The Penn Cove Roundup

Ted griffin awoke with a start, but he wasn’t sure why. It was a warm night in August 1970, and all seemed calm and quiet. Water lapped against the boat’s hull as the lights of Coupeville flickered a mile and a half away. Yet something wasn’t right. The breathing of the whales behind the capture nets sounded clipped and nervous. “How long have they been blowing that way?” he asked the two men on watch. “Blowing? What way?” they answered. “All night I guess.” Straining his eyes in the dark, Griffin scanned the enormous pen, anchored just off the old Standard Oil dock. Everything seemed to be in order—except on the north side. The marker lights there were too far apart. He roused Goldsberry, and the partners jumped into a skiff to investigate. When they reached the floating lights, Griffin stared down at a loose cork line, puzzled. The net looked split. “Not split—cut!” yelled Goldsberry. “And in more than one place.” Griffin couldn’t believe it. Suddenly the orcas’ anxious breathing made sense. During the night, someone had slashed a section of the net. Large portions of loose mesh now drifted in the current, threatening to drown any whales nearby. Griffin and Goldsberry shouted for their crew, and in the following hours everyone worked feverishly in the dark—reattaching lines, mending mesh, anchoring nets. Had they reacted in time? Had the animals managed to avoid danger? Griffin needed to find out. Donning his wetsuit, he slipped over the cork line and into Penn Cove’s murky waters. At first, he was hopeful. All the whales seemed to be swimming near the surface. But a moment later, his eye caught a shimmer of white—perhaps a shark caught in the net? No, it was a tiny orca calf, no more than eight feet long. Ensnared in a floating portion of mesh, the little whale hung lifeless, head down. Other divers found two more, also calves. Initially, Griffin felt only nausea, but that soon gave way to rage. He wanted to lash out at those responsible.

The White Whale

When bob wright awoke on Sunday March 1, 1970, he didn’t feel like getting in a boat. He had attended a wedding reception late into the previous night, and the morning in Victoria had broken cold and blustery. But he had promised to show his whale-catching operation to Don White, Paul Spong’s former research assistant. Wright already had an orca at his new oceanarium, Sealand of the Pacific, but he was keen to try his hand at capture, and he especially hoped to trap an albino killer whale often seen in local waters. When White and a friend arrived for the excursion, however, Wright wasn’t feeling very eager. “Bob is totally hung over, but he is feeling responsible,” White recalled. “He has told me to come, so he feels like we’ve got to do it.” Along with trainer Graeme Ellis, the three men piled onto Wright’s twenty-foot Bertram runabout and started for Pedder Bay. As the boat rounded Trial Island and cruised west past Victoria, the sea became choppy and Wright grew queasier. But minutes later, as they approached Race Rocks, he forgot all about his hangover. “Fuck!” he yelled. “It’s the white whale!” Sure enough, a group of orcas with what appeared to be an albino member was passing Bentinck Island and heading straight for Pedder Bay. The sighting was lucky, but the timing awful. Wright wasn’t set for a capture that day. His seine nets were in storage, and at first he couldn’t hail any of his Sealand staff. Determined not to let this opportunity pass, he gunned the Bertram into the bay and made straight for the Lakewood—a charter fishing boat he had rigged for orca catching. As Wright gathered his crew on the vessel, the excitement was palpable. “We were playing macho whale hunters,” White reflected, “and Bob Wright was our Captain Ahab.” With only one light net on board, the operation would have to be perfect, and everyone watched anxiously as the whales lingered near the mouth of Pedder Bay. Finally, as the sun began to set, the orcas entered.

Fishing for Orcas

Griffin had been receiving letters for weeks, and they painted a vivid picture of Namu’s impact on those who had seen the famous orca. “We are sorry that Namu is dead,” wrote seven-year-old Christopher. “I wish that you will get another whale.” A little girl declared, “I will mention in my prayer tonight for God to send Namu safely to Heaven and for God to watch over him always.” “We are so grateful we saw Namu only a few weeks ago,” wrote one local family. “He was so beautiful and gentle.” “Without our friend Namu, the water­front will be a lonely place,” added a mother in Seattle. “We hope you will consider getting another whale.” The notes helped, but Ted Griffin hadn’t been himself since his friend’s death. The process of forming the first close human bond with a killer whale had produced an intense emotional high, and the animal’s death sent him into a spiral of depression. Usually frenetic, the aquarium owner found himself list­less and untethered from reality. “At first I told myself he would come back, as I had believed my father would after he died,” he later wrote. “I had never faced the reality of death as a fact of life.” Try as he might, Griffin couldn’t pull himself together. “I wanted to shed my burden of guilt,” he reflected. “I had brought Namu into the polluted water where the bacteria had killed him. My loved one died tragically, and indirectly by my own hand.” As the weeks went by, his children became confused by their father’s behavior, and Joan grew worried. Friends suggested that he try bonding with another whale, but they might as well have urged him to replace a lost spouse or child. Something in Ted Griffin had died with Namu. Nearly fifty years later, he sat with me at his dining room table and tried to convey this change. “After Namu died, I kept trying to find that connection,” he explained. “I kept hoping for it with another animal, but I couldn’t find it.” So he turned his mind to business.

Haida’s Song

Haida Didn’t Know it, but Bob Wright was thinking of setting him free. A longtime attraction at Wright’s Sealand of the Pacific, the male orca had reached twenty-three feet, and despite being paired with several females, he had failed to impregnate any of them. In June 1982, the oceanarium’s director, Angus Matthews, proposed an exchange to the Canadian government. In return for a permit to capture two young killer whales in local waters, Sealand would release Haida to the wild. It was a bold plan, made possible by recent scientific breakthroughs. Using Haida’s own calls, researchers had deduced that he was a member of L pod, one of the three southern resident pods identified and named by Mike Bigg. But the orca’s training for release would begin only after Sealand acquired new whales. Following a successful capture, Matthews explained, the oceanarium would move Haida to a pen in Pedder Bay, where the long-captive orca could learn to catch live fish and make acoustic contact with his family. But Matthews cautioned that success would ultimately depend on the whale himself. “Haida will be given his own choice,” he emphasized, “of joining his old pod and becoming a born-again whale, or returning to his friends at Sealand.” In late August, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO, formerly the Department of the Environment) approved the project and assigned Bigg to supervise it. The respected scientist cautioned the public that there was no guarantee Haida would survive, but he argued that the release “needs to be tried.” Critics disagreed. Some accused Sealand of plotting to abandon Haida now that he had served his purpose. Likening the plan to “throwing out the family pet when it is no longer young and amusing,” one local woman warned that Haida’s “trust in humans will probably result in a bullet from a gun-happy fisherman.” The fiercest opposition came from Greenpeace, which denounced the entire proposal. Declaring rehabilitation “unlikely,” Greenpeace Canada president Patrick Moore argued that to move the imprisoned whale to a “halfway house” in Pedder Bay would be “to condemn him to death—alone.”

New Frontiers

Skana looked sick. On September 18, 1980, she failed to finish her show, and the next day she remained sluggish. Murray Newman and his staff were concerned. Along with Hyak II (formerly Tung-Jen), she was the Vancouver Aquarium’s biggest draw. In the thirteen years since Ted Griffin had captured her, Skana had been the star of Stanley Park, giving millions their first close-up view of a killer whale. And through her impact on Paul Spong and Greenpeace, she had helped reframe the international whaling debate. She may well have been the most influential cetacean in history, but she grew weaker each day, and despite heavy doses of antibiotics, she succumbed on Sunday, October 5. The necropsy revealed a fungal infection in her reproductive tract. Although aquarium officials were correct in noting that she had lived longer in captivity than any other killer whale, she was still young—no more than twenty. She might have lived fifty more years in the wild. Skana’s death left Hyak alone. He had come from Pender Harbour in 1968 as a small, frightened calf, and now he was a sexually mature male in need of a mate. Yet the acquisition of killer whales was no simple matter. The Department of Fisheries had stated that it would allow wild capture to replace orcas who died in captivity, but the Vancouver Aquarium hadn’t caught a killer whale since Moby Doll in 1964, and if it tried now, activists would surely oppose it. “I knew it would be unpopular for us to try to capture a live killer whale locally and felt a little frustrated about it,” Newman admitted. “To my mind, the entire awareness of the killer whales’ right to live was brought about by aquariums exhibiting these animals.” With nearby waters out of play, he looked to Iceland, which had become the primary source of captive orcas in recent years. After receiving the Canadian government’s permission to import whales, Newman boarded a plane for Iceland, arriving at Keflavik International Airport in the early morning of December 13, 1980.

Supply and Demand

In the summer of 1968, Richard O’Feldman must have wondered how he came to be playing the flute on the back of a killer whale. The curly-haired twenty-eight-year-old was no stranger to marine mammals. Growing up on Miami Beach in the 1940s, he had often seen bottlenose dolphins. “Back in those days, Biscayne Bay was teeming with them,” he recalled, and his mother told him tales of dolphins rescuing downed pilots. Thirsting for adventure, fifteen-year-old O’Feldman lied about his age to join the National Guard and later enlisted in the navy. Over the next five years, he rode a US destroyer around the world, hearing his first dolphin calls in the ship’s sonar room and training to become a navy diver. Not yet twenty-one when he left the service, he dabbled in treasure hunting off the Florida coast before finding work at the Miami Seaquarium. His first day on the job, O’Feldman joined the marine park’s collection crew on an expedition to capture dolphins in Biscayne Bay. “In those days, you didn’t need a permit,” he explained. “You could do whatever you wanted.” As a diver, his task was to search for entangled dolphins while keeping the net clear of coral snags. The collection method made casualties inevitable. “I would find dolphins wrapped up dead,” he admitted. “We killed a lot.” By 1962, O’Feldman had helped capture more than a hundred bottlenose dolphins. The Miami Seaquarium kept some for display, but it sold most to other marine parks. Among them were US buyers such as Marineland of the Pacific and Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, as well as a growing number of European dolphinariums. “Places were just opening,” he noted, “and we were supplying them.” Among the eager customers was his former employer, the US Navy, which had just launched its Marine Mammal Program. O’Feldman saw nothing wrong with captivity—“never questioned it at all,” he told me. Never, that is, until he began working with the animals himself.

Skana and the Hippie

On september 21, 1967, Vancouver columnist Himie Koshevoy of the Province newspaper witnessed an unexpected Cold War encounter. Soviet minister of fisheries Alexander Ishkov had come to see the Vancouver Aquarium, and Murray Newman invited the reporter along. Ishkov had visited in 1956, when construction of the aquarium was still underway, and he was so impressed that he carried a copy of its plans back to Moscow. Eleven years later, he had returned for a grand tour, and Newman was happy to oblige. He showed his Soviet guest around the exhibits, proudly noting that each year forty thousand schoolchildren visited the aquarium, “gaining knowledge of their coastal environment.” Like most visitors that year, Ishkov was especially eager to see Skana, Vancouver’s captive killer whale. According to Koshevoy, what ensued between communist fishing minister and US-caught orca amounted to “a Little Yalta.” With “squeals of delight,” Skana showed off her acrobatic feats, earning a handful of herring for each one. Although Ishkov may not have grasped the significance of Skana “profiting through her labors,” Koshevoy quipped, the Soviet official clearly enjoyed the performance. When his hosts suggested Ishkov try feeding Skana himself, however, he hesitated. “You could almost see the thoughts racing,” mused Koshevoy. “Was she a potential aggressor? Could he deter an attack? The first-strike ability was clearly on the whale’s side.” Finally, coaxed by trainer Terry McLeod, Ishkov made his démarche, and Skana accepted. As Ishkov smiled and rubbed the whale’s head, it was clear the crisis had passed. The interspecies summit closed, Koshevoy noted, with “mutual expressions of goodwill on all sides.” It was a waggish depiction of the visit, to be sure. Although the Soviet official didn’t want to look skittish in front of his North American hosts, the Cold War was likely far from his mind as he dropped herring into Skana’s maw. Ishkov shared Newman’s interest in fish and marine mammals, and he had recently outlawed the killing of small cetaceans in Soviet waters. Yet he was undeniably part of the political world, and he represented a Soviet empire that was asserting its interests around the globe.

A Boy and His Whale

It was february 1966, and Richard Stroud had seal sex on his mind. A recent graduate of Oregon State University, the Portland-born Stroud had taken a job at the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory in Seattle. For one of his first field assignments, he had come to Morro Bay to study the reproduction of northern fur seals in their wintering area off the California coast. The primary focus of the lab, which was still administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, remained the fur seal harvest on the Pribilof Islands, and its scientists retained close ties to US whaling firms, often chartering their vessels for research. For this seventy-day expedition, Stroud and his colleagues hired the 136-foot whaler Lynnann for the purpose of shooting and dissecting five hundred fur seals under the terms of the 1957 treaty. Stroud also had instructions to kill and examine killer whales when possible. So when the Lynnann passed six orcas off Morro Bay just before noon on February 12, he asked Captain Roy J. “Bud” Newton to follow them. Ordinarily, Newton wouldn’t have bothered with killers. His employer, the Del Monte Fishing Company, focused on fin, sperm, and humpback whales. Located in Richmond, a short drive from Berkeley, the station processed nearly two hundred whales per year. But the whaling season was months away, and the US government was paying for this voyage. Newton wheeled the Lynnann around, and after an hour-long chase, his crew harpooned and killed a large male killer whale. Measuring just under twenty-one feet, it was a healthy specimen, though its teeth seemed unusually worn. Stroud planned to examine the orca’s stomach contents and send its skull and organs to the Seattle lab. Yet he chose not to dissect the carcass in port. Instead, as one reporter explained, Stroud and his fellow researchers “planned to butcher their killer whale Sunday while far out at sea.” The reasons for this decision are unclear. Perhaps they hoped to spare Morro Bay residents the stench of orca innards.

Namu’s Journey

The call came by ship-to-shore radio from a Washington State ferry. The skipper on the Seattle-Bremerton route had just spotted killer whales headed south, and he thought Ted Griffin should know. Shouting his thanks, the aquarium owner raced down the dock, leapt into Pegasus, and tore off in the direction of the sighting. Clocked at sixty miles per hour, the shallow-draft runabout may have been the fastest boat on Puget Sound, and it overtook the orcas near Vashon Island. But as Griffin throttled down, he realized to his disbelief that someone else was already chasing them. There, clear as day, was a blue helicopter hovering over the whales. Incensed, Griffin steered Pegasus closer, until he could almost touch the helicopter’s pontoons. Looking up, he spotted a burly man leaning out the cabin door and eying the pod. “Get away from my whales!” Griffin shouted. “Your whales?” the man laughed. “You’ll have to catch them first.” It was the first time Griffin had met Don Goldsberry, ex-fisherman and animal collector for the Point Defiance Aquarium (formerly the Tacoma Aquarium). The two men’s shared pursuit of orcas would soon bind them together. On this day, however, Griffin left feeling a bit embarrassed, having behaved, as he put it, “like a rancher possessive of his herd.” Some part of him knew his quest to capture and befriend a killer whale was becoming unhealthy. He had a struggling aquarium in Seattle and a growing family on Bainbridge Island. Orcas were his obsession, but they weren’t paying the bills. At home, he still talked and laughed with Joan and played with his little sons, Jay and John. But he had whales on the brain. He dreamed of them when asleep and sometimes mumbled about them when awake. With each reported sighting, he dropped everything—to Joan’s increased annoyance. In time, Griffin had come to see patterns in the animals’ migrations and behavior. He noted that they appeared when chinook salmon were running and that they seemed to cling to the west side of Puget Sound when headed south and to the east side when swimming north.

The Old Northwest

On the morning of Monday, October 12, 1931, early risers in northern Portland noticed a strange creature with smooth black skin in Columbia Slough, right next to the Jantzen Beach Amusement Park. Locals debated its identity. Some argued it was a sturgeon, others a sei whale all the way from Japan. Finally, an old salt tagged it as a small “blackfish.” News of the novelty spread like wildfire, drawing thousands of spectators and causing gridlock on the interstate bridge between Portland and Vancouver, Washington. A local newspaper warned that killer whales were one of the ocean’s “most vicious” creatures, but this one promptly stole Portland’s heart. “From the looks of things,” declared Deputy Sheriff Martin T. Pratt, “nearly everyone in the city is determined to see the visitor,” and when some locals began shooting at the animal, Pratt and his men arrested them. The number of sightseers grew each day, and that weekend, tens of thousands crowded into Jantzen Beach to catch a glimpse of the whale, while enterprising fishermen charged twenty-five cents for whale-watching rides. By that time, someone had dubbed the orca Ethelbert, and the name stuck. Why the little whale had arrived there, a hundred miles up the Columbia, remains a mystery. It had probably become separated from its mother and lost its bearings, wandering up the great river that divides western Oregon from Washington State. But Columbia Slough was no place for an orca. In addition to lacking salt water, it was the main outlet for Portland’s sewage. In summer, the waterway grew so foul that workers refused to handle timber passing through it. As the days passed, observers grew worried. The whale seemed sluggish, and its skin began to show unsightly blotches. The owner of Jantzen Beach proposed capturing the animal with a net and placing it in a saltwater tank. It would have been an extraordinary attraction for his amusement park—already known as the Coney Island of the West. But members of the Oregon Humane Society denounced the scheme as rank cruelty. Instead, they proposed blowing the young orca up with dynamite.