'Canary Islands Snorkelers 1973'

ARTIST: William Louis ("Bill") McDonald

TIME: Circa 15 SEPTEMBER 1973

AGE: Two days after the start of my fifth-grade school year in California at age eleven-and-a-half in mid-September. I attended El Dorado School in Orange, California that year.

NOTE: I was eleven when I made this render and while I was successful in conveying a foreshortened diver's eye view of the whale, I rendered the whale's tail flukes badly from both proportions and configuration and I screwed up both flippers, drawing them out cartoonishly like in an "Aquaman" comic, rendering them inaccurately from an anatomical perspective. I still had a lot to learn at age eleven about sperm whale anatomy as well as for drawing people.

LOCATION: This drawing was made during a ten hour layover in Boston allowing a road trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. The New Bedford Whaling Museum is a museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, United States that focuses on the history, science, art, and culture of the international whaling industry, and the "Old Dartmouth" region in the South Coast of Massachusetts.

I also visited the Seaman's Bethel chapel where the names of all of the New Bedford whalers who were killed on those long two-to-six year voyages around the globe, and later all area fishermen; all are noted on the walls of the bethel. The Seamen's Bethel was specifically constructed for the many sailors who called New Bedford their home port (mostly whalers), who considered it a matter of tradition that one visited the chapel before setting sail.

INSPIRATION: Conversations with local free-divers in Tenerife, Canary Islands and in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on the Island of Gran Canaria during an eighteen hour layover before flying on to Paris before changing planes for Boston Logan International Airport.

I was becoming extraordinarily frustrated with the incredibly stupid looking whale drawings in nearly every book I could find, even in the Jacques Yves Cousteau books, as well as the fact that the only sperm whale photos available were either just breaking the surface at a distance from the boat or were carcasses of hunted and killed Physeter macrocephalus sperm whales ready for flensing (cutting up).

They explained how native Canary Islanders still hunted sperm whales by hand in open longboats, while they, the snorkelers occasionally got lucky and were approached by one or more sperm whales from a passing pod.

The Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of northwestern Africa, are rugged volcanic isles known for their black- and white-sand beaches. The eight main islands are (from largest to smallest in area) Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro and La Graciosa. Tenerife, the largest island, is dominated by the sometimes-snowy active volcano Mt. Teide, which has its own astronomical observatory and is part of Teide National Park.