Cetacean Relations
The similarities between humans and dolphins have fascinated writers for a very long time. Several scholars in the classical period noted that these species share physiological and behavioral characteristics. For instance, in his History of Animals (ca. 350 BCE), Aristotle describes dolphins as live-bearing animals that nourish their young with milk.
The dolphin, the whale, and the other Cetacea, as many as have no gills but a blowhole instead, are viviparous…. None of these is to be seen carrying eggs; they omit this stage, and begin with the actual fetation, which becomes articulated and gives rise to the young animal, exactly as occurs with the human species and the viviparous quadrupeds. … Both dolphin and porpoise have milk and suckle their young…. [The dolphin’s] offspring accompany it for a considerable time; in fact, it is an animal that dotes on its children.
Similarly, Pliny the Elder claims in his Natural History (77-79 CE) that dolphins exhibit social behaviors resembling those found in human families, including monogamous, heterosexual coupling and affection for their “little ones.”
This is to be noted in them, that for the most part they sort themselves by couples like man & wife. They are with young nine months, and in the tenth bring forth their little ones, and lightly in summertime; and otherwhiles [i.e. sometimes] they have two little dolphins at once. They suckle them at their teats, like as the whales or the balænes do: yea and so long as their little ones are so young that they be feeble, they carry them to and fro about them: nay when they are grown to be good big ones, yet they bear them company still a long time, so kind and loving be they to their young.
A myth appearing in the Homeric Hymns (ca. 7th century BCE, actual authorship unknown) imagines an even closer relationship between the two species. In this narrative, which was taken up by several later writers such as Lucian and Ovid, the god Dionysius transforms a group of hostile pirates into dolphins.
- … On the hatches he
- Appear’d a terrible lion, horribly
- Roaring, and in the mid-deck a male bear
- Made with a huge mane, making all for fear
- Crowd to the stern about the master there,
- Whose mind he still kept dauntless and sincere.
- But on the captain rushed and ramped [i.e. reared], with force
- So rude and sudden that his main recourse
- Was to the main-sea straight, and after him
- Leapt all his mates, as trusting to their swim
- To fly foul death; but so found what they fled,
- Being all to dolphins metamorphosed.
- The master he took ruth of, saved, and made
- The blessedest man that ever tried his trade,
- These few words giving him: “Be confident
- Thou God-inspir’d pilot! In the bent
- Of my affection, ready to requite
- Thy late-to-me-intended benefit.
- I am the Roaring God, of spritely wine,
- Whom Semele (that did even Jove incline
- To amorous mixture, and was Cadmus’s care)
- Made issue to the mighty Thunderer.”
Drawing on the myth of Dionysius and the pirates, Steve Mentz argues that dolphins enabled early modern writers to imagine how humans might colonize the oceans.
‘Half-Fish, Half-Flesh’: Dolphins, the Ocean, and Early Modern Humans
In the expanding transoceanic context of early modern England, dolphins and dolphin-stories present rich fantasies about humanity’s ability to live near, or perhaps in, the unstable and inhospitable ocean. This oceanic vision was timely for early modern Europeans whose maritime vanguard was just embarking upon its world-circling expansion. …
For most early modern writers, the narrative core from which dolphin stories emerged was these creatures’ human origin. … This mammalian closeness to humans … fuels dolphin stories in the early modern period. Being oceanic but formerly terrestrial makes these creatures ideal figures through which to speculate about the imaginative consequences of European expansion onto the water-filled globe.
Like their predecessors, early modern writers tended to emphasize the parallels between dolphins and humans. Natural histories from this period often contain illustrations of fetal dolphins (e.g., Guillaume Rondelet, Libri de piscibus marinis… [Lyon: Mathias Bonhomme, 1554], p. 459) and the first book by the comparative anatomist Pierre Belon (1517–1564) includes a description of a dolphin’s brain under the heading “Que toute l’anatomie du cerueau du Daulphin, conuienne en toutes ses parties auec celuy de l’homme” (that all the anatomy of the dolphin’s brain corresponds in all its parts with that of man). Belon also provides a remarkable drawing of a dolphin skull.
Pierre Belon, L’histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins…, vol. 2, (Paris: Regnaud Chaudiere, 1551), fol. 38r. Biodiversity Heritage Library, Public Domain.
Belon’s particular interest in dolphin brains speaks to a broader issue among natural philosophers, namely the question of nonhuman cognition. Early modern writers typically drew a firm boundary between humans and other species based on what they viewed as a unique human characteristic: the capacity for rational thought. This trait elevated humans above all other species, as Erica Fudge explains in Brutal Reasoning.
Simply put, the human possession of reason places humans above animals in the natural hierarchy. Reason reveals humans’ immortality, and animals’ irrationality reveals their mortality, their materiality. Reasonable humans are the gods on earth.
Yet like dogs, which respond to human commands, and parrots, with their ability to mimic human speech, dolphins could act in ways that undermined an absolute human/nonhuman distinction. Indeed, many of the behaviors that Pulter and other writers associated with dolphins—love, loyalty, wisdom, wooing—resemble the outward manifestations of human reason.
These ambiguous cases often made scholars all the more determined to establish rationality as the defining trait of humans, even as they continued to speculate about the emotional lives of nonhuman species. In Renaissance Beasts, Fudge elaborates on this tension between the objectification of animals and the concept of nonhuman sentience.
Thus an instrumental attitude, by which animals are objectified, coexists with concepts of the frailty of humanity as a species and the shared sentience of human and animal. … But the boundary between human and animal is also, and inevitably, firmly reiterated throughout the period. Where there is a fear of the collapse of difference, there is also an urgent need to reiterate human superiority.