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Northwest Traveler. A story of gray whales and humans
by Fernando Martín Velazco
Originally published (in Spanish) by Noro Originals at: https://noro.mx/viajera-del-noroeste
1.
In his famous The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America published in 1874, Captain
Charles M. Scammon records the vocatives that the whaling guild of his time gave to the gray whale: "hard-
heads," "mussel-diggers," "gray-back," "rip-sack," and "devil-fish." The latter, similar to the one used by his
Japanese colleagues on the coast of the Western Pacific: "the whale-demon" (koku-kujira).
Scammon records meticulous descriptions of what he considers "the habits" of gray whales, product of more
than two decades of observations made in the waters of the North Pacific, from the southern tip of the Baja
California peninsula to the Sea of Okhotsk, in Russia. Among them, the commentary on a phenomenon
observed on the Mexican coasts stands out:
“At times, in calm weather, they are seen lying on the water quite motionless, keeping one position
for an hour or more. At such times the sea-gulls and cormorants frequently alight upon the huge
beasts. The first season in Scammon’s Lagoon, coast of Lower California, the boats were lowered
several times for them, we thinking that the animals when in that position were dead or sleeping,
but before the boats arrived within even shooting distance they were on the move again. ”
Apart from intermittent sleep—an unusual observation, if there is one—Scammon warns that the "sea
monsters" feed on the Baja California coast, a behavior whose corroboration was controversial until a couple
of decades ago. It describes in detail the timing and trajectory of its migratory route along the American coast
and gives an account of reports of sightings of the same species in the Taiwan and China Seas.
Scammon was a seaman. He would spend twenty-one years in the service of the U.S. Merchant Marine, nine
of which would be dedicated to whaling, an activity thanks to which he would achieve wealth and fame. He is
credited with opening the route to the San Ignacio and Ojo de Liebre lagoons – winter refuges for this sea
creature – to western ships and initiating their hunt there for the extraction of the then very precious oil.
Therefore, it is not surprising that most of the descriptions recorded of the behavior of gray whales correspond
to the behavior of the species within the context of its industrial whaling. Although the tone of his expositions
is austere and elegant, there have been many who see in his fascination with the hunted creature, the implicit
emergence of a melancholic tone caused by the extermination of which he himself was a part.
The aforementioned book appeared for the first time in San Francisco, in a beautifully illustrated edition that
the Overland Monthly soon reviewed and recognized as "the most important scientific publication produced
in California up to that time." The included plates depicted naturalistic portraits of various species of marine
mammals, with a strong emphasis on the taxonomy and life of gray whales, including the diverse
environments they inhabited throughout the year and the techniques for hunting them. However, by the time
the publication saw the light of day, the situation of the mammal in question was approaching the status of
legend.
The industrial hunting of gray whales in their breeding sites, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, had
dissipated their presence on the American coasts. Scholar David A. Henderson estimated that by 1874, when
Scammon's book was published, more than 8,000 of the species had been killed on the eastern Pacific coast.
Their numbers were so small that industrial hunting was abandoned because it was considered that their
commercialization was no longer a profitable business.
2
When in 1912 the expedition of the famous Roy Chapman Andrews arrived in Japan and found a gray whale
in its waters, the American explorer claimed to have rediscovered an extinct species. Although Andrews went
too far in his assertions, his argument was accurate. The sparse population of gray whales survived the end of
the century elusive to human eyes, and exiled from their former areas of congregation and breeding. In
contrast, their descriptions proliferated.
In 1901, Jules Verne published one of his late novels: Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin, in which he
follows a French whaling ship on its course across the Pacific Ocean, beginning in New Zealand and passing
along the northern coasts of America and Asia in search of balenids and their oil. Chapter five is an
extraordinary, yet accurate, description of gray whale hunting in Margarita Bay (now called Magdalena) on
the Baja California peninsula:
“It was half-past two o'clock when the harpooner of the first boat put himself in a position to wound
the whale. She, who was playing with her calf, had not yet seen him, when the harpoon pierced the
air. The whale, then seized with a fit of rage, becoming one of the most terrible animals. Its tail stirred
the water, which leaped like a waterspout. The animal rushed into the canoe, but it was not possible
to prevent its attack. In vain did the sailors attempt to throw a second harpoon at her, in vain did they
try to wound her with their spears, in vain did the officers discharge their shot-guns at her.”
Verne, who never set foot on the American coast, in his fiction narrates the fear of sailors at the rumor of the
existence of a mysterious sea monster of great dimensions and insatiable appetite, which would be
responsible for the scarcity of whales in the bays of North America. The parody of the sailors' superstition
reveals a perverse background: the nameless monster existed, but the sea did not correspond to its nature.
Tales of gray whales gave way to some legends. Slowly, the names by which the creature was called by its
former executioners were erased. But there were still gaps in that story.
2.
It began as a series of fables or a supposition. In 1646 Dell'Arcano del Mare, Sir Robert Dudley records the
area as a “baia grande e pericolosa”, a large and dangerous bay. The journals of China’s Naos describe it as a
coast full of shoals and sand dunes, whose coastal navigation was inadvisable. Vizcaíno, who was actually from
Extremadura and whose name would bear that same bay, tried to land in its waters during the summer of
1603 without success, but thanks to the testimony of the natives, he noticed the tumultuous presence of
whales, which he did not manage to sight.
Six decades earlier, Captain Francisco de Ulloa described it as a bay of strong winds and a barren coastline,
whose only refuge from storms was the adjoining island of high mountain ranges, which he named Cedros
(cedars). In the attempt to reach an uncertain north, his expedition gave way to anxiety, tracing in its
incomplete course a lemniscate, a form that some historiographers perceived as an enigma and most as an
omen. The survivors of the voyage reported the sighting of five hundred whales, from a species prone to
scratch against the hull of ships and thus terrify the sailors, which they managed to avoid thanks to a favorable
wind, which they received in answer to their many prayers.
For the established crews of the time, the underwater creatures' playing with boats were interpreted as a
demonic manifestation; drifts that could only be avoided by that ship whose captain was Christ. Therefore, to
follow them in playing would be to yield to temptation and condemn their souls.
This iteration of whale presence presumed a hideout. The European navigator found in its winds and the
drawing of its coastal relief, the classical (i.e., Greco-Latin) analogy of the dangers evoked by the African Syrtes
– an area of shipwrecks and alleged abundance of sea monsters – only dominated by the mythological hero
Jason and his Argonauts. In the absence of ports of refuge on the west coast of Spanish California, the
resolution of the mystery was left to chance and time.
3
Seven decades of Jesuit presence on the peninsula did not dispel doubts about the bay in question and its
seafaring inhabitants. Restricted by the availability of trails and water to the eastern coast and the mountain
ranges, the Pacific and the plains aroused little interest in the missionaries, who nevertheless recognized in
the Balenids a certain diversity of dimensions. They identified a particular class smaller and more abundant
than fin whales, which they called "ballenatos."
Self-taught scholars, the Jesuits rigorously and willingly recorded the flora and fauna of the inland and the
Gulf of California, as well as exceptional details of its geography. They learned the various languages of the
desert and described the ways and customs of its inhabitants, whom they converted to faith and subdued to
a sedentary lifestyle. They recorded in books the echo of the subjugated cultures, in which a peculiar cult for
natural forces and nameless spirits can be glimpsed. They ignored—or omitted—in their compilations an
undeniable fact: a thousand ballenatos entering every year to a small strip of sea hidden from the ocean.
Some have glimpsed as the reason for this fault —which would look like stubbornness—the secrets of the
arcane. The native converts dwelt in the eastern missions, but some of them occasionally resumed nomadism,
where it is presumed that they sought the oceanic coast to rehabilitate their pagan cults. After the period of
absence, the repentant Cochimíes had to request confession in order to be able to rejoin missionary life. The
confessed sin could have been the route and the rite: the magic lagoon behind a barrier of dunes, the winter
refuge of a thousand whales. The secret would then be sealed under sacramental secrecy, which would make
it impossible to be informed to the authorities. For that staging of the past that are maps and chronicles, the
refuge remained invisible until the mid-nineteenth century.
A single mention—perhaps an oversight—in seven decades of the Jesuit archive transgresses this censorship,
and perhaps thereby, confirms it. In 1733, the priest Segismundo Taraval traveled to the coast of Anawa (today
Punta Eugenia) and described a "great inlet of many leagues", to which he gave the name of San Xavier. He
visits the islands of Birds (Afegùa) and of Mist (Amalgua) —which previously was called Cedros— where he
baptizes its natives and takes them with him to the mainland. Before returning to San Ignacio Mission, Taraval
climbed the mountain of this island and sighted "three little islands" in the middle of the bay which he named
"Islas De Dolores" (islands of sorrow). He also mentions that the converted natives used to chase the whales
that frequented the area, taking advantage of their own nerves to build the bows with which they hunted
them.
The consequent silence does not escape suspicion, which leads to the assumption of guilt on the part of
converts and clerics. The extinction of the former during the following decades and the expulsion of the latter
from Spanish territories in 1768, would silently seal that secret pact.
The imaginary of the risk related to that coastline would survive the dissolution of the missions in 1833. A few
years later, the British whaling ship, Toward Castle, would run aground on the coast of one of the sandy
"islands". The wreck would claim no human life in the first instance: a small boat would depart south in search
of help, while the rest of the crew would remain in a small settlement on the coast. Upon the arrival of the
rescuers, they would find a house built with the remnants of the shipwreck and the remains of its inhabitants
who died of thirst.
The traveler Arthur W. North relates in his Camp and Road in Lower California, that by the year 1909, there
was not a single laborer with a donkey in the mission of Santa Gertrudis with the courage to lead him to the
southeastern plain, which they did not know. The road, called indistinctly "Llano De Berrendos" (pronghorns)
and "De Liebres" (hares), lacked marked trails and sources of fresh water. The only known well was a shoddy
water spring, located next to extensive salt flats formed naturally in the lagoon's marshes, as well as being
frequented by coyotes. The chronicler remembers and laments about his own land-wreck, so he names this
area: "the sinister region".
4
3.
In 1960, with the publication of the illustrated chronicles of his adventures in Baja California, the explorer Erle
Stanly Gardener made an unheard statement: "the whales of the desert" talk, they communicate with each
other. In 1956 he had made an expedition with the famous doctor Paul Dudley White to the little-explored
Central Desert of Baja California, with the ingenious and ill-fated objective of recording the heartbeat of a
whale. To do this, they followed Scammon's trail almost a century later to the lagoon that in the Anglo-Saxon
world bore his name: Ojo de Liebre (Scammon’s lagoon). At the time, the site was the temporary site of fishing
camps that took advantage of the abundance of sea turtles in the region.
Based on the testimony of local informants, Gardener went further in his claims: the gray whale, he tells us,
is a singularly intelligent creature, able to accurately distinguish its hunters from those engaged in the mere
extraction of turtles. This distinction meant that in practice, the Baja Californian turtle fishermen sailed
unscathed through the calm waters of the lagoon, which —unlike their counterparts, the foreign whalers—
had until recently been demarcations of enormous risk.
Just a decade earlier, the small number of gray whales made their hunting untenable, so the International
Whaling Commission banned it. The industry's plan was that once its population recovered, hunting could be
resumed for commercial purposes. By the middle of the century, in the eyes of the modern world, whales
were still wild and fearsome creatures, but their preservation yielded copious profits.
For its part, the desert whale still boasted that demonic prestige that consecrated it in the popular imagination
during the golden age of industrial hunting; Therefore, sailing the waters of their millenary refuge was seen
by the Anglo-Saxons as an act of unheard-of gallantry. In contrast, for the Mexican fishermen, it was a rather
elusive creature with whom they maintained relations of distant respect, and whose behavior traced unique
stratagems that obeyed the logic of a finely organized underwater community. A sudden approach or a single
attack against them provoked the animosity of the entire cetacean community towards the aggressor vessel,
which could last all winter and be paid for with its life. On the other hand, daily co-presence without aggression
was revealed to be perfectly viable.
By the 1950s, Vizcaíno Bay was a barely inhabited territory, where the construction of a port was planned for
the exploitation of 40,000 hectares of plains and marshes, recently concessioned by the Mexican government
to the American magnate Daniel K. Ludwig for the extraction of sea salt. The presence of small turtle camps
in the area dates back three decades with the arrival of peninsular mountain rangers and fishermen from
central Mexico. Their observations of whales stood out from those of his time, as they had what formal
research lacked: experience, patience, and reflection over time. Their empirical notion harbored an
inescapable enigma.
If the grey giants communicated with each other, a language and therefore a code had to mediate between
them. However, unlike other species of whales—such as humpbacks or blue whales—whose song had been
meticulously described for at least a century, no vocal faculty was known for gray whales. Based on similar
information, in 1950 Carl Hubbs had made an expedition to the San Ignacio lagoon, and once surrounded by
cetaceans he had placed a hydrophone between them, managing to record nothing more than the rattle of
tiny shrimp. In Hubbs' opinion, it was a voiceless mammal in this case, as in the case of giraffes: "the silent
whale."
The information from both explorers gave rise to assumptions that made use of paranormal hypotheses: if
gray whales were mute but communicated in detail with each other, it must be because they made use of a
channel of exchange until now little known to humans. Some American newspapers of the time went so far
as to publish brainy theories about telepathic communication between whales and other species, and there
were even those who claimed the ability to communicate with them without any other instrument than their
minds. In 1957, Soviet whalers recorded and described the sounds of a gray whale as "low-pitched roars," but
5
the looming Cold War caused such information to remain on the fringes of the West, with the
parapsychological notion prevalent for many years in popular culture.
In February 1965, with the salt facilities fully operational in the region adjacent to Ojo de Liebre, the marine
amusement park Sea World sponsored the capture and transfer of a gray whale calf to an oceanarium in San
Diego, for various studies and experiments. The previous expedition identified various vocalizations, which
were described as "croaker-like grunts," "low-frequency rumbles," metallic clicks, and the cry of the captured
calf, which would be named Gigi. She would endure only two months in captivity, before dying of an unknown
infection.
By the early 1970s, belief in gray whale muteness had completely dissipated. On the contrary, it was noted
that it was one of the cetacean species with the highest frequency of vocalizations and more diversity of their
acoustic range. The reason for their apparent silence belonged to a strategy of stealth in the face of threats:
to confuse their messages with the sound of the waves, and despite their size, to hide themselves.
In that same decade, a fisherman from the San Ignacio lagoon, Francisco Mayoral "Pachico", assured that
during the winter some whales approached his small boat, seeking human contact as if they were domestic
animals. Some mothers even allowed their young to approach the boats and be petted by humans. Taking
advantage of the influx of people as a result of the recently inaugurated transpeninsular highway, Pachico
took some tourists to meet the creatures he said he considered part of his family. This activity began to be
referred to as the "friendly whale" sighting.
4.
In 1867 the zoologist Wilhelm Lilljeborg described in the proceedings of the New Swedish Society of Sciences
the fossil remains of a sea creature found in 1959 on the coast of the Baltic Sea: he named it Balaenoptera
robusta, associating it with the family of balenidae. His colleague, the Dane Daniel Eschricht, had examined
similar remains found off the coast of England six years earlier, and although he agreed with Lilljeborg that it
was a species that had not been taxonomically described, he disagreed with the assessment that it was a fin
whale or a right whale. John Edward Gray, the caretaker of the fossil collections at the British Museum of
Natural History, intervened in the controversy, agreeing with Eschricht that it was a different genus. He then
proposed a Solomonic designation that integrated both appreciations: naming the newly described species
Eschrichtius robustus.
Ironically, the common name of the species was associated with the naturalist who had reconciled the
controversy: "the Gray's Whale." In American English, "gray" is the color gray—unlike in British, where it's
spelled with an 'e'. For the encyclopedic information buff, "gray whale" referred to a species that became
extinct in the European Atlantic hundreds of years ago. Equally fortuitous circumstances would lead to that
name merging with that of its counterparts still alive in the Pacific.
Around the same time, industrial hunting in the Baja California peninsula would reach its climax. The unusual
success of Charles M. Scammon and company had caused whaling ships from all over the world to arrive at
the lagoons of Ojo de Liebre, San Ignacio, and Magdalena Bay; and with them came new ways of naming the
one formally designated as the "California whale": Rhacianectes glaucus.
British whalers, as well as some Americans from the east coast, called this cetacean colloquially 'scragg whale',
'skinny whale', or 'poor quality whale’. It was also named “Scrag”, which may have arisen as a pejorative
designation compared to larger cetaceans and had already been used centuries earlier on the east coast of
North America, to refer to the coastal whales that the New England settlers used to hunt in the late 17th
century. This species of Atlantic whale would be designated in 1868 by the American paleontologist Edward
Drinker Cope as Agaphelus gibbosus.
6
It would be Scammon the first to formally use the common nickname 'gray whale' for the species hunted off
the coasts of both Californias – probably taking it from the nickname 'gray-back' used by sailors of the time.
In the same decade and by different paths, extinct and endangered Atlantic and Pacific populations came to
be recognized by the same name.
The three scientific names —along with many others that were added along the way— would be integrated
into one, more than a century later. The coincidence in the name preceded the concurrence in taxonomy. The
20th century, which observed the recovery of gray whale populations after the ban on commercial whaling in
1937, in turn, discovered that the extinct Atlantic whales and the survivors of the Pacific actually belonged to
the same species, or at least, were closely related.
If the vestige of the Icelandic "sandlooegja" or the "otta sotta" attested by the Basques in the 18th century,
was still treated in the mid-20th century as the mere invention of imaginative sailors, the initial consideration
of the rumor of the affable character that gray whales exhibited to humans in their winter sanctuaries in
northwestern Mexico was not very different. The existence of a sea creature that in its wild state approached
boats to play seemed more the product of folklore than of naturalistic observation. Slowly, however, evidence
emerged that in the genealogy of these names there was a trace of extraordinary observations.
In 2001, the archaeological find of Iulia Traducta, an abandoned salt mine in the province of Cadiz in Spain,
seemed like another example of daily life during the time of the Roman Empire. Along with the remains of
shipments of sea salt, the remains of bones of a cetacean rare in Mediterranean excavations were found,
whose genetic analysis yielded a name: Eschrichtius robustus. In 2012, analogous finds in the ruins of Tamuda
in Morocco confirmed the notion of an incipient salt industry in Roman territories around the fifth century,
alongside which a rudimentary gray whaling would coexist.
The context of the findings related to this historical period in the Strait of Gibraltar and other parts of the
Mediterranean suggests the existence of ecosystems such as those still preserved in the sanctuaries of the
Pacific coast in the Baja California peninsula. The fragility of these environments and the deep dependence of
gray whales on them as a winter refuge for breeding and reproduction, lead us to suppose in the case of
archaic Europe, that the beginning of the extinction of the Atlantic gray whales would have been due to human
causes.
Perhaps a vestige sheds light on forgotten stories. In the first century, the Greek historian Gaius Pliny Secundus
—"The Elder"— eloquently described the way in which orcas attacked the calves of whales that visited the
coast of Cadiz during the winter. This observation is identical to the one made every year, twenty-one
centuries later, on the coasts of the American Pacific. Accurately portrayed by classical sources, the
observations would be illustrated by the German naturalist Conrad Gessner, who lived in a Europe without
gray whales, but who, according to the Greek's account, illustrates with fascination the differences between
orcas and extinct whales, as well as the habit of the latter scratching themselves against the hull of boats. On
the caption it reads: "BALÆNA CVM ADIVNCTA ORCA EAM PERSEQVENTE", "whale attached to a killer whale
that chases it"; "BALÆNA ERECTA GRANDEM NAVEM SVBMERGENS", "whale submerging an immense ship".
5.
In the mid-1980s, in a modest poetry booklet published by the University of Veracruz, the young poet Vicente
Quirarte gave an account of his visit to Magdalena Bay in Baja California Sur. "The miracle is already so
common that no one is astonished by the apparitions," he wrote. By then, gray whales' friendly approaches to
vessels while staying in their winter sanctuaries had become commonplace. Gradually, cetaceans had begun
to allow themselves to be petted by visiting humans and began unusual playing dynamics with them. Moved
by the encounter and in the effort to narrate it, the poet declared that just as his snorts broke the surface of
the waters, the metaphors and images of the gray whale—and perhaps its extensive genealogy of names—
dissipated into thin air.
7
Just a decade earlier, the Mexican government had declared the Ojo de Liebre lagoon as a "Refuge Zone for
Whales and Calves" in the then territory of Baja California. In that same five-year period, the phenomenon of
"friendly whales” began to be documented in the San Ignacio lagoon. In 1976, the Royal Polaris, a research
vessel sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, arrived in this lagoon from San Diego and recorded the
phenomenon already known by local fishermen at the time. That same year, the San Diego Union published
an article titled: "Is the California's gray whale reaching détente with humans? There is increasing evidence
that it is."
More cautious but not ignorant of the evidence, a group of scientists who had been studying the species for
years published a very brief – and perhaps timid – note in 1981 in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, where they attributed the approximations to the noise of engines:
Investigations on gray whales in Laguna San Ignacio have previously documented "curious" or
"friendly" whale behavior towards vessels. This behavior was encountered during acoustical studies
conducted in March 1981 in this lagoon. The initial response appears triggered by the underwater
sound generated from outboard engines [...]. Engines kept in idle (running but out of gear) maintained
these whales in close proximity for periods up to 3 hours. Some whales terminated this activity when
the engine was shut off. These behaviors around vessels were videotaped. Sound profiles on engine
noise and ambient noise levels were collected and analyzed. This "curious" behavior is prevalent only
in areas where whales are repeatedly exposed to small vessel activity. This unique behavior has
occurred for the past four years in Laguna San Ignacio, and has only been recently described for
Guerrero Negro Lagoon.
However, the caution of the specialists did not dampen the speed of the changes in the relationship between
whales and humans. As interactions became closer and more common, they increased in San Ignacio as well
as in other areas of the Baja California peninsula. On the other hand, gray whale sightings in areas of the Gulf
of California where they were common until recently, began to decrease until they became extremely rare
nowadays. This was the case of Santa María Bay in Sinaloa, as well as Tojahui Beach and Yavaros Lagoon in
Sonora, where they were colloquially called "ballenas pintas" (piebalds) —because of the abundant marks left
on their skin by barnacles. The reasons for this abandonment point to the accelerated growth of industrial
fishing activities and maritime traffic in these areas, which would make them less welcoming than the
protected sanctuaries of Baja California.
In the 1990s, concern for the preservation of the pristine condition of these sites led a group of Mexican and
foreign intellectuals to publicly oppose the development of the "Salitrales de San Ignacio" project. This group,
known as "El Grupo de los Cien" (The One Hundred Group) and led by the poet Homero Aridjis, rejected the
construction of saline facilities in the lagoon, similar to those built on the adjacent plain to Ojo de Liebre and
Guerrero Negro lagoons, which in the 1970s had passed into the hands of the 50% foreign and 50% state-
owned company Exportadora de Sal.
Given that its operation could potentially have harmful effects on the reproduction and survival of this species
in the area, Aridjis' cause —who called the grays born in Mexico, "our whales"— achieved unprecedented
social support, which eventually caused the project to be canceled. In an article published in February 1995,
he wrote: "We must all speak out in defense of the gray whale before its silence becomes permanent."
During those years, some of the writers convoked by Aridjis after visiting the gray whale sanctuaries, found
themselves with the need to endow the creature with new names, or to restore the sacred ones, no longer
associated with its industrial hunting. Inspired by the story of Scammon's discovery in the 19th century, Jean
Marie LeClèzio revived the Natick word —possibly used centuries ago to name the Atlantic gray whale— to
title his story, Pawana. In it, he describes whales as light goddesses, portraying old Scammon —metaphor of
modern man— as a character who regrets of having destroyed paradise.
8
The topic was in turn addressed by journalist Dick Russell, who in those years, followed the route of gray
whales from their breeding grounds in Mexico —and those hypothetical in Asia— to the summer feeding
grounds in the Arctic. Fascinated by the 'spiritual' effects of close encounters with this species, and their
willingness to approach despite having been exterminated by humans decades earlier, in his Eye of the Whale
published in 2006, he raises the daring notion that having regained its winter shelter, "the mysterious whale",
he writes, seems to have forgiven us.
In contrast, on the coasts of Anglo-Saxon North America, contact with marine mammals is prohibited. With
the advent of digital media, the recording and online posting of close gray whale sightings on the Pacific coast
has become commonplace, as well as a forceful phrase repeated by tourism service providers: “Don't touch
the whale!”. At times, the admonition seems to contradict the will of the cetacean and break the charm of the
moment. Apparently, from whales’ perspective, humans in these areas may seem less friendly.
Escape to that prohibition some native nations of the North Pacific, who in turn preserve for the creature
names that grant it sacred faculties: 'Antokhak' by the Inuit of Alaska, 'Ee-toop' by the Tse-shahts of
Vancouver, 'Sih-wah-wihw' by the Makah of Washington, among many others. With this, the testimony —and
in some cases, the practice— of the playing that the ancients did with the 'non-human relatives' or 'spirits of
the sea' aboard small wooden boats prevails, in some cases as part of hunting rituals, and in others, as mere
atavistic forms of interspecies exchange. In any case, it seems that throughout its extensive migratory circuit,
it is the gray whale that is responsible for dissipating the ambiguous border between nature and human
culture.
In 2021, the appearance of a gray whale on the shores of the Mediterranean surprised the inhabitants of
southern Europe and North Africa. In a case with few precedents, the eight-meter juvenile cetacean seems to
have recovered the route that Pliny described twenty centuries earlier, and where it was perhaps called
"Cetus" or "Leviathan." After prowling malnourished along the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain, escorted by
the coast guard to ensure that no one approached and that it did not beach in a tourist area, the reckless
whale disappeared without a trace. In 2012 another specimen of this species appeared off the coast of Israel,
and in 2013 another appeared off the coast of Namibia, in southern Africa, becoming the marine animal with
the longest migration ever recorded.
It is impossible that from the anomalous sighting of a whale, a story does not emerge that emanates the aroma
of an omen whose reading is unavailable to us at the moment.
Born in a desert whose hidden history she has been a participant in, the Northwest Traveler dissipates the
boundaries between nations and the demarcations between species, posing a crossroads on how the human
world relates to what it considers different. Perhaps, gray whales remind us of our own past pilgrimage and
our ancient sacrificial practices, perhaps their gaze suspends us in the narration of the myth. Heralds of the
ocean, their proximity embodies a playing, and possibly, a challenge.
9
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