The Year of the Whale

"Scheffer wrote his book at a crucial juncture in our understanding of whales in the twentieth century, during the late 1960s, when whales shifted from objects of industrial-scale pursuit to subjects of inquiry, adulation, and awe. As a marine mammalogist himself, Scheffer was well aware of the vast scale of industrial whaling and its devastation at the time—we now know close to three million whales were killed during the twentieth century. The book’s publication only precedes the landmark US Marine Mammal Protection Act by a few years. Federal protection and quick curtailing of industrial whaling coincided with waves of discoveries about the lives of whales—from whale-song and the amazing echolocation sensory abilities of toothed whales—that moved whales into public awareness as organisms almost like us, but with seemingly mystical abilities. Scheffer’s narrative presages these advancements in a real way. The Year of the Whale was also an innovative narrative conceit: a fictional account of the year-long journey of a single sperm whale calf, but blended strongly with facts that Scheffer knew about sperm whales as a scientist, and how they navigate their world, full of encounters with other marine life, and abundant human threats. While sperm whales are no longer under any immediate threat from whaling, many of the human threats such as ship-strike, pollution and net entanglement, continue. Scheffer’s book, and its aesthetic execution also strongly influenced my book. The simple art pieces by Leonard Everett Fisher bookending each chapter has a direct lineage from Rockwell Kent’s woodcut illustrations for the 1930 edition of Melville’s Moby-Dick . I like the approach; we want to tug at the mystery, without revealing all of it, because that admits that there’s so much we don’t really know."