Mysticetes

Mysticetes are the baleen-bearing suborder of whales, defined by a feeding system that filters small prey from large mouthfuls of seawater. The book sets their distinctive anatomy against the active pursuit of prey by toothed whales, then places several mysticete species in the fertile waters of Cape Cod. Their otherness is both biological and literary: baleen marks a different way of living in the sea, while the whaling world around them reveals how human communities organized themselves around whales.

Classification and feeding

The term cetacean derives from the Greek ketos, meaning sea monster. Cetaceans divide into two suborders: the toothed odontocetes, which include porpoises, river and ocean dolphins, beaked whales, orcas, and sperm whales; and the mysticetes, also called moustached whales. The book counts seventy-one odontocete species and at least fourteen mysticete species. This division is more than a list of bodily types: it distinguishes hunters that pursue prey through the water from whales that feed by filtering it.

Odontocetes take fish and squid individually, following their quarry through the ocean. Mysticetes instead graze, taking in mouthfuls of food that range from herring and sand eels to minute zooplankton drifting through the sea. The comparison gives the suborder a distinct ecological character: where toothed whales hunt prey one by one, baleen whales gather abundant small organisms in bulk.

Baleen and the mechanics of feeding

The book presents baleen as an anatomy that makes the whale’s difference visible from before birth. Mysticete fetuses develop tooth buds, but these are absorbed into the jaws before birth. They are replaced by fibrous keratin, the same material found in human fingernails. The resulting long, flat plates line the gums in a broad horseshoe, with their smooth edges facing outward; they continue to grow, and the whale’s tongue wears their ends into fringes.

Feeding depends on the coordinated movement of the mouth and belly. A baleen whale takes in immense quantities of water, disarticulating its jaws to increase the intake, while pleats along the underside expand. It then contracts those pleats and expels the surplus water, leaving food caught in the baleen’s bristles. This sequence makes the suborder’s feeding method legible as a specialized process: the whale does not seize each small prey item but strains it from the water around it.

Species in Cape Cod waters

In the fertile waters of Cape Cod, the book places mysticetes at the center of the local whale life. The species named there span markedly different sizes and forms: the elusive, relatively small minke whale; the performing humpback whale; the rotund right whale; and the sleek fin whale. The fin whale is described as the second-largest animal in the world and as capable of reaching speeds of twenty knots or more. Their variety complicates any single image of a whale: the suborder encompasses elusive and conspicuous animals, as well as bodies built for very different scales of movement.

Whales and the human whaling world

The account also sets whales against the crowded social world built around their pursuit. In New Bedford, Frederick Douglass lived and worked for four years after escaping slavery in 1838. His labor included rolling casks, stowing ships, sawing wood, sweeping chimneys, and working at a blacksmith’s bellows. The port’s whaling economy drew people from many backgrounds: by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, one in twenty residents was Black, and the town’s neighborhoods included Azorean and Cape Verdean communities. Black sailors worked aboard whaling ships, though their bunks were segregated; Lewis Temple, a Black inventor in New Bedford’s supply industries, devised the toggle-iron harpoon.

The whaling ship appears as both a tool for handling whales and a confined human society. A family might travel aboard the Morgan, fitting schoolwork, sewing, and domestic life into tightly used quarters; elsewhere on the ship, low-ranking sailors slept in narrow forecastle bunks. A meeting between ships, called a gam, offered a chance to exchange letters and news. On one such occasion, a crew member’s previously concealed identity as a woman became known. These details place the whale-ship between discipline and temporary freedom, and between the whale harvested beyond its walls and the human lives compressed within them. In the book’s broader literary frame, that enclosed, mobile world is also the setting through which Herman Melville explored life at sea in works including Redburn and White-Jacket.