Leviathan or The Whale

one of few remaining whaling captains, refused to take ‘New England’ boys (that is, white men) as apprentices, knowing that they would be enrolling in a dying industry. The whaling city had turned to cloth rather than cetaceans. Textile mills lined its river banks, employing labour imported from Lancashire as well as the Azores, and steamships ferried tourists to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard–prettier places than the dank quays where rotting hulks stood derelict off wharves that still smelt of whale oil.
    With the decline of American whaling–just one shore-based whaling station remained operational, in California–European whaling expanded to fill the space. In 1904 the armed steamships of the Norwegians and the British opened up the unplundered Antarctic to fulfil a new use for the whale: in the manufacture of nitro-glycerine. In a new century of war, placid animals supplied the world with the raw material to blow itself up. Fifty thousand whales perished during the two global conflicts–as much victims as those whose death and destruction theirs enabled. The same impulse which allowed slaughter on the Western Front seemed to permit the slaughter on the world’s oceans. As Europe suffered losses in their millions, the entire population of humpbacks in the South Atlantic were driven to extinction by 1918. Their oil prevented soldiers from suffering trench foot. In his report on stranded cetaceans of that year, Sidney Harmer noted that ‘several of the specimens were accordingly used for the manufacture of glycerine for munitions’. Whales, like men, were fodder for war.
    The march of events set in motion by Sven Foyn was unstoppable. Within twenty years of the opening up of the sub-Antarctic whaling grounds, ‘the rorquals have declined alarmingly in numbers’, one author noted in 1925. That year, the first factory ship, the
Lancing
, was launched in Norway. With these ‘seagoing abattoirs’, the extermination proceeded, paralleling the most bloody century in human history with the death of one and a half million rorqual whales. It was clear that the slaughter could not continue. ‘Whales have been killed on such an extensive scale in the Antarctic regions that, had it not been for the fact that the whaling ground in the Falkland Islands is in British territory and therefore under certain control, the whales would have been killed off as they have been in the Arctic regions,’
The Times
reported in 1926. ‘It is feared that unless measures are taken in time the whale will become extinct all over the world.’
    As part of that attempt to document and limit catches, and to understand these animals before they entirely disappeared, the Natural History Museum sent its scientists to the southern hemisphere. In 1913 Sir William Allardyce, governor of the Falkland Islands, on whose shores the British whaling stations were sited, realized that the new techniques being used to hunt whales in the Southern Ocean were moving at such a rate that the populations would soon be decimated. The Colonial Office in London agreed to his idea of introducing licences, and to assess sustainability, G.E. Barrett-Hamilton of the Natural History Museum was sent out to investigate. Unfortunately, the scientist died of a heart attack shortly after his arrival in South Georgia, as the indefatigable Percy Stammwitz, who had accompanied him there, had to report.
    Stammwitz’s other letters were full of life, however; his words portray a scene of almost unbelievable, prelapsarian schools of whales. Writing in the year before war laid waste to Europe, his descriptions commemorated the vast and peaceful plenty that existed before man came south–and which was soon to disappear. ‘The Whalers say that the Whales are very plentifull
[sic]
in the Southern Seas,’ he wrote, ‘& can be seen spouting in the thousands, round South Georgia, some of them larger animals reaching one hundred feet in length.’ This last phrase was underlined in blue pencil when the letter was received by the curator, Dr TW. Calman, who added a scribbled note:
‘Can we suggest getting one for the NHM’
.
    Stammwitz worked tirelessly for the museum, and for the whales, in those years. He was as intrepid as any Edwardian explorer, a specimen hunter in his own right, although the trophies he brought back were destined not for the walls of a stately home, but for the cabinets of the nation’s museum. As a young man, he would leave his home in Turnham