Leviathan or The Whale

that looked on, ‘their bodies more than usually elevated out of the water’, moved slowly towards the ship, as if seeking shelter from the monster. They were ‘not spouting or making the least noise, but seeming quite paralysed with fear’. The engraving made from Drevar’s sketch merely underlines the pathos: the cruel sea serpent playing with the placid whale like a cat with a garden bird, twisting and turning it in its grasp as the cetacean fights for its life.
    It may be that Drevar actually witnessed the titanic struggle between a giant squid and a whale. I must confess I have seen whales that look like sea monsters, rolling in the waves. My childish desire to believe in a lost world (Arthur Conan Doyle, on honeymoon in Greece, claimed to have seen a young ichthyosaur in the sea) seeks to create something palpable out of the apparently incredible; to conjure an abyssal nightmare out of the pages of scientific certainty. Yet fishermen, clergymen and men of experience and social standing risked ridicule by swearing to what they saw. Could they really have been deceived by schooling porpoises or basking sharks?
    Doubt would surround the sea serpent until the day it was caught and presented for public display. In 1852, a year after the publication
of Moby-Dick
, a New Bedford whaler promised to do just that. Sailing in the South Pacific, the
Monongahela
claimed not only to have seen a sea serpent, but to have pursued and harpooned it like a whale. The 103-foot-long animal was brought on deck, dried and preserved, along with its long, flat, ridged head and ninety-four teeth, ‘very sharp, all pointing backward and as large as one’s thumb’. This remarkable finding, which seemed set to prove the existence of the beast, was reported in the British journal
Zoology
, after the whale-ship had gammed with a brig which brought back the captain’s letters describing the monster. But the
Monongahela
never reached her home port. A year later she was lost at sea with all hands, and her incredible cargo. What a specimen it would have made for New Bedford’s museum and Ishmael’s eyes: the great sea serpent on display.
    In one of his most mystical asides, ‘A Bower in the Arsacides’, Ishmael tells of an exotic island, supposedly in the Mediterranean, where a whale’s skeleton had become a place of worship. Its ribs were hung with trophies, its vertebræ carved with a calendar, and in its skull burned an eternal flame, ‘so that the mystic head again sent forth in vapory spout; while…the wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen…’ In this living temple of growth and decay, the vine-clad bones turned into a verdant bower–‘Life folded Death; Death trellised Life’–and our narrator takes the opportunity to have the dimensions of this Arsacidean whale tattooed on his own body, ‘as in my wild wanderings at that period there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics’.
    To Ishmael, the whale is as mysterious as any sea serpent: a formidable creature to be feared and even worshipped. And as this gothic episode–with its evocations of the gloomy glade where Melville and Hawthorne met–draws Ishmael’s attention across the Atlantic, so his report summons me home, to discover what became of the whale in my native land. For it was in England that the true nature of the leviathan would be made known; from English whaling ports that distinguished men would set out to identify, categorize, and perhaps even pin down for posterity the still somewhat conditional reality of the whale.

IX
The Correct Use of Whales

    There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales…Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale…articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities–spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan–and swing all day upon his lower jaw.
    A Bower in the Arsacides,
Moby-Dick

    Even its name sounds inexpressive, yet more so in the dialect of the flat east Yorkshire coast, barely a word at all:
‘ull
. But seen from the suspended bridge that sails over the Humber before it reaches the grey waters of the North Sea, the city aspires to its proper name: Kingston-Upon-Hull, a pride evinced in its