Leviathan or The Whale

and precious few certainties), as Liz Evans-Jones, who oversees the strandings project at the Natural History Museum, told me, that modern incidents are more likely to be reported because people are aware of the animals’ plight, and that once remote coasts are now accessible. Whatever the truth, encounters with man’s world seldom turn out to be beneficial for the whale.
    In the past, shore dwellers had regarded a beached whale as a gift from the gods; those less accustomed to such events saw a dead cetacean as an evil omen, like a comet or an eclipse. After a whale arrived in the Thames during a storm in 1658, it was taken to have been an augury of the demise of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, who died the following day. It was certainly a strange sight: a thrashing leviathan off Dagenham. In his diary, John Evelyn, whose estate overlooked the river, noted: ‘A large
Whale
was taken betwixt my Land abutting on the
Thames & Greenwich
, which drew an infinite Concourse to see it, by water, horse, coach, and on foote, from
Lond
., & all parts.’
    Amazingly, this was a right whale, an animal more suited to waters rich in plankton rather than the floating detritus of seventeenth-century London. The whale first appeared at low water, ‘for at high water, it would have destroyed all the boates’. The alien was doomed by its unlucky appearance, as if its ungainliness itself was a sin; cornered, it fought back in a manner with which whale rescuers would be familiar: ‘after a long Conflict, it was killed with the harping yrons, & struck in the head, out of which spouted blood & water, by two tunnells like Smoake from a chimney; & after an horrid grone it ran quite on shore & died.’
    An amateur scientist himself, Evelyn took the opportunity to measure the monster. ‘The length was 58 foote: 16 in height, black skin’d like Coach-leather, very small eyes, greate taile, small finns & but 2: a piked snout, & a mouth so wide & divers men might have stood upright in it: No teeth at all, but sucked the slime onely as thro a greate made of that bone which we call Whale bone.’ Evelyn found it wonderful ‘that an Animal of so greate a bulk, should be nourished onely by slime’. Sixty years later, on his 1721 tour of Britain, Daniel Defoe recorded a whale bone arch on the London to Colchester road, ‘a little on this side the Whalebone, a place on the road so called because the rib-bone of a large whale, taken in the river Thames, was fixed there in 1658, the year Oliver Cromwell died, for a monument of that monstrous creature’. Whalebone Lane still exists in Dagenham; the bones are preserved in a local museum.
    Other would-be visitors to London were little better treated than Evelyn’s whale. In 1788, twelve male sperm whales stranded and died along the Thames estuary, almost within sight of the Great Wen itself; they were soon boiled down for oil. Five years later, in an event recorded by Joseph Banks, a thirty-foot orca entered the river and found itself the subject of ‘an exciting chase’ after it was harpooned, towing its hunters at great speed from Deptford to Greenwich; as a result of this south London sleigh ride, the Royal College of Surgeons acquired the animal’s skull. In October 1842 a whale described as a ‘fin fish’ appeared near Deptford Pier, whereupon five sailors from the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital-ship put out in a boat, armed with a ‘large bearded spear’ and ‘commenced the attack upon the monster, which soon showed symptoms of weakness, and threw up large quantities of water from the blowing apertures on its back’. Surrounded by other boats, it was roped out of the water and onto the pier, where the crowds were such that the constabulary were called to restore order. The creature–most likely a minke–was fourteen feet six inches long, with baleen and a white belly. It was subsequently taken by carriage, and several horses, to a butcher’s shop on Old King Street, where it was placed on a stand for public display.
    It was notable that these whalish strays appeared at precisely the point in London from which their hunters had set out, as if returning to haunt them. In the 1880s a bottlenose whale said to be forty feet long beached off the Woolwich Arsenal. ‘It came up the river with the tide, and, when it found itself stranded on the reed bed, blew furiously and turned half-a-dozen somersaults, injuring itself on the stones, and colouring the river with its blood.’