Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Sperm oil; partially solidified. When refined it is

  used for lubricating light industry.

  Arthur Credland, the well-informed curator–himself a zoologist, and a man who has eaten both whale and seal–opens the cabinet and hands me a phial. The glass still feels oily as I tilt the amber liquid to and fro, slightly scented. Pure and transparent, this is what it all boils down to, a whale in a bottle. Now I recognize the sound as it winds around the room: the song of a whale, lamenting its long-dead cousins.

  Leaving the city behind, suburban Hull gives way to the flat fields of the Holderness Plain. This is a levelled, alluvial landscape. Its coastline might look as though it is shouldering the storms, but this is where England is falling into the sea, at a rate of yards, rather than feet, every year.

  Turning off one of the B roads that run inland but seemingly to nowhere, a rail-straight drive leads to the door of Burton Constable Hall. The Constables have lived in this elegant house with its red-brick towers and battlements since the sixteenth century, conserving their Catholicism in their private chapel while their land was eaten away by the waves. This far from London, no one really cared that the Popish faith was kept in the wilds of Yorkshire.

  Out of season, the ticket office-cum-tearoom is empty. The woman behind the counter looks relieved. ‘I thought for a moment you were wanting to look round the house.’

  I set off in the failing light, only to be told by a passing groundsman that the bones I’m looking for were removed years ago. He tells me, hesitantly, ‘I can show you some vertebræ.’

  From the back of a shed filled with farm vehicles, his colleague emerges, rag in hand. ‘He wants to know about the whale, Dave,’ says my reluctant guide.

  Taking a pencil stub from his pocket, Dave sketches out a shape on the claw of his excavator, outlining what looks like a giant fish bone. He describes how the skeleton once stood in the field beyond, articulated to mimic the animal in the water, held up by iron struts and bolted to a frame. The supports rusted away long ago; some Boy Scouts camping in the grounds had even attempted to make a fire with the remains.

  But the bones had since been rescued. In the gloom of the outhouse, Dave pulls at a piece of sacking with the dramatic flourish of a pathologist drawing back a shroud. Underneath lies a great grey bone, eroded by decades of exposure to the weather; more a gigantic piece of coral than the skull of a cetacean.

  ‘This is the only whale from Moby-Dick to exist,’ he declares. The reality is as incongruous as his claim, all the more so for lying next to a disused caravan. This crumbling lump of calcium once held the animal’s huge brain, controlling its sinewy muscles and the broad flukes and fins; listening to the watery world and watching it through sentient eyes; issuing mysterious clicks from its mountainous head.

  In other outhouses lay the rest of the animal, scattered relics awaiting resurrection. Their bony diaspora was a measure of this martyred whale, ready to be reassembled to satisfy its modern pilgrims: scoured backbones the size of tractor wheels; pitted ribs resembling mammoth tusks dug out of Siberian permafrost; hulking masses of decaying calcium like debarked trees.

  I walk to the end of an avenue of oaks, where a funereal urn is set on a crumbling plinth. In the tussocky grass to one side is an empty space. Bits of brick still lie in the turf, remnants of the foundations that once bore up the whale on iron waves. And as jackdaws caw in the darkening sky, I imagine the leviathan’s bones luminous in the twilight. Could this really have been the whale of which Ishmael spoke, washed up in a muddy field in Yorkshire?

  In April 1825 a dead whale was seen off Holderness, close to Burton Constable. There was nothing particularly unusual in that; such animals often wash up on this coastline, one of England’s most desolate shores, where the North Sea eats away at the boulder clay leaving entire villages to crumble into the waves, and where fossilized forests lie under the surf. But this was a huge specimen, and as it floated out at sea, fishermen steered clear of the whale for fear it might damage their boat. Soon enough the tide did its job, and on the afternoon of Thursday, 28 April, the carcase was cast onto Tunstall beach. There, below the low, soft, chocolate-coloured cliffs, which turn the water a dolorous reddish brown, it was stranded like an enormous flounder.

  The next day, Reverend Christopher Sykes, a keen amateur scientist, arrived to record the animal’s vital statistics. By Sunday, a crowd of one thousand souls were drawn to witness this fabulous beast. Like their Dutch cousins across the sea two centuries before, they were amazed at what they saw: a bull sperm whale, fifty-eight feet long–although this was not the shiny black monster they might have expected. Thrown out of the sea, its proud jaw was dislocated and most of its paper-thin skin had peeled, revealing a strange layer of ‘fur’ between it and the blubber–as if the whale were in disguise all along. Slumped on the cobbles, the putty-coloured carcase had already begun to decay, a process hastened by onlookers who hacked about the body, pulling out the long, thick tendons and using horses and ropes to tear out the throat.

  All Holderness was alerted to this deputation from the depths, as twenty-six-year-old Sara Stickney reported. ‘You will doubtless have heard of the monster washed up on this shore–the bustle it occasioned in the neighbourhood was marvellous.’ The village was ‘more gay than sweet,’ she confessed, ‘the whale becoming every day more putrid–it was a loathsome thing at best. I never could tolerate the sight of an inanimate mass of flesh in any shape.’

  The whale was soon rendered unrecognizable. Men cut into its huge head; the liquid looked like olive oil, but soon began to coalesce. At eighty degrees Fahrenheit, it was nearly thirty degrees warmer than the outside air, although the investigators could not determine whether this was a result of animal heat or of ‘putrescent fermentation’. As it came apart, the wonders of the beast were examined. Its blubber, once tried out, would fetch £500; the case yielded eighteen gallons of spermaceti; and the meat would have fed a few families for weeks (one Hull recipe claimed that the animal’s skin made a tasty dish, with a mushroom flavour). However, this foundling had a scientific value greater than its commercial or culinary worth; and, accordingly, Dr James Alderson was appointed to perform a post-mortem.

  Son of a well-known Yorkshire physician, Alderson was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and of the Cambridge Philosophical Society; his encounter with the whale was a chance not only to address the contradictory evidence about these creatures, but also to further his academic status. ‘Nothing can be more contrasted than the view of the animal perfect, and its skeleton,’ Alderson told his fellow society members, having had the extant parts brought to his laboratory in Hull. ‘The enormous and preposterous matter upon its cheeks and jowl bearing no proportion to that of any other animal whatever, when compared with the bones of the head.’

  The sheer logistics of examining this mountain of blubber presented Alderson with his greatest challenge–even as he received it in instalments. The whale’s eyes had already been removed, being small and oddly shaped, ‘in the form of a truncated cone’, although they presented their own exquisite beauty. Alderson described the iris as ‘bluish-brown; very dark; the pupil…transverse, as in ruminating animals’; while ‘the tapetum presented a very beautiful appearance…its color was a green, formed by an admixture of blue and yellow; with a slight predominance of blue…speckled with lighter colored spots throughout.’ That the doctor could discern such pulchritude in this mass of decaying flesh was a measure of the animal’s fascination. Its parts presented themselves as if to say, Look how beautiful I was when I was alive, when I scooped up squid from untold depths, when I dealt death myself.

  Embedded in its lance-like lower jaw were forty-seven teeth, scarred with its adventures in the abyss. Alderson observed that the penis ‘protruded about 154 feet from the body, and was surrounded by a shaggy process of the cuticle. The urethra admitted the point of the finger.’ Fingering the whale was ever a common abuse. The three-foot-long heart was preserved in formald
ehyde, and later presented to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society for their further ruminations.

  Alderson was frustrated by the treatment of his specimen: ‘indeed, the viscera were so quickly removed, with a view to clearing the bones of the animal, that it was impossible to examine every organ.’ For all his delving, the doctor could find no cause of death, despite the presence of a five-inch section of a sword-fish spear buried in its back, ‘enveloped in the adipose cellular membrane’, as well as another ‘fistulous-like opening in the cutis’ apparently made by a harpoon. Sperm whales were known to carry foreign objects in their flesh, like shrapnel in a soldier’s war wound, and Thomas Beale recorded swordfish attacks on whales. One animal was found with an entire swordfish blade in its dorsal ridge, the result of a violent collision during which the weapon had slid clean into the whale, snapping off at the base; when the scar healed, the sword remained embedded in blubber, a fishy Excalibur. Similarly, Ishmael says that harpoons could lodge in a whale, one entering ‘nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump’.

  Speared and nailed, whales carried not only the scars of their martyrdom, but the instruments of torture themselves. Yet even as this unfortunate, war-weary creature was washed ashore, its destiny was assured: for as Ishmael notes, from that moment on, the whale became the property of the Lord Paramount of the Seigniory of Holderness, the Squire of Burton Constable Hall.

  Almost anywhere else on the English coast, the Tunstall whale would have belonged to the Crown, a royal fish; but here, on what amounted to a personal fiefdom from the cliffs of Flamborough Head to the filigree finger of Spurn Point, the Lord Paramount exercised that right. One of the first men on the scene had been the Constables’ own steward, Richard Iveson, come to lay claim to this odoriferous prize. Iveson had measured and sketched the body as it lay on the beach, as if to reinforce his master’s right. His drawing was subsequently reproduced as an engraving, the accuracy of which would not have pleased Ishmael, resembling as it does a giant tadpole, with an out-of-scale surveyor–Iveson himself–striding across its head.

  More accurate were the illustrations made by Alderson’s brother, Christopher, and included in the doctor’s An Account of the S. Whale Cast on Shore at Tunstall, 1825, a copy of which, suitably bound in red morocco and stamped with gilt flourishes, was subsequently presented to the Lord Paramount. This portrait of the whale is distinctly romantic, every curve and undulation lovingly shaded like the Rokeby Venus–an impression reinforced by the animal’s oddly waisted form and feminine hips, despite the exposed member close to its lackadaisical tail. It is seen from front and rear, from every enticing angle, while yachts flutter in the distance, lending a lyrical air. More pathologically, a second illustration displays its jaw and skull in close-up, as well as a study of the eye, sliced open to display its beauty. A third shows a squid beak, one of a bucketful found in the belly of the beast.

  Although a stranded whale might represent a valuable contribution to the Constables’ coffers–in 1790 a whale found at Little Humber yielded 85 gallons of oil at 9d per gallon–the accounts of previous stewards show that the costs often exceeded the profits.

  Minutes of Escheats, Deodands, Royal Fishes, Wrecks, &c. John Raines, Steward to William Constable.

  Jan. 30th 1749. A Sperma Ceti Whale was thrown on the shore at Spurn Point–Mr Constable sold it to Mr David Bridges of Hull for £90.

  Sept. 13th 1750. A Whale 33 yards long was thrown on shore upon Spurn Point. Mr George Thompson cut it up for Mr Constable–Mr Thompson’s charge for the Exp.s of cutting up amounted to £7 more than the Whale sold for.

  Nov. 7th 1758. A Grampus came on shore at Marfleet–Mr Constable sold it to Mr Hamilton Merchant of Hull for £5. 10.s. Nov. 9th 1782. A Whale 17 yards long came on shore at East Newton–It was sold for one Guinea & an half, being much damaged, & in a state of putrefaction.

  Jul. 14th 1788. A Whale 36 Feet long, came on shore at Spurn Point, opposite the Lights upon the Humber Side. Mr Pattinson the Baliff sold it to Mr De Poyster of Hull for £7. 7.s–But it proved good for nothing, having died of poverty…

  Whatever its financial benefits, the Tunstall whale was destined for a different fate. Sixty years earlier, the Bishop of Durham had laid claim to another of the spermaceti tribe thrown up on the north-east coast–a fifty-foot ‘Sea Monster’ still alive when it was beached at Seaton in 1766, where its ‘calls of distress as it touched ground could be heard for several miles’, and whose skeleton was later displayed in the undercroft of the cathedral; an image that reminds me of William Walker, the Victorian diver who was sent into the flooded foundations of Winchester Cathedral to shore up its medieval timbers. So too the Yorkshire whale was to be preserved for perpetuity. To that end, its remains were buried in a series of pits, and there they were left to rot.

  The new owner of Burton Constable Hall, Sir Thomas Ashton Clifford Constable, second baronet, was just eighteen years old in 1825, and whales were far from his mind. He was more concerned with the business of spending the substantial legacy he had just inherited. Two years later, Sir Thomas married Marianne, youngest daughter of Charles Chichester, and his Yorkshire pile lay empty while its lord lived in Staffordshire, closer to London and its amusements.

  Dry bones proved unequal to such diversions. While its owner enjoyed the fruits of his fortune, the whale’s skeleton, now picked clean and disinterred, languished ‘in a very neglectful condition, being laid in an irregular heap, in the middle of a field’, as one frustrated naturalist noted in 1829. ‘Whether it has since been put together and taken care of, I have not heard.’ Seven years later, little progress had been made in the matter. The geologist John Phillips found the bones in a barn, save those of the tail, which unaccountably hung in a tree. Then, in 1836–when Sir Thomas finally deigned to move to his ancestral home–Edward Wallis, surgeon, anatomist and astronomer, was engaged to articulate the whale: to give it life after death.

  In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, whales were suddenly à la mode. Popular interest in science and natural history met sensationalism and showmanship, and whales were exhibited around Europe and America, preserved or in skeletal form. In March 1809 ‘the curious were gratified’ by a seventy-six-foot ‘stupendous monster of the deep’ shown on a barge moored on the Thames between Blackfriars and London Bridge. The whale was claimed to be a year old, and ‘pronounced by judges to be the Balena Boops, or pike-headed species’–a confusion of the former Latin name for the humpback and another common name for a minke, neither of which reach such lengths. ‘But the prudence of bringing into the centre of a popular city, for the mere gratification of gazers, a monster of such bulk, in a state of putrefaction is quite another consideration,’ queried The Times. ‘In all events, those who visit the whale will do well to use the expedient of holding to their mouths and noses handkerchiefs well moistened with strong vinegar, to guard against inhaling the putrid effluvia it emits, than which few things can be more noxious to health, and even life.’

  Other showmen had the acumen to make their displays fit for more refined tastes. In 1827 a blue whale taken off Ostend was reduced to its skeleton and toured from Ghent to Brussels, Rotterdam and Berlin before arriving, four years later, in London, housed in a custom-built wooden pavilion–‘a wondrous lengthy booth’–at Charing Cross, close to where Melville would stay. The Times claimed–virtually in the voice of the fairground barker–that at ninety-five feet, the whale was ‘of larger dimensions than any that is known ever before to have fallen into the possession of man’. Visitors paid a shilling to enter what one doggerel called ‘a tomb/ A sort of bed-crib, sleeping room/ For what they call–a Whale’. The hut was stocked with volumes of Lacépède’s Natural History of Whales, and customers could quaff wine while sitting in the animal’s ribcage, an ‘unwonted saloon’. They were, however, not treated to the twenty-four-piece orchestra that performed within the whale during it
s European sojourn.

  Whales were the sensation of the age. A few years later, England produced its own regal specimen, claimed to be even bigger–

  As a man of fashion and taste himself, Sir Thomas now saw fit to have his own whale put on display. Its spine was duly riven with an iron rod, its ribs hinged with stirrup-like irons, and long bolts were driven through its skull. Artificially jointed, the skeleton was set to swim along an avenue of trees which became known as the Whale Belt. It was here that Thomas Beale–the foremost authority on sperm whales–came to pay his respects. Alerted by Mr Pearsall, curator of the museum of the Hull Literary and Philosophical Society, Beale sought an audience with the Yorkshire specimen; with his arrival in the East Riding, the whale would be made immortal.

  Unlike many scientists who pronounced upon the subject, Beale had actually seen living sperm whales. As a young man, he had studied medicine at Aldersgate from 1827 to 1829, remaining as an assistant in the school’s dissecting room, then as curator before moving to the London Hospital on Commercial Street. But in 1830, at the age of twenty-two, Beale left the grimy streets of the East End to sail on the whale-ship, the Kent, captained by William Lawton and owned by Thomas Sturge.

  Beale’s journey took him down the coast of South America to Cape Horn, then across the Pacific to Hawaii and on to the Kamchatka Peninsula–almost as far from England as it was possible to be. During his travels he watched whales being hunted, making extensive notes about their behaviour and physiology, gathering scientific information in a manner that echoed the work of Charles Darwin, whose own voyage on the Beagle was under way even as Beale reached the South Seas.

  While Beale was fascinated by the life beyond his ship, he was appalled by the oppression on board it. ‘When I saw thirty-two good, industrious, and harmless, though brave men, abused and browbeaten to a most shameful extent, by a mean and contemptible tyrant…I turned from the scene with horror, and plainly intimated that I could no longer endure the sight.’ At midnight on 1 June 1832, at the Bonin Islands, Beale jumped ship, joining another Sturge whaler, the Sarah and Elizabeth, under whose more temperate captain–who happened to be the gallant William Swain, later master of the Christopher Mitchell and himself to lose his life to a whale–he sailed home, having travelled fifty thousand miles.