In the Heart of the Sea

blood and tissue samples that would later help them determine what the whale had been suffering from. It soon became clear that the whale was decomposing much more quickly than expected, an indication of just how sick it had been before it died. Using scalpels, forceps, and large knives, the team took samples from the lungs, the three stomachs, the bowling-ball-sized heart, the liver, the spleen, and the ears, about the size of a man’s fist and situated far back in the head.
    As one group worked at the whale’s midsection, a New England Aquarium staff member climbed up on top of the whale. With a long-handled Japanese flensing tool, he made an experimental six-foot slice into the intestinal cavity, unleashing a gaseous explosion of gore that blew him off the whale and drenched the others in blood. For the next few minutes, ropelike intestines continued to bubble out of the incision. Even though the whale had been dead for several days and the outdoor temperature was well below freezing, the blubber-encased body steamed in the cold January air.
    The necropsy was finished by three o’clock in the afternoon. Now there was the job of removing more than forty tons of putrefying blubber, meat, and guts from the skeleton. By this point, Jeremy Slavitz and Rick Morcom, two staff members from the Nantucket Historical Association, which owns and maintains the island’s whaling museum, had become deeply involved in the whale stranding. Morcom asked his boss if he could borrow some tools from the Whaling Museum’s collection. After some quick research, he decided that a boarding knife, a cutting spade, and a bone spade were what he needed. Soon the artifacts, their blades long tarnished with age, were once again sharp and glittering.
    Even though the Nantucketers were now ideally equipped, it was backbreaking work, giving all of them an appreciation for the amount of sheer labor whaling in the nineteenth century had required. The blubber was not only difficult to cut, even with the sharpest tools, but also remarkably heavy. A single four-foot-square slab of eight-inch-thick blubber weighed as much as four hundred pounds. The smell was, both Morcom and Slavitz agreed, beyond description. Their eyes watered constantly. They gagged as they worked. Each night both of them left their clothes outside their front doors and ultimately, when the cutting was finished, threw them away. Even after long showers, they could still smell the rotting flesh. One evening, Morcom’s wife, knowing that he had spent a vacation day working from dawn till dusk, cooked him up a big steak, but the smell of frying meat nauseated him. A whale wasn’t a fish, he now knew all too well, but a mammal.
    On January 3 they punctured the whale’s bulbous head, and the spermaceti flowed out. At first it was “as clear as vodka,” Morcom remembered; then, upon exposure to the air, the fluid magically congealed into a cloudy, almost waxlike substance. In a few short hours every available bucket and barrel had been filled with spermaceti, and there were still hundreds of gallons remaining. An island fisherman happened to have his dinghy in the back of his pickup truck and offered it as a spermaceti receptacle. Soon it was filled to the gunwale with oil. They ultimately collected about a hundred gallons of spermaceti and were forced to leave an estimated three hundred more on the beach.
    By the end of the day they had cut away most of the flesh and blubber from the skeleton, dumping the offal in a hole dug in the beach and temporarily storing the bones under a tarp. A job that had taken as many as three weeks at other whale strandings had been accomplished in only three days.
     
    THE bones were eventually buried in a pit, the location of which was kept undisclosed. The jaw and its valuable teeth were buried in Morcom’s backyard, but only after his wife and children were sworn to secrecy. With advice from a variety of experts in the field, the Nantucketers decided to build cages for the bones and place them in the harbor the following spring, in expectation that marine scavengers would strip the bones of remaining flesh. The day after Mother’s Day, Morcom, Slavitz, and others disinterred the bones, which smelled as bad as, if not worse than, they had when they’d been buried in January. The team loaded them into cages, and the cages were lowered into the harbor, near Brant Point—comparatively still waters, where all manner of devourers, from crabs to