Leviathan or The Whale

man to swim in. All was now so much offal.
    And all this was accomplished in an atmosphere of outright hilarity. ‘Workmen laughed and leaped aboard loins that were skidding toward the loading chute,’ observed Lieutenant-Colonel Waldon C. Winston, an American officer accompanying the fleet. ‘Others there started a shanty. Over and over, they filled the box on the small platform scales, then emptied the contents down the loading chute.’ They might as well have been on a Detroit production line.
    Below decks were steel boilers where the blubber was reduced to oil which was then stored in huge tanks. Nothing was wasted. A process had been devised to suck vitamin-rich oil from the whale’s liver. This one animal yielded 133 barrels of oil and sixty tons of meat valued at $28,000. This process went on, day by day, month by month, year by year, in waters so far from land that wounded men often died, there being no hospital to which they could be taken.
    Here, out of sight, off shores belonging to no one, no one was responsible. Yet as the ships canned their whale meat, official observers looked on, and biologists sought to learn about living whales by examining dead ones. It was a uniquely mad situation, belied by its own legitimacy. Although regulations stated that mother and calf pairs were not to be targeted–any gunner who shot them had his pay deducted accordingly–pregnant animals were taken. These were the hardest to kill; one blue whale mother took nine harpoons and five hours to die.
    In ancient Japan, Buddhists had honoured these unborn cetaceans, erecting stone tombs for them facing the sea, so that at least in death they could see the home they had been deprived of in life. American scientists working on the ships had other plans. One who found a five-inch sperm whale fætus had it packed in ice, and back in port at his hotel used a mixture of vodka and shaving lotion to preserve it overnight. The next morning he dissected the specimen. It had the rudimentary features of the animals that became whales: with its pig-like snout, nostrils positioned at the front (before they migrated up the head), its protruding ears and genitals, and its hand-like flippers and residual whiskers, it was as if this whale-in-being might yet become some other creature entirely.
    Only in death could man see whales in such detail; only on these mother ships were the massive animals seen to be colonies in their own right, living cities crawling with whale lice and studded with barnacles which finally loosened their grip as the blankets of blubber were cut away, the hard shells popping out of the epidermis and clattering to the deck. The whale’s interior played host to other parasites: the nematode worms that colonized its guts (intestines which, to scientists’ amazement, unravelled for a quarter of a mile). The
Hashidate Maru
merely minced up these worms along with the rest of the meat. Of more concern were the levels of radioactivity to be found in whale flesh, fallout from the devices that had exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But by then, every man, woman and child on the planet was absorbing strontium-90 into their bones from those explosions, a legacy to be passed on for generations to come.
    In iceberg-blocked waters, serried ranks of rorquals lay belly up like gutted herring, side by side while sea birds fluttered about them like feathered stars. They were captive whales, ready for rendition. A factory fleet could cull seventy animals in one day, using weapons that resembled space-age missiles, flanged and fluked to implode in giant crania. Three hundred and sixty thousand blue whales died in this manner in the twentieth century, reducing their population to one thousand. By the 1960s the blue whale was, to all intents and purposes, commercially extinct.

XII
A Cold War for the Whale

    You have become like us, Disgraced and mortal.

    Stanley Kunitz, ‘The Wellfleet Whale’

    For his 1954 film
of Moby-Dick
, made in Britain and Ireland rather than New England, John Huston requisitioned an 1870 schooner which had recently done duty as the
Hispanola
in Walt Disney’s
Treasure Island
. She was fitted out at St Andrew’s Dock, Hull, where chandlers contributed original harpoons, found in their loft. This movie
Pequod
was then sailed to the west coast of Ireland, where the director chose to shoot only on overcast days to give his film a gloomy look.
    I remember watching Huston’s film as a young boy; it seemed