Leviathan or The Whale

fermentation’. As it came apart, the wonders of the beast were examined. Its blubber, once tried out, would fetch £500; the case yielded eighteen gallons of spermaceti; and the meat would have fed a few families for weeks (one Hull recipe claimed that the animal’s skin made a tasty dish, with a mushroom flavour). However, this foundling had a scientific value greater than its commercial or culinary worth; and, accordingly, Dr James Alderson was appointed to perform a post-mortem.
    Son of a well-known Yorkshire physician, Alderson was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and of the Cambridge Philosophical Society; his encounter with the whale was a chance not only to address the contradictory evidence about these creatures, but also to further his academic status. ‘Nothing can be more contrasted than the view of the animal perfect, and its skeleton,’ Alderson told his fellow society members, having had the extant parts brought to his laboratory in Hull. ‘The enormous and preposterous matter upon its cheeks and jowl bearing no proportion to that of any other animal whatever, when compared with the bones of the head.’
    The sheer logistics of examining this mountain of blubber presented Alderson with his greatest challenge–even as he received it in instalments. The whale’s eyes had already been removed, being small and oddly shaped, ‘in the form of a truncated cone’, although they presented their own exquisite beauty. Alderson described the iris as ‘bluish-brown; very dark; the pupil…transverse, as in ruminating animals’; while ‘the tapetum presented a very beautiful appearance…its color was a green, formed by an admixture of blue and yellow; with a slight predominance of blue…speckled with lighter colored spots throughout.’ That the doctor could discern such pulchritude in this mass of decaying flesh was a measure of the animal’s fascination. Its parts presented themselves as if to say, Look how beautiful I was when I was alive, when I scooped up squid from untold depths, when I dealt death myself.
    Embedded in its lance-like lower jaw were forty-seven teeth, scarred with its adventures in the abyss. Alderson observed that the penis ‘protruded about 154 feet from the body, and was surrounded by a shaggy process of the cuticle. The urethra admitted the point of the finger.’ Fingering the whale was ever a common abuse. The three-foot-long heart was preserved in formaldehyde, and later presented to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society for their further ruminations.
    Alderson was frustrated by the treatment of his specimen: ‘indeed, the viscera were so quickly removed, with a view to clearing the bones of the animal, that it was impossible to examine every organ.’ For all his delving, the doctor could find no cause of death, despite the presence of a five-inch section of a sword-fish spear buried in its back, ‘enveloped in the adipose cellular membrane’, as well as another ‘fistulous-like opening in the cutis’ apparently made by a harpoon. Sperm whales were known to carry foreign objects in their flesh, like shrapnel in a soldier’s war wound, and Thomas Beale recorded swordfish attacks on whales. One animal was found with an entire swordfish blade in its dorsal ridge, the result of a violent collision during which the weapon had slid clean into the whale, snapping off at the base; when the scar healed, the sword remained embedded in blubber, a fishy Excalibur. Similarly, Ishmael says that harpoons could lodge in a whale, one entering ‘nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump’.
    Speared and nailed, whales carried not only the scars of their martyrdom, but the instruments of torture themselves. Yet even as this unfortunate, war-weary creature was washed ashore, its destiny was assured: for as Ishmael notes, from that moment on, the whale became the property of the Lord Paramount of the Seigniory of Holderness, the Squire of Burton Constable Hall.
    Almost anywhere else on the English coast, the Tunstall whale would have belonged to the Crown, a royal fish; but here, on what amounted to a personal fiefdom from the cliffs of Flamborough Head to the filigree finger of Spurn Point, the Lord Paramount exercised that right. One of the first men on the scene had been the Constables’ own steward, Richard Iveson, come to lay claim to this odoriferous prize. Iveson had