Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Like Thoreau, Beale’s experience of whales left him amazed at the lack of knowledge about them. ‘It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting and in a commercial point of view of so important an animal, should have been so entirely neglected,’ he wrote. ‘In fact, till the appearance of Mr Huggins’ admirable print, few…had the most distant idea even of the external form of this animal; and of its manners and habits, people in general seem to know as little as if its capture had never given employment to British capital, or encouragement to the daring courage of our hardy seamen.’ Beale referred to William John Huggins’s South Sea Whale Fishery–an image so enduring that it was still being used as the basis for a New Yorker cartoon in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  Back at his Bedford Square home, Beale set out to correct the cetological lacunæ. A year later, he presented his paper on Physeter macrocephalus to the Eclectic Society of London, which awarded him their Silver Medal for his efforts. Having published his text as an elegant, illustrated booklet in 1835, the surgeon spent the next four years working on an expanded version. The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, published in 1839, was a wide-ranging and eclectic work, part scientific study, part adventure story. Its frontispiece (and this chapter’s) is an all-action scene showing sperm whales in an ocean they have whipped up into a freeze-framed, foam-flecked frenzy as they toss boats out of the water and send harpoons and humans flying into the air.

  Equally evocative are Beale’s chapter headings, succinct summaries of his experiences on far-flung oceans and among exotic peoples.

  the Author is robbed–Sea-Lion fight–Music of the Birds–Shocking Diseases–instances of religious tyranny–an Apprentice drowned–narrow Escape–intense heat–we kill a female Whale–a Dandy Savage–a Necromancer–Tyranny of our Captain–Six Men flogged. I leave the “Kent” at midnight–see immense numbers of large Whales a young man is bled–a Bolabola Girl’s Eyes–we are invaded by thirty Women–three Men washed from the Jib-boom–crossing the Line the sixth time–Reflections on seeing our Native Land–stern Disease has been raging during our absence–we approach Home with faltering steps–the old House–my emotion and fate trade.

  Beale’s narrative–its retelling of myths a presentiment of Sir James Frazier’s anthropo-religious The Golden Bough, its human exploits redolent of a picaresque novel–provided a framework for Melville; an articulation for his own whale. If Moby-Dick owed its metaphysics to Nathaniel Hawthorne, then it owed its facts to Thomas Beale. Entire passages in Melville’s book are filched directly–one might say almost brazenly–from Beale’s. The Natural History of the Sperm Whale was the archetype for Moby-Dick; not only in its cetological details, but in its other preoccupations, too.

  Beale was intrigued by the whale’s role in the human chain of consumption. It was as if, in the spirit of emancipation, he saw the whale as enslaved–a notion underlined by the dedication of his book ‘to Thomas Sturge, Esq, of Newington Butts’.

  As the trusty friend of MACAULAY, you fought the battle of the Negro…and it was not until the enemies of the dark human race began their precipitate retreat, that the wavering friends…flocked around the banner you had helped raise…And now that the Negro is free…I have no doubt…that your greatest reward is in your own feelings, independently of worldly praise.

  Thomas Sturge was scion of an old Quaker family; his kinsman was the even more famous abolitionist, Joseph Sturge. He owned the two ships on which Beale had travelled, and, like his friend Elhanan Bicknell, ran his whaling company from the New Kent Road, near the Elephant and Castle in south London, a decidedly unoceanic address. (He also benefited from standings. When the sperm whale of which Buckland wrote beached at Whitstable in the winter of 1829, to the accompaniment of terrible bellows and groans–and was attacked by man with an axe for its pains–Sturge paid sixty shillings for its blubber.

  There was a certain distance between these refined men and their noisome business. Bicknell–who held the monopoly on the British sperm whale fishery in the Pacific–was a well-known patron of the arts who commissioned Huggins to paint his whale-ships–works that would in turn inspire J.M.W. Turner, another beneficiary of Bicknell’s patronage. In this complex web of connections, whales linked writers, artists, scientists and businessmen in a manner that reflected the reach of the British Empire and the very size of the animals themselves. Whales lent a romantic focus to their gruesome industry. Indeed, Turner, the greatest artist of the age, realized that vision in paint, just as Melville attempted it in words.

  In 1845 and 1846 Turner exhibited four scenes of whaling at the Royal Academy, along with a catalogue attribution: ‘Whalers. Vide Beale’s Voyage p.175’. They portray the heroic hunt for the whale in luminous, almost abstract forms; the whales themselves are the merest, ghostly suggestions. It is likely that Melville had heard of these famous pictures on his visit to London. Certainly, back in New York, having bought his copy of Beale’s work–for three dollars and thirty-eight cents–he in turn wrote on its title page, ‘Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book’.

  Melville’s passion for Turner almost rivalled that of the artist’s champion, John Ruskin. (Critics themselves drew the comparisons: one reviewer of White-Jacket declared, ‘Mr Melville stands as far apart from any past or present marine painter in pen and ink as Turner does from the magnificent artist vilipended by Mr Ruskin for Turner’s sake–Vandervelde.’) Turner appealed deeply to Melville’s sense of the romantic. In his book, Modern Painters–which Melville read before his trip to England–Ruskin described how Turner had himself tied to a ship’s mast to paint his Snowstorm at Sea. Perhaps the painter had more than a little of Ahab in him.

  The influence of Turner’s sublime vistas, numinous with storms and shadows, emerges in Moby-Dick from the first. When Ishmael arrives at the Spouter Inn, he sees ‘a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something…floating in a nameless yeast’. Through the gloom, he makes out a whale launching itself over a storm-tossed ship, seemingly about to impale itself on its masts. ‘A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted,’ Ishmael allowed, with ‘a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant’. It was a dream version of Huggins’s graphic scenes; a fantastical Turner, seen through Ishmael’s ostensibly amateur eyes.

  From these colourful scientists and eccentric artists, and from his own visit to Liverpool and London, Melville’s enterprise acquired an English anchor. Their personæ, as much as their efforts, were integral to the intricate tapestry of cross-references and diversive threads from which Moby-Dick was woven. Above all, it was Beale who supplied Ishmael’s cetology, and who sought to correct those erroneous pictures of whales, applying true science and firsthand experience to the natural history of the sperm whale. He criticized the respected French naturalist Baron Cuvier, for instance, for claiming that the whale struck fear into ‘all the inhabitants of the deep, even to those which are the most dangerous to others; such as the phocæ, the balænopteræ, the dolphin, and the shark. So terrified are all these animals at the sight of the cachalot, that they hurry to conceal themselves from him in the sands or mud, and often in the precipitancy of their flight, dash themselves against the rock with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.’

  To Beale–as to anyone who had seen sperm whales in the wild–this was so much hogwash. ‘For not only does the sperm whale in reality happen to be a most timid and inoffensive animal…readily endeavouring to escape from the slightest thing which bears an unusual appearance, but he is also quite incapable of being guilty of the acts of which he is so strongly accused.’

  Beale comprehensively addressed every aspect of the whale, point by point, fin by fluke. Yet no matter how many facts and figures, how many observations he assembled, no matter what physiological detail–f
rom the function of its stomach to how much blubber its carcase might yield; from its ‘favourite places of resort’ to the ‘rise and progress of the Sperm Whale Fishery’–his quarry remained elusive. Only by laying his hands on the very bones of the animal could the surgeon make his final diagnosis; and even then, he might wonder at the reality of the beast he pursued.

  The sperm whale had taken Beale halfway round the world. Now it summoned the surgeon to east Yorkshire, by no means an easy journey. Having made his way to Holderness, Beale was rewarded for his efforts by a spectacular sight: a skeleton key to the innermost secrets of Physeter. He may have seen the animal in life, but in its decay its true nature was revealed, and he was enthralled by what he saw. ‘The description of the skeleton of the sperm whale at Burton-Constable, which I shall presently give, interests me exceedingly, principally on account of its being the only specimen of the kind in Europe or in the world.’

  Practically falling over himself in his eagerness to get at the bones, Beale lost no time in making notes on ‘this enormous and magnificent specimen of osseous framework’. His report extends for many pages: ‘Extreme length of the skeleton 49 feet 7 inches’–the shrinkage being due to the creature’s unboned flukes and blubber–‘extreme breadth of the chest 8 feet 8 1/2 inches…The gigantic skull…forms more than a third of the whole length of the skeleton…The lower jaw is 16 feet 10 inches long…The spinal column consists of forty-four vertebræ…In the lower jaw there were 48 teeth.’

  Beale’s examination endowed the Tunstall whale with eternal life. This was the first accurate description of a sperm whale skeleton; it became the ur-whale, the whale by which all others would be measured. Seen through Melville’s literary lens, these bones acquired a kind of poetic licence. They pervade Moby-Dick. Dave was right: the jumble of ribs and vertebrae he showed me in a Yorkshire outhouse were indeed the only physical relics of Melville’s book; and they achieved their place in perpetuity via Beale’s ground-breaking book. When his own copy of The Natural History of the Sperm Whale surfaced a century later, Melville’s marginalia had been erased by an owner who had little idea that they were worth more than the volume itself. Enough marks remained to show that the book supplied the scaffolding for Moby-Dick’s construction; and that Melville specifically drew on Beale’s notes on the Tunstall whale to create an elaborate conceit–one that fused his own visit to St Paul’s Cathedral with those travelling exhibitions of whale carcases and skeletons that had become so fashionable. The result was an arch architectural exercise in irony, a wry and witty metaphor for man’s use of the whale.

  Sir Clifford’s whale has been 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. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.

  Yet in his gentle satire, Melville could not know that, only months before his visit to London, the author of this seminal work had died in that city, aged just forty-two. For ten years Beale had worked as medical assistant to the Royal Humane Society; he also joined the Institut d’Afrique, a Parisian organization pledged to the welfare of slaves, and spent the rest of his life as a poorly paid officer at the Stepney Poor House in the East End. There, while caring for his patients in the cholera epidemic of 1848-9 which had claimed 60,000 lives, Beale contracted that same ‘stern Disease’. Within twenty-seven hours, this ultimately humane man was dead.

  The narrow stone-flagged and dark-panelled corridor gives way to gracious Georgian rooms, all wrapped up for the winter. A can-tilevered stairway turns creakingly on itself, without obvious means of support. It is early in the morning; the house is empty. I open door after door, finding bedrooms filled with exquisite marquetry wardrobes, elegant chaises longues and beds covered in embroidered velvet. On one trunk lies a discarded military frock coat, as if its owner had just stepped out of the room. At the other end of the landing stands a pair of mirrored double doors, and beyond them, the Long Gallery.

  Once this was used for indoor recreation, for fencing or strolling in inclement weather. Now it is lined with bookcases and a plaster frieze in seventeenth-century style. It depicts a veritable menagerie of chimerical and transgendered beasts. One has a woman’s torso and breasts, but a stallion’s body and penis. Another shows a snarling, scaly Jacobean whale, fighting to free itself of its entablature; all teeth and flukes, it heads down the hall towards its time-honoured opponent–a giant squid splayed above the door, flanked by a curly-tailed mermaid.

  This antique animation carries on, regardless of the silence of the room, orchestrated by its commissioner, William Constable, whose own portrait hangs below. He is clad in a Rousseauesque gown and turban, a man of Enlightenment tastes–that much is evident from the contents of his cabinet of curiosities, now housed in an anteroom at the end of the gallery. Like the Quakers, Constable was barred from high office by his faith; and just as they directed their energies into business–the business of killing whales–so the squire of Burton Constable was excused the expense of political service, and could spend his considerable fortune elsewhere.

  Chemistry, astronomy, botany, zoology and ancient history all clamoured for Constable’s attention: from ornate shells and polar bear skulls to casts of Roman and Greek coins kept in specially made cases. One cabinet contains early electrical equipment, an elaboration of hardwood wheels, brass cylinders and rubber belts producing sparks to be stored in glass Leyden jars, ready for a Frankenstein experiment. On another shelf lie relics of a true monster: the teeth of the Tunstall whale, arrayed as though newly pulled from a dragon’s jaw.

  John Raleigh Chichester-Constable, the current tenant of Burton Constable Hall, is a dapper man in tweeds, cravat and Geo. F. Trumper cologne. He recalls how, as a boy, more than seventy years ago, he would play in the whale’s skeleton which then stood in the grounds, using it as a giant climbing frame. As heir to the Seigniory, Mr Chichester-Constable is still notified when any cetacean is thrown on this coast, and may dispose of it as he will. He once took a dead porpoise into Hull to have a pair of fashionable ankle boots made for his wife from its skin, only to be asked by the cobbler–who happened to be the father of Amy Johnson, the aviatrix–to take the carcase out of his shop before its smell drove his customers away.

  As a young man, Mr Chichester-Constable was also an amateur pilot, landing his private plane on the long narrow field next to the Whale Belt, while the whale looked on, in an ever more dilapidated state. It endured the decades, exposed to the pouring rain, the freezing frost, the blanching sun, neglected in the nettles and long grass, awaiting the day it would be revived. On a late summer’s day in 1996, the bones were exhumed by Michael Boyd, zoologist and historian. Like Melville before him, Boyd was assisted in his task by Beale’s description in The Natural History of the Sperm Whale; by referring to his nineteenth-century predecessor, Boyd was able to salvage most of the skeleton.

  It was a hot afternoon, and exhausted by his efforts as he worked in his shirt sleeves and vest, Boyd felt as Ahab had felt about ‘thou damned whale’. Although the Victorian articulation had corroded, he still had to saw through thick iron bars before the great ribs and vertebræ appeared, remarkably preserved, not unlike the ichthyosaurs he had excavated from the strata of nearby Robin Hood’s Bay. Slowly, the whale emerged, bit by bit, bone by bone. The skull was still riven by rusty bolts as though it had undergone some ancient and rudimentary cranial surgery. And when the jaw bone was uncovered–split in half like a giant wishbone–an unerupted tooth was found in it, as if the whale had reverted to infancy in its interment.

  Now the result has been brought into the great hall, where it lies on the floor, overlooked
by ancestral portraits and narwhal tusks, like a hunted tiger laid out for its master’s delectation. In a house filled with strange beasts–dead-eyed impala impaled on the walls, and silver-gilt Chinese dragons crawling up the window frames–the whale is an elegant whimsy to greet modern visitors. Yet its bones represent only a reduction of the animal. Alive, it would not have fitted into this huge chamber. Its forehead would have nudged the doors, and its flukes would have squashed against the landscapes hanging on the far wall, like a salmon squeezed into a goldfish bowl.

  X

  The Whiteness of the Whale

  Deathful, desolate dominions those; bleak and wild the ocean, beating at that barrier’s base, hovering ’twixt freezing and foaming; and freighted with navies of ice-bergs…White bears howl as they drift from their cubs; and the grinding islands crush the skulls of the peering seals.

  Herman Melville, Mardi

  Driving north from Burton Constable, the years fall away with the coastal road, running through familiar names: Bridlington, Filey and Scarborough, childhood memories of amusement arcades and fish and chips, and the burnt-sugar smell of candy floss, and pale green gas-mantle lamps hissing into the night, as fragile as the moths that flutter round them while my mother made tea in our caravan.