Leviathan or The Whale

Jonah’s fate. He reasoned that only a sperm whale could have swallowed the prophet, baleen whales having throats that could admit nothing larger than a grapefruit. As it does not chew its food, the sperm whale uses strongly acidic stomach fluids to digest entire sharks and giant squid. ‘Of course, the gastric juice would be extremely unpleasant but not deadly,’ added the don, noting that the whale would digest only dead matter, lest it consume its own stomach.

    In support of his theory, Wilson cited two case histories. In 1771 it was reported that a whaleboat working in the South Seas had been bitten in half by a sperm whale, and one of its crew seized by the assailant and taken down in its mouth as it sounded. Back at the surface, the animal disgorged the man, ‘much bruised but not seriously injured’, onto some wreckage. The historical distance made this story difficult to prove, but Wilson’s second incident was recorded in 1891, when James Bartley of the
Star of the East
, then whaling off the Falklands, had disappeared into the water when a sperm whale’s flukes lashed his boat. Hours later, the whale was killed and brought alongside the ship.
    After working on the carcase all day and part of the night, the crew hauled its stomach onto the deck, and discovered their shipmate curled up inside, unconscious but alive. The man was laid out and given a sea-water bath to revive him; where he had been exposed to the animal’s gastric juices, his skin had been bleached white, like some ghastly full-grown fœtus. For two weeks Bartley was a raving lunatic unhinged by his experience, only to recover his sanity and resume his duties. The captain’s wife would later question the veracity of this story, but it encouraged those who believed a man could survive within a whale–although no one could explain how he could breathe in its belly.
    More credible was another report by Egerton Y. Davis, a surgeon on the
Toulinguet
, sailing from Newfoundland in 1893 in search of harp seals, even if his account, too, is clouded by memory. As an old man, Davis recalled that one of the crew had slipped off an ice floe and into the jaws of an angered whale, which swallowed him before attacking the other sealers. Shot by the ship’s cannon, the whale swam off in its death agony. It was recovered the next day, and when the crew cut into its gas-filled stomach, they found their mate.
    It was a fearsome sight, said Davis, who proceeded to deliver a pathological description. The young man’s chest had been crushed by the animal’s jaws, so he was probably already dead by the time his body reached the whale’s stomach. Gastric mucosa covered the victim like the slime of a giant snail; it was particularly thick on those parts of his flesh that were exposed: his face, his hands and part of his leg where his trousers were torn; these areas were macerated and partly digested. Oddly enough, the lice on his head had survived.
    The surgeon sought to reassure his shipmates that the man had not suffered. ‘It was my opinion that he had no consciousness of what happened to him.’ The idea that the victim might have been aware as he was swallowed was too terrible to contemplate; although in secret his fellow sailors may have wondered what it was like to be within the belly of the whale, to slither down its gullet like a whiting down a gannet’s neck and into the nameless horror of the leviathan’s maw.
    Such stories would persist, from the whale that gulped down Pinocchio, to George Orwell’s
Coming up for Air
, in which the narrator recalls his Edwardian father reading of ‘the chap…who was swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three days later, alive but bleached white by the whale’s gastric juice’, adding that ‘he turns up in the Sunday papers about once in three years’. Indeed, in a letter to
The Times
in 1928, a correspondent claimed to have met a missionary to the Southern Whaling Fleet who was swallowed by a sperm whale. For a man of the cloth, he appears to have been rather accident-prone, having often fallen overboard–a regular Jonah–but ‘could hold his breath longer than most men’. More fortuitously, his shipmates had seen him fall, and harpooned the whale which, in its flurry, evacuated its stomach, and the indigestible cleric along with it.
    And the L ORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

    Evidently fascinated with such stories, Orwell elaborated on the theme