The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  After climbing a wide staircase lined with portraits of past presidents, the visitor is greeted by a quartet of worn wooden boards on the wall. They appear innocuous enough, until you learn that they are overlaid with the nerves and blood vessels of human beings. This macabre furniture suite was the property of the diarist John Evelyn, who acquired it in Padua in 1643. Its planks are the essence of bodies; everything else – flesh and fat, bone and offal – has been stripped away to leave these upended tabletops, their grain coursed by tributaries like congealed river systems. They act as a ghoulish advertisement for what lies beyond: an array of glass cases on whose shelves sit innumerable jars and bottles and boxes, containing every imaginable body part, both human and animal. It’s as though the world had been turned inside out and into its constituent parts by their collector, in whose honour the museum is named.

  John Hunter, born in Scotland in 1728, was a surgeon and anatomist who trained at Barts. After serving in the army, he set up his practice in London; his brother William was obstetrician to Queen Charlotte, and delivered the future George IV. As a fashionable doctor, John Hunter was in demand. His patients included an older and wiser Benjamin Franklin, now suffering with a bladder stone, and the future Lord Byron, whose birth he attended and for whose club foot he prescribed a corrective boot, advice which went unheeded by the poet’s mother. For both of these patients, as enthusiastic swimmers, Hunter’s procedure for dealing with the nearly drowned might have come in useful: he recommended electrical stimulation to restart stopped hearts.

  Hunter’s curiosity knew no bounds. His motto was to experiment, rather than merely ask questions. He was the first to scientifically describe teeth, and transplanted them, still living, from one patient to another. He even experimented on his own body, dipping his lancet in the lesion of a prostitute, then incising his glans and prepuce, aiming to inoculate himself with gonorrhoea, only to contract syphilis too. Less dramatically, he also commissioned his pupil Edward Jenner to take the temperature of a hedgehog.

  Hunter was a great teacher, but his blunt-speaking manner did not endear, nor did his apparent thirst for blood: Blake portrayed him as ‘Jack Tearguts’ in his satirical burlesque An Island in the Moon. In London, Hunter lived in a grand house on Leicester Square, where guests were greeted in his dining room by the gilt-framed specimen of an erect penis; but his country residence – to which he would drive in a cart pulled by a buffalo – was in Earl’s Court, described by The Gentleman’s Magazine as ‘about a mile beyond Brompton, in the midst of fields’, a rural scene – inhabited by ‘animals of the strangest selection in nature’. Here Hunter was surrounded by a living museum, one giant experiment-in-progress,

  On gizzards of gulls, hawks and owls,

  The heat of lizards, spurs of fowls,

  Bones of pigs, air-sacs of eagles,

  Moaning dingos, barking beagles;

  Sleek opossums, prickly hedgehogs,

  Buffaloes, dormice, wolves and dogs

  Leopards and jackals lurked in dens, zebra and ostrich roamed the lawns. There were eagles chained to rocks, buffaloes in the stables, and giraffes nibbling the trees. There was also a boiler for rendering down carcases, both animal and human, and an underground cell which I hope did not contain live specimens – although, if the engravings of the menagerie at Exeter Exchange are to be believed, I suspect it probably did.

  Menageries had been part of London life since the thirteenth century, when King John kept his collection at the Tower, including Barbary lions whose remains have since been identified as an extinct species, as well as elephants, leopards and a polar bear which was allowed to fish in the Thames for its food while tethered by a long chain. In the eighteenth century, exotic animals excited a city alert to every new sensation; they were a kind of theatre. At the ’Change, as it was known, bonneted ladies and high-booted dandies were entertained by lions, tigers, monkeys, crocodiles, sea lions, rhinoceros and even an Indian elephant named Chunee, all displayed in cages barely bigger than their captives’ bodies and housed on the upper floor of a building on The Strand, a veritable department store of beasts. Horses passing on the road below would rear up at the roars of the lions above, and a zebra was once ridden from there to Pimlico.

  Visitors included Jane Austen and Lord Byron. The latter recorded: ‘The elephant took and gave me my money again – took off my hat – opened a door – trunked a whip – behaved so well, that I wish he were my butler.’ In 1826, after accidentally crushing his German keeper when he turned in his cage, Chunee, suffering a septic tusk, tried to break open his iron bars and shook the walls so that the owners believed the entire menagerie might be set loose on London’s streets, ‘there being several lions, tigers and other ferocious beasts confined in the same apartment, all of which he might easily have liberated’. Soldiers from nearby Somerset House were summoned, and, as its keeper ordered his obedient charge to kneel, fired into the elephant’s cage, while the other animals growled. ‘The animal, finding himself wounded, uttered a loud and piercing groan,’ and tried to free itself with its trunk, then hid at the back of its cage, only to be stabbed by long spears.

  After 152 musket shots – and with crowds assembling outside and people offering to pay to see the beast die – Chunee had to be finished off by the keeper with a harpoon. His demise was as chaotic and agonised as that of any hunted whale; his remains were equally coveted. His carcase was dissected by students from the Royal College of Surgeons and his skeleton later put on display there, while his hide was publicly auctioned and his meat sold, along with recipes for ‘elephant stew’. Letters of protest to The Times prompted the establishment of the Zoological Society of London that year, as a more enlightened way of keeping animals. ‘To place an elephant, or any beast, without a mate and in a box bearing no greater proportion to his bulk than a coffin does to a corpse, is inhuman,’ wrote one outraged correspondent, deeply offended by the ‘cruel spectacle’.

  But then, this part of the city was not confined only to animal displays. In his autobiographical The Prelude, Wordsworth described the uproarious human zoo of Bartholomew Fair, where, on the land next to the hospital, ‘the silver-collared Negro’ joined ‘… Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,/The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig’ in a ‘Parliament of Monsters’. It was a world out of Blake’s progress too, where walls were daubed with apocalyptic graffiti: ‘Joanna Southcott’, ‘Murder Jews’ and ‘Christ is God’. Set against such scenes, Chunee’s death seemed of a piece, conjuring up ancient Rome as much as the imperial city which had replaced it.

  In the sedate corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the shelved exhibits are stripped bare of flesh, all of a colour, the same pallor you see in your skin when you flex your knuckles. In one jar is the head of a chimpanzee, its eyes half-open like a doll’s; in another, a rat drowned in formaldehyde. And in others are human foetuses at every stage of development, floating in tobacco-coloured fluid and pressed-glass wombs.

  At the far end of the room is a series of portraits, a decided counterpoint to the worthy surgeons in the hall. They depict piebald children, pathologically obese men, exotic Siamese twins. The saving grace is that they are dignified with names and faces beyond the mere fact of their freakishness, among them Daniel Lambert, whose ballooning body weighed fifty-two stone at his death, and Charles Byrne, whose seven-foot-seven-inch skeleton was acquired by Hunter (at a vast cost of five hundred pounds), despite its owner’s desire to be buried at sea. ‘The whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irish Giant,’ one newspaper noted, ‘and surrounded his house just as Greenland harpooners would an enormous whale.’ Rendered down in Hunter’s Earl’s Court boiler, Byrne’s remains now tower over those of another unfortunate whose crumbling bones desperately tried to regenerate themselves as their owner’s contorted spine, ribcage and pelvis grew ever more baroque, sprouting curlicues and coralline osseous splays.

  Hunter’s three-dimensional index of disease reminds us that pathology is the study
of pain itself, from the Greek pathos, meaning feeling or suffering. But touring this queasy cabinet of medical curiosities, I’m most taken by the jars which contain the stomach linings of whales, so convoluted that it amazes me my own innards should be so formed, resembling as they do a cavern dense with stalagmites, or the living extrusions of a reef, although later, on another hospital visit, I would watch on a digital screen as a miniature camera snaked up my intestine, revealing its reassuringly pink and worm-like tract, while the consultant and I compared the length of human intestines – as long as a tennis court, he told me – to those of a whale’s, which could unroll for a quarter of a mile.

  Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves. Hunter’s assembly of cetacean guts suggests that these creatures and their physiology were equally mysterious to the surgeon – and all the more fascinating for that. ‘The animals which inhabit the sea are much less known to us than those found upon the land,’ he wrote, ‘and the œconomy of those with which we are best acquainted is much less understood; we are therefore too often obliged to reason from analogy where information fails, which must probably ever continue to be the case, from our unfitness to pursue our researches in unfathomable waters.’ He was the first scientist to describe the cetacea – both inside and out – with any degree of accuracy, and he did so in his paper ‘Observations on the structure and œconomy of whales’, presented to the Royal Society on 28 June 1787 by Joseph Banks and which, when published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, ran to more than eighty pages.

  Hunter’s essay proposed a new equivalence. He sought to show the relationship between form and structure in all living creatures. And what better animal to choose than the whale, one which, as his exhaustive descriptions would show, was like us, and yet far from us too? Hunter would do his best to pursue his researches in unfathomable waters, without ever leaving the land; his cetacean specimens came to him, rather than the other way around.

  In 1783 a twenty-one-foot female northern bottlenose whale – Hyperoodon ampullatus, a strange, bulbous-headed animal, one of the deep-diving beaked whales – was captured close to London Bridge, the same bridge under which another female of the same species would pass, to certain sensation, more than two hundred years later. This eighteenth-century wanderer, fatally far from home, was acquired by the renowned whale-oil merchant Alderman Pugh, ‘who very politely allowed me to examine its structure, and to take away the bones’. Almost as surprising as the sight of Ben Franklin besporting himself in the same waters, the whale’s appearance underlined Hunter’s frustrations in obtaining specimens. ‘Such opportunities too seldom occur, because those animals are only to be found in distant seas, which no one explores in pursuit of natural history; neither can they be brought to us alive from thence, which prevents our receiving their bodies in a state fit for dissection.’

  Yet a surprising number of cetaceans ventured into the Thames during Hunter’s working life, as though auditioning for his collection. In 1759 a twenty-four-foot grampus (from the contraction of grande poisson), otherwise known as the killer whale or orca, was caught at the mouth of the river and brought to Westminster Bridge on a barge. In 1772 another grampus, eighteen feet long, was caught; in 1788 no fewer than seventeen sperm whales stranded on the Thames’s lower reaches; and in 1791 a thirty-foot orca was chased up the river as far as Deptford and killed.

  Meanwhile, down in Southampton, there were similary strange forays into the estuary, with similar results. Whales were not unknown here – in the town of Hamwic, bones from Anglo-Saxon whales were used as chopping blocks and worked into combs – and others had passed this way before and since. In May 1770 ‘a large fish was observed rolling up the river Itchen’, and was chased by anglers to Northam, where a nightwatchman saw it strand in the shallows and took the opportunity to attack it with a long knife, stabbing at its head. It proved to be a whale, probably a bottlenose, thirty feet long and six tons in weight. ‘There has not been anything of the kind seen in those parts in the memory of man,’ claimed the local paper, ‘it will therefore be shown at Southam,ton [sic] till the middle of the week.’ And in the summer of 1798 the compendious pages of the Annual Register, or, A View of the History, Politicks, and Literature, of the Year reported that ‘A Fish of enormous size having for several days past been seen swimming in this river, many fruitless attempts were made to take it’; this despite the efforts of Mr Richard Eyamy of the New Forest Rifles Light Dragoons, who managed to lodge a carbine ball in the whale’s flanks ‘which, it afterwards appeared, went through eighteen inches of solid flesh’.

  The animal, also confirmed as a bottlenose, was found the following day languishing on the mud at Marchwood, where three men attacked it, ‘forcing an iron crow down its throat, which evidently put it in great torture’. Towed back to the village of Itchen, it was put on public display – ‘three-pence each person’ – attended by ‘an immense concourse’ which flocked across the river from the fashionable spa town of Southampton ‘to see this uncommon natural curiosity’. These animals, once feared by the Anglo-Saxon author of ‘The Whale’ – who imagined them swallowing up sailors lured, like fish, into their ‘grisly jaws’ by their sweet-smelling insides – had become curiosities; but more than that, too. This was the golden age of British whaling, after all, and London was a whaling port, boasting the Greenland Dock, the largest of its kind in the world, surrounded by refineries which supplied oil to light the capital’s streets and whalebone to corset the fashionable men and women who strolled them.

  In search of fresh and yet more interesting specimens, Hunter commissioned a surgeon – ‘at considerable expense’, he noted – to sail to the Arctic with a British whaler. Unfortunately, the young man returned with little more than a sample of whale skin covered in parasites. However, Hunter need not have looked so far; the whales came to him, presenting the scientist with a remarkable roster, viz:

  Of the Delphinis Phocaena, or Porpoise, I have had several, both male and female.

  Of the Grampus I have had two; one of them, (Delphinus Orca, Linn. Tab. XLIV.) twenty-four feet long, the belly of a white colour, which terminated at once, the sides and back being black; the other about eighteen feet long, the belly white, but less so than in the former, and shaded off in the dark colour of the black.

  Of the Delphinus Delphis, or Bottle-nose Whale (Tab. XLVI.), I had one sent to me by Mr. JENNER, Surgeon, at Berkeley. It was about eleven feet long.

  I have also had one twenty-one feet long, resembling this last in the shape of the head, but of a different genus, having only two teeth in the lower jaw (Tab. XLVIL); the belly was white, shaded off into the dark colour of the back. This species is described by DALE in his Antiquities of Harwich. The one which I examined must have been young, for I have a skull of the same kind nearly three times as large, which must have belonged to an animal of thirty or forty feet long.

  Of the Balaena rostrata of FABRICIUS, I had one seventeen feet long. (Tab. XLVIII.)

  The Balaena Mysticetus, or large Whalebone Whale, the Physter Macrocephalus, or Spermaceti Whale, and the Monodon Monoceros, or Narwhale, have also fallen under my inspection. Some of these I have had opportunities of examining with accuracy, while others I have only examined in part, the animals having been too long kept before I procured them to admit of more than a very superficial inspection.

  This fine selection of cetaceans lined up in Hunter’s showrooms, a deceased menagerie to equal the living one at the ’Change. Almost by default Hunter, practised in cutting up human beings, became a whale-dissector extraordinaire. Under the surgeon’s knife these whales exposed their inner beauty to the world, the visceral evidence which would triumphantly proclaim them mammals, not fish – a deception in which even Carl Linnaeus had initially been complicit. Pinned to the Swedish professor’s door in Uppsala was a cartoonish drawing he had been given of a bottlenose and calf, a contrast to Hunter’s accurate engraving. Its umbilical cord ma
y have convinced Linnaeus otherwise, but the distance between these two depictions spoke of a vast advance which Hunter himself had pioneered.

  Hunter dug and delved into the world of the whale. The ‘œconomy’ of which he wrote was the physical organisation of the animal, one which he was determined to order in an enlightened fashion. Yet the whale withheld as much as it revealed and, almost in spite of himself, Hunter resorted to poetic imagery to encompass its beauty. Faced with a sixty-foot sperm whale, for instance, he noted that the bones of the animal gave little clue to its real shape; that the spaces in between were ‘so filled up, as to be altogether concealed, giving the animal externally an uniform and elegant form, resembling an insect enveloped in its chrysalis coat’. Such sleekness merely made these mammals more mysterious, uncluttered as they were by the impedimenta of their land-dwelling cousins with their fingers and toes and feet and hands. The whale was streamlined to its medium, lithe and unencumbered.

  But beneath its lustrous layer of blubber, Hunter found that a sperm whale’s heart would not fit in a tub; that its tongue was like a feather bed; and that its oil was like butter, ‘unctuous to the touch’. The piked whale – which we would call a minke – had five stomachs, as had the porpoise and the grampus, but the bottlenose had seven; Hunter was particularly interested in whale guts. He even observed that, in the interests of science, his sometime pupil Mr Jenner had gone so far as to taste the milk with which the bottlenosed whale suckled its calves, and found it ‘rich like Cow’s milk to which cream had been added’.

  Little escaped Hunter: his report is extraordinarily detailed, a work of beauty in itself, with a sense of deep focus and scientific rigour. He further noted how the nerve endings in a whale’s skin indicated a sensitivity which might be even greater in water; and that their eyes appeared adapted to see better in the same medium. Yet his own eye was by no means unerring, as Richard Owen, who would become assistant conservator of the collection, made clear in a later edition of Hunter’s works. For instance, when Hunter claimed that the whale’s larynx had no function other than in respiration, Owen deferred to his learned friend and co-editor, Thomas Bell, who considered ‘the evidence to be strong, if not incontestable, in favour of the existence of a voice in the Cetacea. It is variously described as a bellow, a grunt, or a melancholy cry …’