Margot had mentioned. He should have known Hoover would get him into trouble. The famous talking seal had been dead for twenty-three years, and his story had been all but forgotten until Kemp had reignited interest in the phenomenon and the controversy around it.
He used Hoover in his off-campus sessions with the students. He would take them to the aquarium café in Coldharbor, buy them all coffee and promise to answer any question they chose. One question always came up. How do you know seals are so intelligent; how can you be sure they really communicate with each other; animal noises are just animal noises, aren’t they?
So he would tell them the story of Hoover, a seal that not only spoke English but did so in a Maine accent: ‘Good morning,’ ‘How are ya?’ ‘Whaddya doing?’ ‘Gedd over here,’ and so forth were standard greetings to visitors to the Boston aquarium where Hoover lived most of his adult life.
An orphaned pup, Hoover had been picked up shortly after birth by a Maine fisherman. He had been taken home, put in the bathtub and bought up as the family pet. He was given the name Hoover because of the huge quantity of fish he ate. Even for a fisherman, the expense of feeding a seal soon became too much, and Hoover was given to the New England Aquarium in Boston. And that was where he started talking to anyone who cared to listen.
The jaw structure and vocal cords of a seal are very much like those of a human, Leo explained to his students. The scientific explanation for what Hoover could do was clear. He had simply heard the fisherman and his family talking, and had learnt to mimic their speech. It was still a pretty remarkable achievement for a seal. Hoover remained the only non-human mammal ever to vocalise in this way. The media loved him, and he became the subject of many newspaper and magazine articles, and appeared on TV and radio shows. But marine scientists did not appreciate Hoover. To them he was just a freak, a distraction. When Hoover died in 1985, he was paid the tribute of an obituary in the Boston Globe.
And then, years later, when Hoover had been almost forgotten, along came Leo Kemp, with his argument that to dismiss a talking seal as a freak of nature demonstrated exactly the kind of arrogance that Galileo had encountered when he argued that the sun did not revolve around the earth. That may have been stretching it a bit, but the marine science establishment got the point, and they hated him for making it. Leo didn’t mind. The important thing was that some of his students got the point too. An animal that can learn to mimic English is a highly intelligent creature.
That wasn’t good enough for Jacob Sylvester and Rachel Ginsberg, who seemed to have become his girlfriend. They were regulars at the Q. and A. sessions, along with a quiet red-haired Brit, Duncan Dudman, who spoke with a deep West Country accent, which the American students could not get enough of. It came from Somerset, where the cider apples grow, he explained.
‘A seal that can talk is just serendipity,’ said Sylvester, straight from the shoulder as usual. ‘Parrots can talk. Doesn’t prove they’re intelligent. I can’t see you proved your point, sir.’
Leo rolled out the heavy artillery.
‘Consider these facts,’ he said, looking at Sylvester, ‘and then tell me how you rate the intelligence of a seal. There are two types of killer whale – those that feed only on salmon, and those that seek out seals, dolphins and other whales. The behaviour of these two separate populations of killer whales is so different that they are essentially different species. But they all look exactly alike to the untrained eye – black, with a white belly patch extending up the flanks, a white patch behind the eyes and another behind the dorsal fin. Only small variations in the skin patterns and the shape of the dorsal fin distinguish the two varieties of orca.
‘So here is the question: If the difference between the two species of orca is that minute, how is it that seals can differentiate between a deadly foe and its harmless cousin? How do the seals know that there are killer whales within threateningly close range of their pod? A seal’s whiskers are like underwater radar, and can pick up minute vibrations or changes of water pressure, converting those signals into data about the presence of food or foe, or a sudden change in the weather.
‘Could it be that the seals’ acute hearing or its radar whiskers can pick up the whales’ own echo-locating communications and decode them?
‘Either way,’ said Leo, ‘the seals always seek shelter in the tumbling surf close to shore when killer whales are nearby. That way they block the whales’ locating signals.’
‘That’s definitely not serendipity,’ said Duncan.
Leo looked at Jacob Sylvester. God, the arrogance of the boy. He could never admit there might be another viewpoint than his own.
‘OK, I take your point,’ he said finally.
Joe Buckland, known to everyone for as long as he could remember as Buck, was a mile off South Chatham on his gillnet boat with nets out for flounder, bass, maybe squid, when the call came to get the tug ready for a field trip the next morning. Buck turned his boat towards shore, grumbling to himself. He liked the money – the Institute paid $400 for a four-hour trip, exclusive of fuel – but why the short notice? He had other things to do.
When his father had bought the Antoine from the docks at Boston after the Second World War, everyone had laughed. It wasn’t a proper tug, because the builders had gone broke in the Depression and had left the superstructure half finished, with a two-storey plywood box cabin and a bow that reared up like a wounded stag. The Antoine was now 80 years old, an ocean workhorse that for years had shipped out of Boston to salvage and assist wrecked or disabled ships in rough seas off the east coast. Locals joked that she should have been in a museum, but Buck said she was as much an American classic as the 1948 Chevrolet, and just as able to do the job.
His father had died in 1952 when Buck was 18. The Antoine was all he left his son. Once it became clear that the tug was going to make him some money Buck had torn down the old plywood cabin and built a proper superstructure, fitting for a standard seagoing tug of its day: a two-level deckhouse with the second level split between the open Texas deck and the pilothouse, the highest point on the tug. Here, polished to perfection, was the equipment he had bought second-hand from the breakers’ yards: a large manual wooden wheel, the smaller brass power wheel, the polished oak binnacle for the compass. Only the ship-to-shore radio was new.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ his father’s friends had asked. He had his answer when the Institute chartered the tug to take research students up the coast, and occasionally far out into the Atlantic. That was in the early fifties, when the first postgrad students were arriving at Coldharbor. The Antoine had paid for herself many times over since then. Now she was on permanent charter to the Institute, and Buck had a regular income, unlike some fishermen, who were reduced to scrabbling for clams at low tide in the off season.
He still fished from March to October, and had his own line of lobster pots out in the season; lobsters were good business, but the money was not regular because the bureaucrats in the Fisheries Department kept changing the weight and size of permitted take. Worse still, they were now charging up to $100,000 a year for a general fishing licence.
Buck had been lucky. He had spent his best years in a business he loved. Now the fish stocks were declining – and Buck well knew whose fault that was – and the industry was dying. Young men still came into the business, but he wondered what for.
His passion for fishing had begun at the age of 8, when his grandfather let him use a small rowing boat on a lake near his home in Massachusetts. It was when Buck was allowed out night fishing on his own that his young world changed.
The Cape Herald had interviewed him some years before as the oldest working fisherman on the Cape. Sandy Rowan was a
