In Awe of Whales, and in Pain

February 18, 2026

By Derek DiMatteo

The award-winning Fathoms: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs, was the book club’s big read in February. Everyone was glad they read the book. It was incredibly informative and phenomenally well-researched but difficult emotionally. Giggs pulls no punches. Her descriptions of whales and their history left many of us in awe of these amazing creatures, and in pain as we recognized and grappled with the havoc wrought on whale populations by human activity over the last 150 years.

Including the prologue and epilogue, Fathoms contains ten chapters with titles such as Whalefall, Blue Museum, and Sea Pie. Those titles relate only loosely to a chapter’s contents: each chapter is a collection of facts, stories, and philosophical ruminations that swirl around the chapter title’s central idea while escaping any sort of linear organization. Chapter One, for example, is titled “Petroglyph,” which is the term for rock carvings (not paintings) created by chiseling, pecking, or otherwise removing part of the surface of a rock to depict images or convey messages. Giggs describes a specific petroglyph of a whale on a rock located at Balls Head, Waverton in Australia, believed to have been carved by the Cammeraygal people. But the petroglyph is not the main topic of the chapter—it is merely a metaphor for the chapter’s main focus: the significance of whaling within human history, the history of the whaling industry, the resulting defaunation and ecological consequences, and general knowledge about whale products—all of which remain relatively obscure for the vast majority of people, much like the faded carvings of ancient petroglyphs.

One of the most striking passages in the book is of a whale discovered to have swallowed a greenhouse. It reminded me of the photos of sea birds that died and whose decomposing bodies revealed stomachs full of plastic. If birds are eating plastic, then of course it stands to reason that larger animals would too, but it had never occurred to me to consider the difference in scale, and therefore just how more insane an amount of plastic might be trapped in a whale’s stomach. Even more disturbing is that it isn’t just large human-made objects but our industrial toxins that become trapped in whale fat, and that these toxins are passed from mother to child through milk, with the calves taking on 80% of the mother’s toxic load.

Given the difficulties of communicating with whales, it is difficult for humans to comprehend their level of consciousness. What people consider a whale’s “songs” seem to be a whale’s primary vehicle for communication. According to scholars, the language of whale song is a kind of “psycho-social conversation” (p. 153). These songs have been recorded and made available to humans such as through Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970). Yet if these songs, which travel vast distances underwater to reach other whales, begin to disappear due to overwhaling, what remains for those whales still alive are “more unsociable oceans” emptied of the sounds of their kith and kin (p. 38)—a void filled by the noise pollution of mechanized water vehicles and their engines, which disturbs whales’ ability to communicate with potential mates, children, and rivals; disturbs their ability to “see” and to forage via echolocation; and ultimately shrinks their world (pp. 154–155). This noise pollution and the increased ocean traffic of large vessels “can be lethal,” and in most cases a collision “goes unnoticed by anyone aboard” (pp. 167–168). Given the violence that human sea vessels inflict upon whales, we might understand the otherwise inexplicable behavior of adolescent whales ramming boats as evidence of being driven mad, although some explain these whales’ actions not as acts of revenge or temporary insanity but as attempts at curing boredom (Rascoe, NPR).

The question of whale consciousness and its impenetrability recurs throughout the book. Circling back to the beginning, when Giggs describes the death of a beached whale, brings her face-to-face so to speak with the eye of that whale (p. 21). She asks readers to consider the ways in which whales see, think, remember, and suffer. As people heard about the beached whale, they came to see for themselves, in what amounts to a kind of pilgrimage, lining up to look at the dying—and then later, dead—whale. The experience was one that Giggs imagines is marked by a sense of wonder and a sense of awe, but curiously absent a sense or duty of care (p. 22). Her description suggests to me that the feelings of wonder and awe did not amount to the sublime so much as they bordered on the uncanny. She also describes experiencing “a kind of hauntedness…a specter related to environmental change” (p. 23). All the more reason to read this book with Giggs’s exhortation in mind, that we recognize whales as “beings…responsive, cognitively sophisticated animals,” to which we have certain “obligations” as fellow animals (p. 24).

References and Resources

“Balls Head (Waverton) Whale Engraving.” Hiking the World. Undated. https://hikingtheworld.blog/engravings/balls-head-waverton/.

Daniel, Sue. “Archaeological dig reveals mystery death in picturesque Sydney Harbour park.” 1 November 2017. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-02/mystery-burial-aboriginal-woman-balls-head-sydney-curious-sydney/9069892.

Giggs, Rebecca. Fathoms: The World in the Whale. Simon & Schuster, 2020. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fathoms/Rebecca-Giggs/9781982120702.

Payne, Roger. Songs of the Humpback Whale. 1970. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Uj_2Cqb-4.

Rascoe, Ayesha. “How do teenage whales rebel? In the Strait of Gibraltar, by sinking ships.” NPR. May 26, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/26/nx-s1-4981440/how-do-teenage-whales-rebel-in-the-strait-of-gibraltar-by-sinking-ships.

Turns, Anna. “The photo that made the plastics crisis personal.” BBC, 2 June 2023. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230531-the-photo-that-changed-the-worlds-response-to-the-plastics-crisis.

Woods, Catherine. “Mediterranean whales bear the brunt of industry's historic toxins.” PBS, 22 July 2015. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/mediterranean-whales-bear-the-brunt-of-industrys-historic-toxins.