Whale

The whale, the largest of animals, appears in the Bible as the great fish that swallows the prophet Jonah, who has fled the command of God, and holds him for three days and three nights in its belly before casting him up alive on the shore, a story Jesus later takes as a sign of his own three days in the tomb, so that the whale became, in Christian reading, an emblem of death and resurrection, of descent into the depths and return. The vast sea-beast Leviathan of the Book of Job, which no man can master, stands for the untameable power of creation before which humankind is small.

The modern Save the Whales movement traces to a specific and well-documented moment: in 1970 the biologist Roger Payne released Songs of the Humpback Whale, a recording of the animals' haunting vocalisations that sold in the hundreds of thousands and is credited with turning public sentiment toward whale conservation more than any single scientific paper had managed; the International Whaling Commission adopted a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982, taking effect in 1986, a regulatory milestone that remains in force today with only limited exceptions for indigenous subsistence and a small number of objecting or non-member nations.

Among the peoples of the Arctic the whale is a central sustaining animal wrapped in ceremony and taboo, and figures such as Sedna, the mistress of the sea-creatures in Inuit tradition, from whose body the sea-mammals are said to have come, govern the hunt; these belong to living traditions and are noted here from the outside. The whale's sheer scale and its life in the unreachable deep made it, across cultures, an image of the vast, the primordial and the mysterious. In the modern world the whale has become a moral emblem of a different kind, the great endangered creature whose protection stands for the care of the living ocean itself. Depth, power, death-and-return and the immensity of creation gather to the whale.

The blue whale, the largest species in the group, is also the largest animal known to have existed at any point in the earth's history, larger than any dinosaur for which a complete size estimate exists; a blue whale's heart alone can weigh as much as a small car, and recordings of its calls, among the loudest sounds produced by any living creature, can under the right ocean conditions travel for hundreds of kilometres, a scale of life that dwarfs even the vast sea-beasts of Job and the sagas.