Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Epes Ellery of Gloucester, shipmaster, witnessed ‘the upper part of his head, and I should say about forty feet of the animal…I was looking at him with a spy-glass, when I saw him open his mouth, and his mouth appeared like that of the serpent; the top of his head appeared flat…He appeared to be amusing himself though there were several boats not far from him.’

  In their deliberations, the committee consulted historical accounts such as that of Bishop Pontoppidan’s Natural History of Norway of 1755. The cleric recorded that experienced seamen found it strange to be asked if such creatures existed; he might as well have asked if there were such fish as cod or eel. Bearing such evidence in mind, the Linnæans declared ‘the foregoing testimony sufficient to place the existence of the animal beyond a doubt’.

  It was a remarkable conclusion, and as if to mark it, a second serpent was seen in Long Island Sound that October, ‘perhaps not more than a half mile from the shore, a long, rough, dark-looking body, progressing rapidly up sound (towards New York)’. One witness watched through his telescope as its back, forty or fifty feet of which was visible, rose above the surface, ‘irregular, uneven, and deeply indented’. It was a somehow horrifying scene, of a monster approaching Manhattan, and was revisited later when another was seen eighty miles up the Hudson River. A further sighting off Nahant, Boston, was witnessed by at least two hundred people.

  Over the following years, these creatures reappeared in the same waters, as though summoned by the same upwelling of food that brought the whales to the Gulf of Maine. In May 1833, for instance, five officers of the British garrison out fishing for the day in Mahone Bay off Halifax were surprised by a school of pilot whales ‘in an unusual state of excitement and which in their gambols approached so close to our little craft that some of the party amused themselves by firing at them with rifles’.

  Only then did the officers realize that the whales were fleeing ‘some denizen of the deep’ two hundred yards behind. Its movements were ‘precisely like those of a common snake, in the act of swimming, the head so elevated and thrown forward by the curve of the neck, as to enable us to see the water under and beyond it’. The creature was estimated at one hundred feet in length.

  That August, the British consul watched a similar animal from a hotel terrace in Boston: ‘above a hundred persons saw it at the same time’. One was even seen at Herring Cove in Provincetown, apparently enticed by the presence of fish and warmer waters. No less a person than Senator Daniel Webster saw a monster off Plymouth, a sighting recorded in Thoreau’s Cape Cod, along with the politician’s urgent request to fellow anglers never to mention a word of the encounter, lest he spend his life being asked about it. Little wonder that the serpent was a topic of conversation at the luncheon party after Melville and Hawthorne met on Monument Mountain; or that down in Carolina, another monster caused a sensation when it swam up the Broad River into one of its tributaries which was barely a hundred yards wide, chased all the while by a party of men shooting at it with rifles.

  Throughout the century, from all corners of the globe, there were sightings of sea serpents. Surely not even the sceptical could dismiss them as a conspiracy of fools? Spectators swore to the same details: a huge, long-necked animal, able to swim faster than the fastest whale. Precise locations were given, in latitude and longitude, marking these appearances at exact moments in time, to be entered in ship’s logs, and relayed in newspaper paragraphs. Such was the evidence surrounding the sea serpent that when Henry Dewhurst published his Natural History of the Cetacea in 1834, he included it as fact, ‘one of those unknown animals which occasionally puzzle the zoologist when they make their appearance’.

  Scanning the yellowing columns of newsprint, it is remarkable to see how often such mythical animals rear their head, and what a debate raged around the possibility of their existence. The most famous encounter came on 6 August 1848, when the crew of HMS Dœdalus, en route from the Cape of Good Hope to St Helena, watched ‘an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea’. Sixty feet of the animal was visible à fleur d’eau, as Captain McQuhæ, stirred to poetic French by the apparition, described it. The creature (which to me looks rather like a giant slow worm) passed so close that had it been ‘a man of my acquaintance’, the captain added, ‘I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye’. Readers of the Illustrated London News thrilled to a double-page spread on the subject, along with the testimony of an officer of the Royal Navy.

  But of all these accounts, it is those that describe interaction with whales that most terrify and intrigue; not least because, in such company, they seem to disprove the assertions of experts who claimed that what experienced sailors saw were in fact whales, sharks, porpoises, or even elephant seals. In June 1818 eighteen passengers and the captain of the packet Delia, sailing off Cape Ann, watched a sea serpent battling a humpback whale, the creature rearing its head and tail twenty-five feet out of the water. In July 1887 a monster was seen fighting what was presumed to be a cetacean off the Maine coast; the following morning, a dying whale was found stranded nearby, ‘its flesh torn and gashed’. The most extraordinary report, however, came from the South Atlantic in 1875.

  On 8 January, off Cape São Roque, on the north-eastern corner of Brazil–a landmark for emigrating whales–the barque Pauline was sailing in moderate winds and fine weather when her crew saw some black spots on the water, with a whitish pillar high above them. As the ship drew near, it became apparent that the pillar was more than thirty feet tall, and was rising and falling with a splash. George Drevar, ship’s master, picked up his eyeglasses and could not believe what he saw: a sea serpent with its coils wrapped twice around a sperm whale.

  At this point in the narrative I find it almost impossible to proceed, for fear of waking the sleeping monster, wondering if I’d ever dare go out of my depth again.

  Using its head and tail as levers, the serpent was twisting itself around the whale ‘with great velocity’. Every few minutes the pair sank beneath the waves, only to reappear, still engaged in mortal combat. The struggles of the whale–along with two others nearby which were ‘frantic with excitement’–turned the sea around them into a boiling cauldron, rent with loud and confused noise. From its coils, Drevar estimated the serpent to be in excess of 160 feet long. He noted that its mouth was ever open, an observation that somehow makes the scene more awful. As the crew of the Pauline watched, the battle of the leviathans continued for fifteen minutes, and ended only when the whale’s flukes, waving backwards and forwards and lashing the water in its death throes, vanished below, where, Drevar had no doubt, ‘it was gorged at the serpent’s leisure; and that monster of monsters may have been many months in a state of coma, digesting the huge mouthful.’

  With that final act, the two sperm whales that looked on, ‘their bodies more than usually elevated out of the water’, moved slowly towards the ship, as if seeking shelter from the monster. They were ‘not spouting or making the least noise, but seeming quite paralysed with fear’. The engraving made from Drevar’s sketch merely underlines the pathos: the cruel sea serpent playing with the placid whale like a cat with a garden bird, twisting and turning it in its grasp as the cetacean fights for its life.

  It may be that Drevar actually witnessed the titanic struggle between a giant squid and a whale. I must confess I have seen whales that look like sea monsters, rolling in the waves. My childish desire to believe in a lost world (Arthur Conan Doyle, on honeymoon in Greece, claimed to have seen a young ichthyosaur in the sea) seeks to create something palpable out of the apparently incredible; to conjure an abyssal nightmare out of the pages of scientific certainty. Yet fishermen, clergymen and men of experience and social standing risked ridicule by swearing to what they saw. Could they really have been deceived by schooling porpoises or basking sharks?

  Doubt would surround the sea serpent until the day it was caught and presented for public display. In 1852, a year after the pub
lication of Moby-Dick, a New Bedford whaler promised to do just that. Sailing in the South Pacific, the Monongahela claimed not only to have seen a sea serpent, but to have pursued and harpooned it like a whale. The 103-foot-long animal was brought on deck, dried and preserved, along with its long, flat, ridged head and ninety-four teeth, ‘very sharp, all pointing backward and as large as one’s thumb’. This remarkable finding, which seemed set to prove the existence of the beast, was reported in the British journal Zoology, after the whale-ship had gammed with a brig which brought back the captain’s letters describing the monster. But the Monongahela never reached her home port. A year later she was lost at sea with all hands, and her incredible cargo. What a specimen it would have made for New Bedford’s museum and Ishmael’s eyes: the great sea serpent on display.

  In one of his most mystical asides, ‘A Bower in the Arsacides’, Ishmael tells of an exotic island, supposedly in the Mediterranean, where a whale’s skeleton had become a place of worship. Its ribs were hung with trophies, its vertebræ carved with a calendar, and in its skull burned an eternal flame, ‘so that the mystic head again sent forth in vapory spout; while…the wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen…’ In this living temple of growth and decay, the vine-clad bones turned into a verdant bower–‘Life folded Death; Death trellised Life’–and our narrator takes the opportunity to have the dimensions of this Arsacidean whale tattooed on his own body, ‘as in my wild wanderings at that period there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics’.

  To Ishmael, the whale is as mysterious as any sea serpent: a formidable creature to be feared and even worshipped. And as this gothic episode–with its evocations of the gloomy glade where Melville and Hawthorne met–draws Ishmael’s attention across the Atlantic, so his report summons me home, to discover what became of the whale in my native land. For it was in England that the true nature of the leviathan would be made known; from English whaling ports that distinguished men would set out to identify, categorize, and perhaps even pin down for posterity the still somewhat conditional reality of the whale.

  IX

  The Correct Use of Whales

  There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales…Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale…articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities–spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan–and swing all day upon his lower jaw.

  A Bower in the Arsacides, Moby-Dick

  Even its name sounds inexpressive, yet more so in the dialect of the flat east Yorkshire coast, barely a word at all: ‘ull. But seen from the suspended bridge that sails over the Humber before it reaches the grey waters of the North Sea, the city aspires to its proper name: Kingston-Upon-Hull, a pride evinced in its cream-painted and crowned telephone boxes–a defiantly independent network for an imperial place.

  As you descend to the banks of the estuary, the industrial sprawl becomes evident; factories compete with retail sheds to brutalize the landscape. They cannot quite destroy the impression, so carefully constructed by the civic forefathers, of an age of trade and certitude; of an affluence set in sandstone and grand municipal works. In the city centre, at the end of a narrow street, is the gabled home of Hull’s favoured son: William Wilberforce, liberator of slaves and founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Nearby stands a giant column, surmounted by a statue of the man, broadcasting his achievement in capital letters–

  NEGRO SLAVERY

  ABOLISHED

  1 AUGUST

  MDCCCXXXIV

  –although it faces another building, one that belies the city’s claim to manumission.

  Passing through the double doors with their polished brass fingerplates, I follow a sombre corridor over which hangs a skeleton, showing the way, just as I can hear a strange sound rising to a stifled focus, sometimes like a choirboy, sometimes like a trapped dog, luring me on, just as all the sounds I ever heard are compressed into one continuous noise in my head. The lighting is barely brighter in the room beyond. There is a bench, although not for public use. It is built from the bones of a whale: blade bones for the seat, ribs for the back and arms. Next to it is a hat stand created from a narwhal’s tusk nailed to a wooden base.

  On the far wall of this macabre salon hang a pair of portraits both labelled, confusingly, William Scoresby. In the first, a rotund man points over a homely cottage to a ship in the distance; with his white waistcoat, belly and ruddy face, he might be a bluff farmer, rather than a reaper of the sea. The second picture shows his son in starched collar and stock; his are the refined features of a man of the Enlightenment. Between them, these two Scoresbys–one a lifelong merchantman, the other destined to be a fellow of the Royal Society–preside over a collection whose enthusiasm for its subject has faded over the years, like a stamp album put away in the attic, partly from embarrassment at such youthful and compulsive fervour.

  The museum’s displays are contrived to resemble a ship’s superstructure. Everything seems subfusc. Set into the bulwarks are framed photographs, backlit to give them life, although one might almost wish they weren’t. Sepia ghosts projected out of the ether, Yorkshire’s hardy sons labour in the Arctic, in scenes as industrial as any in Bradford’s mills. Tall ships stand glamorously rigged in the ancient sunlight, while their workers’ faces stare out, stilled in the moment.

  Above them, curious souvenirs are caught in the cordage. Hauled up the mainmast is the sleek carcase of a narwhal, its leopard spots losing their sheen; its tusk points downwards like a dart, about to impale itself in the deck below. A sailor saunters by this lynching, adjusting his hat for the photographer’s lens.

  From another chain hangs another prize: a polar bear, caught up at its waist like a wet fur rug. It dangles snout-heavy claws unsheathed as though only just yanked off the ice as it pawed at the water for fish. Behind it, the ship’s laundry flutters in the breeze. A third photograph, almost unbearably sad, shows a young bear still clinging to its mother’s dead body. Destined for life in a zoo, cubs were brought back in barrels barred at the top. Adults were chained to the mast like dogs. Sailors feared them more than whales: Horatio Nelson, who sailed to the Arctic on the unpropitiously named HMS Carcass in 1773, nearly died when he tried to kill a polar bear as a prize for his father.

  A nearby canvas dramatizes just such a scene. Painted in 1829 by William John Huggins–later maritime artist to William IV, the Sailor King–it is entitled Harmony, after the main ship in the picture, although that is hardly an appropriate description. With an unerring eye for detail, Huggins has sought to record every activity carried out by the whaling fleet in the north. Presided over by a distant iceberg that erupts like a frozen flame from the sea, the picture presents an icy Eden under assault. In one corner bobs a baby-eyed walrus, plaintively addressing the viewer while three narwhals flee, tusks tilted high. A sailor stands over a seal, raising his club. The beast backs off towards the edge of the floe, silently barking. In the mid-distance, a bowhead brandishes its broad black flukes. Stuck in its back are two harpoons, and there’s fire in the chimney. Birds scatter into the air.

  Sailing through this bloodlust is the bringer of destruction, the Harmony, a barque of nearly three hundred tons. Around her masts are tied two pairs of jaw bones, trophies announcing a successful voyage in their own triumphal arch. Higher up hangs a garland, a circlet wound round with ribbons given by wives and lovers and tied aloft on May Day eve by the youngest married man. A relic of a medieval rite–attended with ‘grotesque dances and other amusements’ by men in strange costumes–it stayed in place until the ship reached home, when young cadets would race up the rigging to claim possession of the now weather-beaten wreath.

  Below this Brueghelian spectacle, with its fleeting figures and vessel
s top-heavy with blubber and bones, the guilty parties are named: Harmony of Hull, Margaret of London, Eliza Swann of Hull; Industry of London; workaday ships, doing their job. We may look upon such scenes with horror, but a nineteenth-century Huller saw a vision of plenitude to be rendered in barrel-loads and marked by a whale’s tail stamped in the captain’s log. Such bloody acts–the plunging flukes, the spray the sailor felt on his face and the guts that spilt on deck–represented security from beggarly poverty, only ever a footstep away.

  By 1822 Hull was England’s most successful whaling port. One-third of the British whaling fleet sailed from there–thirty-three ships in 1830. Contemporary directories list more oil merchants than eating houses in the port, while maps show ‘Greenland Yards’ on the river banks where whale oil was processed, along with manufactories where whalebone was turned into ‘SIEVES and RIDDLES of every description, NETS…for folding Sheep…’ and ‘STUFFING, for Chair and Sofa Bottoms…preferable to Curled Hair’. They have long since vanished, but other reminders of the industry survive in the city’s museum. A sperm whale’s deformed jaw hangs on the wall; a giant vertebra once used as a butcher’s block stands on the floor; and ranged in a rack like billiard cues are ivory tusks which once formed a four-poster bed for some northern worthy–

  In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale.

  The Pipe, Moby-Dick

  –while in the middle of the room like a tobacconist’s kiosk, a dimly lit case displays a row of glass-stoppered bottles.

  Whale meat extract; an oily substance rich in protein used in margarine manufacture etc.

  Whalemeal prepared from powdered whale meat. Used for animal feedstuffs.

  Whale liver oil; a source of vitamin A.