AERONAUTICS: Whale Spotting

“. . . I started at a sound so strange, long drawn and musically wild and unearthly, that . . . I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the crosstrees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s lookouts, perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvelous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s. . . . You would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate. . . .

” ‘There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!’ ”

So it was when Moby Dick* was a virile old devil. But intelligence from British Columbia marks the passing of the masthead muezzins. A Victoria whaling company has chartered seaplanes to be carried on shipboard to the whaling grounds, launched overside and sent spinning over the ocean in far circles. High over the sea, air observers can “spot” a whale even though he lurk far below the surface; can flash his nautical bearings even to an invisible whaleship and keep leviathan in sight until the harpoons arrive.

*Semi-fabulous white whale whose demoniac history was recorded by Herman Melville (1819-91). Last week. Author Melville’s home, viewing Mt. Greylock in the Berkshire Mountains near Pittsfield, Mass., was reported to be for sale.