The Forgiveness of Leviathans

    I was served whale once. Minke whale. To be fair, I was at the top of the globe during that time—the summer of 2023, in Svalbard’s Arctic Ocean, two degrees shy of the North Pole and far north of the modern-feared North Sea that hugs the coastline Norway steals from Sweden. It felt like the edge of the world, the kind of place where maps blur and the imagination takes over, where the water stretches endlessly and the sky feels closer than it should.
     I didn’t eat the whale, all charred and black on a flimsy paper plate. Pieces of meat were husked onto other flimsy paper plates of the unfamiliar group in line behind me. Most were from Scandinavia. I met a few girls from Estonia. The rest I exchanged quick glances with, picking up on conversations in languages I tried to learn over the years. Russian was a little out of my league, but I did my best. The only thing I picked up on was that everyone seemed to be enjoying the whale but me.
     I gave the whale to my dad because I couldn’t fathom wasting it just because I couldn’t stomach it. I watched him carefully cut and bite each piece until all that remained was grease, char, and remnants of his salad that accompanied the great fish (mammal) that once roamed the seas below the ship we ate on. I knew he would eat it because he isn’t wasteful. It was better off in his stomach than in the trash. I had a hard time accepting that if I looked out the window, people stood smiling and photographing pods as they surfaced calmly through the water—yet those same people came inside to eat the very thing they came here to see. My dad didn’t eat the whale because he wanted to. He ate it because that’s what people do. The whales are—and have been—the prize, and the water our game.
     In the United States it’s not popular to eat whale. Perhaps we are shaken with the abominations our ancestors committed—slaughtering and nearly wiping out major whale species to light the cities of our nineteenth century homes, ripping baleen from bowheads so ladies could have hoop skirts by the time the yearly ball came around. Yet little of this is taught. Every time I zoom into the whaling industry I am disgusted by the violence, stench and grit, and every time I zoom out I see how necessary it was for people of that time. Today I flip on my bedroom light without a thought. Back then, fathers left their families for months to years, chasing creatures across violent seas to light homes not only their own, but across the world. The alternatives were inadequate, dim, unreliable. The promise of light—steady, bright, dependable—was enough to send men into the unknown.
     I began researching because I thought I’d prove killing whales wasn’t vital—but it was to the people and economies of the time. I think about the echoes minke whales sing underwater, low and haunting, traveling distances we can barely comprehend. I think of their smooth skin glistening at the surface, catching the light in ways that feel almost deliberate, almost performative. Perhaps if I invoke this picture, those Scandinavians, those girls from Estonia, maybe they’d turn down their whale meat too. Maybe my dad would have a dozen flimsy paper plates before him. Even still, I refused to eat the meat of a whale whose existence was doomed anyway. Must be bad luck, I thought, or maybe just bad timing—to love something so deeply that you arrive only after its near destruction.
     There is an old photograph in my bedroom of a wooden whaleship stuck in ice. Somewhat capsized, somewhat intact, somehow surviving. I look at it every night. It reminds me of sailing that far north, where our ship pushed through pack ice and the sound of the frozen ocean splitting sent a thunder rippling forward. I wondered about the creatures below us, moving silently through dark water untouched by sunlight. I wondered how far their songs traveled, how long they could swim beneath the ice before needing air, before needing to return to the surface where we waited. Our ship left a path in the ice in the wake. I liked to think we were guiding them north, off the edge of the world.
     The first time I saw a whale was in 2010, when I was eight years old, aboard the National Geographic SeaBird from Sitka to Juneau. I had never known trees so tall or water so cold to the touch. I had never known rain like it poured out there, or how yellow the beak of a bald eagle looked as it flew by. I also had never known time change. I woke the entire ship at five in the morning. The midnight sun crept through my cabin window and I saw a fluke make its way to the depths. A pod of humpbacks surrounded us—breaching, spouting, playing. I woke everyone. I pounded on doors, shouted down hallways, unable to contain it. After breakfast, the captain called me up to his cabin and went over the rulebook with me. Apparently some people signed up to sleep in and not to see whales. So I woke at five every morning for the rest of the trip, scanning the vast horizon of flickering light in hopes for another fluke. Only those times, I kept the whales to myself.
     The abundance of nature captivated me out in the last frontier, a place so vastly different from my home in New Jersey. Eleven years later I returned. The water was placid and mirrored the Alaskan range and the bits of snow that still collected at the top. The fisherman set out for their daily catch and I scanned the horizon of flickering light and waves in hopes of seeing another fluke. And their blood that once stained the water and the oil that strangled the waves had stopped long before ships like the SeaBird toured us through the last frontier. But now oil comes from deep within the Earth, and the blood stays below, tangled in nets and lines that snare the gentle giants. That oil once boiled from blubber was revolutionary in the 1850s. I promised the mountains, the water, the light that I would do something about it. And it’s led me to the corners of the world, places far more north than a calm shoreline in the early, southern Alaskan sun. Where the dinosaurs of their kind roam in the uncharted swells of the Arctic Ocean, where the ice used to capsize the grand wooden ships of the whalers that navigated the seas searching to light the cities of the globe. For it was necessary, I admit now, in our advances at the time, and yet they’ve returned. They still venture out into coves filled with ships, swimming slowly with silent breaths, forgiving to the horrors of the past, sending their flukes out into the deep and stretching across the horizons of the world.
     America, for more than a century, was raised on Herman Melville’s fiction of associating whales with violence—and pinning man and whale against one another. The success of whaling overshadowed the power of the ocean itself. Nations massacred the seas to establish dominance, and for a young United States, we were eager to prove something to old England. When whaleships left Nantucket, the entire town gathered. Wives hid tears. Owners prayed for oil and safe return. Ships creaked, sails snapped, gulls dove. Men sailed into the unknown for light. Millions of whales were killed, and greed united oceans in silent witness.

       Once the ship left port the masts creaked and ropes danced across the sky. Sails lowered and flapped aggressively in the wind, encouraging the dark sea to creep up the sides of the ship with each clash. The gulls dove and screeched amongst the edges where the ships cutthroat path disturbed the small fish the gulls swept down with a gulp. Whale pins clicked together, swaying and twirling on the experienced whaler’s lapels. The stars and the stripes waved in the wind and the men on the ships sailed off to the horizon. The island, a cult of greed and trade, prepared to use oil to quench their first for light. For aside from New Bedford, no one dared to challenge the little island that could, and no one dared to challenge the heart and spirit of a Nantucket whaleman out at sea. In the distance, the town of Nantucket stood in silence, hoping for wealth and oil while dark clouds gathered within a commercial sky.
     The first time I saw a whale underwater was in Tonga in 2025. Slipping into glassy water, hearing their songs travel through me—it was unlike anything I expected. I spent a week photographing humpbacks, but I felt grief each time I stepped onto a boat, scanning for breath like the whalers once did. For days we experienced storms and bad luck. Then a pod swam below me—massive, slow, impossibly calm. How could we see a creature like that and drive a harpoon through it? A leviathan slept fifteen feet below me. From beneath her came her calf, turning toward me. She bumped my camera. I cried. She twirled, and I did the same. Together we spun in warm water, her singing, me crying. I felt forgiveness—something unspoken, something overwhelming. I will never understand the trust that baby had in me, nor her mother, who passed beneath me and called her away. The calf circled me once more before they disappeared into the blue. When I surfaced, my snorkel carried more salt than the ocean.
     When oil was discovered in the ground, and global industries shifted, the whaling empire was an empire no longer. Wooden ships were sent to California to guide men to the gold rush, Nantucket rebuilt their economy and their scorched island and turned to tourism. Rather than tracking down the whales who sang songs in the deep, men pushed drills into Earth’s roots and extracted the blood that runs our world. It replaced whale oil as a cheaper kerosene and later fueled steam ships and propelled industrial growth across the country by train and gasoline. A new threat began to weave its way through the world. Rather than great fires spewing from boiling blubber and harvesting the contents of the sperm whale, men sent emissions into the air, warming our earth’s atmosphere and in turn, melting the ice that once trapped their ships up in the cold. Over time, leading into the twenty-first century, ice formations have dwindled to less than half of what they used to be, and the sovereign nations all turned their heads back to the water that suddenly opened free. So, they took their modern ships, now advanced and equipped to endure the north, and headed for their new claim. The melting Arctic opened accessibility to maritime territory never navigated before, and the oil grounds that lay underneath the deep dark water sit waiting, untouched. The great nations have come together once again in their watery face, sailing far up to the edges of our world to play their favorite game. 

       I found myself struggling greatly upon researching the industry on the ethics behind it all. The alternatives for light in the early nineteenth century aside from the use of whale oil were less than innovative, and the smallest flicker of promising light sent men to the vast corners of the world and adventure along the brink of death. I do believe the idea of associating whales with violence has been overcome, largely due to conservation efforts and the fact that no angry sperm whales have rammed any of our industrial ships. Instead (unless you are Japan, Norway or Iceland), whales are preserved, protected, photographed and studied, often sleeping vertically in large pods off the coast of Dominica or raising their young in the shallow waters of Tonga and the Dominican Republic—humming, playing and swimming curiously among those who dove under the surface to see them. 

       Imperialism over oceanic space has lessened in ways with stricter laws on international waters and limited loopholes, but we always have a way of repeating our past abominations in one way or another, massacring whatever we think we can hold dominance over. I wake up every morning and turn on my bedroom light and I don’t think, not even for a second, about whales, or oil, or oceans. I don’t think about light in that way because it wasn’t the era in which I was raised, and I don’t know how to appreciate it any more than I do. But my understanding, and empathy, rather, has only come from learning of it. And unlike the whalemen of that time, I dream of sharing the ocean with such creatures, diving under the waves with a camera in hopes to hear their songs as they sing them out to me. And they’ll stare at me with their small eyes and dinosaur bodies and there’ll be a moment where I hold my hand out, floating in an eternal abyss of blue, and maybe just for a second we’ll understand each other. That I come from a species of destruction and innovation and for that I am sorry. I think they know we aren’t all that way. I wonder if they knew they lit our homes, and I wonder if they felt relief when Pennsylvania found oil in the ground. I wonder if Moby found it good fun to wreck the Essex and influence early American fiction and I wonder how the Quakers felt when the white whale turned the tables on their business. An industry of oil and fire—fire and water—meticulously fashioned for the blood that keeps the hearts of the great nations bleeding. I like to think I’ll never be like them, the sloppy whalemen who drove harpoons through crying whales. But I’m wrong, you see, because I write from my computer with a flame lit next to me, and I turn on the lights of my home from the oil we pumped from the ground, looking out my window and scanning the vast horizons of shimmering light in hopes of seeing another fluke.