Peaceful creatures not to be messed with

TWO recent news items put me in mind of a book I read some years ago called In the Heart of The Sea.

The first concerned the anger of whales, and the second, long-term survival in an open boat.

I never found the classic whale novel, Moby Dick, an easy read. However, the story on which it is based, the sinking of the whaleship Essex by an enraged sperm whale in the mid Pacific in November, 1820, is an epic of survival, horrifying and heartrending.

Whales are normally peaceful creatures, but they can be dangerous to mess with. The crew of a large state-of-the-art racing yacht, the Mureadritta’s XL, recently learned this to their cost. Last July the yacht was holed by an orca whale when it inadvertently came between her and her calf. The yacht sank; the American crew escaped in a life raft and, using modern SOS equipment, were quickly rescued.

The crew of the Essex had no such equipment and no such luck.

Nantucket Quakers, related by blood or marriage, most were under 30, some no more than teenagers. They had been at sea for 18 months, having sailed south from New England and around the Horn into the Pacific; Atlantic whales were in short supply due to the depredations of their kinfolk over generations. A thousand miles off Ecuador, they killed, flensed and boiled down a whale for its oil on average every five days.

Survivors’ accounts record that the giant whale came at them head-on and pushed the 238-ton ship backwards until water came pouring over the stern.

As the Essex went down, they took to three tiny harpoon boats. They soon drifted apart and were lost in the vastness of the Pacific.

93 days later, a lone boat was spotted by the whaleship Dauphin. It had travelled 3,000 miles. Two young men lay delirious and skeletal amongst the bare bones of their brothers and cousins; by agreement, they had drawn lots for who would be eaten next. Only eight of the 20 Essex crewmen survived.

Last month, three fishermen from San Blas, a remote, mosquito-ridden town on Mexico’s Pacific coast, were rescued by a Taiwanese trawler having drifted 8,500 km over 11 months. At least, so they said. They were dehydrated, half-starved and half-conscious. They said the two other crew members had jumped overboard.

In defence of whales, I would point out that of the hundreds of thousands attacked and slaughtered by man, we have only a few records of retaliation.

The Jonah yarn is clearly a fable, but there is a story of a whaler, James Bartley, gulped down when a harpooned whale capsized a boat off the Falklands in 1893. After the whale had been dragged aboard and flensed, movement was noticed in its stomach and the missing Bartley was found. He was demented but eventually recovered to tell how he had fallen into a slimy darkness, warm and oppressive, from which he could find no exit. There was no shortage of air, and he could have lived there until he starved. The whales digestive juices had bleached his skin to the colour of parchment. It sounds like a sailor’s tale, of the fisherman kind.

We are off to visit La Gomera, our beloved Canary Island, and will pay Carbon Offsets to compensate for the carbon emissions transporting us will entail. Our kids have been doing this for ages and it’s high time we did it too.

Every time we fly, fossil fuels are burnt and greenhouses gases spewed into the atmosphere. By buying carbon offsets, we can help fund energy projects that will reduce emissions elsewhere.

Sustainable Travel International is a not-for-profit organisation. Its carbon offset programme invests in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects worldwide. Sink projects, which sequestrate carbon through reforestation projects, are not supported. Current STI initiatives are sited in Eritrea (warm water collectors for schools and hospitals) India, South Africa etc. Readers can log on to www.sustainabletravelinternational.org/ to find out all about it.

The Carbon Calculator will estimate how much one should pay. The contribution calculated to offset the emissions produced in flying two passengers Cork to Tenerife return is estimated at $12.06, about e10. Payment can be made by credit card over the internet, although I had to add an American state and zip code to my address to make it work. A carbon offset certificate is then issued.

Other websites offering similar are www.carbonfund.org/site/ and www.nrdc.org/thisgreenlife/.

I’m happy to pay and don’t think I’m being ripped off. Look at the websites and judge for yourself.