Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  Still in wartime mode, Britain applied the lessons of war to whaling. In June 1946 it sent out ships equipped with ‘sonic submarine detectors’ to find whales, using ultrasonic nets to keep them within range of the boat. Although these techniques were soon found inferior to the animals they mimicked, the renewed industry gathered pace. On 10 May 1948 the whale-ship Balaena–and her crew of seventy British and five hundred Norwegians–returned triumphantly to Southampton, having captured three thousand whales, ten per cent of the total catch that season, among them a monster measuring 94 feet and weighing 180 tons.

  This massive ship–complete with her own laboratories, blacksmith’s shop and hospital–stood alongside the docks I knew as a child, rivalling the ocean liners for size and presence. Her Antarctic cargo–a contrast to the heatwave in which she had arrived–may have been less glamorous than the Hollywood stars those passenger ships carried (Lana Turner was the next celebrity to appear on the quayside), but it was a major contribution to the national economy: 4,500 tons of meat, 163,000 barrels of edible oil (destined to make margarine), 10,000 barrels of sperm oil, 170 tons of meat extract, and a further 3,000 tons of meat for cattle fodder. Set alongside reports of Churchill’s exhortations to a United Europe in the local paper, the Balaena and her contents represented hope for a post-war world.

  Such resources soon became the cause for resentment, especially as the Americans were aiding the Japanese in their own whaling operations. These were, after all, austere times, and the Allies encouraged the vanquished nation to feed its population fried whale or parboiled blubber as a cheap source of protein. The occupying powers, under General Douglas MacArthur, also helped equip decommissioned naval ships for the purpose; vessels that had fought against the Allies now turned their tonnage towards the whales. They did so against strong opposition from Australia, which complained that the Americans had not consulted it in the matter. It was nervous at the notion of former enemies sailing in its waters, and protested ‘on the ground of earlier Japanese violations of international whaling regulations and the inefficiency and wastefulness of Japanese whaling’.

  That year, 1948, a Japanese whaling expedition sailed six thousand miles to the Antarctic, carrying a crew of thirteen hundred men, enough to populate a small town (or invade it, as some Antipodeans feared). This modern Armada comprised six catchers, a ten-thousand-ton factory ship, the Hashidate Maru, two processing ships to refrigerate its spoils, an oil tanker, and two vessels for cold storage. A Nantucketer would have blinked his eyes in wonder. The ships travelled far apart to avoid collision with each other or with icebergs–using radar to navigate through thick banks of fog–until they came upon their appointed foe: a gigantic blue whale.

  A catcher boat was sent ahead, but whenever it had the whale in its sights, the animal sounded. It was two hours before the gunner hit his target. The first deep cut was made then and there, at the geographical point of its demise, for fear of the animal’s extraordinary metabolism. Insulated by thick blubber, whales generate tremendous heat–as their condensing blows indicate, akin to great steam engines. If they were to over-exert themselves in pursuit of prey, they could die of heat exhaustion; hence their need to regulate their temperature by cooling their blood in their flukes and fins. A whale killed in the Southern Ocean was immediately slit open from throat to tail, allowing cold water to flush through it, lest its internal heat cause its very bones to combust, leaving its hunters with a ‘burnt whale’, burning on its own oil like a giant candle, just as its brethren once burned to light the world.

  Towed back tail first and up through a ferry-like skidway in the ship’s stern where eighty men worked for four hours to butcher it, the blue whale was one of the largest ever caught. It weighed 300,000 pounds, although they only knew this because they were able to slice it into pieces and place it on the ship’s scales. The tongue alone weighed three tons; the heart was as big as a car, and the arteries wide enough for a man to swim in. All was now so much offal.

  And all this was accomplished in an atmosphere of outright hilarity. ‘Workmen laughed and leaped aboard loins that were skidding toward the loading chute,’ observed Lieutenant-Colonel Waldon C. Winston, an American officer accompanying the fleet. ‘Others there started a shanty. Over and over, they filled the box on the small platform scales, then emptied the contents down the loading chute.’ They might as well have been on a Detroit production line.

  Below decks were steel boilers where the blubber was reduced to oil which was then stored in huge tanks. Nothing was wasted. A process had been devised to suck vitamin-rich oil from the whale’s liver. This one animal yielded 133 barrels of oil and sixty tons of meat valued at $28,000. This process went on, day by day, month by month, year by year, in waters so far from land that wounded men often died, there being no hospital to which they could be taken.

  Here, out of sight, off shores belonging to no one, no one was responsible. Yet as the ships canned their whale meat, official observers looked on, and biologists sought to learn about living whales by examining dead ones. It was a uniquely mad situation, belied by its own legitimacy. Although regulations stated that mother and calf pairs were not to be targeted–any gunner who shot them had his pay deducted accordingly–pregnant animals were taken. These were the hardest to kill; one blue whale mother took nine harpoons and five hours to die.

  In ancient Japan, Buddhists had honoured these unborn cetaceans, erecting stone tombs for them facing the sea, so that at least in death they could see the home they had been deprived of in life. American scientists working on the ships had other plans. One who found a five-inch sperm whale fætus had it packed in ice, and back in port at his hotel used a mixture of vodka and shaving lotion to preserve it overnight. The next morning he dissected the specimen. It had the rudimentary features of the animals that became whales: with its pig-like snout, nostrils positioned at the front (before they migrated up the head), its protruding ears and genitals, and its hand-like flippers and residual whiskers, it was as if this whale-in-being might yet become some other creature entirely.

  Only in death could man see whales in such detail; only on these mother ships were the massive animals seen to be colonies in their own right, living cities crawling with whale lice and studded with barnacles which finally loosened their grip as the blankets of blubber were cut away, the hard shells popping out of the epidermis and clattering to the deck. The whale’s interior played host to other parasites: the nematode worms that colonized its guts (intestines which, to scientists’ amazement, unravelled for a quarter of a mile). The Hashidate Maru merely minced up these worms along with the rest of the meat. Of more concern were the levels of radioactivity to be found in whale flesh, fallout from the devices that had exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But by then, every man, woman and child on the planet was absorbing strontium-90 into their bones from those explosions, a legacy to be passed on for generations to come.

  In iceberg-blocked waters, serried ranks of rorquals lay belly up like gutted herring, side by side while sea birds fluttered about them like feathered stars. They were captive whales, ready for rendition. A factory fleet could cull seventy animals in one day, using weapons that resembled space-age missiles, flanged and fluked to implode in giant crania. Three hundred and sixty thousand blue whales died in this manner in the twentieth century, reducing their population to one thousand. By the 1960s the blue whale was, to all intents and purposes, commercially extinct.

  XII

  A Cold War for the Whale

  You have become like us, Disgraced and mortal.

  Stanley Kunitz, ‘The Wellfleet Whale’

  For his 1954 film of Moby-Dick, made in Britain and Ireland rather than New England, John Huston requisitioned an 1870 schooner which had recently done duty as the Hispanola in Walt Disney’s Treasure Island. She was fitted out at St Andrew’s Dock, Hull, where chandlers contributed original harpoons, found in their loft. This movie Pequod was then sailed to the west coast of Ireland, where the director cho
se to shoot only on overcast days to give his film a gloomy look.

  I remember watching Huston’s film as a young boy; it seemed rather wordy and dull to me. Our old-fashioned, veneered black and white television, with its grainy 405 lines, did little to convey the subtle effect that the cinematographer, Oswald Morris, had devised to emulate nineteenth-century whaling scenes, combining two sets of negatives–one monochrome, the other Technicolor–to suggest ‘that this story was filmed in 1843 when it was supposed to have taken place’. I did not appreciate the deftness of Ray Bradbury’s screenplay, for which he read the book nine times and wrote fifteen hundred pages of script to reach a final one hundred and fifty: ‘I found myself plagued with a vast depression,’ said Bradbury. ‘I felt I had the weight, the burden of Melville on my back.’ Any analogies between the nineteenth century’s thirst for whale oil and the post-war desire for petroleum escaped me, too.

  Nor was I impressed by Orson Welles’s bravura cameo role as Father Mapple, performing histrionically from his pulpit-prow–in Shepperton. (Welles would stage his own version of Moby-Dick in 1955–claiming it was the best thing he had ever done–at the Hackney Empire, in London’s East End.) I may have recognized Richard Basehart as Ishmael, but only because he played the submarine captain in A Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, battling a giant squid; as with Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, both whale and squid were Cold War monsters, subaquatic versions of science fiction aliens, the threat the world faced from within. And although the sight of another savage other, Queequeg and his tattooed face and his long red drawers, was terrifying enough, when a whale finally appeared on screen, it was difficult to tell if it were alive or not–not least because Huston had recreated Moby Dick as a life-size model. (At one point during the filming, part of the White Whale’ broke loose while being towed off Fishguard in rough seas, causing coastguards to alert shipping to a ‘possible hazard to navigation’, and the Royal Air Force to send out a flying-boat in search of the errant prop.)

  Roped to this ersatz whale, Gregory Peck nearly drowned as Huston insisted on take after take of Ahab’s final moments. But it is only now, watching the movie again, that I see something shockingly real in these scenes. Intercut with sequences acted out in a studio tank–betrayed by the wrong-sized waves and an atomically lurid, back-projected sky which turns Gregory Peck’s Ahab into a kind of pantomime demon king–Huston inserts footage of sperm whales being hunted off Madeira. Here his film comes closest to the truth, in the mortal spout of dying whales, the gushing crimson fountains. It is an unforgettable, Hemingway-like gesture; only instead of a dying bull, it is the world’s greatest predator that perishes, publicly, as advertised, on screen.

  In 1958, the year in which I was born, Ernest Hemingway told the Paris Review that he had hunted a school of fifty sperm whales, and harpooned one ‘nearly sixty feet in length and lost him’. His was a forlorn boast of a heroic American past. Whaling was now the province of other countries, and their efforts would do far more to bring whales to the brink than the Yankee fleets ever did. In fact, it was within my lifetime that whaling reached its all-time peak. In 1951 alone–one hundred years after Melville’s book appeared–more whales were killed worldwide than New Bedford’s whale-ships took in a century and a half of whaling.

  In my Illustrated Animal Encylopædia, edited by curators from the American Museum of Natural History and illustrated with photographs of the museum’s dusty dioramas–although not, I’m glad to say, with its positively horrifying set-piece of a life-size sperm whale doing battle with a giant squid–the limits of 1950s cetology were acknowledged. As if in response to Ishmael’s question, ‘Does the Whale Diminish?’, the authors issued a tardy reply. ‘We cannot hope for much success until we know more about these deep-sea mammals. We are seriously endeavouring to get this information.’

  The book bears witness to a pre-ecological age. A section entitled ‘MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT FROM THE Whale’ states that ‘One recent whaling season in the Antarctic produced 2,158,173 barrels of oil’, but under another headline, ‘THE WHALE IN DANGER’, it reports that ‘whalers took 6,158 blue whales, 17,989 finback whales, 2,108 humpback whales, and 2,566 sperm whales in a single season…This does not include 2,459 whales taken by the Russians.’

  It is salutary to see how sharply the figures escalate throughout the twentieth century. In 1910, 1,303 fin whales and 43 sperm whales were taken; in 1958, the totals stood at 32,587 fin and 21,846 sperm whales. It was a momentum exacerbated by politics. From 1951 to 1970, the Soviet Union increased its catches outside international agreements, taking more than three thousand southern right whales, although only four were reported to the International Whaling Commission. First convened by President Truman in Washington, DC, in 1946, the IWC–whose headquarters were based in Cambridge, England–introduced successive steps to limit whaling further, but commercial pressures and unsustainable quotas overtook good intentions.

  Humpbacks were particular victims of this slaughter. The Russians claimed to have taken just over two thousand animals, but the figures show that they killed more than forty-eight thousand. Young whales, mothers and calves, protected species were taken indiscriminately, and the figures falsified. Sperm whales, too, suffered badly. At the turn of the century they had enjoyed an illusory reprieve as the newly mechanized fleets began to pursue the rorquals, but after the Second World War, with baleen whale populations rapidly shrinking, the harpoons were aimed again at the cachalots, whose numbers had just begun to recover.

  By the 1950s, at the height of a new antagonism between east and west, an average of twenty-five thousand sperm whales were dying each year, ending up as vitamin supplements or animal feed. ‘Boiled sperm whale flesh can be used for feeding fur-bearing animals,’ noted one Russian scientist, Alexander Berzin, a Soviet-era Beale whose book was illustrated with indistinct images of whale pathology and dissection. His countrymen also used the tendons in the whales’ heads to make glue, and in 1956 alone, 980 tons of whale hide were processed in a single Russian factory, tanned and dyed and destined to make soles for shoes. Men walked on whales.

  The Cold War was taken to the whales in their ocean fastness. North Atlantic right whales, protected since 1935, were reduced to one hundred animals by the USSR, which also killed 372 of the even rarer North Pacific right whales. Southern right whales had already reached a low point of tens off the coast of apartheid South Africa, while Arctic bowheads suffered similarly under the disunited nations.

  The reason for this renewed interest was, of course, financial. Whaling was rapidly becoming the province of new multinational companies. By 1957 whale oil was fetching £90 a ton; in Oslo that year Unilever acquired 125,000 tons of the stuff, from Norwegian, Japanese and British manned ships, although, when asked, the company declined to comment on its purchase. A few years later, it was estimated that whales were worth £50 million a year to the global economy. Helicopters were being used to spot whales in the Southern Ocean, where one whale-ship received a regal gam when the Duke of Edinburgh boarded the Southern Harvester from the royal yacht Britannia, the princely person being hoisted across in a basket slung from the masthead, while a fifty-foot sperm whale provided the buffer between the two vessels. (Later, the Duke was heard to remark in a television interview that ‘A whale has an odour peculiar to itself).’

  The tenth meeting of the International Whaling Commission at The Hague in 1958 implemented new restrictions, extending the existing prohibition on killing humpbacks in the North Atlantic and in part of the Arctic, and limiting their hunting in the Antarctic. Such limits meant nothing to those who had not signed up to the organization. ‘The whaling industry lives with a recurring nightmare: the extinction of the whale,’ The Times stated in a forthright editorial in January 1959, foreseeing ‘a massacre in the Antarctic next season’. It demanded neutral observers and a ban on the building of new whale-ships without consultation. ‘Britain’s role as peacemaker is a laudable one. It can, however, hardly be purs
ued to the detriment of British whaling, and cannot be pursued without the cooperation of others.’ As another scientist pointed out, ‘conservation had failed mainly because whales belonged to no one and it was no one’s direct interest to look after them.’

  While the IWC investigated more humane ways of killing whales, Holland and Norway–two of the so-called ‘big five’ of the whaling nations (the others being Britain, Japan and Russia)–announced their decision to withdraw from the convention ‘because it has proved impossible for the two countries to obtain reasonable whaling quotas’. Even as the western nations squabbled, Japan was increasing its fleet. By 1963, headlines were announcing, ‘TASTE FOR WHALE MEAT BOOSTS INDUSTRY’–a reference to the fact that for the Japanese, whale oil was secondary to its meat–and noting that the nation had recently acquired the Southern Harvester, the same ship visited by the Queen’s husband. There was a certain bias to such reports–‘There is a mechanical ruthlessness about Japanese whaling methods which makes the whalers of a few years ago look like amateur adventurers’–which was another legacy of war.

  The same article added that a ‘state of piracy’ was ‘gradually emptying the whaling grounds’. Whaling was a free-for-all, and one of the worst offenders was the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis, future husband of the former First Lady. His vessels were purposely registered in Honduras and Panama, countries beyond the IWC’s membership, and plundered protected waters, taking whatever whales they met, ‘be they endangered species or newborns’. Only when Norway publicized his actions–and after the Peruvian navy and air force had opened fire on his ships for hunting whales within their territorial waters–was Onassis forced to stop his slaughter, finding it more financially viable to sell his fleet to the Japanese.