Leviathan or The Whale

self-exile, having forsaken the land for the sea.
    I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.
    The Fossil Whale,
Moby-Dick

    The earliest whale-like creatures can be traced back fifty million years to the Eocene and the Tethys Sea, an ancient ocean whose vestiges now form the Mediterranean and Caspian seas. Their ancestors included
Pakicetus
, a four-legged and fox-like creature which in turn gave way to
Ambulocetus natans
, a kind of giant otter, and other so-called ‘walking whales’ such as
Kutchicetus
and
Rodhocetus
. Recent discoveries point to another missing link between whales and land-dwellers:
Indohyus
, a deer-like ungulate which possessed a similar bony structure in its auditory system to that of cetaceans; being a herbivore, it became semi-aquatic to escape its predators. Drawn to the water’s edge, the mesonycids’ descendants would become horses, bison, camels, sheep–and cetaceans.
    The first whales, the archæocetes, were quite as global in range as their descendants–although the serpentine remains of
Basilosaurus cetoides
convinced Victorian palæontologists that it was a marine reptile when its fossilized skeleton was found in the Deep South in 1832; Ishmael claims that ‘awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels’. Only Sir Richard Owen, inventor of the dinosaur, recognized this ‘annihilated anti-chronical creature’ as a ‘pre-adamite whale’ which he renamed
Zeuglodon
, ‘one of the most extraordinary of the Mammalia which the revolutions of the globe have blotted out of the number of existing beings’.
    Around thirty-five million years ago, the whales divided into mysticetes and odontocetes, leaving the archæocetes to become extinct; although some scientists believe that sperm whales are genetically closer to baleen whales than they are to other toothed whales. Similarly, recent fossil discoveries of the baleen whales’ antecedents have revealed animals with huge, baleful eyes and jagged teeth, quite unlike their benevolent, modern counterparts.
    Given the lacunæ in the fossil record and our ignorance of great swathes of time, the evolution of the whale remains obscure. Traces of their land-borne origins can be seen in the residual hind limbs of embryo whales, as if their prehistory could be read there–but then, we are all whales in the womb, swimming in amniotic seas. Occasionally a sperm whale is born with an extra pair of atavistic fins, while one humpback was recorded with freak limbs a yard long, a strange being, neither one thing nor the other, like a Barnum mermaid made from a fish and a monkey.
    The whales made good use of their freedom from the land. It is the buoyancy of the sea that has allowed them to develop into such mighty animals: if they still had legs, they would not be able to stand on them, so great is their weight. Such an evolutionary genesis both refutes and reflects the hand of the Almighty: as one Victorian handbill, advertising the exhibition of a whale’s bones, claimed:
    Who can contemplate this mighty skeleton…without adoring the Mind that formed it? Where can we better cultivate a sentiment of devotion than in the presence of work so expressive of the various attributes of the varied God?

    Yet for an era whose beliefs were under threat, the whale had a kind of equivalence with the origins of the earth and the newly discovered animals of prehistory; if these cetacean giants survived the flood, then so might other monsters. ‘Leviathan is not the biggest fish,’ as Melville told Hawthorne, ‘–I have heard of Krakens.’
    In the first half of the nineteenth century sea serpents were sighted, with remarkable frequency, off the coast of Massachusetts. Witnesses claimed to see huge animals with snake-like bodies and heads held high out of the water. Unlike many such fantastical monsters, however, these beasts were seen by hundreds of people for hours at a time, and no less a body than Boston’s Linnæan Society published its findings on the subject in a pamphlet, a copy of which is lodged in the British Library, stamped with the name of its owner, the naturalist Joseph Banks.
    ‘In the month of August 1817, it was currently reported on various authorities, that an animal of very singular appearance had been recently and repeatedly seen in the harbour of Gloucester, Cape Ann, about thirty miles distant from