This remarkable watercolor speaks to the intimacy of killing in the age of American whaling. Whalers were aware of the intensely social lives of whales, especially sperm whales…that like them whales cared for their young. In the background, men are harpooning an already injured small whale. In the foreground, a mother struggles to save her mortally wounded child. Blood gushes from a harpoon wound and from its blowhole, turning the azure sea red. There is a sense of enormous sadness and desperation, even mourning, as the child expends its last breath. New research affirms what nineteenth-century whalers knew: the emotional lives of whales.