Leviathan or The Whale

second quarter of the nineteenth century, whales were suddenly
à la mode
. Popular interest in science and natural history met sensationalism and showmanship, and whales were exhibited around Europe and America, preserved or in skeletal form. In March 1809 ‘the curious were gratified’ by a seventy-six-foot ‘stupendous monster of the deep’ shown on a barge moored on the Thames between Blackfriars and London Bridge. The whale was claimed to be a year old, and ‘pronounced by judges to be the
Balena Boops
, or pike-headed species’–a confusion of the former Latin name for the humpback and another common name for a minke, neither of which reach such lengths. ‘But the prudence of bringing into the centre of a popular city, for the mere gratification of gazers, a monster of such bulk, in
a state of putrefaction
is quite another consideration,’ queried
The Times
. ‘In all events, those who visit the whale will do well to use the expedient of holding to their mouths and noses handkerchiefs well moistened with strong vinegar, to guard against inhaling the putrid effluvia it emits, than which few things can be more noxious to health, and even life.’
    Other showmen had the acumen to make their displays fit for more refined tastes. In 1827 a blue whale taken off Ostend was reduced to its skeleton and toured from Ghent to Brussels, Rotterdam and Berlin before arriving, four years later, in London, housed in a custom-built wooden pavilion–‘a wondrous lengthy booth’–at Charing Cross, close to where Melville would stay.
The Times
claimed–virtually in the voice of the fairground barker–that at ninety-five feet, the whale was ‘of larger dimensions than any that is known ever before to have fallen into the possession of man’. Visitors paid a shilling to enter what one doggerel called ‘a tomb/ A sort of bed-crib, sleeping room/ For what they call–a Whale’. The hut was stocked with volumes of Lacépède’s
Natural History of Whales
, and customers could quaff wine while sitting in the animal’s ribcage, an ‘unwonted saloon’. They were, however, not treated to the twenty-four-piece orchestra that performed within the whale during its European sojourn.
    Whales were the sensation of the age. A few years later, England produced its own regal specimen, claimed to be even bigger–
    As a man of fashion and taste himself, Sir Thomas now saw fit to have his own whale put on display. Its spine was duly riven with an iron rod, its ribs hinged with stirrup-like irons, and long bolts were driven through its skull. Artificially jointed, the skeleton was set to swim along an avenue of trees which became known as the Whale Belt. It was here that Thomas Beale–the foremost authority on sperm whales–came to pay his respects. Alerted by Mr Pearsall, curator of the museum of the Hull Literary and Philosophical Society, Beale sought an audience with the Yorkshire specimen; with his arrival in the East Riding, the whale would be made immortal.

    Unlike many scientists who pronounced upon the subject, Beale had actually seen living sperm whales. As a young man, he had studied medicine at Aldersgate from 1827 to 1829, remaining as an assistant in the school’s dissecting room, then as curator before moving to the London Hospital on Commercial Street. But in 1830, at the age of twenty-two, Beale left the grimy streets of the East End to sail on the whale-ship, the
Kent
, captained by William Lawton and owned by Thomas Sturge.
    Beale’s journey took him down the coast of South America to Cape Horn, then across the Pacific to Hawaii and on to the Kamchatka Peninsula–almost as far from England as it was possible to be. During his travels he watched whales being hunted, making extensive notes about their behaviour and physiology, gathering scientific information in a manner that echoed the work of Charles Darwin, whose own voyage on the
Beagle
was under way even as Beale reached the South Seas.
    While Beale was fascinated by the life beyond his ship, he was appalled by the oppression on board it. ‘When I saw thirty-two good, industrious, and harmless, though brave men, abused and browbeaten to a most shameful extent, by a mean and contemptible tyrant…I turned from the scene with horror, and plainly intimated that I could no longer endure the sight.’ At midnight on 1 June 1832, at the Bonin Islands, Beale jumped ship, joining another Sturge whaler, the
Sarah and Elizabeth
, under whose more temperate