set sail, other ships were leaving Dutch ports to carry out commercial whaling in the Arctic. Two of the crew of the Mayflower had whaled off Greenland, and reckoned they would have made £4,000 from the whales of Cape Cod Bay. Indeed, it was the whales that had first prompted the Pilgrims to consider Provincetown as a site, and as Cotton Mather recorded, whale oil became the staple commodity of their colony. The Mayflower herself was pressed into service as a whaler, sailing over the bay from Plymouth.
Provincetown, too, took to whaling with aplomb. By 1737, twelve whale-ships were leaving the port, bound for the Davis Straits. By 1846, Provincetown was home to dozens of vessels. Families such as the Cooks, who owned eight houses in a row in the town’s East End, could look out on their ships tied up in front of their properties much as modern cars are parked in driveways. The building that now houses a fashionable delicatessen was once the Cooks’ chandlery. Close by stood the blacksmith’s, forging harpoons and lances, while a blue plaque on another wall commemorates ‘David C. Scull, the Ambergris King’. Later, the Azoreans and Portuguese came to work in the town’s great salt cod trade. Their descendants still live here, incarnate in such names as Avellar, Costa, Oliveira and Motta, and in the annual Blessing of the Fleet, when their fishing boats are bedecked with flags and a dressed statue of St Peter is carried down to the harbour.
In the late nineteenth century other visitors came too, ‘summer people’ brought by steamers from Boston and New York, artists and writers among them. They were attracted by the clear light that bounces around the peninsula as from a photographer’s reflecting shield, but also by its remoteness. Provincetown remained a tentative, if not dangerous place. The Portland gale of 1898 drowned five hundred people and demolished many wharves. Houses out on the sandy spit of Long Point, defeated by decades of storms, were floated wholesale across the bay on rafts of wrecking barrels to find shelter on calmer shores. As the radical journalist Mary Heaton Vorse wrote, ‘Provincetowners have spent so much of their time on the sea in ships that they look upon houses as a sort of land ship or a species of house-boat and therefore not subject to the laws of houses.’
Gradually, reluctantly, the town was tamed. Drainage was installed, pavements laid, roads allowed access to what was, in effect, an island. ‘Indeed, to an inlander, the Cape landscape is a constant mirage,’ as Thoreau wrote. Its sands collect and drift as the town twists and turns on itself, leaving you never quite sure which way is south or which way is west. This is still a place apart, a fold-out on the map; not so much part of America as apart from it. In the summer it babbles with life, its one busy street teeming with day-tripping families and drag queens, before petering out at town limits once marked by a whale’s jaw bone stuck in the ground, and now by Josh’s garage and a straggle of beach huts from an Edward Hopper painting. And out on the ocean, the clamour diminishes like a dying chord, to be replaced by the rise and fall of the sea.
It wasn’t until the day before I was due to leave Provincetown that I went on my first whale watch. I remember how cold it was as the boat left the bay the land’s warmth giving way to a chill sea breeze. As we sailed out of the harbour, our naturalist described the geography of Stellwagen Bank as it passed beneath us. He explained how fishermen had dredged up mastodon bones from the sea floor; how these were some of the most fertile waters on the planet; how they were crossed by the Atlantic’s busiest shipping routes. On a chart behind him, he pointed out the animals we might see. I looked at their unlikely shapes on the pamphlet he had handed out. They seemed as unreal as the dinosaurs I’d memorized from my library books as a boy.
Then someone shouted,
Whale!
and in the mid-distance, a massive grey-black shape slid up out of the water and back down below. Before I knew it, there they were, off our bows, whales blowing noisily from their nostrils, rolling with the waves. Barely yards away a young humpback threw itself out of the water, showing off its white underbelly ridged like some giant, rubbery shell. It was a jump-cut close-up of something impossible: a whale in flight.
Forgetting the children around me, I blurted out an inadvertent ‘fuck!’. Other whales were throwing their tails in the air, slapping their flippers as though signalling to each other, or to us. As I watched, more and more animals appeared, as if summoned by some unseen circus master. I was amazed by the exuberant mastery of their own bodies, and the element in which they moved so elegantly. I envied them the fact that they were always swimming; that they were always free.
Every summer, humpbacks come to the Gulf of Maine. For six months they have fasted, and mated, in the warm but sterile waters of the Caribbean, suckling their calves with milk so rich it resembles cottage cheese, until it is time to make the annual pilgrimage north. It is the greatest migration undertaken by any mammal. Following routes of colonization first undertaken by their ancestors millions of years ago, navigating up to eight thousand miles of ocean via age-old and invisible signs, they arrive off the north-eastern seaboard, where the warm Gulf Stream meets the chill Labrador currents and stirs up nutrients from the ocean floor in a process called upwelling.
Here, in the grey-green waters, a vast food chain is set in motion. The whales fatten themselves on sand lances and herring, growing fat with the seasonal glut. And here, less than two hours’ sail from one of America’s great cities, these gigantic animals–‘the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales’–besport themselves, ‘making more gay foam and white water generally than any other’. Even their hunters acknowledged this playfulness in their nickname for the humpback, the merry whale, although its scientific name is hardly less glamorous: Megaptera novæangliæ, big-winged New Englander, barnacled angel.
Launching fifty tons of blubber, flesh and bone into the air, the leviathan leaves its domain, its fifteen-foot flippers like gnarled wings, the tips of its tail, three times as wide as a man is long, barely in contact with the water.
Seen in the slow motion of recall–the after-image it leaves in your head–a breaching whale seems to be trying to escape its environment, the element that, even as it breaks the surface, is pulling it back down. No one really knows why whales leap. Almost every species does it–from the smallest dolphin to the greatest blue whale–in their own style: backward breaches, belly-flops, half-hearted lunges or full-blown somersaults. It may be that the animals are trying to dislodge parasites–the force is enough for breaching whales to slough off skin, convenient samples to be gathered for genetic tests. There is no knowing when they will breach, although when they do, they may do so repeatedly, often when the wind picks up, as if, like some cetacean Mary Poppins, a change in the weather summons their magical appearance. One scientist reasons that the gymnasts may find it ‘more pleasurable or satisfying, or less painful, to slam the body on rough, rather than smooth, water’.
It seems likely that their aerobatics are an energetic means of communication–advertisements of physical power and presence, telling other whales, ‘Here I am,’ and ‘Aren’t I splendid?’ But when you see a whale leap out of the water like a giant penguin, your first thought is that it looks fun. The fact that calves and young whales are more prone to breach reinforces this idea. The whales may be merely playing, like the boys who dive off Provincetown’s Macmillan Wharf, placing implicit trust in their immortality as they hurl themselves from one medium to the other. Or perhaps they pity us for our enslavement to gravity, allowing us a glimpse of their true nature by rising out of the ocean to reveal their majesty.
Seeing whales in the wild seemed to turn me back into a boy. I remembered what it was that fascinated me about these outlandish animals: their sheer variety, their wildly differing shapes and sizes; a satisfying set to be collected like bubble-gum cards, a catalogue of complexity and colour: from the tiny harbour porpoise to the great rorquals–from the Scandinavian for reed or furrowed whale, a reference to their ridged bellies–and the mysterious sperm whale, a tiny model of which I found in my sister’s toy box, still perched on its own plastic wave. It was as if the watery world I feared was restocked with friendly creatures, an international tribe of global roamers; as discrete and wide-ranging as birds, yet all of a type. This was what appealed to me: their completeness, as opposed to our separateness, for all that we are mammals together. They are a tidy whole; we are in disarray.
Cetaceans–from the Greek ketos for sea monster–fall