Farley Mowat

Mera chota sa beta,

Farley Mowat, an author who promoted consciousness of what humans are doing to the environment, died yesterday, May 7 2014. He wrote 40 books. I read only one: “A Whale for the Killing.” I read it back in the late 1960s, in New Rajender Nagar, Delhi. I was then in 6th or 7th grade. The book made a deep impression on me that I still remember.

“A Whale for the Killing” was the true story of a young 70-ton blue whale that got stuck in a lagoon on the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The lagoon had a narrow mouth opening out to the sea. In high tide, the water at the lagoon’s mouth was deep enough for the whale to swim into the lagoon. One night, at high tide, the whale swam into the lagoon and hung around too long in the lagoon. She was young, not experienced enough yet to the dangers of a lowering tide. The tide lowered. The mouth of the lagoon became too shallow for her to swim out. She got stuck in the lagoon until the next high tide.

On the banks of the lagoon was a fishing village. The village woke up and saw the stuck whale. What did the people do? They brought out their guns and started shooting at the whale. They weren’t killing the whale for food. They just wanted to kill it. The shooting went crazy. Even children joined in to practice shooting.

Outside the lagoon, out in the open sea, the whale’s male partner communicated with her, and she was responding in pain. Several times, with encouragement from her male partner, she tried to rush the lagoon’s mouth to escape, but she stopped short because the tide was still low, and the mouth of the lagoon was still too shallow for a 70-ton huge whale to swim out to freedom and life.

The whale died. Out in the open sea, her male partner called her many times. When he got no response, he swam away.

Farley Mowat lived in that fishing village. He tried to get the people to stop shooting the whale. The people ignored him and, in fact, mocked him. He was already considered a crackpot environmentalist. After the whale episode, he wrote the book “A Whale for the Killing.” (A box office hit movie of the same name was also made starring the then popular actor Richard Widmark.) After the book was published, the village shunned Farley Mowat. He had to move away from the village.

It is writers like Farley Mowat who first made us aware of what humans were doing to the environment.

Some forty years later, three whales, a father, mother, and their baby, got stuck at Point Barrow, northern Alaska. The baby was sick and couldn’t swim south for the winter. The parents stayed with their sick baby. The three got trapped as winter set in and the ocean surface froze to ice. Whales must surface to breathe. They rammed the ice cap and kept open a hole wide enough for them to surface for air. When the stranded whales were discovered, people cut breathing holes in the ice to the open sea. A Russian ice breaker broke a path out to the sea. The whales swam free. (The baby, nicknamed BamBam by the rescuers, died before the ice path to freedom was opened.)

From Newfoundland to Alaska, humankind had come a long way — thanks to authors such as Farley Mowat.

Lots of love.

Papa