Leviathan or The Whale

fourth century BC, when he concluded that whales were mammals, it was not until 1773 that Linnæus classified them as such.
    Yet the confusion continued. Nineteenth-century whalers called their quarry fish, a wilful insistence that Ishmael mischievously maintained. Perhaps it was a subconscious evasion, for the hunters knew perfectly well, as they butchered their prey, that the physiology they found within was that of a creature more like themselves than a haddock or a cod. And although twentieth-century hunting revealed much of what we know about the blue whale, for instance, even here there was deception. Dimensions were overestimated because bodies stretched as they were pulled out of the water. The only way of weighing these huge carcases was to chop them up into chunks, so vague guesses were made to compensate for the tons of blood lost before the flesh met the scales. Since whales possess proportionately two-thirds more blood than humans–the better to store oxygen on their time spent in the relative safety of the depths–this was an additionally inexact technique.
    It was also a self-interested investigation carried out to ascertain profitability, although many scientists, who realized the likely fate of the whale, had another agenda. In the mid-1930s a scheme began from RRS
William Scoresby
to tag whales. Steel darts were shot into whales and retrieved when the animals were caught; whalers were offered a £1 reward to return them to the Colonial Office, with a note of the time and place of death. The data was then analysed ‘to gather information not only on the migrations of the whales, but on the question of whether a whale returns to the same ground in the South year after year’. In 1936, eight hundred whales were thus marked and numbered. The cumulative results were astounding: one blue whale was found to have travelled nearly two thousand miles in less than fifty days.

    Cetacean research remained invasive. In 1956 a project was devised by a Boston heart specialist, Dr Paul D. White–famed for attending President Eisenhower–to record a whale’s heartbeats on an electrocardiogram. This involved shooting a harpoon that contained the metal contact usually placed on a human patient’s chest into the animal; although, as one newspaper noted, ‘there is no indication so far of how the whale may hope to shed its burden when the interests of science have been served.’ ‘It can hardly be said that the animal was benefited by such a diagnosis,’ my encylopædia added. Dr White’s patient–or victim–was a fifty-foot grey whale. Having already experimented with a right whale, White discovered that the whale’s heart beat like that of a human. In the light of such knowledge, attempts were made to limit the animals’ suffering: the British experimented with a new electric harpoon for humanitarian reasons, but it did not prove successful.
    As I was growing up, watching captive dolphins perform in Brighton’s underground aquarium built into the promenade–its yellowy-lit, car-park interior echoing with their clicks and all the more forlorn for its seaside setting–attitudes to whales were changing. They had done so drastically since my parents’ generation. In the 1920s the porpoise was so abundant in the River Tyne that salmon fishermen were urging ‘that steps should be taken for its destruction’. By the 1960s
The Times was
running a headline, BRITISH COLUMBIA STIRRED BY DEATH OF WHALE, noting that the demise of an orca had become national news in Canada.
    The animal–dubbed ‘Moby Doll’–had been harpooned by the curator of the Vancouver Aquarium, where it was destined to be used as a model for a plaster replica. But the whale survived its wound and instead followed the boat. The public reaction was, perhaps, the first real indication of a new attitude towards whales. Although having extracted the harpoon, the animal was kept alive with horses’ hearts, flounders injected with blood, and baby seals (‘There were immediate protests from humanitarians’) and when it was found dead on the bottom of its tank, it was discovered ‘that Moby was no Doll. Moby was a bull.’ The following year, another orca was captured in the same seas. Named Namu, it was towed in a gill net trap four hundred miles south to its new home, the Seattle Aquarium, only for its captors to discover, two hours out of Port Hardy, that their charge was suddenly surrounded by forty killer whales ‘who seem