News that the biggest mammal is returning in lists to Antarctica signals a protection triumph
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I gash at thee; for hate’s sake I spew my last-place wheeze at thee.” Captain Ahab’s splenetic, dying affirmation of defiance, as Moby Dick destroys his whaling send and transports it below the gesticulates of the Pacific Ocean, is among the most famous aisles in Herman Melville’s astonishing novel.
In reality, such joys of the hunted over the hunter were a fantasy in the brutal world-wide of industrial whaling. The biggest cetacean of them all, the blue whale, had all but disappeared from the Southern Ocean by the time a ban on hunting it was introduced in 1967.
Read more: theguardian.com
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