Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Yet these are carnivorous animals, voracious in their appetites. They eat mostly cephalopods, but also take tuna and barracuda; entire thirty-foot sharks have been found in their bellies. And they consume in enormous proportions, taking from three to seven hundred squid a day: worldwide, sperm whales eat one hundred million metric tons of fish a year–as much as the annual catch of the entire human marine fishery.

  Diving deeper than any other mammal, we simply do not know how sperm whales behave in the ocean’s depths. We know what they eat, because we find it in their stomachs; but we don’t know how it gets there. Sound is certainly important to their sustenance. Although they lack a voice box–as Thomas Beale noted, ‘The sperm whale is one of the most noiseless of marine animals…it is well known among the most experienced whalers, that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiation of the spout’–the whale possesses the largest sound system of any animal, using one-third of its body to create the loud clicks that it constantly emits when hunting. The whale’s oversized nose is in fact a huge and highly efficient squid-finder.

  As bats send out sonar to find flying insects, so sperm whales send out similar, if rather louder, pulses to locate their prey. Their characteristic clicks are produced by the expansion and contraction of ‘blisters’ on their nasal sacs. It is a remarkably complicated sequence, as Dr Whitehead explains. Two nasal passages run from the external blowhole, the left and the right. The left runs directly to the lungs, but the right passes through a distal air sac via a kind of valve known as the museau du singe, or ‘monkey’s muzzle’.

  Sound is initially generated by air being forced through this valve–not unlike the clicks you can make by hitting the roof of your mouth with your tongue–then passes through the animal’s upper spermaceti organ or ‘case’ before bouncing off another, frontal air sac set at the back of the skull–a bony sound mirror, in effect. This is then redirected and broadcast through a series of acoustic lenses in the ‘junk’, the lower oil-containing organ in the whale’s head. Thus the strange mechanism of the sperm whale’s nose acts as a living amplifier. Some sound also bounces back and forth along the case, producing a second pulse. As this inter-pulse interval is equal to the length of the case, the actual sound created by the whale–the pulses between its clicks–may be a measurement of its physical size; one may tell the length of the animal from the inter-pulse interval, just as the bigger the whale and its head, the more powerful its clicks. Breeding males may size each other up from their clicks, and can tell each other’s sex by the same sound; they are as much a tribal definer as the click speech of the Xhosa of South Africa.

  The clicks, which can be heard for many miles, are important for navigation and communication. They extend the whale’s sensory map far beyond its own body, and their speed and variation change from group to group, as an English dialect changes from Yorkshire to Hampshire. This allows individual whales to identify and communicate with members of their family, evenas they use the earth’s magnetic fields to map out their subaquatic terrain, the peaks and valleys of the oceanic abyss in which they are effortlessly at home. And as they dive–often in an informal group–they use their clicks to locate and scan, with extraordinary precision, the distance, presence and nature of their prey. It is thought that a whale can ‘see’ into its prey, diagnosing it–even to the extent that it can tell if it is pregnant. The returning clicks are ‘heard’ through the dense, hard jaw bone–the same bone from which Ahab’s false leg is carved–and which acts as a listening device in its own right, conducting sound through bioacoustical oils directly to its eardrums. The whale’s external ear is largely useless; the animal hears through its body itself.

  The deeper it dives, the more effective the whale’s senses are, away from the chatter and interference of the world above. A sperm whale can create a two-hundred-decibel boom able to travel one hundred miles along the ‘sofar’ channel, a layer of deep water that readily conducts noise. It seems strange that such a physically enormous creature should rely on something so intangible; but bull sperm whales, by virtue of their larger heads, generate sounds so powerful that they may stun or even kill their prey. These directional acoustic bursts, focused through their foreheads and likened to gunshots, are the equivalent, as one writer notes, of the whale killing its quarry by shouting very loudly at it.

  In their own researches, Soviet scientists, whose nation’s enthusiastic hunting of the sperm whale in the twentieth century allowed ample opportunity for such study, suggested that in order to hunt in the depths where only one per cent of sunlight penetrates below two hundred metres, the whale uses a ‘unique video-receptor system…which lets the animal obtain the image of objects in the acoustic flow of reflected energy even in complete darkness’. In other words, the sperm whale can see its prey in sound. And just when you think nothing else about this animal could confound you, another theory proposes that the whale’s sonic bursts, and the movement of its head, may cause plankton in the deep water to emit their bioluminescence. In the utter darkness, the leviathan may light its own way to its lunch.

  Even as you leave the Tube station, you remain an underground passenger, conducted through a tiled tunnel before emerging into the shadow of an extravagant cathedral of science. Clinging to the terracotta façade–itself layered to resemble geological strata–is an industrial bestiary: heraldic griffins and scaly medieval fish and, most frightening of all, grinning, toothy pterodactyls, with their obscene storks’ beaks and glaring gargoyle eyes and their leathery wings wrapped about them.

  In the gothic nave, children mill about a blackened diplodocus nonchalantly waving its whiplash tail. A hundred years ago, they would have been greeted by another monster, for here stood the skeleton of a sperm whale, guarded by what appeared to be a Victorian policeman as if it were a prisoner at Pentonville.

  The route comes back like a lost memory. I walk past ichthyosaurs sailing through long-vanished Triassic seas and moth-eaten fauna of the savannah and the jungle, displays out of a dead zoo. Abruptly, the corridor turns into a space more like an aircraft hangar than a museum. There, hanging like one of the model aeroplanes I used to suspend from my bedroom ceiling, is the blue whale, the largest object in the Natural History Museum.

  Contrary to the usual tricks of childhood recollection, it is actually bigger than I remember. Nearly one hundred feet long from the tip of its nose to its twenty-foot flukes, the whale could easily accommodate a large household within its interior. There is something fairy-tale about it, an invention of the Brothers Grimm: its huge mouth has a faint grin, and its disproportionately small eye stares out from its wrinkled socket, part amused, part pleading. Even Linnæus’s name for it is a little Swedish joke: Balænoptera musculus–Balæna meaning whale, pteron, wing or fin, and musculus, both muscular, and mouse.

  I was fooled by this model then, as visitors are now, for this wood and plaster reconstruction is only an approximation of a blue whale, a much more streamlined animal than this bloated model gives credit. Constructed in the 1930s, before anyone had seen an entire living whale in its element, the creators of this whalish effigy relied on carcases hauled out of the water, where they lay deflated like old inner tubes, incapable of bespeaking their true beauty. Like the dinosaurs of Crystal Palace–where we went on another family pilgrimage, to see concrete iguanodons and plesiosaurs stranded in a suburban park–London’s magnificent whale is an object of error and mystification. As a boy, I assumed that inside the model was the animal’s skeleton, like a cathedral tomb containing the bones of a saint. In fact, the whale is hollow, and was made using plaster and chicken wire over a wooden frame constructed on site–as if the great hall had been built around it.

  The idea of a new Whale Hall for the museum had been posited as far back as 1914, but war put a stop to it. The project was revived in 1923, when the museum’s pioneering director, Sidney Harmer, called the Trustees’ attention to ‘the inadequacy of the exhibited ser
ies of the larger whales. The subject of whaling is very much in the air at the present time,’ he noted, and he reminded the Trustees that they had ‘frequently expressed their sympathy with efforts to protect whales from extinction’.

  Warming to his theme–on three sheets of pale blue foolscap paper–Harmer declared that ‘under such circumstances it would be natural to expect that such species as the Greenland Whale, the Blue Whale and the Humpback Whale would be illustrated in the Whale Room…to give the visitor a satisfactory idea of what these three important species are like’. It was even suggested that government grants for the relief of unemployment and men disabled by the war might be used. However, the primary reason for the new hall was to promote the work being done by the Discovery expeditions in South Georgia, where scientists were conducting their investigations alongside the British whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean.

  It took almost a decade for Harmer’s spectacular vision to be realized. In June 1929 the new hall was announced–complete with a glass roof framed with steel girders, in the Modernist style–but was not completed until 1931. To fill this grand new space, a life-size whale was proposed, and so in 1933 the museum decided to commission a Norwegian engineer to procure a blue whale, hang it by its tail in an engraving dock, and take a mould of it. The expense of this ambitious scheme was to be allayed by selling the blubber and by marketing models made from the mould to American museums; however, its decidedly ‘experimental nature’ meant that it too was abandoned.

  Five years later, in April 1937, the museum’s Technical Assistant and taxidermist, Percy Stammwitz, suggested that he should make the model in the hall itself. Stammwitz and his son, Stuart, spent nearly two years creating the blue whale, to measurements taken by the scientists in South Georgia. Giant paper patterns, like a dressmaker’s kit, were used to cut out transverse sections in wood, which were then connected at three-foot intervals with slats. Over this armature wire netting was laid to take the final plaster coat; Stuart himself would paint the whale’s eye. It was a long and laborious task, and during its construction the workers used its interior as their canteen–much as Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had given a New Year’s Eve dinner in his half-built iguanodon in 1853, a party of scientists that one periodical portrayed as modern Jonahs swallowed by the monster.

  As it rose from its timber foundations, the model resembled a huge ship whose keel had been laid down in the museum’s hall, an ark ready for the launch to save the museum’s species before the flood; or perhaps an inter-war airship, about to be inflated with helium for a transatlantic crossing. Indeed, when it was suspended from the ceiling, painters working on the whale complained that it swayed so much that it made them seasick.

  The finished article looked so realistic that The Times thought it would ‘no doubt be mistaken for a “stuffed” whale by the casual visitor’. On its completion in December 1938, just before the outbreak of war, a telephone directory and coins of the realm were placed inside the model as a kind of time capsule. Thus, on the eve of host-ilities, the placid whale became a memorial to a brief peace, a cetacean cenotaph. It was a giant good luck charm, too, for the warders who put pennies on its flukes to encourage visitors to do the same, much as they might throw coins in a fountain for luck. When the museum closed for the evening, the warders scooped up the takings and spent them in the pub.

  Now there is a notice on one side, and, next to it, a twenty-pence and a ten-pence piece lie on the plaster flukes.

  Please do not throw coins on the whale’s tail. It causes damage. Thank you.

  Other models were made to supplement the display, Stammwitz’s initial attempts to stuff dolphins having proved as unsuccessful as earlier attempts to mould a blue whale. They have been replaced in turn by a flotilla of fibreglass cetaceans, from a tiny Ganges River dolphin to a primeval-looking Sowerby’s beaked whale, all following their leader as if one night she might break open the wall of the gallery and guide her charges down to the Thames and out to sea. Until then, there they hang, biding their time, watching the school parties with their beady glass eyes.

  Below the Whale Hall, in the belly of the building, Richard Sabin, the curator of sea mammals, takes me through automatic doors that lock like a spaceship behind us, sealing the climate-controlled area from the world outside. I follow him, past ranks of giant grey lockers reaching from floor to ceiling. As he opens door after door, their contents are revealed: sections of cetaceans preserved in alcohol and labelled with their Latin binomials, Phocœna phocœna, Tursiops truncatus, Balænoptera physalus. One container, the size of a small fish tank, holds a humpback fœtus; with its mouth agape and its pallid skin, it looks more like a rubber toy.

  The end of the corridor opens into a wide room lined with shelves on which stand jars of pale brown liquid, a sharp contrast to the flickering white hum of the lights overhead. Crammed into each glass column is an animal, ghoulishly bottled like a pickled gherkin. A spiny anteater’s spikes twist as it tries to climb out of its transparent prison with its rodent paws. A severed shark’s head sits at the bottom of a wide jar, staring reproachfully. Plunged in another is the scaly carcase of a coelacanth, still swimming in seas tinted tobacco by the immensity of time.

  It is the stuff of my nightmares, and as I reach the end of a row of specimens–some collected by Darwin himself, and all ordered and classified with handwritten luggage labels as if ready for transit elsewhere–I back away from a big, bug-eyed bony fish which someone has left lying nonchalantly on the side, only to find my way blocked by a series of closed metal vats like pans in a canteen kitchen, all the more intimidating for the photocopied labels that indicate their invisible contents: entire dolphins and infant whales. None of these terrors, however, can compare to the gigantic plate-glass tank that runs half the length of the room, supported on bier-like struts. Inside, suspended in a mixture of formalin and sea water, is Architeuthis dux–the giant squid, mythical enemy of the sperm whale.

  It looks strangely spectral as it lies there, the faintly green glow a pale mockery of its ruddiness in life. Rudely yanked to the surface by Falklands fishermen in the Southern Ocean, it was frozen like a giant fish finger and shipped to Hull before being brought here, to the cellars of South Kensington. At twenty-eight feet long, this specimen is by no means the largest: in 1880, a squid measuring sixty-one feet was caught in Island Bay, New Zealand. Some may grow even larger. Nelson Cole Haley, sailing on the whale-ship Charles W. Morgan from 1849 to 1853, claimed to have seen three huge squid swimming together off the northwest coast of New Zealand, one of which he estimated to be three hundred feet long.

  ‘One might say this is a big fish story,’ acknowledged Haley of this monstrous procession; but he had seen many whales and other creatures, and ‘although I might have been frightened at what I saw, I had not lost my head so much but I could use my poor judgement about their appearance as well as ever’. He had no doubt that what he saw were ‘wonderful monsters of the deep’. Science may yet confirm Haley’s apparitions: recent acoustic studies have identified a ‘bloop’ sound from the depths which could only be made by a very large animal, and which may be a massive squid hundreds of feet in length, far bigger than a blue whale.

  To sailors, these creatures were the original kraken, the sea monsters of myth, ‘strange spectres’ believed able to drag entire ships down to the deep. It was as though nature had created a fitting opponent for the whale. On her own hunt for Moby Dick, the Pequod encounters a ‘great white mass’ rising lazily to the surface, a creature so large that it becomes a living landscape: ‘A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.’

  As the word ‘whale’ evokes poetic wholeness, so ‘squid’ seems expressive of fragmentary, faceless evil; and as this ‘unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life’ sinks with a ‘low suc
king sound’, Ishmael seems to shudder, too. ‘So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all…declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale its only food.’ But here in a London basement, the monster lies embalmed in its glass coffin, a legend reduced to the status of a dead fish.

  It is an enormous intestinal tangle of flesh, frayed by its harsh treatment in the trawl. From its long mantle eight arms reach out in a now mushy cordage; they are studded with vicious circular suckers and barbs that could brand a whale’s hide. Nestling at their roots are the squid’s mandibles, hard and strong and shiny as a parrot’s beak and made of chitinous material; as phallic as it is, there is more than a little of the vagina dentata about this monster. In its removal from the dark oceanic columns to this controlled vitrine, its huge eyes, more than a foot in diameter to allow in optimal light, have shrunk into their sockets, depriving the specimen of whatever character it once possessed, blinding it to its fate. Cephalopods have highly developed nervous systems; one reason for the animal’s beak is the need to chew up its food into smaller chunks; as the œsophagus passes perilously close to the brain, an ill-considered meal might damage it. These are truly alien animals: squid also possess two hearts.

  Feeling their way ahead, a pair of twenty-foot tentacles extend beyond the body, at least as long as the animal again. Far from being a passive victim, Soviet scientists suggested that the giant squid may actively wrap its tentacles around a sperm whale’s head, clamping shut its jaws and even attempting to seal its blowhole, the dread of every cetacean. Few humans can claim to have witnessed such a battle. In his book, The Cruise of the Cachalot, Frank Bullen tells how the New Bedford whale-ship on which he was serving was sailing in the Indian Ocean. Late into the night watch and under a bright moon, he saw a great commotion in the sea, far off. At first he thought it might be an erupting island. Then, through field glasses, he saw a great sperm whale battling a giant squid. The cephalopod’s arms had created a kind of net around the whale’s black columnar head, while the whale was mechanically chewing its way through its assailant. Bullen woke the captain to come and see this once-in-a-lifetime sight; his master merely cursed him and went back to sleep.