En route to Cape Verde
Morning brings a calm sea and a cool, light rain as we head north,
anticipating a rendezvous with the northeast trades.
A call from Jim Kelley summons a crowd forward. Dolphins are cavorting off the starboard bow. Not just any dolphins. Richard White and Mike Greenfelder conclude they are Clymenes, also known as Short-Snouted Spinners. They are rarely sighted and as a consequence guidebooks offer scant information on their numbers (presumed to be modest) and habits. What is known, from easy observation, is that when breaking the surface this dolphin may spin like a competition diver, landing on its back or side as it hurtles forward.
Soon the dolphins vanish and whales appear. These too are of a species seldom encountered—beaked whales. It’s known that they are deep divers, descending 3,000 feet or more, and presumably they spend almost all of their lives out of human sight.
Four types are believed to inhabit the equatorial Atlantic, but it’s not easy to tell them apart. One factor of identification is dental. The True’s Beaked Whale, for example, has a tooth protruding on either side at the tip of the jaw, while the Blainville’s Beaked Whale has a visible tooth well back. (Not so easy to discern at a distance.) In place of details on the existence of these whales, guidebooks offer such phrases as “little known,” “largely unknown” and just plain “unknown”—emphasizing that those of us who saw them have joined an exclusive fraternity.
As National Geographic Endeavour proceeded past the bulge of the African continent in the afternoon, David Barnes reminded us that these waters once bore ships crammed with Africans sold into slavery. One estimate cited by David: 11 million Africans shipped to the New World before slavery slowly began to be abolished at the dawn of the 19th century. Another estimate is far higher: 20 million. The greatest number were taken to Brazil, Portugal’s colony; Portugal was long a leader among nations in the Atlantic slave trade. But Britain, the North American colonies (and later the United States) and France all profited enormously from the unspeakable cruelties of human trafficking…providing capital to finance the Industrial Revolution.
Afterward, Ian Bullock spoke eloquently of the magic and the mystery of the ocean—magical because it is so productive, mysterious because we know so little about it. The state of our knowledge, he said, suggests we are “trying to stare through a window into a palace to see what’s going on.” And our oceanic stewardship? Shameful. “We have plundered it, despoiled it… treated it like a sewer. It’s time for some respect for the ocean and the creatures that live in it…. I fear the magic will be lost before the mystery is unraveled.”
Morning brings a calm sea and a cool, light rain as we head north,
anticipating a rendezvous with the northeast trades.
A call from Jim Kelley summons a crowd forward. Dolphins are cavorting off the starboard bow. Not just any dolphins. Richard White and Mike Greenfelder conclude they are Clymenes, also known as Short-Snouted Spinners. They are rarely sighted and as a consequence guidebooks offer scant information on their numbers (presumed to be modest) and habits. What is known, from easy observation, is that when breaking the surface this dolphin may spin like a competition diver, landing on its back or side as it hurtles forward.
Soon the dolphins vanish and whales appear. These too are of a species seldom encountered—beaked whales. It’s known that they are deep divers, descending 3,000 feet or more, and presumably they spend almost all of their lives out of human sight.
Four types are believed to inhabit the equatorial Atlantic, but it’s not easy to tell them apart. One factor of identification is dental. The True’s Beaked Whale, for example, has a tooth protruding on either side at the tip of the jaw, while the Blainville’s Beaked Whale has a visible tooth well back. (Not so easy to discern at a distance.) In place of details on the existence of these whales, guidebooks offer such phrases as “little known,” “largely unknown” and just plain “unknown”—emphasizing that those of us who saw them have joined an exclusive fraternity.
As National Geographic Endeavour proceeded past the bulge of the African continent in the afternoon, David Barnes reminded us that these waters once bore ships crammed with Africans sold into slavery. One estimate cited by David: 11 million Africans shipped to the New World before slavery slowly began to be abolished at the dawn of the 19th century. Another estimate is far higher: 20 million. The greatest number were taken to Brazil, Portugal’s colony; Portugal was long a leader among nations in the Atlantic slave trade. But Britain, the North American colonies (and later the United States) and France all profited enormously from the unspeakable cruelties of human trafficking…providing capital to finance the Industrial Revolution.
Afterward, Ian Bullock spoke eloquently of the magic and the mystery of the ocean—magical because it is so productive, mysterious because we know so little about it. The state of our knowledge, he said, suggests we are “trying to stare through a window into a palace to see what’s going on.” And our oceanic stewardship? Shameful. “We have plundered it, despoiled it… treated it like a sewer. It’s time for some respect for the ocean and the creatures that live in it…. I fear the magic will be lost before the mystery is unraveled.”
