking that humans can grasp. Fellow-mammals: creatures as alien as any a science-fiction writer ever came up with: these were the denizens of Mars, Krypton, Tralfamadore, yet they were equipped with flesh and blood and lungs and hearts like our own. It was the scientist and writer JBS Haldane who said: “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” You don’t have to leave the atmosphere of the earth to know that he’s right.

No-one else but me…

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As I rounded the headland, the fulmars skirted the grassy clifftop on their splinted wings and the razorbills and guillemots whirred at steep angles towards the water before flattening out over the surface. It was as I followed one in the round image of my binoculars that I saw the dolphins, three of them, breaking the surface as they porpoised towards the cliffs, heading towards the fish-rich, confused waters at their base.

My first reaction was to turn and tug the sleeve of the person next to me but feeling no other human brushing against me, I turned and looked around. Casting my head from side to side looking for the person who I knew wasn’t there, I held on my lips a half-formed shout. It was a shout of ‘There!’ or ‘Dolphin!’ but I never said it because there was no-one to say it to. It was just me and the dolphin, a bottlenose in this particular case. I was completely and unusually alone.

Even without the benefit of hindsight, being on my own changed the tempo of the encounter. For the briefest of whiles I shared a breath or two with the dolphin and it felt like we could share a few salty tales too. There was no urgency to make sure other people saw it, no fiddling with descriptions of colouration, no clutching desperately at landmarks to ensure someone else could locate it. (“No not that rock, that rock…”) All of these things were gone and it was just the animal and me.

Being alone with the wildlife I was able to write my signature on the place and time because it was mine and no-one else’s. I had ridden west and stuck my claim stake in the ground. It’s become a page in my history book that’s written in a slightly clearer hand because there was no dilution of joy, no forced sharing of experience but instead a moment of which every detail was mine and mine alone.  I was free to remember the moment as I chose to and it could be assessed and weighed-up on my terms.  

Despite the reality of being alone in this instance, any encounter with the wild in the coastal or oceanic landscape is bound by geography to be a different encounter than those on the land. Because the very existence of the coastline means that half of your space is by definition empty of people: looking out to sea, you can only be crowded out from behind. And in doing so (this makes me wonder why we never look in to the land) our eyes and senses become attuned to something else. We can’t help but look. We can’t help but look because we might see something.

The vastness of any encounter with the ocean forces you to boil the experience down to its essential elements because the sea edges out any complacent emotions.  The view itself is cut to the bone: you see the horizon and you see the water closest to you. And in so doing your place in relation to the great cataract beneath the hull of your boat or beneath your feet is at its clearest, starkest and most humbling.  

 

Mark Brownlow: “We’re not Greenpeace”

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If you’ve watched high quality natural history filmaking, and especially those concerned with the wildlife of our oceans, then the chances are you’ve seen something produced by Mark Brownlow. Mark is series producer of the acclaimed Ocean Giants and has been making world class documentaries for the BBC Natural History Unit in England for nearly twenty years including the landmark Planet Earth. He appeared at WhaleFest 2011 and in 2012 has been telling us where he believes the moving image can take us in our relationship with whales, dolphins, the sea and the planet. He also tells us what he thinks WhaleFest might achieve. Mark was talking to Colin Williams.

There are no two ways about it, most of the population never even go to the seaside and wildlife films still provide a very important function: to give people access to the big picture and impossible places. They can transport people and show them the wonder of nature, while filming technology has opened up huge opportunities for us.

Just around the corner, building on satellite tagging technology, cameras are beginning to appear that we’ll soon be attaching to species like sperm whales as well as other cetaceans. With the downscaling of hard drives and camera size, and as camera systems get better and better, ground-breaking imagery will appear of behaviour that has previously been impossible to capture.  It might not be beautiful but will be hugely valuable. However, because you’re attaching something to the animal, there are some controversial ethical issues and it’s not something that any filmmaker should undertake lightly. It should only be done if it’s part of a project, but at that point there’s a reality check involved, and that’s budget.

So if you’re asking me why I do what I do, its because there is always new imagery to go after. There’s a permanent hunger to film new species and new behaviour, but it’s expensive. The reason why people film bottlenosed dolphins so much is that they’re easy to film and therefore affordable. It’s only very rare projects like Planet Earth or Frozen Planet that have the budget to allow you to take a gamble and attempt something new, like the wave washing killer whales that normally you wouldn’t be able to afford to do. We’d all love to film new behaviours and new species but the costs involved are prohibitive.

But when you get it, there is no question that the ground-breaking footage changes attitudes.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean. At one time everyone liked to think that chimpanzees were benign, warm, positive role models with their friendly nature, scavenging for termites.  But when Wildlife on One showed them capturing other monkeys and dismembering them it was a seminal moment.  The audience had their cosy preconception of chimps turned on its head and it introduced the reality of chimp biology which meant eating meat which involved pulling apart a live monkey.

There was also a great film about the bottlenosed dolphins of Shark Bay [link not  available in some countries] in western Australia and again, perhaps even more than chimps, people like to think of dolphins as smiling, gentle creatures of the ocean. But this film showed male dolphins, as a group, effectively kidnapping females and holding them captive. Films showing this kind of gritty, shocking behaviour turns people’s attitudes.

To shy away from it would be wrong and filmakers have a huge responsibility to present a balanced view of any animal. For instance, the sequence in Planet Earth of killer whales drowning and eating the tongue of a grey whale calf was a memorable one because it presented huge drama in a programme that also contained lighter moments. But it has to be put into context that killer whales have young who have to eat to live – they provide a positive function in the ocean keeping things in check, just like the lions of the savannah. It would be a very different story without these apex predators.

Yes, I do accept a degree of criticism in our industry about what we show. Many filmakers, like me, are ex scientists and perhaps we’re hardened to the realities of nature. We have to be mindful that our audiences are not always as open minded but at the same time, we’re not going to shy away from those realities.

The nature of wildlife filmaking has changed. The good news is that there used to be a complete aversion to environmental issues by programme makers and commissioners. But the environment is much more headline news now, in the public conciousness and no longer an issue for a marginalised audience. There is an awareness creeping in that unless we do something drastic for our planet, that’s it, and I think that TV would look foolish if we ignored environmental issues.

You know as well as I do that within the industry it’s a debate that still goes. We’re not Greenpeace. We’re not paid to make campagning films. We are bound by commercial pressures and we always have to be aware of who is paying the bills. We’re paid to make journalistic films for the viewer to make up their mind where they want to go with it but with that comes huge responsibility. These films can send powerful messages and it’s a very interesting psychology: why do people care about saving pandas when they’re never going to go to China – never going to see one in the wild?  Wildlife filming provides that window, it gives an access.

I’m reflecting on all this becuase I know that people are busy planning WhaleFest right now and I can see that although it is in its infancy it is an idea that can bring together the whale industry, media and the general public and can be powerful movement. There is a dilemma between tourism pressure and cetacean well-being and I’ve seen it many times now where unregulated ecotourism is hugely detrimental to the cetaceans. What I love about WhaleFest is that you are addressing the problem and a lot of your work is with ecotourists. I feel that together you are going to promote responsible ecotourism.

I suppose the last thing for me to say is that I believe that ecotourism is key to saving whales and dolphins because it helps if you can attach an economic value to these creatures. There was a model done on caribbean reef sharks. Apparently every reef shark was worth was $30,000 because of the amount of money they generated on shark dives.  This stopped fisherman taking the sharks because they were too valuable. I’m a bit of cynic: I think everything’s got to have an economic value to make it on this planet and I think ecotourism will provide that as long as it’s done responsibly.  WhaleFest is an open platform to discuss these issues and hopefully we can all work together for the greater good of whales and dolphins.

Florence: “Even today the looming whale figure plays on my mind”

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In a subterranean restaurant near the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol in the late winter of 2012 the WhaleFest team got together with some big names in the world of wildlife and talked about what WhaleFest could achieve. At some point in the meeting someone said that, whether they’ve seen one or not, everyone has a relationship with whales and dolphins. And so I asked my friend Florence who’s 12 years old and never seen a whale to write about them, just to test the theory. Florence, by the way, would like to be a writer and, as we shall see, already writes effortlessly, with passion and a sense of beauty.  She eloquently sheds light on that curious psychological paradox that whales present us with: Fear and Fascination. Her words teach us much about why we do what we do and why WhaleFest exists. Here’s to you, Florence.

Everybody thinks of something different when they see a whale for the first time. Some are happy, some shocked, but I was downright frightened. The sheer size of the model of a Blue Whale in the London Natural History Museum took me by surprise. Never in my life had I seen a creature of such a HUGE size. I had seen different documentaries on whales and dolphins, thinking they were just big and nothing more. This model, however, filled the whole room in the museum. I was only about 7 years old then, which made it seem even bigger.

Previously that day we had been to see the Tour de France leave England, and my brother had very nearly gotten lost in Covent Garden, but the one memory that stood out for me on that day was the enormous whale. Even today the looming whale figure plays on my mind, scaring me. People have phobias of spiders, the dark, snakes, but I seem to have a slight phobia of large creatures. Even so, I find it hard to understand how these gigantic whales are so graceful. Despite their big, heavy bodies they somehow seem to dance in the water with the elegance of a ballerina.

I have recently revisited the Natural History Museum, thinking I wouldn’t find the figure as scary as when I was 7. I was wrong. My aunt and uncle found it a bit daunting too, because the size of its eye is about as big as a humans head! I do admit I am still as scared of the big blue model as when I was a lot younger, although I am a lot more interested in them now I have learnt a bit more about them.

In comparison, I absolutely love dolphins. They are really intelligent, but seem to come across slightly cheeky. Like whales they look so beautiful when they swim in the water, twisting and turning with so much elegance. I love watching programmes on the television where you can hear a pod of dolphins calling to each other in various clicks and squeaks; a bit like mice-aliens. It’s kind of like listening to someone speak in a language you can’t understand, but you want to know what they’re talking about.

David Rothenberg: “A simple moral from a beautiful sound”

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When I first met David at WhaleFest 2011 I didn’t really know what to expect from a thoughtful naturalist, deep thinker, writer of thought provoking and beautiful books and extremely handy jazz musician. After all, there aren’t many of those people around. But for many years David Rothenberg has written and performed on the relationship between humanity and nature. He is the acclaimed author of Thousand Mile Song which explores making music with whales and he demonstrated this to devastating effect at last year’s WhaleFest.  David’s words and music invite us to consider sound, space, perception and endless possibilities. One is left with the impression that although whale song can be infinitely explored we will always be surprised by its capacity to illuminate the charged and liminal nature of our relationship with other animals. His latest book, Survival of the Beautiful, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011 and here he answers some questions exclusively for WhaleFest 2012. 

From your perspective as a musician where do you think music can take us? What more can it show us about our relationship with the ocean and whales?

Music allows us to communicate in ways we cannot quite understand.  I can perform together with someone from another culture with whom I might not be able to speak with, but meaningful music can result.  I believe the same can happen with other species; it is easier to play music with birds and whales than to decipher what they are saying, especially with humpback whales. These animals are contstantly learning new songs, so they are interested in new and unfamiliar sounds they have never heard before.  Music is tremendously important to humans, and to whales, and we are not quite sure why!  This trans-species mystery remains a wondferful and beautiful thing.

So what musicians are pushing the boundaries between humans and whales? And between humans and nature in general?

Check out Alexis Kirke in Plymouth, UK and the Karelian group of electronic musicians in Petrozavodsk known as WHALE KIT.  Between humans and nature generally, then Lasse-Marc Riek and his Gruenrekorder.de label is one place to start.  Louis Sarno and his years among the Bayaka pygmies.  Douglas Quin,  Jana Vinderen, there are many…

What is the piece of music you’ve heard that best distils the unfathomable nature of the sea and why?

George Crumb, Vox Balaenae, is pretty important for me… but I rarely listen to it, because it is as if it comes from a whole different world.

And finally, you worked with the legendary musician and songwriter Pete Seeger on his song The World’s Last Whale. Tell us about that experience…

I wrote a little about this in Thousand Mile Song. There was no recording of it, but a quick internet search did conjure up the lyrics:

It was down off Bermuda
Early last spring,
Near an underwater mountain
Where the humpbacks sing,
I lowered a microphone
A quarter mile down,
Switched on the recorder
And let the tape spin around.

I didn’t just hear grunting,
I didn’t just hear squeaks,
I didn’t just hear bellows,
I didn’t just hear shrieks.
It was the musical singing
And the passionate wail
That came from the heart
Of the world’s last whale.

This song seemed quite different from the others of its time.  It’s all about how the song is recorded, and how the music happens.  At the end, it does return to a morality tale:

So here’s a little test
To see how you feel,
Here’s a little test
For this Age Of The Automobile.
If we can save
Our singers in the sea,
Perhaps there’s a chance
To save you and me.

I heard the song
Of the world’s last whale
As I rocked in the moonlight
And reefed the sail,
It’ll happen to you
Also without fail,
If it happens to me
Sang the world’s last whale.

Seeger got all the details right, the microphone deep under the sea, the rocking, rhythmical beat of the boat swaying back and forth and the whale poetry resounding and repeating underneath.  Never recorded?  I was shocked.  Pete Seeger lives just up the road from me, so I wondered if I might rectify that situation—Let’s record it today.

We had recently performed on the same bill in Toronto, so I gave him a call.  “You remember that song about the world’s last whale?”

“What song?” a scratchy voice on the other end of the line sounded suspicious.

“Goes like this:  ‘I heard the song, of the world’s last whale…’”

“Ah yes, you know my mind doesn’t remember it, but I believe in muscle memory.  My body’s still got that tune.”

“You want to sing it?”

“I’m eighty-seven years old—too old to sing. But you, you should come on down to the Hudson riverfront and play some of those whale songs of yours while the swimmers cross the river from the other side.  They’re going to love it.”

“I’ll do that if you sing the song.”

“What song?”

“’The World’s Last Whale.’”

“Oh, we’ll see about that.”

The next weekend I ambled down to the waterfront festival in the nearby town of Beacon.  Pete started the Great Newburgh-to-Beacon Hudson River Swim four years ago to remind us that this river has gotten clean enough to jump in. He wanted to celebrate some environmental good news, and raise money to build a lined swimming pool in the river to make it safe enough for all.

I had done my homework, found out that in 1988 a humpback whale had actually swum up the Hudson River.  Why not play some of its songs to inspire swimmers just finishing their mile long crossing?  I asked a question of the crowd, “How many of you know what a whale sounds like?”  The parents and grandparents smiled.

I pressed “play” on my computer, and the swoops and bowed bass notes resounded from the speakers from the stage. I accompanied on clarinet, trying to play sounds that would blend.  It was a bit of a change from the usual river festival folk tunes, but the swimmers and their families didn’t seem to mind.

A tall, rail-thin man with a beard pushed his way to the stage with a banjo and a big pile of of papers.  “You know, I had totally forgotten about this song until this young man brought it back to my attention,” Pete nodded in my direction.  “Here are some copies of the words, and I wrote out the music, too.  These whales still need our protection.  Anyone who wants to keep this song alive, here, take a copy.”

Can Pete Seeger still sing after sixty years on the road?  More than once I’ve heard him go on unaccompanied for an hour at a time.  On the tribute album to Seeger’s work, I find that Bruce Springsteen, with his worn, gravelly delivery, sounds a lot older than Pete.

This lilting, grooving tune in a doleful key reveals exactly what the song of the humpback whale meant for us when it first became known:  In the 1960s, miraculous underwater recordings revealed there is music under the sea, and we learned of one more rare thing of nature that was fading away. If we don’t work hard to save this song that is so radiant yet also fragile, we’re going to disappear just like the whales.  It’s a simple moral from a beautiful sound.

Since then Pete recorded the song on his record Pete Seeger at 89, and he and I have now recorded a version together that will be coming out soon on a new project.

Deep thinking

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On Wednesday 23rd September 1857, the good people of a seaside town awoke to find “the carcase of a whale 42 feet long” on their beach. The sleepy resort town, priding itself on its royal connections, its well kept beach and the manicured riviera-style gardens and lawns was now home to a leviathan. The Illustrated London news reported that it was towed along the beach “and is now on show there, astonishing those who go to see it by its vast proportions”.

What species of whale it was is lost to history but it’s one of many moments in time where the ocean has delivered up a message; a message that infiltrated our human sense of comfort with its bulk, sheer looming presence and, no doubt, its smell. As a race, what messages are we sending back?

The world’s oceans are one of the many barometers our planet has by which we can mark the success of our stewardship of nature. Where ice shelves are intact or fragmented, they are the focus of climate change polemic and debate. Where coastal economies boom and fail they are the centre of discussion on fishing quotas and high seas boundaries. And where humans peddle their wares it is a super highway, a place where a quantifiable good is sought 24/7.

On a recent whale watching trip that I was guiding, one of the whale watchers asked ‘if you could invite any species of whale to dinner, which one would it be and what questions would you ask it?’ This question was not exactly expected but, ever the professional, I thought I’d better give it a stab so as to avoid disappointment. The chance here would be to get answers to the big questions, to see what they see; to finally understand the biggest and deepest secrets from a world so improbably inaccessible; a world which we only get glimpses of when they surface to share a brief moment with us and then are gone; a world which we know only from the grainy floodlit images of the bow of Titanic.

So to get answers to these deep questions, who do I invite? What if I asked the sperm whale, one of the ocean’s most grizzled warriors. These are true elderly statesmen; creatures that are imbued with the deepest magic of the very coldest, oldest and darkest waters.

The sperm whale is the biggest predator on earth, by far the largest toothed whale and man’s target for centuries. Its astonishing shape is unlike any other living cetacean and its unique physiology, behaviour and shared history means that in our collective imagination it has become much more than just a species of whale: It has become a representative of all its kind, a mirror for all our fear and wonder associated with deep water. It is Jonah’s predator, Ahab’s incubus and succubus and man’s lamp oil. It is more than a species: it is Whale.

What creatures do you see in the torch beam of your sonar when you are 2 miles down in the inky black? How does it feel to have the ocean’s weight pressing on your senses? In your landscape of the sea bed, do you see man’s influence and detritus in the folds of the deep canyons and arteries? I’d want my questions to be vital and thought-provoking. Otherwise it’s the same as queuing next to the red carpet at a premiere only to ask your favourite film star what it’s like being famous. So what would you ask? How badly do you want to know? What do you really want to hear?

So at the end of the questions, when you think you’re slightly closer to understanding their place on the planet and, more importantly, their vital place in our imaginations and just why they make us feel so uplifted when we see them, what would you say? Would you say ‘thank you’ or would you say ‘I’m sorry’?

‘Prince of Whales’ photograph copyright and courtesy of Rob Cartwright

Steve Knightley: “A descent into darkness and uncertainty”

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Steve Knightley, as one half of the award-winning Show of Hands along with multi-instrumentalist Phil Beer, has just sold out the Royal Albert Hall for the fourth time. On top of that he’s been described as “One of England’s greatest singer songwriters”.  Show of Hands have long been disturbing the roots of English traditional music and Steve’s original songs are a blend of the unsettling and the downright beautiful. He and Show of Hands have been plying their eclectic acoustic trade for at least twenty years and, at the last count, at least twenty albums and their new album Wake the Union is out next month. The ocean is a constant reference point around which his songwriting revolves and and the music is soaked in sea water. He talks to Colin Williams and WhaleFest about why the sea and the whale is such a dominant presence in the musical imagination. So, in rain-soaked Devon just metres from the dockside, we stir hot beverages and ponder big questions:

 

In historical terms, what percentage of your blood is saltwater? 

My Grandfathers were both dockers in Southampton and I think one of them was dockmaster, so on the wall of all my Great Aunts’ houses, in their salons, would have been pictures of sea captains, pictures of boats. My Grandmother’s side of the family came from the Channel Islands and so the images were always there.  Also, strange ornate Japanese vases, the stuff you would find in a Victorian front parlour, symbols of ocean travel. So I was born within sight of the sea, genetically programmed. Apart from a brief interlude in the midlands of the UK the sea has always been my world: Southampton, Exeter, Brighton, Portsmouth. I believe you think of the world where you’re the centre of an arc of contacts and places. Well half of mine has always been cut off by water, just a semicircle. I’ve never been very far from the sight and sound of gulls.

I’ve always believed that the sense that the sea and ocean is something special is inate in everyone. Do you believe that, or is a personal connection essential to really feel it?

Unsurprisingly, I’ve not chatted at length about this with people from the landlocked counties. But one of the expressions that once got said in an interview as a throwaway line has now become a bit of a mantra: “If you’re lucky, your music brings you home.” For many singer songwriters there are none of those geographical boundaries, it’s all about me, about my experiences of my relationships and my world. When it’s great, it’s great. When it’s not, it’s really self indulgent, not connected to place or history or the landscape. If you’re trying to generate stories and you’re not interested so much in your emotional landscape, for me it then seemed natural to write about the land and the sea. In fact in some solo shows I divide it into two halves: the land and the sea. There’s certainly no shortage of material.

Would you say that sheer drama of the sea is enough for almost everyone to have some kind of relationship with it?

Well until recently it was a pretty irreversible step, you couldn’t just fly back if you got fed up with it. In almost all of the folk songs there’s an undercurrent of anxiety: ‘will you remember me when I come back?’ Families in seafaring towns must have got familiar with this idea that you’re leaving for a year, a year and a half.

Despite the fact it stands alone as a location does the sea still need to be associated with a sense of place?

Absolutely. Part of it is maybe this West Country thing where you’re never more than 30 or 40 miles from the sea. And it also points out into the Atlantic. It’s the springboard of wave after wave of exploration. Francis Drake and other such characters have always interested me. It’s important as a strorytelling tool.

Have you found the sea to be an equally rich vein in English traditional music as you have in your own songwriting?

Yes. Almost half the traditional songs we do, if not out and out sea shanties, have some kind of maritime connection: Blue Cockade, Haul Away Joe, Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy. It’s just always there and in the tradition it was the most dramatic way you could travel. Maybe a central European folk tradition may have had different tools that took you away from your home but nothing could be more dramatic than getting on a boat and not getting back for a year and a half. I’m just performing a song at the moment I co-wrote with Seth Lakeman called I’ll Haunt You and the opening line is “I’m a year at sea when your letter came / and I can’t get back.” He ends up sending his curses and his bad wishes across the sea. Then what happens is that once something works for you as a method, you carry on doing it and you become known for it. It almost becomes a principle as if you always intended that. But really you’re looking for context, a narrative.

Presumably music that illuminates your relationship with the sea means different things to different people. Does it strike a chord with people you play to?

It does for people who live by the sea and it does those who long to live by the sea. I imagine if you were singing in southern Germany a song like The Dive which is about father and son, working on the water it would still connect. People have an imaginative sense of it even if they don’t have an actual sense of the sea. Maybe it’s very much the British Isles but I always say that one of the national geniuses of the English is this ability to collect and collate. If we didn’t travel so much or maybe but for the Empire… We do it in food, we do it in literature. The English gift is to be like magpies to take stuff and to form it into something else. Maybe more settled countries, more central countries don’t have that experience of the sea but I’d lose half my repertoire if I took out references to the ocean.

There’s a part of your Tall Ships suite of songs that expresses that dual role it plays as saviour and curse: You don’t really want to go but it may be the only way to feed your family…

“Sea that brings us life / take your sacrifice.” Martin Carthy once said that resignation was “that most beautiful and most precarious of emotions.” It’s a very English thing and I also think a bloody- minded thing. For instance, if you knew the pressgang were out and about on Weymouth seafront you probably wouldn’t go out there for a pint with your friends would you? You’d probably take a view about it and say ‘I tell you what, let’s go out to Bridport instead.’ There’s that sort of deal you do with dangerous events and none more so than with the waters of the open ocean.

It’s an observation I often make that in traditional music and song that there is a whole gamut of emotions attached to going away to sea. In the song The Humpback Whale whaling is portaryed as rollicking good fun, in The Weary Whaling Grounds it’s a lament for a sickening three year voyage for no pay, chasing whales that have nearly all been slaughtered…

Yeah, I can see that. There’s a genre that we sometimes call industrial nostalgia that you get amongst northern musicians, lamenting for a way of life that perhaps as a parent the worst, the most signal mark of failure in your life was that you condemned your children to have to do the same job you did whether its in the mines or the mills: “This way of life, this community, we’ve lost so much!” It’s a double edged sword because you verge on nostalgia for a way of life that wasn’t particularly pleasant and it’s the same with the ocean. But I often make the point about folk songs or as a songwriter is that you should be able to be these other people without being made to feel un-PC: In the song you can go out whaling, wenching and hunting because it refers to a way of life and isn’t necessarily a reflection of your own feelings. In the case of the sea, it was always a source of income, always a source of nutrition as well as a geographical constant in your life.

Has the water lost its potency in the public eye as a dangerous place, a killing machine? 

Yes. From a time when everybody would have known a percentage of their friends or family who were in danger or who was lost or whose lives could be threatened by working out here on the water. That’s obviously in decline so it starts to drift into myth and legend we’re not likely to know people who have been lost at sea.

You’ve worked with musicians from other parts of the world. Is the sea a connector of cultures as well? Is it something that’s a shared experience?

Only partly. It was for the Chilean musicians. They had a strong sense of the maritime traditions of the country. There are other songwriters with a very very strong sense of place like Chris Wood and for him the sea is not as richer backdrop as the Kentish rivers, he’s very rooted in the soil. It’s not inevitable for musicians. We’ve been working with the American songwriter Richard Shindell and on the new album due out in the autumn we have a version of Reunion Hill which is set in the American Civil War and they have that have that as a palette, with photos and family connections. Think how distant the Crimean War seems to the British: the American Civil War was in the same era but for Richard that is his ‘sea’.

I’ve met the Chilean musicians you worked with and I know that they were exiled during the Pinochet regime for playing traditional music. Is the sea as a means of escape also strong in traditional song and your own songs?

It plays that role too, because it was such an irreversible step to leave your home in the age of sail. It’s also a psychological barrier: You’d travel and return and you’d come back slightly altered, particularly if you’d travelled by sea.  I think journeys do that to you. When you’re away what you focus is not on what you’re looking at but where you’ve come from. That’s how we make sense of new experiences, a stronger awareness of what you’ve got back home.

Can you imagine yourself not being by the water?

No, never. Not now. It’s still a daily ambition to be able to go to sleep and wake up within sight and sound of it. I’m about two hundred yards away where I live now but I’d like to be next to it. I like the sound of it. It’s the soundtrack to everything we’ve done.

Our economic relationship with the ocean, certainly in the United Kingdom, has changed. Has it changed our outlook and yours in terms of your songwriting?

Not necessarily, only in that you’re singing about occupations in a more nostalgic way but you’re on the edge of that trap of nostalgia. Having said that, you meet less people involved in the trade. In Exmouth around the docks there was a strong community but it’s in decline. One of best friend here has a fish outlet and a fish restaurant but it’s not a daily encounter. Whoever you are, the sea is always there as a reference point, a source of income and recreation that doesn’t change. But I often observe that you get very mixed messages about why and how the sea is collapsing. One person will say that we’re awash with cod, another will say there are none left. There seems to be as many stories to account for fish stocks as there are for global warming.

So is the sea is going to keep throwing up these stories? Will the narrative constantly renew itself?

Yes. After a while it’s not a cynical, conscious thing. You need reference points. You need songs to be about something. On the new record there’s a lyric: “I’m up on deck and you’re pulling away.” Its just there. It’s a great source of poetic imagery there’s no doubt about it, with other mediums you just wouldn’t get that descent into darkness and uncertainty. Maybe a mountain race has a place they go to represent that danger but to me, there’s nowhere that’s as potent as the sea.

Paragraph 10: Who Writes the Rules of Progress?

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In a probably smoky meeting room at the Brighton Metropole hotel on Friday 23rd July 1982, the International Whaling Commission, with it’s 30 member nations  and 37 voting members gave the all clear on a global pause on commercial whaling. This had already been presaged earlier that week by a specific suspension on the hunting of sperm whale. The amendment to paragraph 10 of the IWC’s policy was passed by the necessary three-quarters majority. The text coldly reads:

“Notwithstanding the other provisions of paragraph 10, catch limits for the killing for commercial purposes of whales from all stocks for the 1986 coastal and the 1985/86 pelagic seasons and thereafter shall be zero. This provision will be kept under review, based upon the best scientific advice, and by 1990 at the latest the Commission will undertake a comprehensive assessment of the effects of this decision on whale stocks and consider modification of this provision and the establishment of other catch limits.”

“Catch limits…shall be zero.” The measure passed by 25 votes to 7, with 5 abstentions.

1986? 1986! That was a full four years after the measure. A further four years of quota’d, counted and measured killing was, it seems, the politically advantageous minimum notice period for this variation to our contract with the planet. Reading the list of voters and abstainers the political lines drawn then still look familiar, some recognisable as being drafted by colonial rule. There are many more member states now but back in 1982 Iceland, Japan and Norway led the naysayers and Switzerland (that famous whaling nation and ever the neutral) abstained.

Outside, protesters stood and planted a forest of placards.  Off the beach, two Greenpeace ships the Cedarlea and Syrius waited to see if it would pass. But pass it did. On the pavement outside demonstrators cheered and waved. A van with a blue papier mache whale on its roof drove by with whale song playing over its loudspeakers. It had on it a ‘save the whales’ banner and underneath it another banner saying ‘whales saved Brighton 1982.’

This thing, 30 years on, still acts as a milestone of monolithic proportions in our relationship with the oceans and its whales.

But (isn’t there always a ‘but’?) milestones are solid. It somehow doesn’t feel as if this is. To really go over the top with the metaphors, it’s less milestone than marker buoy: It will always be somewhere in the vicinity but it rises, falls and moves with the tide of public, scientific and political opinion and evidence. The surety of where we stand on the killing of whales is not cast in bronze just yet. For instance, many of the most hardened of conservationists still don’t know where on their continuum of approval to place indigenous subsistence hunts. Japan, Norway and Iceland still hunt whales. And the man on the street knows that whales and dolphins are ‘nice’ but would be hard pressed to name the environmental and ecological factors that now pose a greater threat than the harpoon.

So, what milestone would mean more to you? For me, it’s too easy to say ‘When everybody stops killing whales’ because it is simply not enough. It’s attitudes that count. The amendment to paragraph 10 was the start but if whaling by three countries continues, what else have we got in reserve to save the whales that will never be killed by a harpoon but might be killed by the rest of us?

Jonathan Harris: The Whale Hunt

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How does one begin to describe what Jonathan Harris does and how he does it? Using online media to present his work he is artist, scientist, mathematician, philosopher, computer geek and storyteller. He creates visually arresting interfaces that, in his words “reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other”. In 2007 he undertook an epic project, The Whale Hunt in which he documented (in the most ingenious way) an indigenous Alaskan Inupiat subsistence hunt for the bowhead whale. This of course is a controversial topic: Debates rage endlessly about indigenous subsistence hunting but Jonathan wants the world to know that this project was not about the politics of hunting whales but about a new way to tell the story of one of the oldest relationships between man, whale and the landscape. We may be dismayed by the act and even disturbed by some of the images but this sprawling and astonishing piece of work sits completely apart from the indigenous hunting debate; it waits quietly for us to draw our own conclusions and it exists as a reference point for our thoughts rather than a statement of position. To visit The Whale Hunt interface, click here and click on Begin the Whale Hunt.

The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling.

In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. The first several days were spent in the village of Barrow, exploring ramshackle structures, buying gear, and otherwise helping the whaling crew to prepare for the hunt. We then traveled by snowmobile out onto the frozen Arctic Ocean, where we camped three miles from shore on thick pack ice, pitching our tents about ten feet from the open water. Boats were readied, harpoons prepared, whaling guns loaded, white tunics donned, a snow fence constructed, and then we sat silently in the -22 °F air, in constant daylight, waiting for whales to appear.

A thousand-year-old tradition, the Inupiat whale hunt provides the community’s annual food supply, limited by international law to 22 whales a year (in 2007). Each spring as the ocean thaws, ice breaks away from the mainland as a single massive chunk, which then floats out to sea, creating a canal of open water called the “lead”. It is through this lead that Bowhead whales migrate north to the Arctic Circle, where they spend summers, surfacing for air every 30-45 minutes en route. We saw hundreds of whales on the horizon, but most were too far away to attack. Finally on the fourth day two whales (each 36 feet long and weighing around 40 tons) were harpooned, hauled up onto the ice using a block and tackle system that resembles a giant tug of war between man and sea, and summarily butchered, the meat and blubber then distributed to the Barrow community.

I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

The purpose of this project was threefold:

First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.

Second, to subject myself to the same sort of incessant automated data collection process that I usually write computer programs to conduct . Much effort is spent making computers understand what it’s like to be human (through data mining and artificial intelligence), but rarely do humans try to see things from a computer’s perspective. I was interested in reaching some degree of empathy with the computer, a constant thankless helper in my work.

Third, to take an epic personal experience from the physical world and translate it optimally to the Internet, so that many people can share it.

I am grateful to Andrew Moore, a New York based friend and photographer who accompanied me on the trip, and to the Patkotak family of Barrow, Alaska, for their generosity in welcoming us into their house and later into their whaling camp. The Whale Hunt is really their story.

Personal and sincere thanks to Jonathan for his correspondence and permission to use his words and pictures all of which belong solely to him.

The Clash and the Titan

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Stick with me, this is about Whales.

Hearing properly for the first time London Calling by The Clash was one of those life-defining moments. I don’t wish to exaggerate but I imagine the unveiling of Picasso’s Guernica was but a ripple in the artistic pond compared to what this record meant (and means) to me: Mick Jones’ atom bomb guitar punctuating Joe Strummer’s desperate howls. I was, and I mean this quite literally, transfixed with every pulsing, sweating, sneering word and note. If He played in a band, this is what God sounded like when He brought His A-game.

Looking back on the experience with hindsight, I always knew this was what music was supposed to sound like. Before the needle even rested in the groove I carried a genetic imprint in my fibres of what would happen to all of my endorphins, hair follicles and cells when music was at its best and most affecting. But until that moment, it was largely a matter of faith, kept alive by what history has proved to be a pretty tasty collection of my Father’s records. Records like London Calling turned me into a true believer.

Seeing a whale for the first time brought about much the same crisis of physiology and mental instability. Despite being steeped in affection for the wild and wild things from an early age this was a piece of blubbery, evolutionary liveliness on a scale which was unlike anything I’d experienced before. The animal, a fin whale in this case, was breathing, stinking and swooshing just a few yards away from me and I was suddenly plunged into a depth of feeling for which I was quite unprepared.

Up until that point, I had seen endless hours of footage and countless photographs: I knew what whales did, how they moved, what they looked like, that there were species that seemed impossibly strange, that they made noises and leapt and breached and swirled and blew. I knew all of that. But seeing the thing… that was a needle dropped on a very deep groove indeed.

Since then I have seen thousands of cetaceans. It would be cool and detached of me to say that the experience of that first whale is dimmed slightly in the light of the sheer volume of blubber I’ve observed since. But that would be a fabrication: Much like the first listen of that record it wasn’t a one-off high but instead acted as an elevator of everything after that; It was a new lens through which I could view everything else rather than a temporary hit. Because of that, my experiences around whales and dolphins since then have built in a slow-burning intensity and never, but never, get boring.

And years after that first listen, I met Mick Jones, guitarist on that beautiful mess that is London Calling. He had just come off stage at an event which I was involved in and in the backstage bustle he looked exhausted but elated after a barnstorming set with his band of the time, Big Audio Dynamite. Always intending to play the cool and reluctant observer it was inevitable that this façade would crumble in the presence of yer man. He was with an eye-wateringly beautiful woman but I barely noticed the poor girl as I shambled up to him and proffered a hand.  He was, of course, the quintessential rock n’ roll gent: pleasant, affable, self deprecating and patiently putting up with my ridiculous questions before autographing a scrap of paper and leaving me beaming.

Like I said, some things do not diminish with the passage of time. I, and my pleasures in life, will age well having been gilded somehow. Because whales (and The Clash) can do that.