Leviathan or The Whale

Green–from where his wife would write anxious letters to Sidney Harmer, asking after her husband’s whereabouts and whether she should continue to pay his insurance premiums–travelling to the Shetland Islands to work with the Alexander Whaling Company, reporting that fin, sei and minke whales were there in plenty; they were ‘hoping for Humpbacks, too’. There he gathered sometimes dubious information on whale behaviour in the dawn of modern cetology–Gunder Jenssen, manager of the company, replied to one query, ‘I never heard of Killers attacking Sperm, as the Sperm are regarded as rather a frightening brute and will go for anything, even sharks’–but also sent back body parts from fins to fætuses, to the delight of his bosses. Back at the museum, Stammwitz took moulds of whale carcases, creating the models that would hang alongside his greatest achievement, the blue whale.
    Percy Stammwitz’s annual appraisals, still held in his staff file at the museum’s library, are testament to his abilities, not only as Technical Assistant, but as a cetologist in his own right. They list the replica whales–killer, beluga, caaing (or pilot) whale; Commerson’s and Heaviside’s dolphins, white-beaked dolphin, common porpoise, sei whale, and even a young sperm whale–all recreated in plaster by Stammwitz’s expert hands from stranded animals he collected, sometimes in harsh conditions. (After one particularly difficult attempt to recover a sixty-foot sperm whale in Yorkshire–which necessitated a formal request for new boots–it was agreed ‘that Mr P. Stammwitz may be allowed six days’ special leave in view of his long hours and arduous work at Bridlington’.) Stammwitz’s loving fashioning of specimen whales was an intimate tribute to their inherent beauty, one that his young son Stuart would inherit as he assumed the same post at the museum under curators who knew him from his boyhood, noting his ‘great mechanical skill’ and endearing personality and behaviour when sent on his own collecting missions with the Royal Navy.
    As the Scoresbys had seen the rise and falling of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century whaling, so the Stammwitzs’ careers mirrored the modern rise and fall of whaling, and the zoologists’ deepening concern for the future of the whales themselves. As early as 1885, the museum’s first director, William Flower, had made a speech decrying the avarice of whaling in Atlantic and Australian waters. It was the work done in the Southern Ocean by those pioneers that laid the foundations for conservation efforts which would save entire species, at the very moment that they came closest to extinction.
    As ever, bureaucracy and finance slowed matters, and it was not until 1925 that the Royal Research Ship
Discovery
–a steam-assisted, three-masted wooden sailing ship first built in Dundee along the lines of a whaler for Scott’s Antarctic expedition of 1901, and now refitted at Portsmouth–left for South Georgia, where a laboratory was built next to the Grytviken whaling station. Here the scientists could study whales brought ashore, albeit in hellish circumstances. ‘Flesh and guts lay about like small hillocks and blood flowed in rivers,’ one researcher wrote, ‘…while clouds of steam from winches and boilers arose as from a giant cauldron.’ Four years later, a new ship,
Discovery II
, was built, a 232-foot vessel dedicated–as the memorably named Sir Fortescue Flannery declared at her launching–to collecting data that might bring about an international agreement to restrict hunting in the Antarctic. It would be joined by a newly equipped vessel ‘of the whale-catcher type’, christened after another famous explorer: the RRS
William Scoresby
.
    Restraint in whaling, however, came out of self-interest rather than scientific study. British and Norwegian whalers petitioned the League of Nations–formed to prevent another human Armageddon–to request restrictions on the factory fleets. The need for control became all the more urgent, as Sir Douglas Mawson observed from his Australian perspective, in light of the ‘tremendous onslaught’ of the 1930-1 whaling season, although another correspondent with an evocative name, Arthur F Bearpark, wrote from his St James’s gentleman’s club to point out that both Britain and Norway already had voluntary agreements in place.
    In 1935 an international agreement was drafted under the auspices of the League of Nations and