Island Conservation Society and Seychelles Islands Foundation-Could Seychelles become a whale watching paradise? |14 July 2008

At a symbolical level the story has been described by one critic as “a conflict between the eternal, unscathable forces of nature and the ineluctable enmity of man”.

Although the novel has been acclaimed as a “stupendous yarn”, it is long (135 chapters, not counting the prologue and the epilogue!) and filled with “minute details” and “cloudy symbolisms” (it actually exhausted the writer himself). This obviously did not discourage historian William McAteer, who appears to have been the first to point out that Seychelles is mentioned in Chapter 44:

  … Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean… (Note, in passing, Melville’s spelling:

several writers, mistaking the “s” as the end of “Seychelles” for a plural sign, have referred to the “Seychelle islands” – like we say “the Comoros” but “the Comoro islands”).

At the time Melville wrote Moby Dick “the golden age of the whalers was drawing to a close, though no decline had yet set in” – it was the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859 that was going to change the way we live and affect the whale-oil market. British and American vessels had been hunting whales in the western Indian Ocean since the end of the 18th century. The Cruise of the Cachalot:

Round the World after Sperm Whales by Frank Thomas Bullen, the “writer of stirring sea stories”, makes depressing reading. The following allegedly took place in the vicinity of the Comoros:

… a school of medium-sized sperm whales were sighted... They were exceedingly fat and lazy, moving with the greatest deliberation, and, when we rushed in among them, appeared utterly bewildered and panic-stricken, knowing not which way to flee.  Like a flock of frightened sheep they huddled together, aimlessly wallowing in each other's way, while we harpooned them with the greatest ease and impunity…

Here in Seychelles, the preferred hunting ground for kasalo was around Ile aux Vaches (now Bird Island) and Ile Denis, although it was on Ste Anne that a land base was established in 1914. Mercifully, it was closed down the following year – but more recently there have been reports, based on Bureau of International Whaling statistics, that “in most years between the early 1950s and 1979, Soviet whalers took numbers of sperm whales in the Seychelles/ Amirantes area on their way to the Antarctic”.

I thought of all this the other day when reading a report released at the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) and other conservation groups. Entitled The State of Whale Watching in Latin America, it describes how the whale watching industry – tourists paying to observe whales in their natural environment – has boomed in recent years and brought an enormous amount of revenue for no less than 18 Latin American countries. Between 1998 and 2006, the number of whale watching visits increased from under 250,000 to nearly 900,000, generating some US $80 million from direct ticket sales and close to $280 million from both direct and indirect tourism expenditure (hotels, restaurants, etc.).

“This is a timely reminder of the potential for the whale watching industry to provide a sustainable and long lasting income not only in Latin America, but for hundreds of coastal communities around the world, “ the report’s authors say.

“Responsible whale watching offers substantial, diverse community benefits compared to the narrowly focussed, out-of-touch whaling industry.”

Whale watching is already very much a reality in parts of the Indian Ocean. It has become one of South Africa’s major tourist attractions, with people travelling from all over the world to observe the acrobatics of whales and dolphins off places like Mossel Bay, halfway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Closer to us, at just this time of the year, hundreds of humpback whales migrate from the Antarctic to the waters around Madagascar. They swim past Tôlañaro (Fort Dauphin) and along the channel separating Ile Sainte Marie from the mainland en route to Baie d’Antongil in north-east Madagascar, where they nurse their young and teach them how to feed and swim before heading back south. Most hotels in the vicinity offer boat trips out to see these magnificent “giants of the ocean”.

Humpbacks also pass along the western coast of Madagascar when heading up the Mozambique Channel to Mayotte.  Some of these balenn bos end up at Aldabra, where Seychelles Island Foundation (SIF) rangers have occasionally sighted groups of 15 to 20 right inside the lagoon. Humpbacks, some of which come up as far north as the granitic islands as well, are among the 25 or so species of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) that have been observed in Seychellois waters, the most common being bottlenose dolphins (marswen).

Perhaps one day the efforts of the Ministry of Environment, the Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF), the Island Conservation Society (ICS) and the Marine Conservation Society of Seychelles (MCSS) to protect these marine mammals will be rewarded – and we could have a thriving whale and dolphin watching industry here in Seychelles!
Then our islands would benefit from the economic value of whale watching as a real and more lucrative alternative to hunting whales. And residents and visitors alike would be able to admire and marvel at what Herman Melville himself described so vividly:

…a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror…

By Pat Matyot