Leviathan or The Whale

scientific knowledge of navigation accumulated over the centuries. This is one reason why he is so deadly a menace.’ Such potential imagery could be turned against the west, too. Twenty years later, the anti-capitalist terrorists of the Baader-Meinhoff gang, imprisoned for pursuing their own war on imperialism, assumed code names from
Moby-Dick
(with Baader himself as Ahab)–seeing the monster of Melville’s myth, as much as Hobbes’ state, as their target. Even now, Ahab’s crazed pursuit remains the currency of political satire as world leaders are likened to Melville’s dæmonic captain in the ‘war on terror’.
    He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
    Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil

    By the 1960s cetaceans were being bodily enlisted into the military. The US Navy instituted its Marine Mammal Program, teaching bottlenose dolphins and beluga whales to identify mines and even act as underwater sentries. Dolphins served in Vietnam where it was rumoured that they were trained as assassins, using needles fitted to padded nose-cones and cartridges of carbon dioxide to deliver body-imploding doses of gas to Vietcong divers attacking American ships. They still play a part in warfare, deployed in the last Gulf War to clear mines from the port of Umm Qasr using cameras strapped to their pectoral fins. To some, such conscription was the ultimate perversion of the relationship between man and whale.
    Human technology was catching up with its cetacean equivalent as machines mimicked whales themselves. In one experiment, a whale’s skin was replicated in rubber on a submarine’s hull, where it was found to reduce turbulence and drag; as a result, protruding parts such as radar dishes and conning towers were sheathed in rubber. This may have been the reason why one submarine was found with the sucker-marks of a giant squid. It had, it seems, been mistaken for a whale.
    The development of marine acoustics during the Second World War had alerted the military to the sounds made by whales (which whalers had once mistaken for ghosts in the ocean as they heard them through the hulls of their ships). As the undersea world which everyone had assumed to be a silent place was discovered to be alive with noise, it was suggested that submarines could be disguised as whales by playing their recorded sounds. A century before, slave ships operated under the guise of whalers; now nuclear submarines sought the same deceit. Cetacean technology allowed man to invade the whales’ world, in the process creating sounds that would prove fatal for them.
    As below, so above. While robo-whale submarines imitated them in the depths, lubricated by sperm oil which would not freeze at great depths and echoing with the ping of cetacean-inspired sonar, whales enabled the exploration of another extreme environment, as NASA used sperm oil for its delicate instruments and rocket engines, sending a trace of whale genes into outer space. Two centuries before, whales had sparked rivalry between Atlantic states; now they were part of the space race. One scientist who sailed with whaling fleets in the 1950s and 1960s told me that it was only when it had a lifetime’s supply of oil–I imagine marked barrels sitting in some secret cellar–that America lobbied for a ban on hunting sperm whales (despite the protests of the Pentagon). The fact that the US evolved chemical substitutes for other military uses of whale oil, while the USSR relied on sperm oil for its tanks and missiles, further fuelled the brinkmanship. Even now, space agencies in Europe and America still use whale oil for roving vehicles on the moon and Mars; and as you read this, the Hubble space telescope is wheeling around the earth on spermaceti, seeing six billion years into the past, while the
Voyager
probe spins into infinity playing the song of the humpback to greet any friendly aliens–who may well wonder at our treatment of the species with which we share our planet.
    To the medieval world, which believed the earth to be flat, and monsters to lie in the oceans beyond their illuminated maps, the whale was a scaleless, naked fish–a convenient confusion that allowed its flesh to be eaten by monks on fast days–just as puffins were thought to be half bird, half fish, and geese were believed to be born of barnacles. Despite Aristotle’s investigations in the