Leviathan or The Whale

colleague emerges, rag in hand. ‘He wants to know about the whale, Dave,’ says my reluctant guide.
    Taking a pencil stub from his pocket, Dave sketches out a shape on the claw of his excavator, outlining what looks like a giant fish bone. He describes how the skeleton once stood in the field beyond, articulated to mimic the animal in the water, held up by iron struts and bolted to a frame. The supports rusted away long ago; some Boy Scouts camping in the grounds had even attempted to make a fire with the remains.
    But the bones had since been rescued. In the gloom of the outhouse, Dave pulls at a piece of sacking with the dramatic flourish of a pathologist drawing back a shroud. Underneath lies a great grey bone, eroded by decades of exposure to the weather; more a gigantic piece of coral than the skull of a cetacean.
    ‘This is the only whale from
Moby-Dick
to exist,’ he declares. The reality is as incongruous as his claim, all the more so for lying next to a disused caravan. This crumbling lump of calcium once held the animal’s huge brain, controlling its sinewy muscles and the broad flukes and fins; listening to the watery world and watching it through sentient eyes; issuing mysterious clicks from its mountainous head.
    In other outhouses lay the rest of the animal, scattered relics awaiting resurrection. Their bony diaspora was a measure of this martyred whale, ready to be reassembled to satisfy its modern pilgrims: scoured backbones the size of tractor wheels; pitted ribs resembling mammoth tusks dug out of Siberian permafrost; hulking masses of decaying calcium like debarked trees.
    I walk to the end of an avenue of oaks, where a funereal urn is set on a crumbling plinth. In the tussocky grass to one side is an empty space. Bits of brick still lie in the turf, remnants of the foundations that once bore up the whale on iron waves. And as jackdaws caw in the darkening sky, I imagine the leviathan’s bones luminous in the twilight. Could this really have been the whale of which Ishmael spoke, washed up in a muddy field in Yorkshire?
    In April 1825 a dead whale was seen off Holderness, close to Burton Constable. There was nothing particularly unusual in that; such animals often wash up on this coastline, one of England’s most desolate shores, where the North Sea eats away at the boulder clay leaving entire villages to crumble into the waves, and where fossilized forests lie under the surf. But this was a huge specimen, and as it floated out at sea, fishermen steered clear of the whale for fear it might damage their boat. Soon enough the tide did its job, and on the afternoon of Thursday, 28 April, the carcase was cast onto Tunstall beach. There, below the low, soft, chocolate-coloured cliffs, which turn the water a dolorous reddish brown, it was stranded like an enormous flounder.
    The next day, Reverend Christopher Sykes, a keen amateur scientist, arrived to record the animal’s vital statistics. By Sunday, a crowd of one thousand souls were drawn to witness this fabulous beast. Like their Dutch cousins across the sea two centuries before, they were amazed at what they saw: a bull sperm whale, fifty-eight feet long–although this was not the shiny black monster they might have expected. Thrown out of the sea, its proud jaw was dislocated and most of its paper-thin skin had peeled, revealing a strange layer of ‘fur’ between it and the blubber–as if the whale were in disguise all along. Slumped on the cobbles, the putty-coloured carcase had already begun to decay, a process hastened by onlookers who hacked about the body, pulling out the long, thick tendons and using horses and ropes to tear out the throat.
    All Holderness was alerted to this deputation from the depths, as twenty-six-year-old Sara Stickney reported. ‘You will doubtless have heard of the monster washed up on this shore–the bustle it occasioned in the neighbourhood was marvellous.’ The village was ‘more gay than sweet,’ she confessed, ‘the whale becoming every day more putrid–it was a loathsome thing at best. I never could tolerate the sight of an inanimate mass of flesh in any shape.’
    The whale was soon rendered unrecognizable. Men cut into its huge head; the liquid looked like olive oil, but soon began to coalesce. At eighty degrees Fahrenheit, it was nearly thirty degrees warmer than the outside air, although the investigators could not determine whether this was a result of animal heat or of ‘putrescent