Leviathan or The Whale

captain–who happened to be the gallant William Swain, later master of the
Christopher Mitchell
and himself to lose his life to a whale–he sailed home, having travelled fifty thousand miles.
    Like Thoreau, Beale’s experience of whales left him amazed at the lack of knowledge about them. ‘It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting and in a commercial point of view of so important an animal, should have been so entirely neglected,’ he wrote. ‘In fact, till the appearance of Mr Huggins’ admirable print, few…had the most distant idea even of the external form of this animal; and of its manners and habits, people in general seem to know as little as if its capture had never given employment to British capital, or encouragement to the daring courage of our hardy seamen.’ Beale referred to William John Huggins’s
South Sea Whale Fishery
–an image so enduring that it was still being used as the basis for a
New Yorker
cartoon in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
    Back at his Bedford Square home, Beale set out to correct the cetological lacunæ. A year later, he presented his paper on
Physeter macrocephalus
to the Eclectic Society of London, which awarded him their Silver Medal for his efforts. Having published his text as an elegant, illustrated booklet in 1835, the surgeon spent the next four years working on an expanded version.
The Natural History of the Sperm Whale
, published in 1839, was a wide-ranging and eclectic work, part scientific study, part adventure story. Its frontispiece (and this chapter’s) is an all-action scene showing sperm whales in an ocean they have whipped up into a freeze-framed, foam-flecked frenzy as they toss boats out of the water and send harpoons and humans flying into the air.
    Equally evocative are Beale’s chapter headings, succinct summaries of his experiences on far-flung oceans and among exotic peoples.
    the Author is robbed–Sea-Lion fight–Music of the Birds–Shocking Diseases–instances of religious tyranny–an Apprentice drowned–narrow Escape–intense heat–we kill a female Whale–a Dandy Savage–a Necromancer–Tyranny of our Captain–Six Men flogged. I leave the “Kent” at midnight–see immense numbers of large Whales a young man is bled–a Bolabola Girl’s Eyes–we are invaded by thirty Women–three Men washed from the Jib-boom–crossing the Line the sixth time–Reflections on seeing our Native Land–stern Disease has been raging during our absence–we approach Home with faltering steps–the old House–my emotion and fate trade
.

    Beale’s narrative–its retelling of myths a presentiment of Sir James Frazier’s anthropo-religious
The Golden Bough
, its human exploits redolent of a picaresque novel–provided a framework for Melville; an articulation for his own whale. If
Moby-Dick
owed its metaphysics to Nathaniel Hawthorne, then it owed its facts to Thomas Beale. Entire passages in Melville’s book are filched directly–one might say almost brazenly–from Beale’s.
The Natural History of the Sperm Whale was
the archetype for
Moby-Dick;
not only in its cetological details, but in its other preoccupations, too.
    Beale was intrigued by the whale’s role in the human chain of consumption. It was as if, in the spirit of emancipation, he saw the whale as enslaved–a notion underlined by the dedication of his book ‘to Thomas Sturge, Esq, of Newington Butts’.
    As the trusty friend of MACAULAY, you fought the battle of the Negro…and it was not until the enemies of the dark human race began their precipitate retreat, that the wavering friends…flocked around the banner you had helped raise…And now that the Negro is free…I have no doubt…that your greatest reward is in your own feelings, independently of worldly praise.

    Thomas Sturge was scion of an old Quaker family; his kinsman was the even more famous abolitionist, Joseph Sturge. He owned the two ships on which Beale had travelled, and, like his friend Elhanan Bicknell, ran his whaling company from the New Kent Road, near the Elephant and Castle in south London, a decidedly unoceanic address. (He also benefited from standings. When the sperm whale of which Buckland wrote beached at Whitstable in the winter of 1829, to the accompaniment of terrible bellows and groans–and was attacked by man with an axe for its pains–Sturge paid sixty shillings for its blubber.
    There was a certain distance between these