Text 1: Eye to eye, by Freya Mackintosh

An original contemporary magazine article.

We hear the whale before we see it: a long, wet exhalation, like a giant letting out a breath it has been holding for an hour. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what it has been doing. Our skipper, Rui, cuts the engine, and the little inflatable boat rocks to a stop on a sea the colour of ink, eight miles off the coast of the island.

The sperm whale is lying at the surface fifty metres away, resting after a deep dive. From here it looks like an upturned hull, grey-brown and wrinkled, with a blowhole set crookedly on one side of its enormous square head. Every few seconds it breathes again, and a bushy spout drifts towards us on the breeze. It smells, unromantically, of fish and old cabbage.

We do not approach. The rules here are strict and Rui enforces them like a headteacher: no closer than fifty metres, no more than thirty minutes, engine off, voices down. ‘She decides,’ he whispers. ‘Not us.’

And then she does decide. Slowly, the whale turns and drifts towards the boat until her head is level with our bow, close enough for me to see the pale scars on her skin, the marks of old battles with squid in the dark half a mile below us. For a moment, an eye the size of a fist rolls upward and looks at me. I have been looked at by many things, but never by something that has dived to depths I will never see. Nobody on the boat speaks. Someone forgets to take a photograph.

Then, unhurried, she arches her back, lifts her tail clear of the water, dripping like a curtain, and slides out of sight. The sea closes over the place where she was. Rui checks his watch and writes in his notebook: time, position, behaviour. Fifty years ago, men from these same islands rowed out in open boats to kill whales like her. For Rui, today is data. For the rest of us, sitting in silence on a rocking boat in the middle of the Atlantic, it feels more like being forgiven for something.

Text 2: A chase in the whale-boat, by Josiah Penhallow

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this journal, kept in 1846, a young sailor describes his first whale chase aboard a whaling ship.

Tuesday. At about ten in the forenoon the look-out at the mast-head sang out that he saw a whale blowing, and in less than a minute the whole ship was in an uproar. Three boats were lowered, and I found myself in the mate’s boat, pulling at an oar with all my strength and with my heart in my mouth, for I had never yet been on a chase.

We came up with the creature after an hour’s hard rowing. It lay upon the water like a great black rock, and as we drew near I could hear it breathing, a sound like the blowing of a giant’s bellows. The mate bade us be silent. Our harpooner stood up in the bow, braced his knee, and threw.

What followed I can scarcely describe. The whale went down like a stone, and the line flew out so fast that it smoked as it ran round the post, and a man was set to pour water upon it lest it should take fire. Then it rose again close beside us and struck the boat with its tail. I was thrown into the sea. When I came up, half drowned and blinded with spray, I saw our boat stove in and my shipmates clinging to the wreck of her, and the whale towing the second boat away across the water at a speed I would not have believed.

We were picked up within the hour, and by evening the whale was alongside the ship, dead. I confess that I took no pleasure in the sight. I had seen its eye as it rolled in its last struggle, and it looked at me, I thought, as a creature looks that does not understand why it is being hurt. The men laughed at me when I said so, and told me I should soon grow used to it. Perhaps I shall. Tonight the fires are burning on deck to boil down the blubber, the whole ship stinks of smoke and oil, and I cannot sleep.

Both of these texts are about close encounters with whales at sea.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of being close to whales
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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