Suddenly the animal “made an unprovoked attack … with his jaws … After having struck the boat once, he continued to play with her, on every side, as if manifesting a disposition to renew the attack, and did a second time strike the bows of the boat, and split her stem”. Imagine, then, the consternation of the captain, whose ship had been sunk by one species of cetacean, only to find a 3.5m orca – which he called a “killer-fish” – following their flimsy boat. The story became the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and was subsequently re-imagined in Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestselling book, filmed as In The Heart of the Sea starring Cillian Murphy and Ben Whishaw. The Nantucket whaleship was struck twice by a sperm whale, holing it and causing it to sink, and setting the crew adrift in boats. The greatest foundation myth of whales of our time was the sinking of the Essex in the Pacific in 1820. Whales had yet to acquire their modern status as emblems of environmental threat. In all these incarnations, orca are seen as ravenous hunters: indeed, their early species name, Orca gladiator, reflected this pugilistic sensibility. Twenty years later, the orca suddenly comes into focus in a remarkably realistic, almost god-like image – save for the odd whiskers – of an animal stranded in Hartlepool, as illustrated in Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium of 1558. Olaus Magnus’s 1539 description appears almost prophetic in light of the current news stories: “An Orca is like a Hull turned inside outward a Beast with fierce Teeth, with which, as with the Stem of a Ship, he rends the Whales Guts and tears his Calves body, he quickly runs and drives him up and down.” But their actions do have a historical precedent.Įarly modern accounts of orca, or killer whales, saw them as sea demons. We’ll probably never know, unless we learn to translate their whistles and clicks. Sentient, matriarchal, tremendously successful as a species, their culture is much older than ours, and the recent reports of orca interactions off the Iberian peninsula force us to readdress the power of these marine mammals on our imagination: on what these animals represent and what they are thinking when they interact with us. In our encounter with wild orcas off Sri Lanka, the intense presence of these graphic, glossy black and white animals, so perfect that they almost appeared animatronic, seemed a kind of vindication of their beauty. A scene from the film The Heart Of The Sea.

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