Leviathan or The Whale

on its inflated pontoon, the whale’s frantic muscular movements began to flag. At seven o’clock that evening, it finally expired, somewhere near Gravesend, two hours from freedom. Borne on its rubber bier, its tearful attendants asked that the cameras be turned off in respect for its passing.
    To some these scenes evoked the funeral of Winston Churchill, when the hero’s coffin was taken down the river by naval barge, and which I watched on television as a young boy, instructed by my father as to its historic importance. To others, it all seemed a kind of collective madness. This princess of whales–for it was a she–became the subject of national debate and newspaper headlines. There were leader columns on how its treatment was a testament to our humanity; and others that claimed, equally, that its appearance was a reminder of the barbaric practices of the whaling nations. The Victorian press would have reacted in quite the same way: entire tabloid sections, edged in black, appeared to commemorate the whale. Others saw satire in its misadventure: one cartoon showed the animal on a flag-draped catafalque in the manner of a royal lying-in-state–only instead of a quartet of Life Guards with their sabres unsheathed, four photographers stood at each corner with their telescopic lenses downturned. Unbeknown to the artist, his image was an echo of a previous century, when the Royal Aquarium’s beluga, another public object of mistaken sex and dislocation, had lain in state in Westminster.
    By coincidence, the reading at Mass that Sunday was from the book of Jonah, prompting one clergyman to write from Hull to a national newspaper, noting that the passage was the one in which ‘Jonah says Nineveh, the London or New York of his day, will be overthrown in forty days. The people cut consumption by fasting and wearing the simplest possible garments and renounced violence. With the oil running out and global warming beginning to gallop and the continuing hideous aggression of the USA, perhaps the poor creature was giving us a hint’ In fact, as its necropsy revealed, the whale died of dehydration and stress. Months later, Richard Sabin showed me its dorsal fin, preserved in a specimen jar at the Natural History Museum. Wrinkled and greyish black, with the central core of cartilage visible where it was removed, the fin retained its last position, bent on one side, a sign of the trauma its owner suffered in its final days.
    (The treatment of the London whale contrasts with that of another bottlenose whale which swam up the Humber in 1938. ‘The whale…went up and down the river many times between Heap House and Keadby,’ wrote the Secretary to the Receiver of Wreck in Hull. ‘It grounded continuously, and its struggles caused damage to the river banks, whilst its presence in the river was a constant source of danger to shipping. It was on this account that Starkey decided to shoot it.’ The carcase was claimed by the Natural History Museum, although only after querying the butcher’s bill from W.A. Hudson in Scunthorpe: ‘To: Degutting Whale: £5’.)
    Throughout the twentieth century dead whales continued to be a source of fascination. In 1931 an embalmed, sixty-five-ton whale arrived at London Docks, the property of the Pacific Whaling Company and destined for display at a Christmas circus. Housed in a specially built case, it required the world’s largest floating crane, the London Mammoth, to transfer it from the ship to road bogies, on which it was taken to the circus, ‘the journey to be made by night’. One observer, as a young boy, remembered it with a great stick propping open its mouth, covered in tar to preserve it and smelling like roadworks.

    Twenty years later, in 1952, a seventy-foot fin whale caught off Trondheim (after being found by helicopters sent out for the purpose) was preserved on a huge one-hundred-foot-long lorry–also said to be the longest in the world–and was trundled overland through Europe, Africa and Japan, appearing in such unlikely places as Barnsley, Yorkshire, before ending up in exile in Belgium. It was a scenario reminiscent of the Hungarian film,
The Werckmeister Harmonies
, in which a travelling leviathan creates psychic upset in a Cold War-era town and becomes an allegory for totalitarianism–‘Some say it has nothing to do with it, some say it is behind everything’–just as the Czech poet Miroslav Holub imagined,
    There is a serious shortage of whales.
And