Leviathan or The Whale

warders scooped up the takings and spent them in the pub.
    Now there is a notice on one side, and, next to it, a twenty-pence and a ten-pence piece lie on the plaster flukes.
    Please do not throw coins on the whale’s tail. It causes damage. Thank you.
    Other models were made to supplement the display, Stammwitz’s initial attempts to stuff dolphins having proved as unsuccessful as earlier attempts to mould a blue whale. They have been replaced in turn by a flotilla of fibreglass cetaceans, from a tiny Ganges River dolphin to a primeval-looking Sowerby’s beaked whale, all following their leader as if one night she might break open the wall of the gallery and guide her charges down to the Thames and out to sea. Until then, there they hang, biding their time, watching the school parties with their beady glass eyes.
    Below the Whale Hall, in the belly of the building, Richard Sabin, the curator of sea mammals, takes me through automatic doors that lock like a spaceship behind us, sealing the climate-controlled area from the world outside. I follow him, past ranks of giant grey lockers reaching from floor to ceiling. As he opens door after door, their contents are revealed: sections of cetaceans preserved in alcohol and labelled with their Latin binomials,
Phocœna phocœna, Tursiops truncatus, Balænoptera physalus
. One container, the size of a small fish tank, holds a humpback fœtus; with its mouth agape and its pallid skin, it looks more like a rubber toy.
    The end of the corridor opens into a wide room lined with shelves on which stand jars of pale brown liquid, a sharp contrast to the flickering white hum of the lights overhead. Crammed into each glass column is an animal, ghoulishly bottled like a pickled gherkin. A spiny anteater’s spikes twist as it tries to climb out of its transparent prison with its rodent paws. A severed shark’s head sits at the bottom of a wide jar, staring reproachfully. Plunged in another is the scaly carcase of a coelacanth, still swimming in seas tinted tobacco by the immensity of time.
    It is the stuff of my nightmares, and as I reach the end of a row of specimens–some collected by Darwin himself, and all ordered and classified with handwritten luggage labels as if ready for transit elsewhere–I back away from a big, bug-eyed bony fish which someone has left lying nonchalantly on the side, only to find my way blocked by a series of closed metal vats like pans in a canteen kitchen, all the more intimidating for the photocopied labels that indicate their invisible contents: entire dolphins and infant whales. None of these terrors, however, can compare to the gigantic plate-glass tank that runs half the length of the room, supported on bier-like struts. Inside, suspended in a mixture of formalin and sea water, is
Architeuthis dux
–the giant squid, mythical enemy of the sperm whale.
    It looks strangely spectral as it lies there, the faintly green glow a pale mockery of its ruddiness in life. Rudely yanked to the surface by Falklands fishermen in the Southern Ocean, it was frozen like a giant fish finger and shipped to Hull before being brought here, to the cellars of South Kensington. At twenty-eight feet long, this specimen is by no means the largest: in 1880, a squid measuring sixty-one feet was caught in Island Bay, New Zealand. Some may grow even larger. Nelson Cole Haley, sailing on the whale-ship
Charles W. Morgan
from 1849 to 1853, claimed to have seen three huge squid swimming together off the northwest coast of New Zealand, one of which he estimated to be three hundred feet long.
    ‘One might say this is a big fish story,’ acknowledged Haley of this monstrous procession; but he had seen many whales and other creatures, and ‘although I might have been frightened at what I saw, I had not lost my head so much but I could use my poor judgement about their appearance as well as ever’. He had no doubt that what he saw were ‘wonderful monsters of the deep’. Science may yet confirm Haley’s apparitions: recent acoustic studies have identified a ‘bloop’ sound from the depths which could only be made by a very large animal, and which may be a massive squid hundreds of feet in length, far bigger than a blue whale.
    To sailors, these creatures were the original kraken, the sea monsters of myth, ‘strange spectres’ believed able to drag entire ships down to the deep. It was as though nature had created a fitting opponent for the whale. On her own hunt for Moby