We were along to deliver eight ventilated boxes of African Jackass penguins back to their rookery. The 24 birds were among the last of almost 40,000 penguins that were rescued from a devastating spill after the wreck of the oil tanker M.V. Treasure four months ago.
The Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, the International Fund for Animals and hundreds of volunteers like Captain See mobilized to clean them up and return them to the sea. They picked up the contaminated birds one by one, brought them to shore, hand washed them with solvents to remove the oil and fed, shampooed and brought them back to strength before returning them in boxes to their rookery on Robben Island, as we were doing now.
Off our bow, the flat rock of Nelson Mandela’s former prison hovered into view. A succession of white apartheid governments forced the man who would become the first black president of South Africa to spend almost a third of his life within distant sight across the waters of Cape Town and the continent of Africa. Robben Island was also the first European foothold in sub-Saharan Africa and perhaps symbolically, it also served as a leper colony and an asylum for the insane.
Where the doomed had once stepped off boats onto this man-created purgatory, we dropped off the Jackass penguins at the pier. Other volunteers would return the birds to their rookery, and we waved goodbye. We were heading back, when Captain See’s boating mate and bright 17-year-old daughter, Samantha, spotted whales. These were Southern Right whales, so named by early whalers because they were the “right” kind to kill for the high volume of oil in their blubber. Their numbers drastically reduced even now, the Southern Right whales swim these warmer summer waters at the southern tip of Africa calving and resting. In winter, they migrate three thousand miles south to feed in the krill-rich waters of Antarctica. We held out little hope of more than a distant glimpse.
Molly, Fraser and Charlie stood in the bow by the rails, catching the sea spray and the brisk wind. Suddenly, we were in amongst a whale pod–three, six, eight of them cruising in ranks. They showed their flukes, and one of them, for a reason known only to it, befriended our boat. Huge, gnarled and dark, it swam up close and showed the size and power of its fins as it rolled over on its side perhaps to better see us leaning way over the boat’s deck. It blew out its spout, and we were breathing the mist of whale’s breath: a pleasant and vaguely fishy smell from deep within a friendly leviathan’s own lungs.
Molly was enchanted. Charlie could not stop herself from screaming out with glee. The whale rolled over within three feet of Fraser’s touch, and with nothing but a thin wire separating whale from boy, suddenly the whale blew out its spout with a mighty snort. The two sets of its blowhole’s lips parted and then clamped back together. The air was clouded with thin salty spray. The whale’s dark, saucer-sized right eye stared at Fraser. The frozen look on his face told me that he had finally met his match. He was awed without having to utter the word.
