by Philip Hoare
‘This valuable and interesting animal, generally called The Whale by way of eminence…is more productive of oil than any other of the Cetacea, and, being less active, slower in its motion, and more timid than any other of the kind…is more easily captured.’ Like Beale, Scoresby drew on his own observations to delineate the leviathan. ‘Of 322 individuals, in the capture of which I have been personally concerned, no one, I believe, exceeded 60 feet in length…’
And how to convey that magnitude, that mass of whalish flesh, that cavern of ceiling-high baleen? ‘When the mouth is open,’ observes Scoresby, as the latest captive was brought to book, ‘it presents a cavity as large as a room, and capable of containing a merchants-ship’s jolly-boat, full of men, being 6 or 8 feet wide, 10 or 12 feet high (in front), and 15 or 16 feet long.’ Such detail is as telling of its author and his time as it was of the whale. ‘The eyes…are remarkably small in proportion to the bulk of the animal’s body, being little larger than those of an ox,’ he continues, writing at his desk by whale-light, ‘nor can any orifice for the admission of sound be described until the skin is removed.’ As with so much of the whale, so little could be discovered until it was dead.
Yet that tiny eye is all-seeing. ‘Whales are observed to discover one another, in clear water, when under the surface, at an amazing distance. When at the surface, however, they do not see far.’ In fact, they sensed one another’s presence by sound, even though, like Beale’s sperm whales, Scoresby considered bow-heads to be dumb. ‘They have no voice,’ he concludes, ‘but in breathing or blowing, they make a very loud noise.’ The ice echoes to these trumpets of watery elephants, effortlessly negotiating oceans that defeated mere unblubbered men. ‘Bulky as the whale is, as inactive, or indeed clumsy as it appears to be…the fact, however, is the reverse.’
And age, Scoresby, sir, what of that? ‘In some whales, a curious hollow on one side, and ridge on the other, occurs in many of the central blades of whalebone, at regular intervals of 6 or 7 inches,’ replies the captain testily, somewhat irritated at my interruption. ‘May not this irregularity, like the rings in the horns of the ox, which they resemble, afford an intimation of the age of the whale?’ It took science two hundred years to catch up with another of Scoresby’s discoveries, one that lay buried, almost unnoticed, in his book. In his search for the fabled North-West Passage, he had, accidentally, opened the way to the whale’s most abiding mystery.
Set with deliberate anachronism next to Scoresby’s technological Marine Diver is a drawing of a stone tool, a Neolithic contrast to an invention of the Industrial Revolution. ‘The master of the Volunteer, whaler of Whitby, when near the coast of Spitsbergen, July 19. 1813, shewed me part of a lance which had been taken out of the fat of a whale killed by his crew a few weeks before,’ Scoresby related, with a degree of cool amazement. ‘It was completely embedded in the blubber, and the wound was quite healed. A small white scar on the skin of the whale, alone marked the place where the lance had entered.’ But the telling fact was that such weapons were ‘in common use among the Esquimaux a century ago’.
Scoresby found that these tools were ‘struck by some tribe of the same nation, inhabiting the shores of the frozen ocean, on the northern face of the American Continent, yet unexplored’. If whales had been caught in the Atlantic implanted with implements made on the Pacific coast like some early form of tracking device, then there must be a passage between the two oceans.(Three centuries earlier, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert presented his argument for a North-West Passage to Elizabeth I–a year before Frobisher’s expedition–he cited as evidence a narwhal horn found on the Tartary coast.) This was the Holy Grail for which Scoresby and his father had searched, the opening up of the northernmost world. In the pursuit, they were diverted from a yet more extraordinary finding: Scoresby’s Marine Diver may have plumbed the waters to reveal their depths, but this primitive artefact had uncovered the sensational secret of the bowhead.
On 29 April, 1850, Herman Melville withdrew the two volumes of Scoresby’s work from the New York Society Library. As he read the Arctic Regions–which he failed to return for a year–Melville’s imagination was fired by the story of the stone lance. It led him to a startling conclusion. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael reports the finding, during the cutting-in of a whale, ‘of a lance-head of stone…the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before America was discovered.’ Even given his exaggeration, the idea was staggering: if Scoresby’s lance was a century old, then this meant the animal was even older.
Until recently, fact-checking editors have dismissed Ishmael’s airy claims. ‘Anatomical evidence from larger whales suggests a life of up to seventy or eighty years,’ Harold Beaver assured readers in a footnote to Moby-Dick in 1972. ‘But a longer span, stretching to centuries, is sailors’ myth.’ Now, in a belated confirmation of Melville’s musings, scientists are beginning to realize that ideas about how long whales may live have been substantially underestimated. The clues to this revision came from native Alaskans who still hunt bowheads in the Bering Sea. The Iñupiat have observed the whales for centuries, and their storytellers claim to have recognized individual animals over successive human generations. Since 1981, six stone or ivory harpoon points have been found in the blubber of whales–weapons that modern Iñupiats did not recognize, having used mostly metal harpoons since the 1870s.
Long after Scoresby’s discovery, scientists came to their own conclusion: that these whales must be as old as the implements found in them. And as the Iñupiat hunted only young whales, being better eating, it seemed likely that there might be even older animals, hidden in the icy reaches. The bowhead’s Arctic existence seemed to slow down its life, extending it, decade by decade, century by century; a sentient entity suspended in vast vistas of time, virtually cryogenically preserved.
Using a technique for dating animals from changes in the aspartic acid levels in their eyes, Dr Jeffrey L. Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California examined tissue from whales caught by the Iñupiat hunters. Most were twenty to sixty years old when they died; but of five large male bowheads, one was ninety years old, four were aged between 135 and 180 years, and one was 211 years old. Employing other methods for measuring radioactive lead in bone, and samples of skin collected from living whales, Dr Bada stated that ‘what we have assigned the bowheads are only minimum ages…These are truly aged animals, perhaps the most long-lived mammals.’
Since it is unlikely that the oldest whales have been caught–that older whales could and most probably do exist–Bada’s assessment is hardly underestimated. Even as I write, a three-and-a-half-inch lance tip, made in New Bedford in the 1890s, has been retrieved from the blubber of a bowhead caught off Alaska. The consequences haunt me: that these whales swam the same seas that Scoresby had negotiated; that the same animals from which he had made his observations might yet be alive. It is also an exquisite revenge: born before Melville, the whales have outlived their pursuers.
In his chapter entitled, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?–Will He Perish?’, Ishmael dismisses the idea that whale populations, particularly those of the great baleen species, were declining. On the contrary, he claimed, they had ‘two firm fortresses’, which, he averred, would ‘for ever remain impregnable…their Polar citadels…in a charmed circle of everlasting December’.
Wherefore…we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s ark; and if ever the world is to be flooded again, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
In his fantasy, Melville saw a new dispensation, a watery version of Hawthorne’s prairie holocaust, Harry Hinton’s
icy sanctuary come to life.
It was recently announced that the earth entered a new geological epoch around the year 1800, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The era of the Holocene has ended, say the scientists; the era of the Anthropocene has begun. In one of the cathedrals in the walled city where the tsars of all the Russias lie in their monumental sarcophagi, there is a medieval mural of a whale. This fragile image has seen off Peter, Nicholas, Josef and Mikhail, surviving human empires like some Neolithic cave painting, like the stone within the whale. Now the whale’s citadels are rapidly receding, making the North-West Passage a permanent reality, opening continent to continent as fresh water locked into polar ice leaches into the ocean, and the world’s northern nations prepare to plunder the Arctic’s resources anew.
What will this mean for the whale, as the sea rises to remind us of its power? Krill, which feed on the algæ on the undersurface of the ice, may diminish, and food sources for the whales are already becoming scarce at lower latitudes as warming oceans push them ever further north, only to find that those everlasting citadels have vanished. On the other hand, the mineral nutrients released by the same process in the Antarctic may have beneficial effects for the food chain and, perhaps, cetaceans. No one really knows. We are living through a vast experiment, one which may result in the flooded world that Melville imagined; a world that the whales will inherit, evolving into superior beings with only distant memories of the time when they were persecuted by beings whose greed proved to be their downfall.
Having published his book, Scoresby returned to the sea in the newly built Baffin, taking leave of his wife and his family in Liverpool–had he but known it, for the last time. He returned home in September 1822, after charting the east coast of Greenland, to be told of his wife’s death. Disheartened, he made only one more trip, before giving up the sea for another vocation: that of vicar. As its erstwhile champion exchanged ‘the clatter of hailstones on icebergs’ for the sound of psalms from pews, Whitby’s whaling fleet dwindled to just ten ships. In 1825, at the parish church of St Mary’s, high on the hill overlooking the town, it was Scoresby’s sad duty to preach on the occasion of the loss of all hands on the Lively in an Arctic storm; and the Esk, his own former command, which sank just thirty miles from Whitby. The terrible toll of sixty dead added up to the end of an industry–as did the depletion of the whaling grounds, and the thousands of slaughtered animals.
Scoresby became Vicar of Bradford–where his parishioners included the Reverend Patrick Brontë of Haworth village, and his young daughters–and turned his scientific attention to the mysterious forces of mesmerism. Instead of dealing in oil and whalebone, Whitby now traded in jewellery carved from the shiny black jet found in its cliffs and made mournfully fashionable by a perennially grieving queen. And by the time my own grandfather was walking along Bagdale on his way to Mass with his brothers and sisters, Whitby’s arched buildings of bone were dwarfed by the railway viaduct, overturned arks for a new age of extinction.
XI
The Melancholy Whale
A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue…is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king.
Blackstone, Extracts from a Sub-Sub-Librarian
On a bleak strand south of Skegness and its garish amusements, the sun was already beginning to set as I trudged through the damp grey sand. Something lay ahead in the creeping dusk, growing closer until its vague shape resolved into a discernible form. Before that, I smelled it. I can smell it still when I look at the pictures. Lying there, like a cod on a fishmonger’s slab, was a minke whale. Its shiny black skin had been entirely flayed, leaving a fishy-coloured beige, the texture of latex–except where the blubber had begun to turn blue-green.
When I had last seen a minke, it was surfing over Stellwagen Bank, snatching breaths at the surface, briefly showing the sharp-pointed rostrum for which the whale is named, Balænoptera acutorostrata. (It owes its other name to a Norwegian sailor, Miencke, who mistook this, the smallest rorqual, for more valuable prey. Not for the first time, it occurs to me that whales are named for their usefulness to man, rather than for their innate beauty.)
Then, in a rare moment of revelation, a minke had swum by the bow of the boat, clearly silhouetted below, its fins emblazoned like the chevrons on an officer’s sleeve. Now all I saw was a piece of dead matter that smelled like something between fish and meat. Its elegant flukes were reduced to raw cartilage; there was barely anything to indicate that it had ever been alive, save for its pale little penis hanging from the underside of its belly, flaccid and worm-like. I fingered it, then I walked back in the failing light, the moon rising like a bloody pearl out of the North Sea.
This stormy eastern coast has always been a wrecking place for the whales, forever echoing to their plaintive blows. Eighty years before my encounter in Skegness, another minke washed up near Mablethorpe, in September 1926. This time, the animal was still alive when it beached. Summoned from the Natural History Museum, Percy Stammwitz attempted to return the fifteen-foot female to the sea, without success, before claiming it as a specimen. Newspaper reports claimed that the whale lived for a day and a half after its capture, and that on its way to South Kensington, destined for the sand pits, ‘its blowing was audible notwithstanding the noise of the engine, until the lorry was within about 30 miles of London, when the animal burst a blood-vessel and died of hæmorrhage of the lungs.’ In truth, Stammwitz was aware that the whale was still alive when it was put on the lorry, but as it was not conscious, he reasoned that if he tried to kill the animal, it could suffer more if it regained consciousness in the process.
In 1913 the Crown gave first right of refusal to the carcases of royal fish to the Natural History Museum, thereby recognizing their scientific as well as their commercial value. The Board of Trade requested that the Receivers of Wreck–then stationed around the country–should send ‘telegraphic Reports’ of stranded whales to the museum. The earliest records, compiled during the years of the First World War, were collated by the museum’s famous director, Sidney Harmer. They were sad casualty lists to mirror others being published at that time (when, as Harmer noted, coastguards had other matters to deal with): from a finback in the Firth of Forth, ‘at first supposed to be an aeroplane’, to a rare Sowerby’s beaked whale found at Skegness and which ‘appeared to have been killed by rifle-shots, perhaps in mistake for a German submarine’. The animal’s calf lay alongside it on the beach. Other whales died after swimming into mine fields intended to blow up U-boats.
Thirteen thousand beached whales have been recorded by the museum, but as they span the twentieth century–each lost and expired cetacean plotted on a deathly map of the British coastline–only a few have been claimed for scientific research. The remainder represent a collective rebuke and a logistical dilemma, for even in death, whales present humans with gargantuan problems.
From a modern office block overlooking Southampton Docks, the Receiver of Wreck administers a fourteenth-century decree. Since 1324, when the right was enshrined in the reign of Edward II, every whale, dolphin, porpoise and sturgeon found on English shores has become the property of the monarch. What was once a royal prerogative is now a liability. In the twenty-first century the Receiver of Wreck is, in effect, whale undertaker to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
The Receiver, or her Deputy–the current holders of these ancient posts both happen to be young women–will be alerted by one of nineteen coastguard stations. A dead or dying whale might be floating at sea, a potential shipping hazard, or it may present a public nuisance as it is washed up. Sometimes a whale will appear on one beach, only to be carried by the tide to another. In this morbid game, it is the Receiver’s job to deal with the equivocal prize: a massive, stinking carcase. In remote locations, the whale is allowed to become carrion for birds; elsewhere, police cordons may be needed–less to shield people from zoonotic or interspeci
es infection than to protect them from the heavy plant machinery required to move an animal weighing many tons.
These are expensive disposals. Small whales cost from £6,000 to £8,000 to shift; large whales as much as £20,000. A profitable right has become a public expense. When whales were unprotected, they were valuable commodities, bounties to be claimed by the Crown; now they are treated as managed or even toxic waste, a result of pollution, or of the large doses used to euthanize the animal. And although they soon decay–the epidermis peeling, the internal organs breaking down, swelling their bellies with gas–dead whales remain resilient. Their blubber is thick and hard to puncture, and carcases hang from mechanical claws like Indian mystics suspended from hooks. Sometimes a pair of excavators join forces to pull them apart; other techniques include the use of high-pressure water jets. One fin whale that stranded on the Isle of Wight, having drifted from the Bay of Biscay, required nine truckloads to cart it away piecemeal to the local landfill. Another, at Lee-on-Solent, was interred at a site in the New Forest.
In her open-plan office, Sophia Exelby shows me her gallery of stranded whales. It is a gruesome car-insurer’s album, each cetacean crash more ghastly than the last. A pilot whale lodged in Devon rocks, caught in the kind of boulders over which children clamber looking for rock pools. A finback washed up at Ventnor, its blubber dripping like wax in the sun, its separated head yards down the shore. A sei whale, one of the rarer rorquals–and one of the fastest–lying on Morecambe Sands, victim of its deceptive tides. A humpback in Kent, slumped on its white flippers like an airliner in an emergency landing. An orca in the Mersey.
Whales where they should not be.
Many may be accidents, such as ship-strikes, or the result of entanglements or disease. Mass strandings–more familiar on the beaches of Cape Cod or New Zealand–are less easily explained. Freak tides, bad weather, sand bars and ailing whales inadvertently leading their fellows to disaster have all been cited as possible causes; in his notes on strandings, Sidney Harmer remarked that they often occurred when the sea temperature was abnormally high or low, due to an influx of water from colder or warmer latitudes, and that a localized wind was blowing onto the shore.