Porphyrios (whale)

This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.

Then the darkness parted, and he came. Huge he was, white and gray, burned onto the depths like an afterimage of the sun. His silent wings rippled, rills of current flowing off their tips. His eyes were thin and slitted like a cat’s, his mouth a bloodless slash. I stared. When I had stepped into the water, I had told myself that this would be only

Pirates in the ancient world were both an endemic menace and a usefully unspecific figure of fear, not far different from the modern ‘terrorist’ – including anything from the navy of a rogue state to small-time human traffickers.

Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.

Off the southeastern coast of Iceland sits a low barrier island called Papós. Treeless and rocky, perpetually clobbered by gales howling off the North Atlantic, it takes its name from its first settlers, now long gone, the Irish monks known as papar.

The sound of sudden inhalation followed, like water being sucked down a drain. I caught a glimpse of a pinkish gray hump before it vanished beneath the murky surface. “Boto,” said Soldado as he tossed his cigarette butt over the railing. The legendary Amazonian river dolphin. It surfaced again, and this time the animal sprayed water ten feet into t

The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.