The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  Those cries remained unheard as Hunter boiled down whales’ bodies in his backyard, while copper vats bubbled to prove the purity of spermaceti oil and its point of crystallisation, turning Earl’s Court into a whaling station, and its outhouses into ossuaries. Now the remains of these Georgian whales stand arranged in their constituent parts, ready for inspection or even reassembly, should necessity arise; we might genetically re-engineer Eden from these glass shelves and their duly labelled jars. Meanwhile, down in the entrance hall, whale skulls and teeth lie unbiting in dark wooden cabinets, as hippos and rhinos yawn fleshlessly beside them.

  John Hunter died in 1793 in mid-argument from a fit of angina, probably induced by his syphilis-weakened heart. Nevertheless his collection, which had been displayed at his house in Leicester Square and which was transferred to the College of Surgeons in 1799, continued to grow. The Hunterian Museum was established in 1811, and expanded in 1855 by Richard Owen. In 1941, three-quarters of the collection was destroyed in a German air raid, smashing into splintered bone and shattered glass the specimens so painstakingly assembled over the centuries, including Chunee’s skeleton. Hunter’s house in Earl’s Court had long since been demolished – having outlived its subsequent use as a private lunatic asylum for ladies, complete with a ‘seclusion room’ lined with painted canvas. When the site was raked over for redevelopment, bone-filled pits were found, along with evidence of the scientist’s experiments into the grafting of trees, their bark excised in the same way he would reduce a limb for amputation; all now covered up by new constructions while lorries thundered along roads which once carried the carcases of whales.

  The building is 1930s, brick with white Crittall windows, set back from the street. It might house offices or light industry. Inside, the corridors have the unmistakable smell of an institution. From Rob Deaville’s cluttered office – filled with books and equipment and, in one corner, polystyrene containers covered by a sheet of glass under which flies are buzzing in some kind of experiment – I’m led downstairs, past rooms in which young students’ faces are lit by screens, into a space that is part changing room, part prison visiting area.

  The anteroom is divided into two by a low wooden-slatted bench. One side of the tiled floor, Rob tells me, is ‘dirty’; the other is ‘clean’. He hands me a well-laundered lab coat, fastened with a row of poppers up one side. As I climb over the bench, I pull a pair of elasticated blue protectors over my boots. My camera, pen and notebook are placed by a sliding glass partition, from where I collect them on the other side.

  The laboratory is lined with cabinets containing various instruments. On the far side of the room garage-like doors open out to a view of the trees of Regent’s Park. Just over the concrete wall is the zoo and its unseen but vocal inhabitants.

  It’s a quiet, warm afternoon, the last day in October.

  Matt, Rob’s colleague, goes through the doors and opens a freezer the size of a small car. From it he pulls a black bin-liner, almost as big as him. It is evidently very heavy. With Rob’s help he lifts it to a pair of industrial scales, the thick chains of the pulley system dangling overhead as if in a garage.

  I stand, waiting, anxiously. The black plastic bag and its contents are hoisted onto a large stainless-steel dissection table, complete with a sink and drain hole. Rob is talking to me, but I’m not paying attention, because over his shoulder I can see Matt unwrapping the object from the plastic.

  From inside the black a slick of brown and red appears. Without ceremony, the subject of this afternoon’s study is revealed: a harbour porpoise, Phocoena phocoena, a common enough animal around our shores. Until a week ago, this small cetacean was swimming around Cardigan Bay, feeding on small fish. Now it lies in a basement of the Zoological Society of London, quite calmly, almost as if asleep.

  The fluorescent light is reflected onto its flanks by the dull sheen of the stainless steel. It is subtly marked, brown with greyish striations. Its tail is elegant, on a small scale; its dorsal stubby. The animal is plump. In fact, it looks remarkably healthy, and one might almost imagine it could swim away – if not for the fact that its eyes have been eaten out of its sockets, and its side has been pecked by gulls, leaving dents like those made by a pencil point in an eraser. And when I walk around to the other side, I discover that one half of its face has been entirely eaten away. Yet the carcase – probably about four and a half feet long from its curved flukes to its snub head – has the dignity which all dead things have, from birds to humans. Death wipes away fear, leaving beauty behind. I feel guilty as I photograph it, invading its privacy; an animal out of its element and laid on cold metal, instead of being suspended in water. The images I take are forensic; I suppose that’s what my body looked like when I was photographed for medical science. I take one last look at the animal, whose wholeness is about to be destroyed.

  Rob talks me through the cetacean’s dimensions, and what he is about to do. Picking up the scalpel onto whose handle he has just snapped a new blade, he cuts through the flank with deft and unerring swiftness. The dark skin opens to show the glaring white beneath – the colour of coconut. With an adeptness a sushi chef would envy, Rob slices out a long sliver of the blubber. He lays out the section like a bacon rasher, and carefully measures it. ‘It’s a healthy layer,’ he says. ‘It gets thicker in the winter, to keep the animal warm.’ Already, he has spotted something anomalous: a cavity in the blubber, filled with blood, big enough for Rob to poke his finger in. It is the first internal sign that this animal did not die of natural causes.

  ‘See – the ribs are snapped, here, and here,’ says Rob, whose own movements are, ironically, compromised by over-adventurous paragliding at the weekend which has left him with cracked ribs. Matt is summoned to cut out the ribcage with a long-handled pair of cutters. The bones are loosened and laid out, like spare ribs, sticky with sweet and sour sauce. ‘Porpoise meat is good eating, you know,’ as Ishmael says.

  Turning his attention to the animal’s underside, Rob removes two identical organs from its interior. They resemble a pair of elongated plums: the porpoise’s testes. Given the size of the animal, they’re remarkably large, I say. ‘It’s because they’re so sexually active – like dolphins,’ Rob says. ‘The testes of a dolphin can weigh two kilograms.’ There they lie, by the side of the porpoise. No use to him now.

  Slowly Rob works his way through the rest of the animal, carefully excising each organ. It’s like taking apart a three-dimensional, bloody jigsaw. The rest of the blubber is peeled off in large white slabs and tossed into a large yellow plastic sack. CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, demands that every part of a protected animal such as this one – even though there may be half a million porpoises in British waters – must be bagged up and taken away to be incinerated. Matt stands by with small plastic containers for the tissue specimens Rob saves for later analysis.

  Soon the steel is awash with blood, its surface strewn with offal like a miniature whaling station. Even Rob and Matt admit to each other, after a beer or two, an occasional sense of revulsion at their work, although it reveals something miraculous: the essential secrets of the cetacean, so like us that it might be a child lying there on the slab, deconstructed and, bit by bit, dumped in the bin. I realise that the animal is as beautiful inside as it is outside; I ought to put down my camera and paint it instead. Digital images only heighten the lurid quality, and lose the subtle colouring of what lies inside; nor can they convey the faint but evocative smell of the sea that still hangs about the carcase.

  The largest organ of all, lying across the others, is the liver. As Rob cuts into it – its interior still crackling with ice like a partly-defrosted steak – he discovers a huge tear through its centre. One almighty blow caused this rupture, and the congealed blood that lies around it. There are more contusions on the other side of the animal; clearly it was the victim of a sustained attack.

  Out of the chambers of its lungs, Rob’s fingers tease slender, long
worms that infest the organs. It’s hard to resist a sense of disgust at this discovery, even though this is a minor infestation compared to the thousands of nematode worms found in large whales. Rob tells me about a particular parasite that gravitates to the genital regions of small cetaceans, from where they can complete the final cycle in their parasitic lives. There a shark will nip and gnaw at its victim, and in the act of ingestion provide the parasite with its end-user, its ultimate destination.

  As I watch Rob pull a two-inch worm out of the porpoise’s lungs, I ask if they harm the animal. Rob says they don’t appear to; but there are areas of calcification in the lungs, too, hard and brittle within the surrounding tissue, a result of former infections. It may have looked healthy, but there were plenty of assaults on this porpoise’s well-being; the presence of anthropogenic contaminants may reduce cetaceans’ resistance to such infections.

  Taking hold of the tongue, Rob removes the ‘pluck’ of the animal – the mouth, oesophagus and heart. They come away in one long lump. The heart is healthy, and looks as though it has only just stopped pumping blood around the animal’s body. Rob pulls out the valves that did this sterling work, then it too is consigned to the bin, just another piece of offal, having served its useful purpose.

  Now all that is left is the head, lying forlornly in a corner of the shallow sink. The mouth is agape. Its two rows of tiny teeth are rounded, rather than pointed like those of a dolphin, designed to grabble about in the sea bed, searching for the small prey that constitute most of the porpoise’s diet. Earlier, in its stomach folds, we found tiny squid beaks and fish otoliths, minute ear bones.

  Rob turns the head on its side and locates a tiny dent in the skin behind the eye. You need to know a cetacean inside-out to be able to locate the external aperture of this organ. The hole is barely more than a pinprick. Rob’s scalpel swiftly slices it open to show the threadlike auditory canal, a dark root running down to the tympanum. It is a bare, minimal form, since most of what the animal hears is conveyed by the spongy, oily tissue that lines its jaw.

  This strange cetaceous sound equipment – a scaled-down version of what one would find in larger-toothed whales – is thus exposed. We follow it, with the aid of Rob’s knife, from the ‘melon’ or forehead, a thick white wall of fat with bio-acoustical properties, to the ‘monkey’s lips’ buried deep below, a cartilaginous valve that snaps together to create the animal’s clicks.

  Finally, Rob digs out the ear bones or ossicles, so dense that they’re the last part of any cetacean to survive. They’re exquisitely shaped, like shells. I have three in my own collection: a time-darkened, fifteen-million-year-old fossilised specimen as heavy as a stone; a yellowing otolith from a pilot whale which had been butchered sometime in the early twentieth century; and a fresh sculptural shape I found when walking on a remote beach, bone-pale and light and multi-chambered, so intricate as to be a miracle in itself. These convoluted objects, more like musical instruments, are all that remains of their owners, their existence reduced to the echo chambers of their most intense sense. They hold the last sound they heard, just as our hearing is the last we will know of the world.

  Matt unplugs a battery-powered circular saw from its charger on the wall and hands it to his colleague; the noise revs through the room. Rob tells me, ‘You may want to step outside while I do this – there’s a possibility of aerosol.’ As he pulls down the heavy Perspex visor over his head, I move into the welcome fresh air. I have already been instructed not to put my hands in my pockets or touch my lab coat with my face, for fear of zoonotic disease; with an animal so genetically close to my own species, infection is a real risk.

  Outside the room – filled as it is now with the mingled smell of blood and the sea – the zoo’s inhabitants are going about their business, unaware of what is happening to one of their fellow creatures. I imagine other subjects that have passed through this room – from a giant leatherback turtle splayed over the tiles, to other exotic animals from the modern menagerie next door: elephants, antelopes, apes.

  The high-pitched squeal of machinery stops, and Rob calls me back in. He has cut off the back of the creature’s skull. There’s a burning smell in the air, familiar from the dentist’s chair. White flecks of sawn bone are strewn over the red tissue. Rob eases away the section of cranium and digs around inside with his scalpel, as though working on a giant oyster. With a plop, the loosened brain falls out into his hands. It fills his cupped palms like a wobbly, incarnadined blancmange. Jiggling it in his fingers, Rob points out the cranial lobes and the cerebellum. What information did this organ process in the final few minutes of its owner’s existence? Earlier in the dissection, we’d seen the porpoise’s overdeveloped adrenal glands, bigger in proportion because of all the stress the animal had suffered in its life.

  It is now that Rob reveals the reason for this animal’s death; a conclusion he suspected all along, and which its blood-flooded brain confirms. The porpoise was murdered by its own cousins, the bottlenose dolphins of Cardigan Bay, the latest in a long line of such fatalities, no fewer than three hundred known incidents in the past twenty years, perhaps indicating many more.

  I imagine that attack. Some testosterone-fuelled young dolphin decided to play with its fellow cetacean’s life, treating its body like a rugby ball, tossing it high in the air with a flick of its powerful hard beak, then repeatedly butting it till the porpoise’s ribs snapped and its liver split. I hope that it lost consciousness before the gulls descended to peck out its eyes. Later, I speak to a researcher from the scene of the crime. She tells me she has often found dead porpoises on the beach that look similarly unscathed, until, with a depression of the foot, you realise every rib has been broken. The phenomenon may be a recent one, or it may not. Perhaps the dolphins’ ever-present smiles have kept us from this shocking discovery: that they could be such cold-hearted killers. Mostly young adult males are to blame, and attacks happen around periods of mating – indicating that the porpoises may be the victims of male aggression over access rights to fertile females.

  Adult males may mistake the porpoises for infant dolphins whose existence challenges their genetic legacy. Whatever the reason, the evidence is clear: dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we’d like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins. A few months later, I’d visit Spey Bay in the Highlands of Scotland, home of another resident pod of bottlenose dolphins; they too have been implicated in crimes against their cousins. As they swim under the boat, out of the misty North Sea, I realise that they are huge creatures, up to twelve feet long, almost black, with white bellies that flash as they leap. It’s easy to imagine their power; or why one local man tells me that when he goes fishing up to his thighs in the bay and sees those dark fins coming nearer, he quickly orders his dog out of the water, for fear – rational or not – that they might turn and go for it.

  As I stand in the dissection room, looking at this carcase laid out for my edification, I feel a sense of privilege to have been granted such an access to its inner secrets. Its anatomy is so close to ours; every excised organ is a reminder that what is contained within the mammal’s blubbery coat is also held together by my bag of skin and frame of bones. As it is taken apart, so am I, all my bones and organs and skin and guts. I’m looking at myself.

  Outside, the macaws are calling loudly from their cages. I cycle off into the dusk, the smell of porpoise in my hair.

  4

  The azure sea

  These whales are reported to have their lairs … their own territories and apportioned dwelling-places, and remain there without trespassing on their neighbours’ preserves. They do not rove aimlessly to and fro seeking changes of abode, but love their own home as if it were their native country, and find it gratifying to linger there.

  ST AMBROSE, Hexameron

  From my plane window, the islands seem to rise up as if newly erupted from the sea. It’s four years to the day since I last came here. I know that because the same festival is in pro
gress. Perhaps it never ended.

  Every so often rockets fizz into the air. Troupes of children and adults are dancing and singing, each followed by their own brass band. Teenage boys who elsewhere would be embarrassed to take part in such a procession are dressed in satin bows. They and their partners pirouette along the route, dancing down to the square, where, the following day, in the shadow of the basalt-outlined church, tables will be loaded with round loaves of sweet bread, stuck over with flowers and offered up to São Pedro, patron saint of fishermen. For all these joyous celebrations, however, a current of reservation runs through these streets, defined as they are by the sea.

  A few months before that last visit my mother had died. My grief seemed implicit in this place. I felt open to its remoteness and obscurity, its clinker-dark shores which looked as though the whole place had burnt to the ground.

  The mid-Atlantic night is pitch-black and impenetrable. The moonless sky sinks into the sea, allowing the Cory’s shearwaters to sail inland to their nests, feathery ghosts in the darkness. All day they’ve worked the waters, seizing fish and squid from below the waves. But as evening falls, they burst into eerie squeaks – qwwwaaark—qwak-qwak—qwwwaaark – strangulated, semi-human, half-comical cries constantly reiterated as they soar inshore, each sounding more demonic than the last; little wonder that their calls were once thought to be those of the devil.