Jeffrey L. Bada

Jeffrey L. Bada appears as a scientist whose work gives measurable depth to the bowhead whale’s long life. By estimating ages in whales hunted in the Arctic, he helped overturn the assumption that these animals’ lives could be understood on an ordinary human timescale. His findings also sharpen the book’s contrast between the brief history of whaling and the far longer lives of some of its victims.

Research and Method

Bada, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, examined tissue from bowheads caught by Iñupiat hunters. He used changes in aspartic acid levels in the whales’ eyes to estimate their ages. The results showed that most of the sampled whales were between twenty and sixty years old when they died, but the large males included animals estimated at 90 years, four between 135 and 180, and one at 211.

He also drew on other methods: measurements of radioactive lead in bone and samples of skin collected from living whales. Taken together, these approaches gave his age estimates a basis beyond a single kind of tissue or a single set of hunted animals.

Findings and Limits

Bada emphasized that the ages assigned to the bowheads were minimum estimates. The oldest whales were unlikely to have been among those caught, he argued, so older animals could still exist. His caution matters: the figures do not set a maximum lifespan but establish that bowheads can reach extraordinary ages even in the available samples. He described them as truly aged animals and possibly the most long-lived mammals.

The findings alter the scale on which the whales’ history is read. A bowhead alive today might have been born before some of the hunters and observers whose accounts shaped human knowledge of the Arctic. The book notes that a three-and-a-half-inch lance, made at New Bedford of Whaling's Decline and Whale-Oil Industry Debates in the 1890s, was later retrieved from the blubber of a bowhead caught off Alaska. That discovery does not belong to Bada’s research, but it gives material force to the possibility his age estimates raise: a whale could survive for generations, carrying evidence of an earlier encounter within its body.

Significance in the Book

Bada’s work supplies a scientific counterweight to the confidence of earlier claims that whales would endure indefinitely as a species. Their long lives may allow them to outlast human pursuers, but longevity does not make them invulnerable to hunting. The book turns that tension into a pointed reversal: whales born before Herman Melville may have outlived the people who pursued them, yet their survival remains exposed to human actions.

Bada is presented not as solving the mystery of whale time but as defining its scale more carefully. His estimates make the bowhead’s age legible while leaving open how old the oldest animals may be. In that gap between measured minimum and unknown maximum, the whale appears at once as a subject of scientific inquiry and as a creature whose history exceeds the records humans have made of it.