Volume 47, Number 19 · November 30, 2000
The Last Harpoon
By Jonathan Raban
A Whale Hunt: Two Years on the Olympic Peninsula with the Makah and Their Canoe
by Robert Sullivan
Scribner, 283 pp., $25.00
On May 17 last year, just before 7:00 AM, a crew of Makah Indians from Neah Bay, an impoverished reservation village on the extreme northwestern tip of Washington State, harpooned by hand, then shot dead, a gray whale. The sea was calm, with a gentle westerly swell. Drizzle was falling from the low sky, where helicopters carrying reporters and cameramen hovered noisily over the whalers' thirty-five-foot cedar canoe. Close by, a motorized support vessel held the gunman with his .50-caliber rifle. Two boats lay a little way off—one crammed with more newsmen, the other containing biologists from the National Marine Fisheries Service, who were there to see fair play at the kill. Beyond them, a Coast Guard patrol ship stood ready to enforce the five-hundred-yard-wide DMZ between the whalers and the motley fleet of protesters from animal rights and environmental groups. None of the activists had yet, quite, arrived on the scene because of the earliness of the hour, and their fleet had been seriously depleted by the Coast Guard having impounded many of their boats on previous days.
Review, 4288 words
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