Victory at San Ignacio Lagoon. ch. 27. close encounter at San Ignacio Lagoon -- ch. 2. The whaler who became a naturalist -- ch. 3. The poet and the Saltworks War -- ch. 4. The Makah tribe : hunting the gray whale -- ch. 5. A tribal elder and the gray whales -- ch. 6. Return to La Laguna -- ch. 7. Journey to the pillars of salt -- ch. 8. Whale watchers : the scientist and the artist -- ch. 9. Sound check : echoes from Magdalena Bay -- ch. 10. Orcas and grays along the shores of Monterey -- ch. 11. Oregon and Washington : scholars of the great migration -- ch. 12. The kill -- ch. 13. Whalemen of Vancouver Island -- ch. 14. Alaskan journey : beginnings -- ch. 15. Whales in strange places : Kenai, Kodiak, and Unimak Pass -- ch. 16. Into the Bering Sea -- ch. 17. Among the hunters at Bering Strait -- ch. 18. To the Diomedes : life on the edge -- ch. 19. Sakhalin Island : last of the western grays -- ch. 20. Breakthrough across troubled waters -- ch. 21. Catastrophe in Chukotka -- ch. 22. Northern coda : end of the expedition -- ch. 23. Christopher Reeve and the gray whale -- ch. 24. Scientific puzzles in San Diego -- ch. 25. Mysterious evolutions -- ch. 26. Scammon's legacy -- ch. 27. Victory at San Ignacio Lagoon.
Summary:
In the 1980s, naturalist Dick Russell led the crusade to save the Atlantic striped bass. Now he focuses his energies on the gray whale in this brilliant mosaic of man's complex relationship with the natural world. 48 b&w photos and 15 maps throughout. Of full-color photos. Inches below the surface, the whales appear not so much gray as whitish blue. The immensity of these creatures is overwhelming. Fully grown they reach at least thirty-five feet in length and weigh more than thirty tons-ten times the size of a large elephant. The mother dwarfs our little boat. The calf is nearly one-third her size. With a mere flick of the tail, either whale could overturn us. Eye of the Whale focuses on one great whale in particular-the coastal-traveling California gray whale. Gray whales make the longest migration of any mammal-from the lagoons of Baja California to the feeding grounds of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia (nearly 6,000 miles). That the gray whale exists today is nothing short of miraculous. Whaling fleets twice massacred the species to near extinction-first during the nineteenth century and again during the early part of the twentieth century. As they moved in for the kill, whalers claimed their prey by naming it: hard-head; devil-fish; sea-serpent crossed with an alligator. These ominous tags suggest a fearsome creature, yet today the grays are most commonly known as the friendly whale, the species that inspired the whale-watching industry. Eye of the Whale shows the life-changing effect the gray whale has had upon people past and present-whalers, hunters, marine scientists, whale watchers, and even businessmen-who have looked into the eye of a whale and have come away transformed. Over the course of this astonishing book, the gray whale emerges as a millennial metaphor, mirroring a host of ecological, political, and social issues concerning our relationship to nature. The book also traces the remarkable story of Charles Melville Scammon, the whaling captain responsible for bringing gray whales to the brink of extinction after discovering the Baja lagoons in the 1850s to 1860s. Paradoxically, he went on to become one of the most renowned naturalist writers of his time, and in 1874 authored and illustrated a still-definitive work, The Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America. More than a hundred years later, author Dick Russell sets out to track the migration of the gray whale and to retrace Scammon's own path. This epic journey stretches from Mexico to California, Oregon, Washington, Vancouver Island, Alaska, and into Siberia and even remote Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. In these exotic locales see the current controversies surrounding the gray whale: an effort by Mitsubishi and the Mexican government to build a massive new salt factory within its pristine nursery area; the Makah tribe's renewed hunting of gray whales after a hiatus of seventy years; Japan's recruitment of the Makah and other indigenous peoples in their quest to resurrect commercial whaling. Eye of the Whale is a stunning work of scientific reporting and travel writing that greatly advances our understanding not only of the gray whale but of the natural world. While it may be impossible to know for certain the fate of this majestic creature, with Russell's sage guidance we may glimpse it-in the eye of the whale.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.