Humpback whale

The Humpback whale appears as both an exuberant inhabitant of the ocean and a witness to the consequences of human exploitation. Each summer, humpbacks return to the Gulf of Maine after a long migration from Caribbean breeding waters. There they feed, breach, and gather in large numbers, their distinctive markings allowing researchers to recognize individuals. Their story also carries a harder history: hunters pursued them for food and oil, modern weapons made them easier to kill, and international protections arose only after vast losses. The book’s movement from harpoons to whale-watching does not erase that history; it makes the animals’ renewed visibility part of the account of what was nearly lost.

Migration and seasonal life

For six months, humpbacks fast and mate in the warm waters of the Caribbean. They then travel north on an annual migration described as the greatest undertaken by any mammal. The route may extend as far as eight thousand miles, following paths used by their ancestors millions of years ago and guided by signs in the ocean that remain invisible to people. Their arrival off the northeastern seaboard coincides with the meeting of the warm Gulf Stream and cold Labrador currents. The resulting upwelling brings nutrients from the ocean floor and sets a seasonal food chain in motion.

In the grey-green waters of the Gulf of Maine, humpbacks feed on sand lances and herring. The seasonal abundance allows them to build up their bodies after the months of fasting. This return is not simply a movement across a map: the changing currents and the food they concentrate make the sea an active part of the whales’ lives. The book places their migration alongside the ocean’s larger, recurring transformations, which can be difficult to perceive from land but determine where the animals can feed.

The name Megaptera novæangliæ is glossed as meaning big-winged New Englander. Whalers called the species the merry whale, recognizing a playfulness that the book also associates with its activity at the surface. Its scale is conveyed through the account of a breach: a whale weighing fifty tons launches much of its body into the air, its long flippers held out like wings and its broad tail barely touching the water. The leap is described as a moment of suspension between the ocean that supports the animal and the air into which it rises.

Breaching and feeding

The reasons humpbacks breach are uncertain. The book presents several possibilities rather than a single explanation: a leap may dislodge parasites, and striking rough water may be more comfortable than striking smooth water. Breaching may also communicate an animal’s presence and physical condition to other whales. Calves and younger whales are especially prone to it, a pattern that leaves open the possibility of play. These explanations remain conjectural; the spectacle is visible, but its purpose is not fully known.

The feeding scenes show a different kind of surface activity: coordinated action within a dense marine food web. Humpbacks gather beneath schools of fish and make large mouthfuls of their prey. They may blow spirals of bubbles as they ascend, creating rings that rise and break at the surface before the whales emerge to feed. In one summer account, sixty or seventy whales gather within a circle three miles across, in groups of five or six surrounded by gulls. Some use kick-feeding, flexing and striking the water with their tails to stun fish. Fin whales lunge on their sides, while minke whales move through the same food source. The episode presents hunger and sustenance as a shared, observable cycle rather than isolating the humpback from the other animals around it.

Humpbacks are also among the whales most likely to be seen at the surface, which makes them comparatively accessible to observers. Their flukes carry black-and-white patterns, with notches and scars that accumulate over a lifetime. Researchers use those patterns, distinctive like fingerprints, to identify individuals when they return. Females bring calves back to feeding grounds, where the young can learn to feed; a whale is named only after it has been seen again two years after its first identification. The delay makes recognition a record of survival across migration, disease, and possible attacks by orcas, rather than a label assigned from a single encounter.

From hunting to protection

Humpbacks became targets when hunters, after weeks without finding sperm whales, turned to other species. One account records sailors objecting when a mother and calf were killed. The mother tried to keep the calf close or push it out of danger, but it was killed; later, a surviving orphaned calf, weakened by hunger, tried to suckle from a bull whale and was driven away. The passage registers both the economic pressure to find prey and the distress such scenes could provoke among the crew. It also shows how a hunt continued beyond the immediate killing: the calf’s loss became visible in its subsequent search for nourishment.

New technology widened the scale of the danger. In the late nineteenth century, Sven Foyn’s explosive harpoon and the steamships that carried harpoon-launchers enabled hunters to pursue faster, larger whales, including humpbacks. The book describes this as a change in the reach of the fishery: animals that had once been harder to catch could now be pursued with greater efficiency. As American whaling declined, European operations expanded, and humpbacks in the South Atlantic were driven to extinction by 1918. During the twentieth century’s wars, whales were also taken for products used in industry and munitions. Their history thus intersects with human conflict, even though the animals themselves were not participants in it.

International agreements attempted to curb the damage. The 1937 London convention limited pelagic whaling and provided protections for whale calves and females accompanied by calves, among other restrictions. Such measures did not end exploitation. The book describes how later catches were underreported and how Russian fleets killed more than forty-eight thousand humpbacks despite claiming a much lower total. Young whales, mothers, and calves were taken, including animals that were supposed to be protected. The difference between official claims and the reported scale of killing exposes the limits of rules when enforcement and accurate records fail.

Recognition and the whale-watching encounter

In the whale-watching account, humpbacks return to waters where their ancestors had been hunted. One summer, sixty-eight cow-calf pairs have been identified among roughly two thousand known individual humpbacks in the region. The figures indicate both the richness of the feeding grounds and the fact that the animals remain endangered in the book’s account. Their presence is not treated as proof that the earlier violence has been undone: some of the whales may still face human threats.

The change in human attention is visible in the work of whale-watch naturalists. Passengers are shown a rubber sand lance, displays explaining what they might see, a jar of seawater containing copepods, and old baleen plates. The outing makes the animals legible through food, anatomy, and observation, while the whales themselves remain only partly known. Individual recognition depends on brief views of flukes, fins, and the animals’ departures beneath the water. Those glimpses do not yield a complete picture; they establish a continuing practice of looking and identifying.

The Humpback whale therefore occupies two contrasting human histories: it was once pursued as a resource, and it is now sought out as a living animal whose movements and individuality merit attention. The book keeps both histories in view. Its feeding displays and leaps are not merely entertainment, and its identifying marks are not merely picturesque details. Together, they make the humpback a presence in its own right—mobile, social, and adapted to a marine world that human observers can encounter but never entirely command.