Leviathan or The Whale

become the enemy by default. Every kind of device was used to kill the animals: exploding harpoons, strychnine, cyanide and curare poisoning (inspired, perhaps, by the Aleutian Islanders who used barbs contaminated with rotten meat to infect a whale with blood poisoning). Even electrocution was attempted: the same method by which the civilized world got rid of its most venal criminals was brought to bear on dumb animals. The hunters came armed with cannon and bomb-lances, ostensibly hastening death, but in practice causing what we can only imagine to be agonizing pain; an apparent indifference to the dignity of animals illustrated by the fact that men on Antarctic whaling stations threw penguins on their fires, using the oily birds as kindling.
    As cetacean war was waged from above, using aeroplanes to spot their targets, bombers mistook whales for submarines below, with the inevitable consequences. British and Norwegian ships left the dangerous Atlantic for the Pacific coast of South America; from 1941 to 1943, a Norwegian flotilla working off Peru captured 8,500 sperm whales. These young men working on the whalers were as much a part of the war effort as my mother, busy making machine gun parts in a Southampton factory, or the now elderly Percy Stammwitz, proud to serve in the Home Guard, defending London during the Blitz. War even evoked the whale in an animated propaganda cartoon, in which an insular Britain was menaced by a Nazi whale morphing out of the map of Europe, with Scandinavia as its sinister swastika’d head and the Baltic as its evil-toothed jaw.
    As German U-boats extended their operations south of the Equator and the Pacific too became a theatre of war, whaling virtually ceased. Some shore stations still operated in South Africa and Australia, but most whale-catchers were converted to warlike uses, ‘and such of the large factory ships–some of them displacing more than 17,000 tons–as escaped destruction are required for more urgent purposes’,
The Times
noted under the headline, ‘WAR AND THE WHALE’. ‘It will be interesting to observe the results of the close season imposed by war,’ added the newspaper, which hoped that the rapid decline in numbers noted in the last open season of 1939-40 ‘will prove to have been but temporary. At the same time,’ it admitted, ‘the virtual extinction of the Greenland whale, the Pacific grey whale, and the Biscayan and southern “right whales” is a warning against optimism.’
    The aftermath of war did not bring peace for the whales any more than it did for their fellow species. Whale oil–and meat–was more valuable than ever as a supplement to rationed diets, and the whaling nations agreed that, in the first year after the war, the season would be extended. In 1945, only months after the cessation of hostilities, the first British whaling steamer to be built since the war sailed from the Tyne for South Georgia in her colours of red, white and blue, with a crew of four hundred on board. ‘The
Southern Venturer
is in a hurry…The vessel, which has only just been completed, will not reach the whaling waters by the official opening of the season.’ Two Norwegian vessels would arrive before her; but so too would two British whalers, converted from captured German ships.
    The urgency was to feed a hungry nation. A new technique had been developed of shipping dehydrated whale meat–‘which is said to have high degrees of proteins…and of digestibility’–and soon recipes were appearing in the popular press. ‘How to Cook Whale Meat–Goulash Recommended’ (Add tomato ketchup to colour…Serve with macaroni or dumplings’), while Waleburger Steaks’–deliberately misspelt, perhaps to obscure their origin–appeared on the menus of London restaurants. (After he had eaten his “Waleburger” Mr Lightfoot said he was agreeably surprised by the taste…There was no flavour of fish.’)
    ‘Whale meat was neither fish nor fowl,’ Dr Edith Summerskill of the Ministry of Food admitted, ‘but it was now hiding its “Jack Tar” accent and insisting upon roast beef connexions. As a result all the whale meat obtained was being accepted and sold.’ At one shilling and tenpence the pound, it was excellent value, and could be grilled, braised or minced, and served with fried onions, mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts, although one commentator noted, ‘it might be advisable to eat sparingly of it until the digestive system has become more