Right whales

Right whales are a group of large, slow-moving whales whose natural history has repeatedly made them conspicuous to humans: they spend much of their time near the surface, often frequent coastal waters, and float when killed. Those same traits once made them a preferred quarry, and their blubber and baleen turned their bodies into valuable raw material. In the book’s account, that history has left the North Atlantic right whale so reduced and genetically restricted that legal protection alone may not secure its future.

Coastal animals and useful bodies

Right whales are well suited to life near the surface. Their bodies are buoyant, in part because fat makes up about forty per cent of their weight, and they often remain close to shore. The book describes them as urban whales: their coastal range can bring them into contact with crowded human routes, but the same habit historically made them accessible to hunters. When killed, their bodies floated, making recovery easier. A combination of anatomy, habitat, and human convenience thus shaped their place in the whaling economy.

The animals’ physical form also made them valuable after death. Their blubber supplied whale oil, while their long baleen could be heated and shaped into objects such as umbrella ribs, corset stays, blinds, and brush bristles. In an era when oil served as an important fuel and baleen as a flexible material, these uses encouraged sustained hunting. Right whales were among the first whales to be pursued, including by Basque hunters in the Bay of Biscay. Their French name, baleine de Biscaye, preserves an association with that early history of capture.

The book also presents the right whale as an imposing and unusual animal, with a broad mouth lined with baleen and distinctive rough patches on its head. This mixture of strangeness and familiarity made it seem, in the author’s account, almost like a definitive example of what people imagined a whale to be. Yet the whale’s recognizability did not mean that people understood its life; for centuries, its most readily perceived qualities were precisely those that made it useful to hunters.

Centuries of hunting and a record of loss

The scale of this exploitation appears in the book’s account of the North Atlantic population: fewer than four hundred were believed to remain. A later stage of the same history brought the population lower still. During the Cold War, Soviet whaling reduced the North Atlantic right whale population to about one hundred animals; the even rarer North Pacific right whale was also heavily targeted. These figures register more than a sequence of changing estimates. They show how protection in one period could be followed by renewed killing elsewhere, with populations exposed to industrial fleets and international competition.

A much earlier encounter on the Thames offers a vivid record of how a right whale’s arrival could become a public spectacle. In 1658, a whale appeared at low water near Dagenham, where its presence drew large crowds arriving by boat, carriage, and on foot. The animal was killed after a prolonged struggle. John Evelyn measured it at fifty-eight feet long and noted its small eyes, large tail, lack of teeth, and wide mouth lined with baleen. The whale’s appearance was also interpreted as an omen: it was associated with the death of Oliver Cromwell the following day. Decades later, a rib from the animal was still remembered in the name Whalebone Lane, and the bones were preserved in a local museum. The episode joins practical observation, popular spectacle, and superstition around a single animal brought into human territory.

Protection and the hazards of modern waters

The North Atlantic right whale became the first cetacean protected from hunting in 1935, but the book stresses that this legal milestone did not produce a clear population recovery. Numbers remained broadly static despite changes to shipping lanes and instructions requiring vessels to stay five hundred yards away from whales. The population’s breeding base was described as extremely narrow, with only eight matrilineal lines remaining. The author presents this restriction, the legacy of centuries of hunting, as a major threat to long-term survival.

The qualities that once made right whales easy to hunt can also make them vulnerable to modern hazards. They may remain silent and still at the surface, a behavior that can leave them difficult for ships to detect. Busy shipping routes therefore pose risks even where direct hunting is prohibited. Ship strikes were killing more whales than had previously been suspected, including females of calf-bearing age. Fishing line is another persistent danger: more than sixty per cent of right whales had been caught in it, according to the book. Entanglement can threaten an animal’s survival, and the loss of a fertile female may carry consequences for a population with so few breeding lines.

Stormy Mayo’s work illustrates how the relationship between people and whales could change from pursuit to rescue. He 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. His interest became a lifelong commitment. After helping to found the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown in 1976, he collected data on right whales and became the first person licensed by the government to rescue entangled whales. The work requires rescuers to approach animals at sea and free them from fishing line; it turns practical knowledge of whale capture toward protection rather than killing. The book emphasizes this reversal by noting that some rescue methods recall older hunting techniques, even as their purpose has changed.

Uneven recovery and an uncertain future

The book distinguishes the plight of the North Atlantic population from signs of recovery elsewhere. Southern right whales were breeding successfully off South Africa and South America, raising the hope that their population might contribute genetic diversity to the North Atlantic relative, though the account does not present that possibility as a guaranteed solution. More generally, the return of great whales along old migration routes after the international commercial whaling moratorium demonstrates that depleted populations can recover under changed conditions. It does not make them invulnerable: the animals’ renewed presence in busy waters exposes them again to human activity.

The future of the North Atlantic right whale is therefore framed as a problem of cumulative pressures rather than a single past disaster. Hunting removed animals over centuries; a restricted set of maternal lines leaves little room for further losses; ship strikes and fishing gear continue to threaten individuals in the waters they inhabit. The book warns that, despite formal protections, this population may not survive the century. Right whales embody the contradiction at the heart of human encounters with wildlife: the very coastal presence and physical qualities that once made them accessible and profitable now make their continued survival dependent on how carefully people share the sea.