Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  If the past is a contraction of what has passed, then the future exists only if we imagine it. These resorts recede into memory, and safe fields yield to wild moorland, wide expanses of nothingness book-ended by impenetrable plan-tations of black conifers. The car radio turns into white noise as we pass the giant white golf balls of the Fylingdales listening station. Then the road descends to Whitby, another half-hidden place, with its ancient red roofs and its steep streets and snickleways coursing down to its horseshoe harbour.

  Here, among these narrow terraces, lived my great-grandfather, Patrick James Moore; a Catholic, too, albeit born to rather less propitious circumstances than the tenants of Burton Constable. The son of a Dublin blacksmith, he had joined the general exodus from Ireland, passing through the same Liverpool docks that Melville had explored; one of Melville’s shipmates on the St Lawrence was an Irishman named Thomas Moore. By 1882 Patrick Moore had arrived in Whitby, with his wife Sarah, a housemaid from Faversham who, six months after they were married, gave birth to their first child, Rose Margaret. Perhaps that’s why they lived in a poor part of town at Grove Street, close to Scoresby Terrace; although at the end of the lane were the riverside works where James Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, was built.

  It was there that my grandfather, Dennis, was born in 1885. He would grow up to be a tailor, making suits for J.B. Priestley and an overcoat for Winston Churchill, but by the time I knew him, at the end of his life, he had retired to Morecambe–known as Bradford-by-the-Sea–where he would die in a home facing the great expanse of the bay. I have only vague memories of his visits to us: a dapper, white-haired old man dressed in elegant dark suits. He always wore a watch and chain and, as my parents told me, had such a passion for reading that he would often miss his bus stop, so engrossed was he in his book. I was a young boy, and I had no idea that my grandfather had been born in a town that lived with the memory of whales.

  Still less did I know that, around the same time as my young grandfather was playing in its streets, Bram Stoker was holidaying in Whitby, a stay that inspired his most famous work, the sensational story of Dracula. In it, Stoker’s heroine Mina climbs the steps to the town’s clifftop graveyard, where she meets an elderly man who had sailed to Greenland ‘when Waterloo was fought’, and who tells her ‘about the whale-fishing in the old days’. This old sailor, nearly one hundred years old, is a relic of Whitby’s past, and an industry carried out, not in the balmy seas of the Pacific, but in the freezing wastes of the Arctic: the wilderness at the top of the world.

  In Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, a sixteen-year-old stowaway sails on a mutinous whale-ship out of New Bedford. After murder and shipwreck, Pym and his companions are forced ‘to this last horrible extremity’–to dine on their young shipmate, Richard Parker. Poe’s tale–which Melville must have read–was inspired by the fate of the Essex; it also had a strange reverberation forty years later, when the survivors of a shipwrecked yacht sailing from Southampton for Australia ate their own cabin boy. By remarkable coincidence, his name was also Richard Parker, and his memorial in the local churchyard, close to where I grew up, forever fascinated me with its ghoulish epitaph: Though he slay me yet will I trust in him.

  But Poe’s story has other resonances, too, in the lands and creatures that young Pym encounters on his subsequent adventures in the Antarctic, where he sees ice bears with blood-red eyes and murderous Indians with black teeth. Drawing on notes made by his friend, Jeremiah Reynolds, who had undertaken his ultimately disastrous expedition to the Antarctic in 1829 (Reynolds’s crew mutinied on the way back, forcing him off the ship at Chile thus providing the setting for his own story of Mocha Dick), Poe presented his book as non-fiction. He even told friends he had been a whaler himself. Newspapers ran excerpts as factual accounts, convincing readers of a new and unknown land where the waters grew warmer rather than colder as one travelled towards the pole and where superstitious natives regarded anything white as taboo, fearful of ‘the carcass of the white animal picked up at sea’, and ‘the shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds which issued from the vapoury white curtain of the South’.

  As its adventurers sail into the furthest unknown, they encounter a ‘shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men’, its skin ‘of the perfect whiteness of the snow’. This eerie otherworld, teetering between travelogue and science fiction, was the birthing-ground for Melville’s monster. It is the source of the whiteness that appals Ishmael and on which he expands compendiously, if erratically, like a nineteenth-century search engine: from albino humans, ‘more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion’, to ‘the tall pale man’ seen in the forests of the ‘fairy tales of Central Europe…whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glided through the green of the groves’. Whiteness for Ishmael is as much the colour of evil as of good; it is an intimidating absence: ‘Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?’

  But that whiteness was also an invitation. Before the last of the wild lands were mapped, it was left to storytellers to fill in the fictional spaces on the map–from men such as Poe who had never travelled further than New England, to the mulatto boat-steerer Harry Hinton of Nimrod of the Sea, who imagined a shining wall of ice beyond which was an open sea, home of mermen and krakens with golden antennæ; a sanctuary where ‘worried whales find peace, and grow in blubber on the crimson carpets of medusæ’, safe from hunters who sought ‘to harpoon and lance, to mangle, tear, and boil’.

  Such imaginings crept into what claimed to be reality, too. In a remarkable frontispiece created for Oliver Goldsmith’s encyclopædic Animated Nature (‘with numerous notes from the works of the most distinguished British and foreign naturalists’), first published in 1774, but subsequently reissued ‘for the young and tender’, as Ishmael observes, the artist assembled the known denizens of the frozen world, drawing freely on William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions, to the extent that its decorously beached narwhal and bucking whale busy throwing its assailants in the air are direct imitations of Scoresby’s pictures.

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  Yet among these seals and sea lions–themselves assailed by a ferocious polar bear–sea eagles and auks and walruses, a sea serpent swims blithely through the scene. It is perfectly at home among water spouts and icebergs, all the while observed by another narwhal, as if there were nothing extraordinary about its appearance at all; as if its existence were, by virtue of the many reports of its dalliances in other seas, established as a biological fact, to be represented alongside the other fauna of the polar ocean–even though further inspection reveals that this too is a crib of a creature, copied from the maned monster depicted in Pontippidan’s Natural History of Norway.

  The myth and romance of the Arctic was implicit in its alternative names: the Barren Grounds, Ultima Thule, the North Pole. As white as it was, this was one of the world’s dark places, spending six months in perpetual night, a land so inhospitable it might as well be another planet altogether. Its axial emptiness, both on the page and in the mind, made it a site of sublime extremes. Its virginal whiteness meant death for any living thing unaccustomed to it; yet its temperatures produced the most abundant seas on earth. Delicate snow crystals could freeze a man’s blood; but they also preserved an icy paradise ruled over by the land’s greatest predators, whose fur looked white but was in fact translucent and coal-black beneath. Meanwhile, in its limpid waters swam creatures stranger than any invented by Poe.

  And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

  The Arctic whales–bowheads, beluga and narwhals–are the most tantalizing of all cetaceans. Rising and falling with the changing seasons of ice, they are barometers of an invisible world, spectrally floating within their bounded sea, locked into its cycle. They are philopatrous animals, l
oyal to the site of their birth, and the only whales to live in the Arctic throughout the year. One hundred thousand belugas swim in polar seas; the geographical remoteness of the less populous bowheads and their outriders, the narwhals, is such that they are seldom seen.

  The beluga and the narwhal are a family unto themselves, the only two species of the Monodontidæ. Belugas, or belukhas, Delphinapterus leuca, owe their common name to the Russian for white, belyy. Their whiteness is not that of an albino as Moby Dick was supposed to be, an animal made unearthly by being devoid of colour; rather, they are born grey, and only achieve pure white in late adulthood, becoming sinless with old age. Their malleable melons (which one observer describes as feeling like warm lard) and their articulated necks allow the beluga to change the shape of their heads, holding them at right-angles and lending them a quizzical, human expression. Sailors called them canaries of the sea on account of their songs–and William Scoresby depicted his white whale perched on rocks like a seal basking in the sun–but to me they look like labradors, snow puppies in search of a master.

  The narwhal, too, shares the beluga’s sad beauty, a mortality suggested by its name–from the Old Norse, nar and hvalr, meaning ‘corpse whale’, because its smudges resemble the livid blemishes on a dead body. (It is not the only cetacean with such morbid overtones: the Latin name of another Arctic visitor, the killer whale–or, more correctly, whale-killer, Orcinus orca, has its root in orcus, meaning ‘belonging to the kingdom of the dead’, a reflection of its reputation as the only non-human enemy of the great whales.) However, it is the narwhal’s most obvious feature–implicit in its binomial, Monodon monoceros–that is its own emblem of melancholy.

  The narwhal’s tusk is actually an overgrown, living tooth which erupts to pierce its owner’s lip on the left-hand side and spirals up to nine feet long, sometimes even longer, but for centuries it was identified as the horn of a unicorn, invested with magical powers. A medieval conspiracy grew up between its Arctic hunters and the apothecaries who passed this natural wonder off as something truly legendary. Worth twenty times their weight in gold, the tusks were prized booty in the Middle Ages, stolen by Crusaders and traded across Europe as talismans of state. Only fifty were known to exist during the mid-1500s, and on his return from an expedition in 1577 to find the fabled North-West Passage, Sir Martin Frobisher presented Elizabeth I with a ‘sea-unicorne’s horn’ valued at £10,000, more than the cost of a new castle. Evidently the Virgin Queen saw royal potency in the tribute, for she used it as a sceptre.

  The powdered tusk was prized, too, as an antidote for poison and for melancholy, ‘the English malady’ whose anatomy, documented by the reclusive clergyman, Robert Burton, Melville had studied. Likewise, Albrecht Dürer’s enigmatic Melencolia of 1514, with its brooding angel and a comet soaring over a distant sea provides Moby-Dick with its secret code according to one modern writer, Viola Sachs: a hidden structure based on the magic square of four. Through this cipher, says Sachs, Melville unites his melancholy theme with the story of the biblical outcast Ishmael and in so doing, ‘expresses his vision of the terrestrial origin of creation’.

  Freighted with such symbols and conspiracies, the narwhal became a fantastical beast, redolent with its own melancholy, as if bowed down by its onerous extension. To hold a narwhal tusk requires two hands, and the great ivory spike feels like carved stone in the grip, an ornate weight out of a cathedral mason’s yard, belonging to the same place as a gargoyle. Little wonder that fairytale unicorns were, and still are, portrayed with a narwhal’s horn.

  It was only in 1685, when Francis Willughby described the narwhal in his Icthyographia, that the fraud was exposed. Further evidence came in the shape of the animals themselves, confronting us with their reality. In the 1880s a narwhal swam up the Humber and the Ouse to York, a medieval apparition in the shadow of the minster; a few years later, a beluga was shot in the same waterway, trying to make its way back to the north. In 1949 a pair of female narwhals appeared as far south as Rainham, Essex, and the River Medway in Kent.

  Nowadays, microscopic examination has revealed the real magic of the narwhal’s tusk. Unlike other teeth, its surface has open tubules connected to inner nerves; it is, in effect, a giant sense organ, lined with ten million nerve endings to enable the animal to detect subtle changes in temperature and pressure. This may explain why narwhals raise their tusks above water, as if to sniff the air. Other research indicates that the tusk is not only a sensory probe, but may also be a transmitter or receiver of sound, and even of electricity. Such discoveries exceed the narwhal’s mythical powers. Its legendary spike is no dead bone, but an enervated growth producing ‘tactile sensations’ which ‘might be interpreted as pleasurable’. Males rubbing their tusks together were formerly thought to be duelling over females; clearly, this behaviour has other aspects. So sensitive are these appendages that if broken, the animal suffers such severe pain that, in a remarkably philanthropic gesture, another narwhal will insert the tip of its own tusk in the exposed space, and break off the end to plug the aching gap.

  Given such facts, who could resist a narwhal, with its shadowed damask, shrouded in black and white and grey and brown, monochrome daubs on a painter’s palette? Perversely, it is the animal’s other end that I find most beautiful: its wonderfully ornate flukes, flowing from a central notch in an exuberant sweep to the tips and back in an ogee curve to the tail stock. They may look back to front, but they are made for performance as much as any spoiler on a sports car.

  The reader may guess that I am inordinately fond of the holarctic whales. Like belugas, narwhals also change colour as they age. It is an improbable sequence. They are born light grey, a nursery colour that endears them to their mothers; as they approach maturity, they darken to a purplish black. This then separates into black or dark brown spots, so that young adults resemble leopards or thrushes; in old age these marks recede, revealing the white below, just as the fine hair of an elderly woman turns silvery grey, making them seem wise as well as old.

  This transformation is often thwarted by fishing nets or Inuit harpoons. The narwhal’s blubber is a particular delicacy, and when a harpooned animal is hauled out of the sea, slices are eaten warm from its carcase as mak taq–a vitamin-rich fast-food to forestall scurvy. The Inuit carve its tusks into decorative objects, a useless embellishment for a thing of natural beauty. Yet to them, the narwhal is an entirely utilitarian catch: its lance makes fishing rods and its intestines supply the line; its fine oil is burned in moss lamps. In the past, both the narwhal and beluga have furnished soft leather for gloves, pale grey, white or mottled, ready decorated for a dandy’s hands. One Hull company manufactured beluga bootlaces, with a somewhat self-defeating warning on the box, ‘should not be pulled or jerked violently’.

  In the mid-twentieth century, Canada imposed licences for hunting belugas, although native peoples and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were still allowed to kill them ‘for their own domestic use and for feeding their dogs’. Thousands of narwhals and belugas are still hunted every year from small boats or shot at from the ice, a cull in which nature itself is complicit. In winter, the inlets up which the animals swim can freeze over, creating a barrier too wide for them to cross in one breath. The whales are sealed in a blue-green world, one that threatens to become their collective tomb.

  It is a heart-rending notion. At Point Barrow, Alaska, nine hundred belugas were forced to share an ice hole or savssat one hundred and fifty yards long by fifty yards wide. Unable to find open water, the animals surfaced every twelve to eighteen minutes, taking ten or fifteen breaths, then dove again, singing their distress. Their innate sense of community compounded the crisis as they rose to respire at one and the same time, a deadly synchronicity that caused some animals to be bodily squeezed out of this frozen hole of Calcutta and into the arms of the Inuit. In one day, they took three hundred whales.

  But of all the Arctic cetaceans, the bowhead or Balæna mysticetus is the most mysterious. It is p
erhaps my favourite whale, although I have never seen one, and probably never will. Closely related to the right whale–distinguished mainly by its lack of callosities–it is able to break through the ice with its massive bow-shaped head, thereby avoiding the pathetic fate of its lesser cousins. It also has the longest baleen of any whale, measuring up to fifteen feet in length. Hanging in crystalline water with its huge white jaws decorated with a ‘necklace’ of black spots, this ebony-grey giant seems to embody the silent, ominous spirit of the Arctic–although, like the humpback, it too sings a low, resonant song. Living at the top of the world, it is the first whale, one that struck even hardened whalers with a kind of awe. In 1823, the crew of the Cumbrian from Hull watched in fearful wonder as a fifty-seven-foot female bowhead circled their ship, then calmly pushed the vessel backwards with her snout to repel their invasion. For centuries the bowhead lived in icy obscurity; that was its salvation. Preserved by the very harshness of its environment, this vast creature simply vanishes when winter closes over the pole as though disappearing from a radar screen, upending its lacquer flukes and slipping back into the sea, along with its secrets. It has good reason to seek such sanctuary: the blubbery, baleen-heavy creature has learned to its cost that there is no hiding place so remote that it cannot be sought out by man.

  For imperial Britain the Arctic represented wealth and exploitation, and even its peoples were fair game. In 1847 Memidadluk and Uckaluk, ‘The Two Esquimaux, or Yacks’, were exhibited along with their artefacts to fascinated crowds in Hull, York and Manchester. Fish, flesh, people, blubber, baleen, oil: the Arctic was an index of unsustainable resources ready for the taking, and for the inhabitants of the northern ports of Hull and Whitby there seemed to be an invisible tie between their maritime fastness and the frozen seas beyond.