You could call her Ishmael. In a remote corner of the South Pacific, Jemma Cooper was one of four sailors on board the Tai Tam, a 52ft yacht, when she heard a thud. Her husband, Jeremy, was below deck and the crash was enough to wake him.

“The whole boat was pushed sideways,” she said. She was thrown from the helm by the force of a blow from a sperm whale, which started a round-the-clock fight for survival about 250 nautical miles north of the tiny Norfolk Island. “We looked out to our port side,” she said, “and there were six to eight — a pod of whales there. So then it became clear that that’s what it was.”

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