The Killer Whale Who Changed the World. Mark Leiren-Young
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feel not just needed but essential. Friends, colleagues, and coworkers—and the labels tended to be interchangeable—all claimed that Newman had honed helplessness to an art form. He never simply asked people to work for him; he convinced them there was no way his scheme could succeed without them. If they didn’t come on board with his latest venture, it was utterly and completely doomed. Everyone Newman recruited—whether teenaged volunteers or titans of industry— received a variation of the same pitch:
“I can’t do this without you.”
NEWMAN ASSEMBLED HIS crew of whalers as if he were selecting master criminals in an Oceans 11–style caper movie. He needed a harpooner, an artist, a scientist, and someone to share their story with the world.
Killing a whale is easy—just aim the gun and shoot. Using a harpoon would allow the whale to be killed without doing serious damage to the body or the organs, but it would be challenging. Fortunately, the Department of Fisheries knew the perfect man for the job—veteran fisherman Ronald Sparrow. A respected member of the Musqueam nation, Sparrow knew how to harpoon a whale, and most importantly, he had his own harpoon.
Sparrow had installed an ancient Norwegian gun on his own gill-netter to shoot the killer whales that were chasing his catch. The weapon was a natural whale repellent; the moment it was mounted on Sparrow’s boat, the whales vanished. That was good news for Sparrow, but perhaps someone should have taken it as a sign that it might not be the ideal weapon for landing a whale.
Newman found his sculptor by asking the head of Vancouver’s Emily Carr Art School to recommend someone who could make an accurate and beautiful model of a killer whale. The answer was thirty-eight-year-old Samuel Burich. Burich had specialized in stone carving at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and was now teaching sculpting at the Vancouver school of art. Not only was he a respected sculptor, he was also a fisherman and marine engineer. This combination of skills made him the perfect man for the mission, especially since the plan called for him to study the shape of the dead whale and take precise measurements while it was still in the sheltered bay off East Point.
Burich was so intrigued by the offer that he quickly crafted a small sculpture of a killer whale, which he presented to Newman as proof that he was the only man for the job. The most enthusiastic member of the crew, Burich also offered to serve as Sparrow’s “co-gunner.” He was hired for $300 a month (only $100 less than Newman’s original salary for running the aquarium), plus a $500 completion bonus, to craft a whale out of fiberglass and plaster.
Newman’s most impressive catch, however, was Dr. Patrick Lucey McGeer. Since Newman was the aquarium’s chief fundraiser, his curatorial skills were less important than his political skills, so his choice for a lead scientist was ideal on every front. A world-renowned neuroscientist, the thirty-seven-year-old McGeer had recently been elected a member of the B.C. legislature, representing one of the province’s wealthiest communities—an electoral district adjacent to the one where the aquarium was located.
McGeer had grown up in the spotlight. His father was a provincial court judge, his mother was one of the city’s only female media stars, and his uncle Gerald Grattan McGeer was arguably B.C.’s most popular politician—a two-term mayor of Vancouver who was also elected to the provincial and federal legislatures.
A scientist and an athlete, McGeer also found himself in the spotlight as a basketball star, leading his university team in scoring to beat the visiting Harlem Globetrotters and representing Canada in the Olympics.
McGeer met his wife, Edith, when they were both doing research at Princeton. After moving to Vancouver to work together at UBC, they began turning their lab into one of the world’s most respected neurological research facilities, where they were assembling a huge collections of human brains.
Newman and McGeer first met at a school fundraising dinner. Newman joked that “he [McGeer]was famous and I could read. I said he should really be working on whales. I was beginning to think about this idea of somehow capturing a killer whale and I discussed this with him a little bit and he was hooked.”
According to McGeer, Newman was an expert with the hook. “Murray has this marvelous technique of engaging people with something terribly important and then pretending that he’s helpless and he can’t do it unless you participate. Nobody else I’ve ever met has this particular skill, but that’s how he built the aquarium from nothing. Murray could have gone a long way in politics.”
McGeer didn’t know much about whales—he’d never even seen one—but he loved the idea of getting his hands—and scalpel—on what promised to be one of the biggest brains in the world. “It was known that dolphins had very large brains and these were sort of like super dolphins,” says McGeer. Since this was the height of the Cold War, dolphins weren’t just studied; they were being trained by Americans and Russians as potential underwater spies. “I thought if we’re going to kill a killer whale, then I’d better get a look at the brain and compare it with the brains of other species.”
McGeer was too busy to spend time on Saturna—he had smaller brains to deal with as a politician—but he was touted in all the media coverage. His involvement gave the endeavor an air of gravitas, and other specialists lined up for their piece of orca pie. This was the era of slice-and-dice science—the way to study an animal was to catch, kill, and dissect it. Dr. Gordon Pike, a marine biologist, called dibs on most of the internal organs. Researchers at Vancouver General Hospital wanted the heart and lungs.
Because the hunt was expected to be historic—or at the very least, a great way to capture headlines—members of the media accompanied the team.
Jack Long, a documentary maker for the National Film Board of Canada, was initially on hand to record the historic mission. After Long left the island, Vancouver Sun newspaper columnist Jack Scott arrived to chronicle what he described as “the most obsessive whale hunt since Moby Dick.” Scott filed a series of special reports on the adventure he dubbed “Murray’s Operation Killer Whale.”
Vince Penfold, the aquarium’s assistant curator, was brought to Saturna as a lookout.
The final members of the crew were the five men serving on the sixty-five-foot coast guard vessel the Chilco Post. It was their job to finish off the specimen once Sparrow shot it. Scott explained:
The plan is this: On the far side of the cliff, beyond Chilco Post’s view, one of the lookouts will race to the high ground of the lighthouse when the action begins. He will wave a yellow rainslicker. This will be the signal for Chilco Post to get into the act. It will run at full speed out through angry waters to the Boiling Reef, around the headland and engage the harpooned whale in combat, following its flight by means of the enormous marker buoys attached to the end of the harpoon’s line. When the stricken whale surfaces for air, as, of course it must, the crew of Chilco Post, braced at the gunwales will pump a hail of rifle bullets into it.
Then Scott warned of the possible consequences. “No one can say for sure how a killer whale will react if the harpoon does not strike a vital spot and, moreover, there’s every likelihood that the other bulls in the pack, or ‘pod,’ as it’s properly known will attack the ship itself, as they have been known to do in the past . . . Since a bull killer whale runs to 25 feet in length, and has a mouthful of teeth and a disposition that can only be described as perfectly dreadful, the possibilities are downright chilling.”
Scott was trying to sell newspapers by amping up the drama, but he’d captured the zeitgeist. The Vancouver Aquarium was hunting a monster, and these hunters were risking their lives.
CHAPTER FOUR
A LIVING NIGHTMARE
“Since the whale in question is the strongest, bloodthirstiest, most unpredictable creature in the seven seas, the party could get rough. We’re after Orcinus Orca, better known as the killer whale, the only creature other than dear old Homo Sapiens, which kills for the sheer lust of killing.”
JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN, JUNE 2, 1964
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