it with a retractable, triangular steel spike. When sharks were spotted, the Comox Post would race to the fishermen’s rescue and lower the blade at their bow to save the endangered gill nets by filleting the giant fish. The device spiked more than forty basking sharks in its first month of operation. The Victoria Daily News declared on June 22, 1955, that “since no commercial use has been found for the shark, their presence in a salmon school is a fisherman’s nightmare.” They were also considered a nightmare for the tourist industry. If their submersible skewer wasn’t handy, the Post followed the same protocol as other large vessels and intentionally rammed the sharks head on—also an effective method of murdering them. Meanwhile, Sunday fishermen happily harpooned the sharks. Some thrill-seekers used them as water skiing ramps and, quite literally, jumped the sharks.
Wildlife was just another limitless Canadian resource, like minerals and trees. The day Newman’s appointment as aquarium boss was announced in the Province, an ad on the same page featured a sketch of an adorable whale spouting water. The whale was the logo for “100% organic blue whale compost and soil conditioner.” Acme Peat Products promised that their whale meal—available “at all garden supply stores”—was “ideal for all phases of gardening and fine green lawns.”
Yes, Canadians loved whales—as fertilizer.
Newman asked the Department of Fisheries to approve his plan. The officials didn’t just offer their blessing but steered Newman toward someone who could shoot the whale and a scientist who could choose the best spot to set up the harpoon.
The whale expert was one of the men who’d inspired Newman to move to British Columbia—Ian McTaggart-Cowan. Now the head of UBC’s Zoology Department—and Canada’s first celebrity scientist (his CBC TV show Fur and Feathers launched in 1955 and set the table for Dr. David Suzuki’s long-running environmentally themed series The Nature of Things)—McTaggart-Cowan suggested the aquarium set up camp on Saturna. There was a spot on the island—East Point— where the water was so deep and the whales were able to swim so close to shore that McTaggart-Cowan hoped to build a research facility there.
For the previous four years, June Fletcher, wife of East Point’s assistant lighthouse keeper, Pete Fletcher, had kept a detailed record of how many whales, seals, and sea lions she saw each day. According to her records, it was rare for a summer day to go by without a pod approaching the shore, and some of those pods numbered fifty or more.
The aquarium’s board put $3000 toward the expedition, and a Vancouver charity offered another $1,000 to the cause. When the project was announced, the media was captivated by the idea of a whale hunt. “The killer whale is more abundant in B.C. waters than anywhere else—it is really a spectacular animal,” Newman told reporters before launching his sea safari. “He deserves to be called king of the beasts more than the lion. He could swallow an African lion whole. The public just isn’t aware of the magnificence of this animal. We want to emphasize and dramatize the whale by making it the primary exhibit in the foyer.”
Newman surprised everyone, especially himself, with his talent for showmanship. According to many people who worked with him, Newman’s greatest skill was making everyone 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
