The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  The thylacine had become a shadow of the past projected onto the present. Did it still exist, or not? In 1966, a six-hundred-thousand-hectare game reserve was set up in south-western Tasmania, partly to protect any animals that might remain in the area. It was both a futile and an optimistic gesture, as if a space had been made, ready to be restocked with all the flora and fauna that had disappeared from the island.

  Since extinct animals no longer exist, we must take their once-existence on the word of others, especially if they seemed improbable in the first place. Even living animals defy our comprehension. The narwhal, for instance, with its icicle-like and onerous tusk, seems too strange to have survived into the twenty-first century, and yet, having never seen one, I take its existence on trust. Equally, the tiger-striped stuffed dogs with kangaroo legs which I saw in Hobart’s museum might well be clever fakes, just as the first duck-billed platypus brought back to Europe was declared a preposterous and obvious forgery.

  Set back from the city’s Parks Road, Oxford’s University Museum was built, from 1855 to 1860, on what was then an open plain north of the city. Despite its splendid stone and slate façade, it is an only half-finished building. It was designed by Benjamin Woodward, a civil engineer from Cork with a fondness for medievalism, but its presiding geniuses were John Ruskin and his friend Sir Henry Acland, who determined that here, on the university plain, art and science would meet in a glorious hall of knowledge. ‘I hope to be able to get Millais and Rossetti to design flower and beast borders,’ Ruskin told Acland, ‘– crocodiles and various vermin – such as you are particularly fond of – Mrs Buckland’s “dabby things” – and we will carve them and inlay them with Cornish serpentine all about the windows. I will pay for a good deal myself, and I doubt not to have funds. Such capitals as we will have!’

  The new museum would bestride the Oxford lawns, its iron and glass roof wrought in the image of plants and animals, and its cast-iron pillars topped with stone capitals and bases sculpted with fork-leafed and serrated ferns and fox-like animals peeking in between. Others sprouted lilies with protruding stamens, waiting for some masonry bees to pollinate them.

  At the entrance to the museum, and almost too big to be seen, hanging by a crude iron hinge and standing at more than double the height of a man, is the lower jaw of a sperm whale. Splayed like an enormous wishbone, its broad, veined bone narrows and curves to meet in a gothic arch, tall enough to create its own, alternative entrance to the museum; little wonder Melville called such a jaw a ‘terrific portcullis’. From under its shadow, I am conducted by the smartly dressed Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, who invites me, in her faint Slavonic accent, to follow her along a corridor, over a thick red velvet rope, and through a heavy wooden door. The dark, cave-like interior beyond is filled with modern, white-painted metal shelves which, as Malgosia presses a discreet button, slide apart to reveal row upon row of glass jars.

  Here is the usual array of mammalian organs and dead-eyed fish, the everyday horrors of the half-known world. A monkey’s head sits on top of a dissected spine, like something from an etching by Odilon Redon. But in a corner on the floor by the shelves stands a tall transparent cylinder, about waist-height, with an unsecured glass disc for a lid. The liquid it contains is the colour of stewed tea. And in it, held upright by a white rag tied around its neck, giving it the appearance of a convict who might escape at any moment, is a thylacine.

  Confined in its glassy prison, the animal is difficult to distinguish. It might be an oversized rat. I peer in at the sides and over the top, trying to imagine its living magnificence. From one of the shelves, Malgosia fetches a smaller jar. In it is thrust the skinned head of another thylacine, its skull removed, the deboned face swirling in its alcohol like a pickled glove. The fur is that of a dog or a fox, Labrador-pale and in good condition, as though someone had preserved a much-loved family pet.

  Back in her office on the far side of the building, Malgosia opens the wooden doors of a cupboard to another pair of specimens: busts of Truganini and Woorrady. Briefly, dramatically revealed, they stand blank-eyed on their pedestals in the shadows, simulacra of their countrymen and women whose bones lie in other cupboards and drawers of this museum, awaiting repatriation.

  In an anteroom, perched on top of a set of dusty metal-framed shelves as though it leapt up there one day and was afraid to come back down, is a stuffed thylacine, donated to the museum by the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1910. When Malgosia steps out of the room, I illicitly climb up the ladder-like shelves to unveil the marsupial from its inelegant plastic wrapping. It’s fixed to a wooden base in an upright position, like the toy dog on wheels my sister pushed about as a child. Its fur is threadbare, and its lips have been sealed by the taxidermist’s art. Having photographed it, half hanging onto the shelves, I reach out and stroke its leg, much as I once surreptitiously stroked the behind of a dozy koala in Sydney’s zoo. Had I attempted such an intimacy with a living thylacine, the result might have been quite different. When Dr Fleay attempted to photograph the last tiger in Hobart’s zoo, he was rewarded with a snap of its jaws; another visitor was bitten on the buttocks. Yet this stiff semblance of an animal is charged with a mystique; perhaps it will rub off on me, just as when I once shook the hand of a man who’d shaken the hand of a man who’d shaken the hand of Oscar Wilde.

  In the shoebox-sized study room, I look through the careful notes and drawings made by Professor Tucker, who dissected the thylacine from London Zoo – or, at least, its head – in 1942. The world might have been at war, but these learned men were exchanging letters over soon-to-be extinct marsupials.

  Oxford Museum of Natural History

  5 Aug 1942

  Dear Tucker,

  Huxley has passed to me your letter of the 3rd inst, re. Thylacine material etc. I regret we cannot supply the trunk of the Thylacine, the head of which you are now dissecting, because the remainder of the animal was sent on Oct 8th 1931 by order of the Society, to Professor Rowan of the Natural History Museum, Edmonton, Canada, in exchange for a collection of live stock Rowan sent to the London Zoo! We have had no other Thylacine and it is doubtful if we shall ever get another …

  Yours very truly

  A.E. Hamerton.

  The Huxley to whom Hamerton referred was Julian, brother of Aldous and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Mr Darwin’s Bulldog’. He was Secretary to the Zoological Society of London, and that year was also corresponding with T. H. White in Ireland on the subject of whether animals had a ‘mind’.

  Spilling over the desk, page after foolscap page details every aspect of the animal’s anatomy with exhaustive descriptions written in Professor William Tucker’s neat hand. His is an update of William Paterson’s report in 1805; and as Paterson’s had been the first detailed description of the thylacine, so Tucker’s might be the final one. As far as the professor knew, he was the last person to have direct physical contact with the extinct animal. It was as though he had been able to perform a necropsy on a velociraptor.

  Putting the professor’s minutiae to one side, I turn to another document in the file, one which purports to summarise thylacine sightings in north-eastern Tasmania in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Assembled by a husband-and-wife team, it is a painstakingly compiled list of encounters experienced by people used to the Tasmanian bush, one of the most protected wildernesses left on earth. These witnesses are well qualified and reliable, the report is eager to stress, and include practised bushmen and retired university lecturers. They were going about their ordinary lives when something extraordinary interrupted them.

  One couple, driving back one night after having been to the movies in Launceston, saw a pair of strange shapes amble across the road. At first they mistook them for dogs. But as the animals were caught in the headlights, they saw erect ears on large heads, unlike any canine. The pair moved slowly, even nonchalantly, said the witnesses: ‘It was almost as if they were disdainful of the car’; as if it, not they, were the interlopers. Amazed b
y the sighting, the couple reported it to the Parks and Wildlife Department, where an apparently uninterested official heard them out, then said, ‘Yes, it looks like you saw what you saw. Now, will you do us a favour and shut up about it? Don’t tell anyone.’

  Such encounters stress the odd motion of the animals. One experienced bushman in his fifties was logging in the forest with three other men when an animal that corresponded to a thylacine – ‘Couldn’t have been anything else’ – ambled out of a tree, ‘as slow as you please … He wasn’t in a hurry. But, then, they aren’t very fast, anyhow.’ All four men saw it for long enough to observe its strange gait and the rigidness of its hindquarters, the way that it couldn’t turn around like a dog because of the stiffness of its back, but instead had to move in a circle. And in 1980, a woman in her own garden found herself face to face with a creature which she too identified as a thylacine. It was standing on her chicken coop. ‘It stared at me and I stared at it. It was really quite beautiful. Sort of golden. It had a big head and stripes across the base of its rump.’ In this brief moment, both were transfixed. ‘We just sort of stared at each other.’ She called quietly to her husband inside, at which point the animal disappeared. When she went back inside, she was grey and shaking.

  Many witnesses remarked on the animal’s serenity and stillness; ‘No wonder they got killed.’ Others claimed to have smelled its pervasive aroma, described a century ago as that of an unknown herb. Some came close enough to look into its large yellow eyes. Nor are these sightings confined to Tasmania: others have been reported from the Australian mainland, where video cameras captured dog-like animals ambling through the bush. Yet nothing definitive exists, only blurry smears that may or may not be anything other than a mongrel and yet which, like the ‘true’ films of the tiger, take on a strangeness all of their own.

  One sequence, shot in 1973 through a windscreen (the wipers occasionally get in the way), is perhaps the most persuasive, since it is a mixture of the banal and the potentially astounding. An animal runs out of the trees and across a road. It might be a wild dog, but it has a long, stiff and pointed tail. It is powered by thickly-muscled back legs, which look more kangaroo-like than canine, and in the sunlight, magical stripes appear across its back. Rerun in slow motion, the images seem at once both eerie and ordinary, something caught between worlds.

  In 1982 Hans Naarding, an experienced field ranger with the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Department, was in north-west Tasmania, conducting a survey of the Latham’s snipe, an endangered migratory bird. He’d been sleeping in his vehicle when he awoke to heavy rain.

  It was two o’clock in the morning. Out of habit, Naarding scanned the bush with his spotlight. ‘As I swept the beam around, it came to rest on a large thylacine, standing side-on some six to seven metres distant.’ The ranger’s camera was out of reach – sceptics might say it always is – but anyway, he didn’t want to disturb the animal. His decision allowed him to make detailed, and convincing, observations. ‘It was an adult male in excellent condition with twelve black stripes on a sandy coat. Eye reflection was pale yellow. It moved only once, opening its jaw and showing its teeth.’ Having watched it for several minutes, Naarding took his chance and reached for his camera. As he did so, the animal moved off into the undergrowth, leaving a strong scent in its wake. Because of his professional position, Naarding’s sighting was taken seriously. It was also kept quiet while an intensive two-year search was made over two hundred and fifty square kilometres. Nothing was found.

  Even as I write, Dr Stephen Sleightholme, who has made a lifetime study of the thylacine, shares with me a message he has just received from a witness who, a few weeks before, had apparently watched a Tasmanian tiger at eight o’clock in the morning, in broad daylight. As Dr Sleightholme notes, the thylacine was a shy animal that preferred the twilight; even when it was relatively common, it was rarely seen in any great numbers – it was no pack-running, predatory wolf. But perhaps the most intriguing evidence for its putative survival is supplied by dry statistics. In the early 1990s, Professor Henry Nix of the Australian National University developed a computer-generated map to correlate recent sightings, using a programme, BIOCLIM, created to predict where specific flora, fauna or ecosystems should occur.

  Professor Nix used this map to compare historical records of thylacines hunted or trapped in Tasmania during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the frequency and location of sightings from 1936 onwards. The two sets of data coincided almost exactly, leading the professor to conclude that these witnesses might indeed be seeing thylacines, and he proposed that an official search should be made before going ahead with the considerable expense of attempts to clone the species from its DNA.

  As to what all this adds up to, I do not know. There are always hoaxes and misidentifications and rumours of conspiracies and vested interests. Indeed, if a living thylacine were to wander out of the bush and be wrestled to the ground – as one Tasmanian professor of zoology fantasised – it might mean an end to the exploitation of the island’s virgin forests, an industry that angers many Tasmanians as they see ancient trees being cut down and shipped out to make toilet paper.

  What I do know is that in one institution I visit, a curator lets slip a quickly retracted remark, telling me it is not their secret to reveal. It is clear from what this person says, or does not say, that this strange half-life limbo of an animal which may or may not exist may soon be resolved, in its favour. That history is about to be reversed. That the thylacine is no longer extinct.

  If it ever was.

  7

  The wandering sea

  Far from land, far from the trade routes,

  In an unbroken dream-time

  Of penguin and whale,

  The seas sigh to themselves

  Reliving the days before the days of sail.

  DEREK MAHON, ‘The Banished Gods’

  Take out your atlas and look at it.

  You can’t. Just as no two-dimensional map of the world represents the true proportions of its continental masses, so no chart presents the reality of its greatest ocean. If you were to rise up, like an impossibly elevated albatross, from the centre of the Pacific, the Earth would appear almost entirely blue. No wonder Arthur C. Clarke thought a better name for our planet would be the Sea.

  The facts defy that paltry layer of land which we call home. The Pacific contains one hundred and seventy million cubic miles of water, and covers sixty-three million square miles, a third of the planet’s surface. It descends to the greatest depths, the Mariana Trench, nearly seven miles down, a place visited only twice by human beings, a lightless sea bed less mapped than the moon. This ocean also holds the oldest water: such are its slow-moving undercurrents that the oxygen in its middle layer has been there since that water was last in contact with the air at the surface up to a thousand years ago. It is as much an archive of the ancient atmosphere as the air bubbles trapped in ice cores taken from the Antarctic. Given these superlatives and immensities, it is not hard to believe that of the million species in the sea, three-quarters are yet to be described, and one third remain unknown to science. Even its sepulchral abysses support life forms alien to our imaginations: colourless creatures, living far from the sun and the photic layer, feeding off another energy entirely from volcanic vents. Life itself may have begun in such places.

  Yet the Pacific is by no means a landless, uninhabited expanse. It is studded with twenty-five thousand islands, large and small, each with its own stories, of people, and animals. Their narratives crisscross the ocean in an embroidered web, drawn together in invisible lines of connection from shore to island to sea, transversed in ancient feats of navigation and migration that put our modern, computer-assisted efforts to shame. Here the remotest journeys ended; and here many began, too.

  Out of the silence and darkness of the night, I’m plunged into a hubbub of people and cars and cargo, all jostling to join the ferry that rises from the quayside. An hour later, and the
ship is pushing out from harbour. The sun seeps back into the sky, and the ocean opens up to meet us. I settle on the top deck to drink tea, lazily raising my binoculars – only to see a huge grey shape in the mid-distance. It takes me a moment to realise that it is a whale.

  A voice crackles over the Tannoy to alert the passengers to the sight. They lurch over the rail for a better look. The sperm whale’s blow fizzes in the air. It raises its head, shiny with seawater, but it doesn’t really look like a whale. The passengers soon lose interest, and drift back to their breakfasts.

  I watch as the whale slips into the distance and, with a final flourish of its flukes, dives. Such a sight is rare in these waters nowadays. Yet a century ago, ships plying this route were often accompanied by another cetacean – one which acquired a near-mythical status.

  From 1888 to 1912, a Risso’s dolphin appeared regularly in the Cook Strait, the turbulent channel that separates New Zealand’s two islands. Nicknamed Pelorus Jack after Pelorus Sound, it was seen by thousands of passengers, including Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. Some claimed it as a kind of guardian angel, guiding ships across the dangerous waters, but it is more likely that the animal was surfing the compression wave created by the vessels’ bows, as many dolphins do. A third theory suggested a more emotional connection: that it had lost its mother and was seeking a surrogate – an idea encouraged by accounts of unweaned cetaceans attempting to suckle at the sides of the same whaleships that had made them orphans.

  Other remarkable abilities were claimed for Jack. That he could choose between two ships as to which would make a better scratching-post to rid his body of parasites, and that he preferred to follow steamers because of the sound they made. He even attracted the attention of London’s Linnean Society, whose president, Sidney Harmer, the director of the Natural History Museum, noted: ‘In the light of this story, we may have to review our incredulity in regard to the classical narratives of the friendliness of dolphins towards mankind.’ But Pelorus Jack would be both endangered by and rewarded for his dalliance with humans. After a drunken passenger on the ferry SS Penguin took a pot shot at it in 1904, the dolphin became the first marine mammal to become protected by law: a hundred-pound fine awaited anyone who interfered with it. It was reported that Jack declined to escort Penguin thereafter; five years later the ship was wrecked off the South Island, with the loss of more than seventy lives.