Mike Fedak, with whom I had lunch after his final lecture before retirement, and who was suitably buoyed by celebratory champagne, talked of seals as stylish, playful and curious creatures, very much determined to do things their way. One example he gave was the way seals deal with their enemies according to circumstance: in the Galapagos islands, when in great numbers, seals will mob and confuse shark predators; but in northern waters they will defend themselves from killer whales, by hiding in the roar and tumble of the surf thus jamming the echo locating sonar of their ancient foe. That was incredible to me. The clown-like characters in the London Zoo suddenly had become the highly intelligent citizens of the oceans, survivors of a continuing slaughter that had been, and is now, driven by commercial greed.
In the mid-nineteenth century, before the invention of kerosene, the lamps of Europe and North America were lit by oil from seal blubber. About that time, the first bicycle riders rested their bottoms on saddles covered in rubbery sealskin. As the bone-jarring two-wheelers became hugely popular around the world, so the demand for seal saddle covers soared.
As I write this in the summer of 2009 Reuters News Agency reports from Toronto that hundreds of villages in Atlantic Canada are feeling a sharp economic downturn from the European Union’s ban in July on the import of seal products. Depressed prices for pelts meant that many hunters didn’t bother to take part in the annual seal cull this year so that only 72,156 harp seals were killed against a quota of 280,000 animals. What caught my eye was not the large numbers involved but a complaint by a lobbyist for the seal industry. Canada, he said, would no longer be able to meet growing European demand for Omega 3 fish oil of which seals provided a rich source. The oil that once lit the lamps of Europe was now being used as a health supplement for heart disease.
My research at St Andrews led me inevitably to Cape Cod where the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography is one of the world-leading centres for marine research. From Dr Peter Tyack, a senior scientist at the Institute, I learnt just how much we don’t know about the oceans that cover four-fifths of the world’s surface and the marine mammals that live in them. We are only scratching the surface of our knowledge about the behaviour of the animals with which we share this planet. Whether it be the extraordinary dance of the honey bees, the melodic singing of humpback whales or the rattle and clickety-click of seal talk, the science of animal behaviour is far from reaching any frontiers.
Finally it was my good fortune to meet Sophie Van Parijs and her husband Peter Corkeron who proved such enthusiastic guides to my research. Both are marine scientists and it was through them that I came to appreciate the extraordinary passion with which men and women study the behaviour of our marine mammals, seals, dolphins and whales, and the oceans in which they live.
The book is, of course, a novel but I have tried to ensure that the marine science in the story is accurate. I should say again that none of those who I have talked to is responsible for the inevitable inaccuracies or arguable interpretations of facts. Nor indeed have I drawn on any of them for the characters who were well formed in my mind before I began the book. I have, after all, had long enough to think about them.
Also by James MacManus
Ocean Devil, The Life and Legend of George Hogg
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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On the Broken Shore Page 23
