The first sight was dreamlike: a white body piercing the brilliant blue of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Then I saw another, and another. So many pure white islands bobbed to the surface that, before I could reach for my camera, a pod of 25 beluga whales had circled our Zodiac. They dipped away and returned, a spray of breath signaling their arrival. I was close enough to see their faces — and I could swear they were smiling.
Of course, this run-in was no coincidence. My whale watch from the Canadian village of Tadoussac set out with a singular mission: to spot whales. And because whales populate North America’s shorelines, feeding, calving, and playing along the same beaches we do, they’re easy to find, depending on the time of year.
Whale watching is an increasingly popular activity; it can also be intensely moving. “I’ve seen grown men burst into tears,” said Philip Hoare in an interview; he is the prizewinning author of "The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea and the Hunt for Moby Dick", a new BBC documentary. “It’s such an emotional experience.”
The affinity, and sometimes antipathy, between mankind and whales reaches across generations and has been well recorded in tales from Jonah and the whale to Moby-Dick. While sailors and whales were once sworn antagonists, the tide has turned in a single generation. Commercial whaling peaked in 1965 and was outlawed in 1986, while recreational whale tourism is steadily on the rise, growing by 10 percent each year into a $2.1 billion industry last year with some 13 million people going to see whales.
Fortunately, there are plenty of options. The denizens of the deep are some of the greatest travelers on the planet — just like us, many head south in winter. In Hawaiian waters, on-shore visitors can watch newborn humpback calves learn to jump and play. In summer off Cape Cod, it appears there are as many whales off the coast as there are tourists on it.
Whales can be seen on every continent, but remain new and compelling puzzles. We catch only a glimpse of back, a spout, a fluke, or if we’re lucky, a breech — leaving our mind to assemble the whole. In fact, mankind saw images of the earth from space an entire generation before we captured a full underwater picture of a whale. “They are utterly unfathomable,” says Hoare. Or, in the words of Herman Melville, “I know him not and never will.”