3 - Leviathan’s Families

Summary

In late 1805, the members of the United States government’s Lewis and Clark expedition became the first Americans to travel overland to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Greeting the expedition with endless rain and cold, the Pacific largely disappointed. But, there was one moment of intense interest. On 5 January 1806, the group received word from the Clatsop Indians in present-day Oregon that a huge whale carcass had washed ashore at a place called Ecola, the local word for cetaceans. Expedition leader William Clark headed out to see it, but as he readied to leave, a woman named Sacagawea insisted on coming with him. A former slave who had lived her entire life inland among the Rocky Mountains, Sacagawea was the expedition’s only Native American, only woman, and only member to have brought a child. ‘She observed’, the logbook notes, ‘that she had travelled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either.’¹ Clark found the request pushy and importunate, disruptive of the racial and gender hierarchies that reigned on the expedition. Nevertheless, he relented. After a laborious day of hiking, the two were led to the rotting remains of a whale Clark measured at 35 metres long, surely a blue whale, the largest animal ever to have lived on Earth.