Leviathan or The Whale

silently barking. In the mid-distance, a bowhead brandishes its broad black flukes. Stuck in its back are two harpoons, and there’s fire in the chimney. Birds scatter into the air.
    Sailing through this bloodlust is the bringer of destruction, the
Harmony
, a barque of nearly three hundred tons. Around her masts are tied two pairs of jaw bones, trophies announcing a successful voyage in their own triumphal arch. Higher up hangs a garland, a circlet wound round with ribbons given by wives and lovers and tied aloft on May Day eve by the youngest married man. A relic of a medieval rite–attended with ‘grotesque dances and other amusements’ by men in strange costumes–it stayed in place until the ship reached home, when young cadets would race up the rigging to claim possession of the now weather-beaten wreath.
    Below this Brueghelian spectacle, with its fleeting figures and vessels top-heavy with blubber and bones, the guilty parties are named:
Harmony
of Hull,
Margaret
of London,
Eliza Swann
of Hull;
Industry
of London; workaday ships, doing their job. We may look upon such scenes with horror, but a nineteenth-century Huller saw a vision of plenitude to be rendered in barrel-loads and marked by a whale’s tail stamped in the captain’s log. Such bloody acts–the plunging flukes, the spray the sailor felt on his face and the guts that spilt on deck–represented security from beggarly poverty, only ever a footstep away.
    By 1822 Hull was England’s most successful whaling port. One-third of the British whaling fleet sailed from there–thirty-three ships in 1830. Contemporary directories list more oil merchants than eating houses in the port, while maps show ‘Greenland Yards’ on the river banks where whale oil was processed, along with manufactories where whalebone was turned into ‘SIEVES and RIDDLES of every description, NETS…for folding Sheep…’ and ‘STUFFING, for Chair and Sofa Bottoms…preferable to Curled Hair’. They have long since vanished, but other reminders of the industry survive in the city’s museum. A sperm whale’s deformed jaw hangs on the wall; a giant vertebra once used as a butcher’s block stands on the floor; and ranged in a rack like billiard cues are ivory tusks which once formed a four-poster bed for some northern worthy–
    In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale.
    The Pipe,
Moby-Dick

    –while in the middle of the room like a tobacconist’s kiosk, a dimly lit case displays a row of glass-stoppered bottles.
    Whale meat extract; an oily substance rich in protein used in margarine manufacture etc
.
Whalemeal prepared from powdered whale meat. Used for animal feedstuffs
.
Whale liver oil; a source of vitamin A
.
Sperm oil; partially solidified. When refined it is

used for lubricating light industry
.

    Arthur Credland, the well-informed curator–himself a zoologist, and a man who has eaten both whale and seal–opens the cabinet and hands me a phial. The glass still feels oily as I tilt the amber liquid to and fro, slightly scented. Pure and transparent, this is what it all boils down to, a whale in a bottle. Now I recognize the sound as it winds around the room: the song of a whale, lamenting its long-dead cousins.
    Leaving the city behind, suburban Hull gives way to the flat fields of the Holderness Plain. This is a levelled, alluvial landscape. Its coastline might look as though it is shouldering the storms, but this is where England is falling into the sea, at a rate of yards, rather than feet, every year.
    Turning off one of the B roads that run inland but seemingly to nowhere, a rail-straight drive leads to the door of Burton Constable Hall. The Constables have lived in this elegant house with its red-brick towers and battlements since the sixteenth century, conserving their Catholicism in their private chapel while their land was eaten away by the waves. This far from London, no one really cared that the Popish faith was kept in the wilds of Yorkshire.
    Out of season, the ticket office-cum-tearoom is empty. The woman behind the counter looks relieved. ‘I thought for a moment you were wanting to look round the house.’
    I set off in the failing light, only to be told by a passing groundsman that the bones I’m looking for were removed years ago. He tells me, hesitantly, ‘I can show you some vertebræ.’
    From the back of a shed filled with farm vehicles, his