I was served whale once. Minke whale. To be fair, I was at the top of the globe during that time. It was 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. Up there, it feels like the edge of the world, the kind of place where maps blur and 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. Everyone, that is, but me.
I gave the whale that day 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 had accompanied the great fish (mammal) that once roamed the seas below the ship we now ate upon. 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 were here to see. My dad didn’t eat the whale because he wanted it. 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 by the abominations our ancestors have 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. Little of this is taught in schools. 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 am able to switch on my bedroom light without a thought. Back then, fathers left families for months, even years, chasing these creatures across violent seas to bring light to not only their own homes, but for others across the world. The alternative light forms were inadequate, dim, and unreliable. The promise of light—steady, bright, dependable—was enough to send men into the unknown.
I began my research because I thought I’d prove killing whales wasn’t vital—even though it was to the people and economies of the time. I now know about the echoes that minke whales sing underwater, low and haunting, traveling distances humans can barely comprehend with our limited hearing. I reflect on the whale’s smooth skin glistening at the surface, catching the light in ways that feel almost deliberate and performative. Perhaps, I think, if I invoke this picture for those girls from Estonia, they might turn down their whale meat too. Maybe my dad would have a dozen flimsy paper plates before him. Even so, I would have refused to eat the meat of a whale whose existence was doomed anyway. Must be bad luck, I thought, or maybe just bad timing for me—to love something so deeply that you discover it only after its near destruction.
There is an old photograph in my bedroom depicting a wooden whaleship stuck in ice. In the photo, the ship is somehow capsized, somehow still intact, and surviving. I look at that photo every night. It reminds me of sailing to the far north where our ship pushed through the pack ice and the sound of the frozen ocean splitting upon our stern sent a thunder rippling forward. I wondered then about the creatures below us, moving silently through the dark water untouched by sunlight. I wondered how far their songs traveled, how long they could swim beneath the ice before needing to come up for air, before needing to return to the surface where we waited, cameras ready. Our ship , on that trip, left a path of broken ice in our wake. I like to think we were guiding the leviathans northward, off the edge of the world.
The first time I saw a whale for myself was in 2010 when I was eight years old aboard the National Geographic SeaBird from Sitka to Juneau, Alaska. I never had seen trees so tall or felt water so cold to the touch. I had never experienced rain like the downpours we experienced out there, or how yellow the beak of a bald eagle looked as it flew by. I also had never experienced time change. On the first day, I woke the entire ship at five in the morning. The midnight sun had crept into 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 my excitement. After breakfast, the captain called me to his cabin and went over the rulebook with me. Apparently, some people signed up to sleep in and not to see the whales. So I woke at five every morning for the rest of the trip, scanning the vast horizon of flickering light in hopes of spotting another pod. Only those times, I kept the whales to myself.
The abundance of raw nature captivated me out in that final frontier, a place so vastly remote from my home in New Jersey. Eleven years later, I returned. The water, on that second trip, was placid and mirrored the Alaskan range with its bits of snow still collected near 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.
The blood that once stained this water and the oil that strangled these waves had stopped long before ships like the SeaBird toured us through the last frontier. Now, oil comes from deep within the Earth and the blood stays below the water, tangled in nets and lines that snare these gentle giants. That oil, once boiled from blubber, was revolutionary in the 1850s. I promised the mountains, the water, and the light that I would do something about it.
That promise has led me to the corners of the world, places far more north than the calm shoreline in the early, southern Alaskan sun. Places where these ancient dinosaurs of their kind still roam within uncharted swells of the Arctic Ocean. These are the same places where the ice used to capsize the wooden ships of the whalers who navigated the seas in search of oil to light cities around the globe.
These leviathans 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.
For more than a century, the United States of America was raised on Herman Melville’s fiction that associated whales with violence. A great story of circumstance pinning a man and a whale against each other. The success of whaling overshadowed the power of the ocean itself. Nations crossed the seas to establish dominance, and a young United States was eager to prove something to old England. When whaleships left Nantucket Massachusetts in those early days, the entire town gathered. Wives shed tears. Owners prayed for oil and safe return. Ships creaked, sails snapped, and gulls dove. Men sailed into the unknown in search of the source of light. Millions of whales were killed, and greed united the oceans.
Once a ship left port, its masts creaked and the ropes danced across the sky. Sails were lowered and flapped aggressively in the wind, encouraging the sea to creep up the sides of the ship with every clash. Gulls dove and screeched along the lines where the ship's path disturbed the small fish that the gulls swept down in one gulp. Whale pins clicked together, swaying and twirling on the experienced whaler’s lapels. The stars and stripes waved in the wind while the men aboard the ships sailed off to the horizon. The island of Nantucket, a cult of greed and trade, prepared to use oil to quench their thirst for light. Aside from New Bedford, no one dared to challenge this small island, and no one dared to challenge the heart and spirit of the Nantucket whalemen 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 the glassy water and hearing their sonic songs travel through me was unlike anything I expected. I spent the week photographing humpbacks, but I felt unexpected grief each time I stepped onto the boat, scanning for breath on the water like the whalers once did. For days we experienced storms and bad luck. Then a pod swam below me—massive, slow, and impossibly calm. How could anyone see a creature like that and drive a harpoon through it? A leviathan slept fifteen feet below us. From beneath her came a calf. Turning toward me, she bumped my camera. I cried. She twirled, and I did the same. Together, we spun in the warm water, her singing, me crying. I felt a forgiveness, This was something unspoken, and yet completely overwhelming. I will never understand the trust that baby whale had for me, nor that of her mother, who passed beneath me and called her baby away. The calf circled me once more before they disappeared. When I surfaced, my snorkel carried more salt from my tears than from the ocean.
When oil was later discovered underground, global industries shifted. The whaling trade was an empire no longer. Wooden ships were sent to the west coast to guide men in the California Gold Rush. Nantucket rebuilt its economy. This scorched land turned towards tourism. Rather than tracking down whales who sang songs in the deep, men now pushed drills into the Earth’s depths and extracted the blood that runs our world. This extractive process replaced whale oil as a cheaper kerosene. Later, it fueled steamships and propelled further industrial growth across the country by train power and gasoline.
This new threat wove its way into our world. Rather than building great fires spewing from boiling blubber and harvesting contents of the sperm whale, men now sent emissions into the air, warming our earth’s atmosphere and melting the ice that once trapped their ships in the cold northern hemisphere. Over time, ice formations dwindled to less than half of where they used to be, and sovereign nations turned their heads back to the water that suddenly opened free. They took modern ships, now advanced and equipped to endure the frigid north, and headed out to claim new lands. The melting Arctic created a greater accessibility to maritime territories never explored before, and the oil grounds that lay underneath the deep dark water sat waiting, untouched. Great nations came together once again, sailing far up the edges of our world to play their favorite game, mining for oil.
Today, I find myself struggling while researching the whaling industry and the ethics behind it. The alternatives for light in the early nineteenth century beyond whale oil were less than dependable. That is why the smallest flicker of promising light sent men to the vast corners of the world. Today, any idea associating whales with violence has been dissolved, largely due to conservation efforts and the fact that no angry sperm whales have rammed any industrial ships. Instead, (unless you are Japan, Norway or Iceland) whales are preserved, protected, photographed and studied. They are often photographed sleeping vertically in large pods off the coast of Dominica or raising their young in the shallow waters of Tonga. The Dominican Republic—humming, playing and swimming curiously among those who dive under the surface to see them.
Imperialism over oceanic space has lessened with tighter laws in international waters with limited loopholes. However, humans always find new ways of repeating our past abominations by 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 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 has only come from learning of the history of whaling. I dream of sharing the ocean with these beautiful creatures, diving under the waves with my camera in hopes of hearing their songs. I hope to find them staring at me with their small eyes and dinosaur bodies. Perhaps, there might come a moment as I hold out my hand, floating in an eternal abyss of blue, where maybe -just for a second- we will understand one other.
I come from a species of destruction and innovation, and for that, I am sorry. I think the leviathans understand we aren’t all destructive. I wonder if they knew how they lit our homes, and I wonder if they felt relief when Pennsylvania found oil under the ground. I wonder if Moby found good fun in wrecking the Essex and influencing 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.
