Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...YEAR OF THE WHALE, by Victor B. Scheffer. The most awesome of mammals has been left alone by literary men almost since Moby Dick. Now Dr. Scheffer, a scientist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes of the whales' life cycle and the mysterious deep with a mixture of fact and feeling that invokes Melville's memory...
Zoology's general rule is that no animal dies of old age. But the whale may come as close as any. For the whale has no "natural" enemies, in the sense of larger animals that habitually feed on him. Only when young or when attacked by his own kind does he need to flee. Though scarred by the sucking disks of the octopus, bitten by the squid, carrying the buried bills of swordfish, a few of this year's crop of calf whales may survive to be 75. But most of those that escape the whalers' harpoons...
Unrecorded Death. In this respect, at least, a whale's death resembles a human's, and takes on something of the tragedy of the unheroic and unnoticed. In a remarkable passage reconstructing the death of a whale tangled in an underground cable off Ecuador, Dr. Scheffer writes: "His is an unrecorded death, for the cable does not break. The soft words flow around his grave; the messages of life and death, the loving words and stupid words, and pesos up and pesos down. . . . The luminescent beasts and the dark beasts and the beasts in between come...
...subject is a whale; the insight is into man. For Dr. Scheffer's supreme achievement is to take the king of the ocean's beasts, careering half-blindly across the world's seas, and cast him as Lear...
...have. The female lead, Susan Channing, as the Devil, superb actress she is, was so wonderfully bratty, saucy and puckish that it is hard to imagine what liberties she will take when she has fully mastered her part. Michael Dobbson clowns splendidly in a mime of Jonah and the whale--a mime set to cello music in a kind of Mayeresque Peter and the Wolf...