Cape Cod Bay is a place where the history of whaling and the precarious future of whales meet. Once associated with abundant animals and shore-based hunting, it is now an important feeding ground for North Atlantic right whales, a species reduced by centuries of hunting and still exposed to ship strikes, fishing gear, and environmental change. The bay’s history is legible both in the remains left on its shores and in the difficult work of finding and protecting whales at sea.

A coastal history of whales

In the waters around Cape Cod, whales have long shaped human livelihoods and expectations of the coast. Whaling here ranged from the more modest operations of Indigenous people to later hunters who could find a thousand dollars’ worth of stranded whales on the sand. The bay remains a place where pilot whales and dolphins strand in unusually large numbers. Squid can draw them into the shallow coastal waters, where the animals may become trapped and helpless when the tide leaves them out of the water.

Henry David Thoreau encountered this coast as a frontier landscape. Approaching Whale-Watching Provincetown, he described a part fishing village and part frontier town, with only one road and one pavement. He imagined that New Englanders might one day come to the coast for the seaside, though he thought it unlikely to appeal to fashionable visitors. On the beach, what first seemed to be a bleached log proved to be part of a whale skeleton. Thoreau associated it with the timbers of a nearby wreck, unaware that the sands concealed a cetacean graveyard. Winter storms still expose old ship keels, their crossbars resembling ribs, making the shore’s buried histories visible in fragments.

The bay’s whale abundance also entered local memory through dramatic exaggeration: the Pilgrims were said to have thought they might walk across the bay on the backs of whales. A later, more personal record of the old hunting culture came through Stormy Mayo’s grandfather, a blackfish hunter. After taking a mother whale and hearing her calf calling beneath his boat, he could no longer bear to whale. His family story links a change in one hunter’s actions to the emotional cost of separating whales from their young, while the remembered whaling station at Eastern Harbor places that history near the narrow stretch of land by Whale-Watching Provincetown.

The right whale and the legacy of hunting

North Atlantic right whales are exceptionally vulnerable to human activity in the bay and along its busy coast. Their bodies are rich in fat, they float after being killed, and they tend to stay near shore: traits that once made them especially convenient targets. Their long baleen was also valuable as a flexible material, shaped into such products as umbrella ribs, corset stays, and blinds. The physical features that made the species profitable to hunters helped drive its decline.

The right whale’s modern habitat presents a stark reversal. The species frequents some of the most populated shores and busiest shipping routes, and its tendency to remain quiet and still at the surface can leave it unseen by approaching vessels. Although right whales became the first cetaceans protected from hunting in 1935, the North Atlantic population remained very small. Measures described in the book include moving the shipping lane farther north and requiring vessels to stay five hundred yards from whales, but those protections did not remove the danger. Ship strikes continued to kill whales, including females of breeding age, while more than sixty per cent of right whales had been caught in fishing line. With fewer than four hundred North Atlantic right whales remaining and only eight matrilineal lines, the population’s restricted genetic base made its long-term survival uncertain.

Researching a changing feeding ground

The Center for Coastal Studies investigates whether the bay can continue to support returning whales by measuring its zooplankton. In late winter and early spring, the research vessel Shearwater samples the water for copepods and other small organisms. The researchers use a threshold of 3,750 organisms per cubic metre as an indicator of whether enough food is present to sustain the whales. The work turns attention from the visible giants to the minute organisms on which they depend: the presence of whales in the bay begins with conditions that can only be assessed through patient sampling.

One survey found too little food. After six hours at sea, the sample nets trailing from the stern remained empty, and the searchers saw no whales. The low count was troubling in the context of warming: plankton had shifted northward by ten degrees of latitude, while warmer oceans absorbed more carbon dioxide and became more acidic. Three months later, in early May, right whales had still not appeared in large numbers and the plankton counts remained low. But conditions in the bay changed, and the Shearwater headed toward its western side, eight or ten miles in the direction of Plymouth.

There, the researchers saw a right whale moving steadily through plankton-rich water, followed by four more. The whales fed by travelling through the bay with purposeful, repeated movements, while the researchers observed them from the vessel. Their return made the contrast with the earlier empty samples concrete: the same feeding ground could seem deficient, then support whales when food conditions changed. The encounter did not erase the uncertainty surrounding the population; it showed how closely whale presence depended on the condition of the habitat.

Protection and the bay’s future

Research and rescue work have made the bay a site of active conservation. Stormy Mayo first saw a right whale as a sixteen-year-old fishing with his father on Stellwagen Bank, when the animals were already close to extinction and their whereabouts were poorly known. His interest developed into a career in research and rescue. After helping to found the Center for Coastal Studies in Whale-Watching Provincetown in 1976, he collected data on right whales and became the first person licensed by the government to rescue whales entangled in fishing gear.

The same broad techniques once used to hunt whales can be turned toward saving them. Rescuers approach an entangled animal in an inflatable boat and attach sea anchors to slow it, echoing the use of wooden kegs by whalers and inflated sealskins by Indigenous hunters. Mayo cuts through the lines with a long-handled hook. The practical resemblance between pursuit and rescue is unsettling, but the purpose has changed: equipment and knowledge once organized around capture now serve an attempt to free a whale before it dies from drowning, starvation, or infection.

The bay’s feeding habitat is also crossed by commercial traffic moving through Cape Cod Canal and beneath Sagamore Bridge. During the researchers’ May trip, whales fed within sight of that movement, apparently unaware of the ships approaching their waters. After the Shearwater reported their presence to shipping, the day’s observation had an immediate protective consequence: warning vessels may have helped avert a collision. Cape Cod Bay thus appears not as a refuge separate from human activity, but as a place where the survival of whales depends on recognizing their presence, understanding their food supply, and changing how people use the waters they share.