Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  The British came late to whaling. At the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, their ships had attempted to compete with the Dutch for the rich, unexploited Arctic grounds: ‘At that time, you see,’ noted a later chronicler, ‘whaling was like finding a gold mine. It was untapped wealth; the mammals had not been scared, and the rewards were immense.’ While the Dutch established their Spitsbergen factory at Smeerenberg, or Blubbertown, British whalers set out from Hull and even from Exeter. But their trade declined in inverse proportion to Dutch success; by 1671, the Netherlands was sending out 155 whalers to Greenland, and sometimes their annual catch would reach as many as two thousand whales. In 1693 there was a move to revive the British industry ‘formerly…very beneficial to this Kingdom’, as Sir William Scawen, London financier and merchant, told Parliament, ‘not only for the great Quantities of Whalebone and Oil which hath imported from thence; but also a Nursery for Seamen, and the Expence of Provisions for victualing the ships’. Scawen bemoaned that since 1683, ‘there hath not been one Ship sent from England to Greenland; so that Whalebone, which…was sold at Sixty Pounds per Ton, is now sold for Four Hundred Pounds the Ton; whereby Holland and Hamburgh draw out of this Kingdom above One hundred thousand Pounds for Whalebone and Whale Oil.’

  Soon enough, business turned back to the whale. In the 1720s the South Sea Company, recovering from the infamous financial scandal of the Bubble, invested in whaling on the advice of Henry Elking, who too had bemoaned Britain’s lack of initiative to be ‘a very great Mistake’. The company fitted up a dozen ships on the Thames and sent its fleet north, encouraged by a government tax exemption for all whale products. The rewards were discouraging–the squadron returned with just twenty-five whales, barely enough to cover the cost of the expedition–and it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the country applied itself seriously to whaling. Once begun, however, Britain excelled, employing the same efficiency it brought to slavery (in which my mother’s own ancestors, living in Bristol, were complicit). On both were built the foundations of empire: the trade in humans, for sugar; and in whales, for oil.

  As a result, London became the best-lit city in the world. By the 1740s, five thousand street lamps were burning whale oil, expunging the primal darkness. The capital itself was a whaling port. Unlike the Yankee syndicates, entire English fleets were owned by one merchant such as Samuel Enderby Thomas Sturge, or Elhanan Bicknell. Their ships sailed from the Howland Great Wet Dock at Deptford, the largest commercial dock in the world, a huge gash cut into the south side of the river, precursor of the time when London would be undermined by its own commerce, its river banks riddled with such inlets. Able to handle one hundred and twenty ships, it was renamed Greenland Dock in honour of its Arctic trade, with quayside bollards made of whale bones. Try-works were established here too, where whales were processed away from the city so as not to offend its inhabitants with the stench. Further rendering was done around the looping bend of the river, on what became the site of the Millennium Dome. Here, where the coffee-coloured Thames widens into the sea, dead whales were brought back to London’s streets. Here, where expensive Docklands flats now preside, blubber was also boiled.

  It was on the eastern coast that British whaling truly prospered, however, from ports closer to the northern whale fisheries; pre-eminently Hull and Whitby. They had long experience of the earliest traditions of whaling: a thousand years before, the Vikings had whaled off Norway–in the saga of Beowulf, the sea is called a ‘whale-road’–and by the ninth century were exporting whale meat to England. Eight hundred years later, in 1753, whaling began in Whitby. Only three animals were taken that season, but over the next eighty years, fifty-eight ships sailed on 577 voyages from the Yorkshire port, harvesting a total of 2,761 whales, 25,000 seals and 55 polar bears.

  It was hardly a safe occupation for the hunters. During its peak years of whaling, Whitby lost seventeen ships–an awful attrition, added to by such individual tragedies as the death of four men when a boat of the unhappily named Aimwell was stove in by a whale in 1810. None the less, whaling was now a lucrative British trade, and by 1788 The Times was reporting munificent catches for the northern ports. In one week alone, the Albion brought into Hull ’500 butts of oil and two tons of fins, the produce of seven and a half whales’; the Samuel arrived in the same port with ’60 butts of blubber and one ton of fins, the produce of three whales’; and the Spencer arrived in Newcastle with ’270 butts of blubber, and five and a half tons of fins, the produce of seven whales’–not including a further four ships bringing the bounty of sixteen and a half whales, and two thousand seals. The ‘great slaughter of the Greenland whale’ was truly under way, as techniques were improved to satisfy Britannia’s need for oil to light her subjects’ way, and for baleen to corset her Prince Regent in a ‘Bastille of Whalebone’.

  Like the Yankee whalers, the British hunted their prey from smaller boats, modelled, in their case, on early Viking craft. Whales were often killed from the ice, too, and dragged onto it to be butchered; unlike the Americans, British whalers did not render down blubber on board, but brought it back wholesale. So many ships were engaged in the business that up to a hundred vessels could be seen along the ice margin, a virtual cordon making it almost impossible for any whale to escape. It was nearly as hazardous for the whalers–one in ten of the ships would never return.

  As war with America forced Britain to find new supplies of sperm oil, the government offered bounties of up to £500 to ships owned by companies such as Enderby and Sons. Samuel Enderby had arrived in London from Boston, Massachusetts, in 1775. He was a British loyalist–his ships had carried the famous consignment of tea into Boston Harbour. In 1776, along with Alexander Champion and John St Barbe, Enderby equipped twelve whalers with American captains and harpooneers. They returned with 439 tons of oil.

  In 1788, acting on information gathered by James Cook, who had seen sperm whales on his voyage to Australia, Enderby sent out Amelia, the first British ship custom-built for ‘sperming’ to sail into the Pacific, thereby stealing a march on the Yankees, whose first ship, the Beaver, did not leave Nantucket for the Pacific until 1791. With on-board try-works enabling vessels to hunt far from home, these were ‘by far the longest of all voyages now or ever made by man’, as Ishmael says. They were the starships of their day, boldly going after animals whose own ancestors had colonized remote seas millions of years before. Now humans were creating their own new routes of oceanic colonization.

  It was a new rivalry of the high seas. Through whaling, the British Empire extended its influence into the southern hemisphere in an ‘atonement’ for the loss of its American colonies. Britain intended to be self-sufficient in the matter of whale oil. ‘We are all surprised, Mr Pitt,’ a sardonic John Adams, the first ambassador of the new republic, told the Prime Minister in 1785, ‘that you prefer darkness and consequent robberies, burglaries and murders in the streets to the receiving, as a remittance, our sperm oil.’ Adams, a future president, spoke with the confidence of a former charge who had stolen a march on his master, ‘seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years’, as Ishmael boasts. Whaling was a presentiment of a new world order.

  Whale-ships cleared the way for missions to the South Seas; whalers brought God as well as light to the world. As Hal Whitehead remarks, ‘They left behind diseases, non-native animals (especially rats), technology, and their genes.’ Outgoing British whale-ships–which would otherwise be empty–supplied the convict settlements of Australia. ‘Evidence inclines us to believe that these colonies would never have existed had it not been for whaling vessels approaching their shores,’ Thomas Beale wrote. ‘It is a fact, that the original settlers at Botany Bay were more than once saved from starvation by the timely arrival of some whaling vessels.’ In 1791 the enterprising Samuel Enderby opened an office in Port Jackson, Sydney Harbour, and arranged for his ships to carry convicts there, delivering n
ew slaves to New South Wales. The establishment of these colonies gave Britain a great advantage in the southern whale fisheries; soon those same colonies would be supplying sperm oil in their own right, hunting the animals from their own shores and exporting the products ‘at a much less cost of time and capital’ to Britain. Meanwhile, James Colnett, an officer of the Royal Navy, sailed from Portsmouth on HMS Rattler to extend the nation’s whale fisheries in the Pacific, although Ishmael mocks his rendition of a whale: ‘Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!’

  More than ever, whaling was seen as ‘the mine of British strength and glory’, a vital source of maritime experience and mercantile speculation. Later, whale-ships ferried victims of the Great Hunger from Ireland to America, just as my own great grandfather fled Ireland for England and, eventually, Whitby. In a manner more extensive than even Ishmael suspected, whales played their part in world affairs, in the movement of entire populations, and in shifting spheres of influence to come.

  I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling.

  The Advocate, Moby-Dick

  Each April, when the weather improved, Whitby’s ships set off for Greenland, harpooning the easily caught whales of the Arctic. They brought back chunks of blubber, creating a stench that Ishmael compares to a whale cemetery, and which turned the port into one of the most noisome places in England.

  Whitby whaling captains–many also Quakers–built their elegant houses high on the West Cliff, out of range of the stinking manufactory of their fortunes. Their Georgian terraces still overlook the harbour, a view framed by Whitby’s famous whale bone arch. When I stood under this monument as a boy, I presumed it had been there for centuries. In fact, its mandibles, from a blue whale, were only erected in 1962, and have since been replaced by the jaws of a bowhead, presented by the people of Alaska. But down in the town, whale bones were used as timbers for roofs and walls. Entire houses and workshops were constructed from these giant ribs and jaws. If a man might stand within a whale’s mouth, why not make a more convenient shelter for himself and his family, swapping bones for bricks? After all, the whale had no need for them now.

  The expansion of the whaling fleet was almost frightening in its speed. In 1782 there were forty-four British whale-ships operating in the Greenland Sea. Two years later, that figure had doubled; and by 1787, 250 ships were sailing from British ports–only for a new war to erode their returns; ‘greenmen’ were imposed on whale-ships as a means of training them for the navy, while experienced whalemen were in turn impressed to fight Napoleon.

  As a young sailor, William Scoresby had himself been captured off Trafalgar, and in a daring escape, managed to evade his Spanish jailers, stowing away on a British ship exchanging prisoners of war. Back in Whitby, Scoresby enlisted on the whale-ship the Henrietta, rising quickly to the rank of Specksioneer (a Dutch-derived term for principal harpooneer), then to captain. It was the beginning of a career that would claim the lives of no fewer than 533 whales.

  Scoresby was a powerfully built man of great vitality and his talent for whaling was undeniable. On his second voyage as master of the Henrietta, he returned with eighteen Greenland whales; in the next five years, the ship took eighty more animals, yielding nearly 800 tons of oil. Soon Scoresby was commanding a larger ship, the Dundee; on her first voyage she garnered an unprecedented thirty-six whales. Scoresby’s heroic status was only reinforced when his ship faced a French warship off the Yorkshire coast and destruction seemed imminent: at the last moment the Dundee uncovered her eighteen-pound guns, at the sight of which the enemy turned and fled.

  In 1803 Scoresby took command of a new, double-hulled vessel with metal plates on her bow, enabling her to plough through Arctic ice. With the Resolution sailed his own son, also named William, fourteen years old and about to become a whaler, explorer and inventor in his own right. He had a heady precedent to follow. Scoresby Senior had come closer than any other man to claiming the £1,000 prize offered to anyone able to sail north of the eighty-ninth parallel in pursuit of the fabled North-West Passage, a search which ‘laid open the haunts of the whale’. He had also devised an enclosed crow’s nest, an ingenious contraption with a protective framework of leather or canvas, storage space for telescope and firearm, and flags and speaking trumpet for communication with the crew or other ships. It was an eccentric device to Ishmael, who satirizes Scoresby as ‘Captain Sleet’, standing in his invention, armed with a rifle ‘for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters’.

  Scoresby was no ordinary seaman, often writing his ship’s log in verse: ‘So now the Western ice we leave/ And pleasant Gales we doe receive’. He also kept a pet polar bear, which he would walk on a leash down to Whitby harbour to fish for its lunch. Scoresby presided over the peak years of British whaling, the personification of this national harvest. By the summer of 1817, columns in The Times were being devoted to reports from Berwick, Greenock, Peterhead, Aberdeen, Montrose, Dundee, Kirkcaldy, Leith, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle, London and Whitby as whale-ships returned laden with blubber and bone.

  In 1823, after a long and successful career, Scoresby gave up the sea and retired to Whitby. He had never questioned the right of man to take the whale; rather, he reasoned that whaling was a tribute to man’s ingenuity and God’s grace. ‘We are led to reflect on the economy manifestation respect to the hugest of the animal creation, whether on earth or in the ocean, whereby all become subject to man, either for living energy or the produce of their dead carcasses.’ ‘The capture of the whale by man, when their relative proportions are considered, is a result truly wonderful,’ Scoresby declared. ‘An animal of a thousand times the bulk of man is constrained to yield its life to his attacks and its carcase a tribute to his marvellous enterprise.’ His was a righteous pursuit, ‘satisfactorily explained on the simple principle of the Divine enactment. It was the appointment of the Creator that it should be so.’ However, Scoresby’s own departure from the world would be as brutal as his butchery of the whales of the Arctic.

  An elevated pavement runs the length of Bagdale, passing the elegant terrace that overlooks a walled Quaker graveyard and, beyond that, Pannet Park, once decorated with whale bone arches, as were many other Whitby gardens. Here Scoresby lived, in a fine Georgian house with classical fanlights and carved sandstone porch. And here, on 28 April 1829, at the age of sixty-nine, he took up his pistol, and shot himself through the heart. ‘He appears to have been in a state of temporary derangement for several months past,’ the subsequent inquest found. It is impossible to know the reason why Scoresby took a pistol to his heart; it would certainly be too sentimental to read into his self-murder any sense of guilt over the five hundred whales he had killed, and for whose deaths he gave thanks to God.

  From his portrait, William Scoresby appears a refined version of his father; rational, scientific, pious, inquisitive; a combination of disciplines that the era allowed. He too had gone to sea as a boy, but had studied science in Edinburgh before joining the navy, and after his discharge went to London to meet Joseph Banks, the renowned naturalist who had sailed with Captain Cook. Banks received Scoresby at his house in Soho Square; he may have seen something of himself in this young man who spoke so eloquently of the Arctic regions he had already explored on his father’s whaling voyages.

  A year later, William took command of his first whale-ship, the Resolution, followed by the Esk. On his voyages, he sought to prove that the temperature of the sea was warmer below its surface. Sending his findings to Banks, the two men developed an instrument to more accurately measure the ocean’s residual heat: the ‘Marine Diver’, a brass contraption that could be lowered 7,000 feet into the water. For Scoresby, whaling was a way to finance his investigations. During
the Esk’s perilous journey–when he nearly lost his ship to pack ice, and when his men may have cursed their captain’s curiosity–Scoresby made scientific notes in books and papers which flowed out over his desk: calculations, sketches, suppositions and descriptions, a fluid body of work which, for the first time, documented these unblemished seas.

  An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery was published in two volumes in Edinburgh in 1820, and profusely illustrated with maps and engravings. Scoresby’s became the work by which all others were measured, a compendium of cetology and whaling techniques and the nature of the Arctic itself, complete with ninety-six snow crystals illustrated by this son of Captain Sleet in dizzying pages of repeated patterns.

  A polar counterpart to Beale’s Pacific travels, Scoresby’s text had a religious overtone, as if the animals and places and phenomena he catalogued were evidence of Eden; the book was later taken up by the Religious Tract Society and supplied to the American Sunday School movement as an affirmation of the Creation. For all its scientific rigour, there was no conflict between its author’s beliefs and his investigations. Scoresby’s faith echoed his father’s; and like his father, his avowed aim, by God’s grace, was to find the North-West Passage. But if the whale’s true nature could only be guessed at from its spouting, steamy surfacings, or an iceberg’s entirety could be seen only from below, so the deeper meaning of Scoresby’s facts and figures lay submerged.

  Section I. A Description of Animals, of the Cetaceous Kind, frequenting the Greenland Sea.

  Balæna Mysticetus: The Common Whale, or Greenland Whale.