Leviathan or The Whale

yet, in some towns,
whaling flotillas drive along the streets,
so big that the water is too small for them

    while another poet, Kenneth O. Hanson, wrote of a pickled whale carried across Wyoming on a flatcar railway truck, ‘shunted to a siding the gray/ beast lay dissolving in chains’. I imagine whales in containers, shipped out in a cetacean pogrom, each in its rusty box on rolling stock. A ferry hits a humpback, a freighter carries a fin whale on its upturned bow, whales slump on sandy beaches.
    Ah the world, oh the whale.
    Man had developed a new relationship with the whale, although, as ever, it was one predicated on his desires, rather than the rights of the animal. Although the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been founded in England as long ago as 1824, and an animal protection law passed in 1835, it would take a long time for whales to be included in this order. ‘Yes; the beasts, the birds, and the fishes all prey upon one another,’ wrote a correspondent to
The Times
, who had observed the fate of the London beluga in October 1877,
    and man, whom we believe to be nearest to the Great Creator, preys upon them all. If he wants a sealskin jacket, he kills the seal and takes his skin; if he wants a mutton chop, he kills the sheep and takes his chop; and if he wants a live tiger to stare at, he catches a tiger alive and puts him in a cage; and I am afraid that the sight of the dying throes of the whale will have no more effect upon the feelings of the managers of the Westminster Aquarium than the same sight would have to soften the heart of a North Sea whaler as he drives in his last harpoon, because he wants the oil.

    Sentiment still gave way to business. On Christmas Eve 1868, Sven Foyn wrote in his diary: ‘I thank Thee, O Lord. Thou alone hast done all.’ The Norwegian was giving praise for the grenade harpoon he had just patented; a bomb that would implode in a whale’s head. A former seal-hunter, Foyn was ‘a most fortunate, religious, and good old man, respected and beloved by all who met him’, and the maiden voyage of the
Spes et Fides
–Hope and Confidence–with the eponymous Miencke among its crew, set out equipped with his efficient weapon.
    Cannon had been used on whales since an Englishman devised the Greener Gun in 1837, but Foyn’s holy invention allowed his fellow countrymen to pursue the great rorquals that had been beyond reach of the Starbucks and the Scoresbys: blue whales and fin whales, the largest animals on earth. Now no whale, no matter how fast, could escape; as soon as sighted, it was as good as dead. And a dead whale was a good whale to a Norwegian sailor. Soon the Scandinavians were killing a thou-sand finbacks a year. Humpbacks, too, began to suffer heavily from the new technological era of steamships and harpoon-launchers.
    It was a necessary advance, hence Foyn’s earnest prayers: the other cetacean species had simply run out. The sperm whale and right whales were so depleted as to make their pursuit uncommercial; and anyhow, the price of whale oil had plummeted since the introduction of petroleum and gas, and in 1879 the first electric light was switched on. The world looked elsewhere for illumination. The eastern Arctic fisheries were almost finished; when the young Arthur Conan Doyle took passage as a ship’s surgeon on the SS
Hope
out of Peterhead in 1880, the vessel returned after a six-month voyage having caught just two whales, and had to rely on seals for profit. Dundee remained an important port, historically prospering by marrying Scottish jute with the whale oil needed to treat it: seven hundred whalemen were still resident in the town in 1883, when a humpback swam up the Tay and, after six weeks’ feeding on shoals of herring, was harpooned by a steam launch from the
Polar Star
, and was subsequently embalmed and exhibited in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh.
    In America, the industry experienced a fitful revival with the discovery of the bowheads of the western Arctic; these virginal herds were culled for their huge baleen, used for corsets and hoops to amend the female form. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, whalebone was being supplanted by steel and plastic, and as women emancipated themselves from constricted waists and deformed ribcages, it seemed the whales were about to be set free, too. In 1924 the last whaler sailed out of New Bedford. The trade had long been in decline; Charles Chace,