The silence of the whale

The silence of the whale is not simple absence but a contradiction: whales were treated as voiceless even as their sounds and sensory lives exceeded human understanding. The account makes that silence scientific, industrial, and moral. What people could not hear or interpret became a reason to regard whales as mute; later, the sounds humans learned to detect were appropriated for military purposes, with consequences for the animals themselves.

Hearing, Seeing, and the Limits of Knowledge

William Scoresby describes bowheads as able to detect one another at considerable distances beneath clear water, while their vision at the surface is limited. Their awareness of one another depends on sound, though Scoresby concludes that they have no voice. He distinguishes vocal expression from the loud noise made in breathing or blowing: audible evidence is present, but it does not fit the human idea of animal speech.

That distinction exposes the limits of observation. Scoresby’s account recognizes the whale’s capacity to navigate an environment that defeats people, yet classifies the animal as voiceless. The text sets this judgment beside the evidence of underwater perception, making silence less a fact about whales than a boundary in human knowledge. Sounds that could be heard were not necessarily understood as communication.

Silence Under Industrial Pursuit

The industrial chase turns this gap in understanding into an imbalance of power. Catcher boats fire from prows high above the water, and the account contrasts this method with earlier Yankee whaling, when a whale could still fight back. In the newer form of pursuit, a sighting leaves the animal with little chance. The whale’s silence therefore accompanies not a peaceful absence of conflict but a technological situation in which resistance has been made increasingly futile.

The account describes a range of methods used against whales, including explosive weapons and poisoning. These practices present the animal as an enemy to be subdued, while the hunters’ equipment places them at a distance from their target. The whale is not heard as a participant in this encounter. Its presumed muteness helps sustain a hunt in which human power can proceed without having to acknowledge an answering voice.

The Unheard Cost and Human Complicity

At Dundee, former whaling workers later recalled their work in terms of an ordeal. They said that if the whales had been able to scream, the work would have been unbearable. The thought is not evidence that whales were literally silent in every sense; rather, it reveals how the workers remembered the absence of a humanly recognizable protest. The account turns that absence back on the people who acted upon the animals: silence seems to spare the workers, yet also makes their conduct more difficult to excuse.

The narrator’s childhood details extend responsibility beyond the whaling station. Whale oil was processed into margarine in Southampton, and whale fat was used in cosmetics; the products entered domestic life as ordinary commodities. This proximity unsettles any simple division between the distant hunt and everyday consumers. The whale could remain unheard not only because of the conditions of capture, but because its transformation into familiar goods concealed the animal behind its uses.

Acoustic Knowledge and Military Appropriation

During the Second World War, marine acoustics brought military attention to sounds whales made underwater—sounds whalers had once mistaken for ghosts heard through ship hulls. The newly recognized acoustic world was no longer imagined as silent. One proposal was to disguise submarines as whales by broadcasting recorded whale sounds. The account draws a pointed parallel: slave ships had once operated under the guise of whalers; now submarines sought to borrow the whale’s acoustic identity as concealment.

This appropriation makes the whale’s silence especially unstable. Human technology first mistakes or ignores cetacean sounds, then records and imitates them to enter the animals’ world. The account links that intrusion to sounds that would prove fatal to whales, so that the knowledge gained by listening does not simply correct human misunderstanding. It also becomes a new instrument of human reach, extending the same extractive relationship into the underwater realm.