Leviathans of the Deep

Just as Herman Melville is the hagiographer of the sperm whale, Charles Melville Scammon served that function for the gray whale. Although Melville was only a sometime whaleman (he sailed aboard the New Bedford whaler Acushnet in 1841 and participated in some actual whaling before jumping ship in the Marquesas), Scammon, who was born in 1825 in Maine, spent most of his adult life as a whaling captain.

His "Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America, Together With an Account of the American Whale-Fishery," first published in 1874, has long been considered the classic discussion of the gray whale, even though there have been innumerable technical and semi-technical studies published since then.

Capt. Scammon, stand aside for Dick Russell.

Once in a while, a book comes along that redefines its subject to the extent that most previous works immediately become obsolete. "Eye of the Whale" is such a book. Almost everybody, well, almost everybody in California, anyway, knows about the gray whales' southward migration from the Bering and Chukchi seas to the lagoons of Baja, where they mate and deliver the calves of the year before turning around and swimming back to Siberian-Alaskan waters. Their 13,000-mile round trip is the longest annual migration of any mammal.

Lots of Californians and visitors to California have been whale-watching, either in boats or from shore, watching the leviathans pass on their timeless journey, and many have even made the trip to Magdalena Bay or San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja to see the so-called "friendly whales." But if you think that watching the whales pass Point Loma or even seeing one up close from a Zodiac in Magdalena Bay is the sum of the gray whale experience, think again.

Scammon not only chronicled the history and natural history of the gray whale, he also participated in the species' downfall. In 1858, as captain of the whale ship Lenore, he discovered the whales' breeding grounds in Laguna Ojo de Liebre (now known as Scammon's Lagoon) and essentially led the charge of the whalers to Baja California to kill as many gray whales as they could find there. Since the entire population of Pacific gray whales went to Baja every year, it was not long before the whalers, who simply sailed there and waited for the whales to show up, had so reduced their numbers that the population was considered almost extinct.