“We Will All Be Marine Mammals Soon”: Oceanic Intimacy and Extinction from Shakespeare to the Left-to-Die Boat

Whales sing songs of extinction from blue depths. From the heady “Save the Whales!” days of environmental activism in the 1970s to today’s commercialization of whale-watching tourism, large cetaceans have been powerful symbols that focus our understandings of extinction risk and the biological health of our oceans. These vast swimmers make us feel deeply. Many of us, whether we contact these creatures physically or not, feel touched by cetacean presences. Probably more than any other marine creature, cetaceans catch human emotions. Their massive bulk, alien intelligence, and visible vulnerability have made them potent symbols of oceanic mysteries and changes in our global waters. But these emotionally powerful connections represent a relatively new phase in the cultural history of humans and whales. These creatures have entered the category of “charismatic megafauna,” which emphasizes their emotional value for humans. The feelings of intimacy and dislocation that whales generate today contrast sharply with early modern understandings of these creatures as symbols of predation and destruction. As whale hunting has given way to whale conservation, a taste of violence continues to follow these vast bodies. In both modes whales are powerful, and in fact Graham Huggan’s recent suggestion that whales represent “not just a profusion of allegories but the making of allegory itself” (Huggan 2018, 86) may hold true across the divide between early modern and modern eras. Whales touch human bodies and minds as symbols and warnings, carrying traces of violence and intimacy. Ideas about whales trace a complex history of how we feel about the world’s oceans. The threat of extinction may apply only to the modern whales that we love, but traces of vulnerability also appear in stories about threatening premodern cetaceans.