A drone captured footage of a North Atlantic right whale breeching in the water off of Cape Cod in early April 2019. It was a rare sight. According to the Ocean Conservancy, there are only about 440 right whales left on the planet. An article by the Conservancy says the whales are so named because they were the “right” whales for whalers looking to make a profit off of whale oil and blubber. They’ve been hunted since the 10th century.

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville devotes the entirety of Chapter 75: The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View to compare an contrast the right and sperm whales’ heads and concludes: “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.” Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher interested in knowledge of a transcendent being, namely, God.