Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Another theory is that whales align themselves to the earth’s invisible power lines by means of magnetosomes in their bodies; ferro-magnetic material has been found in the tissues of cetacean organs to support this idea. Ever aware of their position–birds may use a similar technique in their migrations–they orientate themselves to magnetic contours as though possessed of personal GPS systems. But sometimes there are anomalies in this unseen map, lines running at right-angles rather than parallel to the land, or places where the coast has changed and no one has updated their system.

  For a marine mammal, such a mistake can be fatal. The Cape’s sands–laid down since the ice age–are a case in point. Deceived by their own senses, pilot whales and dolphins are led onto shore rather than through deep water. Spurn Point–a kind of Cape Cod in miniature at the mouth of the Humber–may have the same effect. Even more recent research shows that increases in standings may also coincide with solar activity which disrupts the magnetic field. Studies of sperm whales stranded in the North Sea over the past three centuries indicate that ninety per cent occurred when the sun’s activity cycle was below average–a finding that raises the notion that those seventeenth-century Dutch omens of catastrophe might have a meteorological, as well as an eschatological basis.

  Other reasons put forward for mass standings raise intriguing questions about the whales themselves. One biologist believes that such behaviour is a genetic memory of their evolutionary past: that stressed and ailing whales seek to return to the land because they know that at least they will not drown there. Some see a Malthusian instinct for the preservation of the greater species: mass strandings as a kind of population control at times when the whale numbers in a certain area have reached their sustainable limit. The fact that standings increased after the end of commercial whaling is given as evidence for this rather drastic self-restriction.

  However, decidedly unnatural forces may act as siren voices. It is increasingly certain that whales are affected by powerful military sonar, developed since the 1960s to detect newly silent enemy submarines. Standings have been noted near naval exercises, during which sounds twice as loud as a jet engine are created. Toothed whales, reliant on their own sonar, are particular victims of this distortion of their natural soundscape; worst affected are beaked whales, which must normally rise slowly after their deep dives. The loud pulses panic them into surfacing, and gas bubbles form in their bloodstream, inducing compression sickness. Necropsies also indicate massive hæmorrhaging around their brains and spinal cords.

  Anthropogenic noise may be the reason for the frequency of modern standings on the British east coast, where seismic soundings for oil surveys not only cause localized distress, but may disturb the whales in their ancient sonic routes, causing them to take a wrong turn into the unsuitably shallow North Sea where they fail to find adequate food. Or it may be (as ever with whales, there are so many maybes and precious few certainties), as Liz Evans-Jones, who oversees the strandings project at the Natural History Museum, told me, that modern incidents are more likely to be reported because people are aware of the animals’ plight, and that once remote coasts are now accessible. Whatever the truth, encounters with man’s world seldom turn out to be beneficial for the whale.

  In the past, shore dwellers had regarded a beached whale as a gift from the gods; those less accustomed to such events saw a dead cetacean as an evil omen, like a comet or an eclipse. After a whale arrived in the Thames during a storm in 1658, it was taken to have been an augury of the demise of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, who died the following day. It was certainly a strange sight: a thrashing leviathan off Dagenham. In his diary, John Evelyn, whose estate overlooked the river, noted: ‘A large Whale was taken betwixt my Land abutting on the Thames & Greenwich, which drew an infinite Concourse to see it, by water, horse, coach, and on foote, from Lond., & all parts.’

  Amazingly, this was a right whale, an animal more suited to waters rich in plankton rather than the floating detritus of seventeenth-century London. The whale first appeared at low water, ‘for at high water, it would have destroyed all the boates’. The alien was doomed by its unlucky appearance, as if its ungainliness itself was a sin; cornered, it fought back in a manner with which whale rescuers would be familiar: ‘after a long Conflict, it was killed with the harping yrons, & struck in the head, out of which spouted blood & water, by two tunnells like Smoake from a chimney; & after an horrid grone it ran quite on shore & died.’

  An amateur scientist himself, Evelyn took the opportunity to measure the monster. ‘The length was 58 foote: 16 in height, black skin’d like Coach-leather, very small eyes, greate taile, small finns & but 2: a piked snout, & a mouth so wide & divers men might have stood upright in it: No teeth at all, but sucked the slime onely as thro a greate made of that bone which we call Whale bone.’ Evelyn found it wonderful ‘that an Animal of so greate a bulk, should be nourished onely by slime’. Sixty years later, on his 1721 tour of Britain, Daniel Defoe recorded a whale bone arch on the London to Colchester road, ‘a little on this side the Whalebone, a place on the road so called because the rib-bone of a large whale, taken in the river Thames, was fixed there in 1658, the year Oliver Cromwell died, for a monument of that monstrous creature’. Whalebone Lane still exists in Dagenham; the bones are preserved in a local museum.

  Other would-be visitors to London were little better treated than Evelyn’s whale. In 1788, twelve male sperm whales stranded and died along the Thames estuary, almost within sight of the Great Wen itself; they were soon boiled down for oil. Five years later, in an event recorded by Joseph Banks, a thirty-foot orca entered the river and found itself the subject of ‘an exciting chase’ after it was harpooned, towing its hunters at great speed from Deptford to Greenwich; as a result of this south London sleigh ride, the Royal College of Surgeons acquired the animal’s skull. In October 1842 a whale described as a ‘fin fish’ appeared near Deptford Pier, whereupon five sailors from the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital-ship put out in a boat, armed with a ‘large bearded spear’ and ‘commenced the attack upon the monster, which soon showed symptoms of weakness, and threw up large quantities of water from the blowing apertures on its back’. Surrounded by other boats, it was roped out of the water and onto the pier, where the crowds were such that the constabulary were called to restore order. The creature–most likely a minke–was fourteen feet six inches long, with baleen and a white belly. It was subsequently taken by carriage, and several horses, to a butcher’s shop on Old King Street, where it was placed on a stand for public display.

  It was notable that these whalish strays appeared at precisely the point in London from which their hunters had set out, as if returning to haunt them. In the 1880s a bottlenose whale said to be forty feet long beached off the Woolwich Arsenal. ‘It came up the river with the tide, and, when it found itself stranded on the reed bed, blew furiously and turned half-a-dozen somersaults, injuring itself on the stones, and colouring the river with its blood.’ The crew of the steam tug Empress took a rope to it and towed it off the beach, ‘with the intention of consulting with the Thames Conservancy officers as to its disposal’. Most extraordinary of all, at least to modern readers, may be the fact that a dolphin stranded at Battersea Bridge in May 1918 was summarily eaten by the museum’s ‘distinguished correspondents’, and parts served at a banquet at the Mansion House. ‘The opinions received afterwards were nearly all favourable, and some of them enthusiastic. It is a fact which deserves to be more widely known, particularly during a period of shortage of meat, that the Cetacea furnish meat of excellent quality and high nutritive value.’ Sidney Harmer admitted that ‘a certain Cetacean flavour, which is not universally popular, is apt to develop on keeping, but it is possible to remove this to some extent by parboiling…it is a fact that there are persons who consider Cetacean meat preferable to all other kinds.’

  Even in the late twentieth century, dolphins and porpoises were not rarities in the Thames. In 1961 a sixteen-foot minke was seen d
iving and surfacing in the river as far as Kew, ‘followed by a police launch warning boats to keep clear’. Earlier that day the whale had been found on the river bank, having apparently collided with a boat. Inspectors from the RSPCA, along with police officers and other helpers, had dragged it in a tarpaulin to the water, hoping it would make its way back to the sea, but the animal became caught in reeds by Kew Bridge, and soon after died. This interloper was not so innocent in the minds of the newspapers that reported on it, for twenty-four hours earlier an engineer had drowned when his dinghy overturned at Chiswick, close to where the whale was found; and two boys in another boat were nearly capsized by a ‘thrashing whale or porpoise’. The accompanying photograph showed two men standing over the presumed perpetrator, as if to accuse it of these crimes.

  The hindsight of history seems to allow such transgressions as naturalists eating their own specimens; but few could have predicted that, in the twenty-first century, a whale would swim under Waterloo Bridge, past Charing Cross–almost under the window where Melville stayed–and past the Palace of Westminster, only to strand itself on the Battersea embankment within the sound of the King’s Road.

  It was an event that became a kind of global circus entertainment. An animal used only to the booms and clicks of its cousins in the open sea was suddenly subject to the confinement and cacophony of one of the world’s largest and noisiest cities. Disorientated and distressed, the northern bottlenose whale moved up and down stream with the tides, its flukes flapping furiously, its curiously baby-like head rising plaintively out of the water while people shouted at it and boats surrounded it and helicopters filled with film crews buzzed overhead, transmitting pictures around the world for fascinated audiences to see. When I watched these scenes again, months later, hindsight served only to make them more poignant in the knowledge of what happened next: a pathetic death, deafened and assailed by traffic, trains, boats and people, frightened by those who sought to save it, starving and therefore suffering terrible thirst, trying futilely to follow a dead-end river to the western ocean.

  Inevitably, this visitation was seen as a new omen for the world. A month before, six Arnoux’s beaked whales had made an unusual appearance in Cape Town harbour, looking, with their strange, stubby, protruding teeth, their brown skins and mottled, veined markings, like primeval denizens of the deep come to confront the modern world with its sins. Only days before the arrival of the London whale, a fifty-foot-long dead finback was taken from the Baltic at Bremen and driven, with a police escort, to the centre of another capital city, to be laid at the steps of the Japanese Embassy in Berlin as a protest against that nation’s continuing actions in the sanctuary of the Southern Ocean. And on the same day that the whale appeared in the Thames, four Cuvier’s beaked whales beached in Spain, the victims, as subsequent tests would indicate, of naval sonar exercises.

  The London whale was doomed from the moment it entered the estuary, and from which it was scooped up and carried in a procession back towards the sea, watched by news crews and crowds on the Thames bridges. As it lay on its inflated pontoon, the whale’s frantic muscular movements began to flag. At seven o’clock that evening, it finally expired, somewhere near Gravesend, two hours from freedom. Borne on its rubber bier, its tearful attendants asked that the cameras be turned off in respect for its passing.

  To some these scenes evoked the funeral of Winston Churchill, when the hero’s coffin was taken down the river by naval barge, and which I watched on television as a young boy, instructed by my father as to its historic importance. To others, it all seemed a kind of collective madness. This princess of whales–for it was a she–became the subject of national debate and newspaper headlines. There were leader columns on how its treatment was a testament to our humanity; and others that claimed, equally, that its appearance was a reminder of the barbaric practices of the whaling nations. The Victorian press would have reacted in quite the same way: entire tabloid sections, edged in black, appeared to commemorate the whale. Others saw satire in its misadventure: one cartoon showed the animal on a flag-draped catafalque in the manner of a royal lying-in-state–only instead of a quartet of Life Guards with their sabres unsheathed, four photographers stood at each corner with their telescopic lenses downturned. Unbeknown to the artist, his image was an echo of a previous century, when the Royal Aquarium’s beluga, another public object of mistaken sex and dislocation, had lain in state in Westminster.

  By coincidence, the reading at Mass that Sunday was from the book of Jonah, prompting one clergyman to write from Hull to a national newspaper, noting that the passage was the one in which ‘Jonah says Nineveh, the London or New York of his day, will be overthrown in forty days. The people cut consumption by fasting and wearing the simplest possible garments and renounced violence. With the oil running out and global warming beginning to gallop and the continuing hideous aggression of the USA, perhaps the poor creature was giving us a hint’ In fact, as its necropsy revealed, the whale died of dehydration and stress. Months later, Richard Sabin showed me its dorsal fin, preserved in a specimen jar at the Natural History Museum. Wrinkled and greyish black, with the central core of cartilage visible where it was removed, the fin retained its last position, bent on one side, a sign of the trauma its owner suffered in its final days.

  (The treatment of the London whale contrasts with that of another bottlenose whale which swam up the Humber in 1938. ‘The whale…went up and down the river many times between Heap House and Keadby,’ wrote the Secretary to the Receiver of Wreck in Hull. ‘It grounded continuously, and its struggles caused damage to the river banks, whilst its presence in the river was a constant source of danger to shipping. It was on this account that Starkey decided to shoot it.’ The carcase was claimed by the Natural History Museum, although only after querying the butcher’s bill from W.A. Hudson in Scunthorpe: ‘To: Degutting Whale: £5’.)

  Throughout the twentieth century dead whales continued to be a source of fascination. In 1931 an embalmed, sixty-five-ton whale arrived at London Docks, the property of the Pacific Whaling Company and destined for display at a Christmas circus. Housed in a specially built case, it required the world’s largest floating crane, the London Mammoth, to transfer it from the ship to road bogies, on which it was taken to the circus, ‘the journey to be made by night’. One observer, as a young boy, remembered it with a great stick propping open its mouth, covered in tar to preserve it and smelling like roadworks.

  Twenty years later, in 1952, a seventy-foot fin whale caught off Trondheim (after being found by helicopters sent out for the purpose) was preserved on a huge one-hundred-foot-long lorry–also said to be the longest in the world–and was trundled overland through Europe, Africa and Japan, appearing in such unlikely places as Barnsley, Yorkshire, before ending up in exile in Belgium. It was a scenario reminiscent of the Hungarian film, The Werckmeister Harmonies, in which a travelling leviathan creates psychic upset in a Cold War-era town and becomes an allegory for totalitarianism–‘Some say it has nothing to do with it, some say it is behind everything’–just as the Czech poet Miroslav Holub imagined,

  There is a serious shortage of whales.

  And yet, in some towns,

  whaling flotillas drive along the streets,

  so big that the water is too small for them

  while another poet, Kenneth O. Hanson, wrote of a pickled whale carried across Wyoming on a flatcar railway truck, ‘shunted to a siding the gray/ beast lay dissolving in chains’. I imagine whales in containers, shipped out in a cetacean pogrom, each in its rusty box on rolling stock. A ferry hits a humpback, a freighter carries a fin whale on its upturned bow, whales slump on sandy beaches.

  Ah the world, oh the whale.

  Man had developed a new relationship with the whale, although, as ever, it was one predicated on his desires, rather than the rights of the animal. Although the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been founded in England as long ago as 1824, and an animal protection law passed in 183
5, it would take a long time for whales to be included in this order. ‘Yes; the beasts, the birds, and the fishes all prey upon one another,’ wrote a correspondent to The Times, who had observed the fate of the London beluga in October 1877,

  and man, whom we believe to be nearest to the Great Creator, preys upon them all. If he wants a sealskin jacket, he kills the seal and takes his skin; if he wants a mutton chop, he kills the sheep and takes his chop; and if he wants a live tiger to stare at, he catches a tiger alive and puts him in a cage; and I am afraid that the sight of the dying throes of the whale will have no more effect upon the feelings of the managers of the Westminster Aquarium than the same sight would have to soften the heart of a North Sea whaler as he drives in his last harpoon, because he wants the oil.

  Sentiment still gave way to business. On Christmas Eve 1868, Sven Foyn wrote in his diary: ‘I thank Thee, O Lord. Thou alone hast done all.’ The Norwegian was giving praise for the grenade harpoon he had just patented; a bomb that would implode in a whale’s head. A former seal-hunter, Foyn was ‘a most fortunate, religious, and good old man, respected and beloved by all who met him’, and the maiden voyage of the Spes et Fides–Hope and Confidence–with the eponymous Miencke among its crew, set out equipped with his efficient weapon.

  Cannon had been used on whales since an Englishman devised the Greener Gun in 1837, but Foyn’s holy invention allowed his fellow countrymen to pursue the great rorquals that had been beyond reach of the Starbucks and the Scoresbys: blue whales and fin whales, the largest animals on earth. Now no whale, no matter how fast, could escape; as soon as sighted, it was as good as dead. And a dead whale was a good whale to a Norwegian sailor. Soon the Scandinavians were killing a thou-sand finbacks a year. Humpbacks, too, began to suffer heavily from the new technological era of steamships and harpoon-launchers.