Baleen is made from keratin (the same protein that hair, horn and nails are made of) and was used to make whalebone corsets. You might think that corsets were made from whale’s bones, but no. Thousands of Victorian ladies enveloped their bodies in what whales have instead of teeth.
Knox needed to get the baleen, the head and the skeleton to Edinburgh. He began with its head, which weighed 7 or 8 tons. On the first attempt the carriage that was carrying it collapsed and everything was taken back to North Berwick.
Again, they tried to move the head. Knox describes what happened:
‘Eight, ten, twelve horses were put to the carriage. These horses were known to be the best in East Lothian; the word was given, the eyes of the horses flashed, their breath was in their nostrils, every muscle was in violent action, and a simultaneous effort made, and nearly every horse freed himself by snapping the chains which attached him to the carriage. The cranium of the whale stood unmoved, and seemed to laugh at the vain attempt’.
With the help of double-strength chains and thanks to the extraordinary effort of the horses, the whale head-lifting team finally managed to get the skull to Edinburgh. From then on Knox spent three years and three months preparing and preserving the skeleton that now lives back beside the sea, outside of Edinburgh.
Knox went on to write many papers detailing the whale’s anatomy and behaviour. ‘These animals are said to be most frolicsome when the storm rages most,’ wrote Knox. When he was finished it was displayed in the Royal Institution, on Princes Street, Edinburgh where visitors gawped at its majestic size. It was one of the few blue whale skeletons on display in Europe. The model on display in the Natural History Museum is just a model, but this is real. For centuries it took pride of place in the museum in Edinburgh, where it was suspended above visitor’s heads.
Blue whales are popular with everyone – perhaps because they are so astonishingly big – so why is this prize specimen no longer on display? In 2011 the museum reopened as the National Museum of Scotland after a £47.4 million transformation of its Victorian galleries and the whole building in which the blue whale flew was redesigned.
The blue whale was moved out to make room for a new display. I went to see what had replaced it in the new museum that sits on a hill, just over the road from a statue of Greyfriars Bobby and the cafe where J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter overlooking Edinburgh Castle.
I could see the spot where the enormous skeleton once hung. Now, suspended from the ceiling, there is an array of swimming and flying mammals and animals from across the globe, including a great white shark, a false killer whale and a hippo. The jawbone from the blue whale in storage is hanging up there too, but not the rest of its skeleton.
That doesn’t stop people asking for it. Visitors who knew the old museum always wonder where the blue whale has got to, and every day museum attendants are asked whether they know where it is.
I found it in the National Museum Collections Centre, in Granton, a 20-minute car ride from the museum building in Edinburgh. The Centre is made up of about 15 buildings, that store around 8 million artefacts and specimens that don’t fit into the various big museums in Edinburgh.
The blue whale lives inside one of the biggest warehouses. The bones are painted grey and they lie, in order, along the length of a shelf that runs across the inside of the warehouse.
It was interesting that it has become such an intrinsic part of the museum that the curators had forgotten its history. They thought Knox had something to do with it, and thought maybe that he prepared the skeleton on The Meadows, the big park in the centre of Edinburgh, and the taxidermist I met on site wondered whether Jawbone Walk in The Meadows was named after the scene. But when I asked to write about the whale they kindly dug up its story from a nearly two-century-old tome, in the library, written by Knox. This is the story I have told here. It turns out that Jawbone Walk in The Meadows has nothing to do with the blue whale. There are two pairs of jaws on the Meadows today; one of them once decorated a stand of the Faroe Islands at an International Exhibition held in 1886.
The blue whale bones will stay here for the foreseeable future, kept company by a hippo on the floor beside it, lots of whale skeletons and two sperm whale skeletons. One sperm whale skull used to be on show. In those days children threw coins inside it, so there are coins in the collection now that came from the sperm whale.
Most whales that come into the collection nowadays have been found stranded on a Scottish beach. The museum preparators use biological washing powder to clean the bones ready for storage or display. This is what happened to the bones of the Thames whale. Do you remember the sight of that poor whale, on the news, and in the papers – a big bottlenose whale stranded in the heart of London, just outside the Houses of Parliament in 2006? Damon Albarn, the lead singer of Gorillaz and Blur wrote a song about her called ‘Northern Whale’. He said it ‘started off as a love song for someone I love and then a whale came up the Thames … and it turned into a song about a whale’. It’s a sad song, for a sad tale of a poor whale. After attempts to rescue it came to nothing, its skeleton was preserved and cleaned up in the National Museums Collections Centre.
Sometimes natural history museums use tiny employees – thousands of beetles – to clean new specimens. They place new arrivals into an incubator full of beetles that crawl all over the body of the specimen and eat and eat until all that is left are bones, but the National Museum of Scotland don’t keep the beetles as they’re too high maintenance. If one escaped it would gobble up lots of the collection and they don’t want to have to deal with that.
Further into the warehouse I saw a bubble wrapped Indian elephant – the African one wouldn’t fit through the door of the museum when it was renovated, and so it is still part of the displays. I also saw a new aardvark being prepared for display by the museum’s taxidermist and looked at dinosaur footprints in crates, lots of armour, some Turkish kettles, pre-Columbian artefacts, things from Skara Brae, thousands of bikes and motorbikes, an old diving suit and a steam traction engine from 1907 being cleaned up for display.
The most beautiful thing I saw was a fifteenth-century triptych belonging to the National Gallery of Scotland being x-rayed before being sent to Los Angeles to be displayed by the Getty Museum.
The blue whale’s skeleton wasn’t beautiful, but it was quite amazing. I certainly didn’t expect to find the biggest animal on Earth in the archives of a museum. Now I wish I could see a living, breathing blue whale, maybe one that is frolicking in a storm.
[Blue whale skeleton]
The National Museum of Scotland keeps an entire blue whale skeleton in storage on a long, long shelf.
[The blue whale]
Before the museum was renovated the blue whale was on show. Now it is in storage and people who visit the museum often ask where it is.
A SCUFFED-UP BLACK EXERCISE BOOK filled with tales of whales, storms and adventure on the high seas written by a handsome Norwegian scientist, Thor Heyerdahl, lives in the archives of the Kon-Tiki Museum. It is the logbook of the Kon-Tiki expedition, when Heyerdahl and five crew members crossed the Pacific – from Peru to the Polynesian islands – in a raft made out of nine balsawood tree trunks tied together with rope. They had a little bamboo hut built on top of the raft.
Kon-Tiki was named after a pre-Incan hero called Con-Tiki Viracocha, a sun-king who once ruled the land of the Incas. According to their history, when the Incas arrived, the sun-king moved to the Easter Islands. So Heyerdahl followed in his wake, to test out a theory he had that South Americans may have settled the Polynesian islands. He set sail in the Kon-Tiki to prove that it was possible then, and is now, to cross our world’s biggest ocean on a prehistoric Peruvian raft. He built a perfect replica of an indigenous raft by referring to sixteenth-century manuscripts that described the boats and watching the rafts that local Peruvians still sailed off their coastline.
Once the boat was ready, Heyerdahl and his crew, plus a parrot named Lorita and a stowaway
crab from Peru, spent 101 days at sea, drifting 8,000 kilometres on their raft across the Pacific, carried by the Humboldt Current, until they washed up on Raroia atoll in Polynesia.
While the raft that carried them safely across the Pacific is on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, the logbook in which Heyerdahl wrote daily tales of their life in the Pacific is kept out of sight. I slipped through a door, just behind Ra, another of Heyerdahl’s expedition rafts, and headed upstairs to see the diary. The curator of the museum and I lifted it out of its archival box. It was bigger than I had imagined.
As I turned its crisp, weathered pages, I noticed that Heyerdahl’s writing was of a normal size at the beginning. As the trip goes on, his writing becomes tinier and tinier, as he tries to squeeze in every last detail. He wrote in English, even though his Norwegian was, of course, a lot more fluent. Maybe he thought that if his words were written in English more people would easily understand them, should anything happen to the raft. It’s also the language logbooks are generally written in. I thought it was testament to how amazing the Scandinavians are at English.
On page one, on 27 April 1947, Heyerdahl describes how the ship was christened Kon-Tiki by the expedition secretary, Miss Gerd Vold, ‘who broke a coco nut against its bow’. Next, Heyerdahl describes the flags onboard his home for the next three months: ‘Astern waved the Norwegian flag, in the top mast waved the Peruvian flag and the flag of The Explorers Club, and at its side the flags of the USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France.’ Then he describes lots of press and diplomats from many countries checking out the raft: ‘60 visitors, totalling roughly 3½ tons, went on board at a time without affecting buoyancy of the raft noticeably.’ The next day, the Kon-Tiki set sail. Heyerdahl wrote:
On board Kon-Tiki remained only the expedition members, which are:
Thor Heyerdahl, leader
Herman Watzinger, technical leader, 2nd command
Erik Bryn Hesselberg, navigator
Knut Magne Haugland, radio operator
Torstein Raaby, radio operator
Bengt Emmerik Danielsson, Steward
As a ships-pet a green parrot was presented to the crew at the time of departure.
The first day and night passed without incident: ‘Quiet night, passed light starboard at 01.30.’ For the next hundred days Heyerdahl jotted down the things that happened to them. I turned the pages and read what he had got up to. It sounds like they had a wonderful time.
As they moved into the Humboldt Current, they found it was teeming with life. They had visits from whales – once, they counted 120 splashing around the raft at the same time. One day, they were followed by a whale-shark.
On 24 July 1947, the crew saw a double rainbow, ‘enormous shoals of dolphins swam around,’ and they were all happy onboard. ‘We are all able to enjoy a marvellous sun-set or a huge sea, and jokes are never wanting.’
On another day, they nearly had company when some natives on the island of Angatau paddled out in canoes to get a good look at them, but the Kon-Tiki swished past the island, so the Scandinavians didn’t have time to get too acquainted with the locals.
Heyerdahl explained that they spent most of their time in the bamboo hut they had built on their raft. When I looked inside it at the museum, I thought how cosy it looked, their little cabin, with the small beds inside.
The trip was mostly free from danger, although Heyerdahl does describe two storms with 9-metre waves. The well-designed raft surfed the perilous waves.
Heyerdahl drew only one picture in the logbook. He wrote how, on Norwegian National Day, 17 May, in the very early morning, a huge fish, 94 centimetres long, leapt out of the ocean and on to the raft, waking everyone up. ‘Bengt woke up too, sat up in his sleeping-bag and said quietly: “Nå sådana fiskar fines inte! (No, such fishes do not exist),” whereupon he fell asleep again.’ Herman ‘grasped firm around the belly of the twisting [fish], it vomited, and out came another fish, 8 inches long with big eyes and built much like a flying fish’. The fish that jumped onto the raft was a snake mackerel, and this was the first time any human had ever seen one. So Heyerdahl drew the fish as a souvenir of the day it leapt aboard to say hello. As day dawned, the crew raised the Norwegian flag, and that night they ‘celebrated with toasting and singing on edge of raft while great waves chased by us in the dark’. They nearly lost their compass.
Near the end of the logbook, on the day they crash-landed ashore, he wrote: ‘WE HAVE MADE IT. THANKS, GOD.’ He must have been over the moon as he wrote these words in this book. Some days later, people on a neighbouring atoll saw their campfire and came over to have a look: they got a shock to find six blond, blue-eyed men and a wooden raft. The blonds stayed for a week, enjoying their atoll, before a boat came to collect them and rowed the raft to Tahiti.
A lot of the stories in the logbook were rewritten into a book, The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft across the South Seas, which has sold 60 million copies and is one of the best-selling non-fiction books in the world. People fell in love with the story, perhaps because the Second World War had just finished and Heyerdahl’s madcap experiment was light relief.
The museum keeps the handwritten and the typed manuscripts of this book in archival boxes, just beside the original logbook. Heyerdahl began writing the book on board, alongside his logbook, but I preferred reading through the logbook written in the intrepid adventurer’s hand.
The diary has never been on display, and probably never will be. This is because it is fragile, of course, and has already got soaking wet, out in the ocean. However, it is also because, although Heyerdahl wrote everything in it, the stories belong to every man on board the raft, and they all went on to do different things after the expedition, so it wasn’t easy to get permission from everyone to publish it.
Added to that, there are a few things in the diary which weren’t really for public consumption. One of the stories Heyerdahl talks about in the diary but left out of the book was that one of the crew was dating Gerd Vold, the expedition secretary, and the two of them exchanged love messages via the raft’s radio.
In the published book Heyerdahl also glossed over the day when they got drunk and nearly lost their compass, and the moment Heyerdahl needed to take down the sail in an emergency: he got so nervous untying it, he couldn’t do it – he just froze with fear. Heyerdahl could not swim and had been terrified of water since the time he had almost drowned as a child – an extraordinary fact, given what he was attempting to achieve.
The book also smoothed over the moment when Herman Watzinger was airing his sleeping bag and the wind pulled it from his hands. He ran after it, slipped and fell overboard. Knut Haugland grabbed a rope, jumped in and swam to his friend, and pulled him to safety.
From the outset, Heyerdahl had wanted to take the raft to Easter Island, and the Marquesas. He had spent time on the Marquesa Islands not long before the Kon-Tiki expedition and had read an article about Easter Island when he was 12 or so, and had said to one of his pals, Arnold Jacoby, ‘One day I will solve the mystery of Easter Island.’ The statues inspired the Kon-Tiki experiment, as they reminded him of statues he’d seen in South America and made him think that, maybe, the South American natives had travelled across the Pacific to Polynesia.
However, once the raft was upon the ocean, the Humboldt Current had other plans, and the raft drifted elsewhere. One night, Torstein Raaby was on night watch, and decided to change their course, giving up on Easter Island and the Marquesas and heading towards the Tuamotus archipelago so that they would find land more quickly. Heyerdahl woke up to find they were totally off track from what he had planned. He decided it was best to stick with the change. In the logbook in storage he discusses the pivotal moment, but he skipped it in the published book.
In the logbook, Heyerdahl at times shows his anxieties and doubts, whereas in the dramatized version he does not. The logbook is more intimate and private: it is the only place where you can read the world of Heyerdahl, as he was.
In 2004
, Heyerdahl’s grandson, Olav Heyerdahl read the logbook and started to plan an expedition, Tangaroa, to follow the trail of Kon-Tiki and see how much things had changed in the past 60 years. In 2006, he and five others left from the same location, on the same day of the year as the Kon-Tiki, in a raft made of balsawood, only with a bigger sail.
He describes how ‘in the Humboldt Current, we crossed this patch of garbage. Plastic floating all around our clean and 100% natural raft. Shocking experience! At that time I did not know that all these plastic parts were floating around. Nothing of this was described in the KT logbook.’ He had been excited about filming and diving with the sharks his grandfather had described, but ‘in total we saw 4 sharks! 4 sharks in almost 2.5 months at sea! If people continue eating sharkfin soup, the oceans will be clean. The sharks will for sure not survive.’ While his grandfather supped on healthy shoals of tuna fish, ‘We caught one tuna across! We are misusing our planet. There will only be leftovers for generations to come.’
Sailing through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a big soupy mess six times the size of the UK, made up of all those thrown-away carrier bags, plastic bottles and pieces of packaging that have not been recycled, must have been a devastating experience. It encouraged him to set sail aboard Plastiki, a 12-ton catamaran made entirely out of 12,500 recycled plastic bottles. I saw Plastiki being made in a warehouse in the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and followed its trip in the news as it sailed along the same route as Kon-Tiki and on to Australia. The aim of the trip was to highlight the damage that plastic waste is doing to the oceans and the creatures that live there. The crew hoped to inspire people to use less of the stuff and to dispose of what is used more carefully so that it doesn’t end up in the ocean.
Back in the museum, the logbook is slowly being digitized, and bits of it are being put online. This began when the Thor Heyerdahl Archives were inscribed into the UNESCO Memory of the World list in 2011. The museum then decided that if the logbook was a world treasure, people really ought to be able to read it. The original will, of course, be kept safely upstairs in the museum, next door to a cold store filled with 1,300 photographs from the Kon-Tiki expedition and 100,000 others from Heyerdahl’s later voyages. I put on a warm jacket and stepped inside to see them. I pulled a strip of negatives out at random and held it to the light. It was a row of black-and-white images of Lorita, the Kon-Tiki’s pet parrot. She fell overboard and was eaten by a shark, and became the only casualty of a daring and inspiring venture across the Pacific Ocean.
The Secret Museum Page 14