Leviathan or The Whale

The crew of the steam tug
Empress
took a rope to it and towed it off the beach, ‘with the intention of consulting with the Thames Conservancy officers as to its disposal’. Most extraordinary of all, at least to modern readers, may be the fact that a dolphin stranded at Battersea Bridge in May 1918 was summarily eaten by the museum’s ‘distinguished correspondents’, and parts served at a banquet at the Mansion House. ‘The opinions received afterwards were nearly all favourable, and some of them enthusiastic. It is a fact which deserves to be more widely known, particularly during a period of shortage of meat, that the Cetacea furnish meat of excellent quality and high nutritive value.’ Sidney Harmer admitted that ‘a certain Cetacean flavour, which is not universally popular, is apt to develop on keeping, but it is possible to remove this to some extent by parboiling…it is a fact that there are persons who consider Cetacean meat preferable to all other kinds.’
    Even in the late twentieth century, dolphins and porpoises were not rarities in the Thames. In 1961 a sixteen-foot minke was seen diving and surfacing in the river as far as Kew, ‘followed by a police launch warning boats to keep clear’. Earlier that day the whale had been found on the river bank, having apparently collided with a boat. Inspectors from the RSPCA, along with police officers and other helpers, had dragged it in a tarpaulin to the water, hoping it would make its way back to the sea, but the animal became caught in reeds by Kew Bridge, and soon after died. This interloper was not so innocent in the minds of the newspapers that reported on it, for twenty-four hours earlier an engineer had drowned when his dinghy overturned at Chiswick, close to where the whale was found; and two boys in another boat were nearly capsized by a ‘thrashing whale or porpoise’. The accompanying photograph showed two men standing over the presumed perpetrator, as if to accuse it of these crimes.
    The hindsight of history seems to allow such transgressions as naturalists eating their own specimens; but few could have predicted that, in the twenty-first century, a whale would swim under Waterloo Bridge, past Charing Cross–almost under the window where Melville stayed–and past the Palace of Westminster, only to strand itself on the Battersea embankment within the sound of the King’s Road.
    It was an event that became a kind of global circus entertainment. An animal used only to the booms and clicks of its cousins in the open sea was suddenly subject to the confinement and cacophony of one of the world’s largest and noisiest cities. Disorientated and distressed, the northern bottlenose whale moved up and down stream with the tides, its flukes flapping furiously, its curiously baby-like head rising plaintively out of the water while people shouted at it and boats surrounded it and helicopters filled with film crews buzzed overhead, transmitting pictures around the world for fascinated audiences to see. When I watched these scenes again, months later, hindsight served only to make them more poignant in the knowledge of what happened next: a pathetic death, deafened and assailed by traffic, trains, boats and people, frightened by those who sought to save it, starving and therefore suffering terrible thirst, trying futilely to follow a dead-end river to the western ocean.
    Inevitably, this visitation was seen as a new omen for the world. A month before, six Arnoux’s beaked whales had made an unusual appearance in Cape Town harbour, looking, with their strange, stubby, protruding teeth, their brown skins and mottled, veined markings, like primeval denizens of the deep come to confront the modern world with its sins. Only days before the arrival of the London whale, a fifty-foot-long dead finback was taken from the Baltic at Bremen and driven, with a police escort, to the centre of another capital city, to be laid at the steps of the Japanese Embassy in Berlin as a protest against that nation’s continuing actions in the sanctuary of the Southern Ocean. And on the same day that the whale appeared in the Thames, four Cuvier’s beaked whales beached in Spain, the victims, as subsequent tests would indicate, of naval sonar exercises.
    The London whale was doomed from the moment it entered the estuary, and from which it was scooped up and carried in a procession back towards the sea, watched by news crews and crowds on the Thames bridges. As it lay