Leviathan or The Whale

might yield; from its ‘favourite places of resort’ to the ‘rise and progress of the Sperm Whale Fishery’–his quarry remained elusive. Only by laying his hands on the very bones of the animal could the surgeon make his final diagnosis; and even then, he might wonder at the reality of the beast he pursued.
    The sperm whale had taken Beale halfway round the world. Now it summoned the surgeon to east Yorkshire, by no means an easy journey. Having made his way to Holderness, Beale was rewarded for his efforts by a spectacular sight: a skeleton key to the innermost secrets of
Physeter
. He may have seen the animal in life, but in its decay its true nature was revealed, and he was enthralled by what he saw. ‘The description of the skeleton of the sperm whale at Burton-Constable, which I shall presently give, interests me exceedingly, principally on account of its being the only specimen of the kind in Europe or in the world.’
    Practically falling over himself in his eagerness to get at the bones, Beale lost no time in making notes on ‘this enormous and magnificent specimen of osseous framework’. His report extends for many pages: ‘Extreme length of the skeleton 49 feet 7 inches’–the shrinkage being due to the creature’s unboned flukes and blubber–‘extreme breadth of the chest 8 feet 8 1/2 inches…The gigantic skull…forms more than a third of the whole length of the skeleton…The lower jaw is 16 feet 10 inches long…The spinal column consists of forty-four vertebræ…In the lower jaw there were 48 teeth.’
    Beale’s examination endowed the Tunstall whale with eternal life. This was the first accurate description of a sperm whale skeleton; it became the
ur
-whale, the whale by which all others would be measured. Seen through Melville’s literary lens, these bones acquired a kind of poetic licence. They pervade
Moby-Dick
. Dave was right: the jumble of ribs and vertebrae he showed me in a Yorkshire outhouse were indeed the only physical relics of Melville’s book; and they achieved their place in perpetuity via Beale’s ground-breaking book. When his own copy of
The Natural History of the Sperm Whale
surfaced a century later, Melville’s marginalia had been erased by an owner who had little idea that they were worth more than the volume itself. Enough marks remained to show that the book supplied the scaffolding for
Moby-Dick’s
construction; and that Melville specifically drew on Beale’s notes on the Tunstall whale to create an elaborate conceit–one that fused his own visit to St Paul’s Cathedral with those travelling exhibitions of whale carcases and skeletons that had become so fashionable. The result was an arch architectural exercise in irony, a wry and witty metaphor for man’s use of the whale.
    Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities–spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan–and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.

    Yet in his gentle satire, Melville could not know that, only months before his visit to London, the author of this seminal work had died in that city, aged just forty-two. For ten years Beale had worked as medical assistant to the Royal Humane Society; he also joined the Institut d’Afrique, a Parisian organization pledged to the welfare of slaves, and spent the rest of his life as a poorly paid officer at the Stepney Poor House in the East End. There, while caring for his patients in the cholera epidemic of 1848-9 which had claimed 60,000 lives, Beale contracted that same ‘stern Disease’. Within twenty-seven hours, this ultimately humane man was dead.
    The narrow stone-flagged and dark-panelled corridor gives way to gracious Georgian rooms, all wrapped up for the winter. A can-tilevered stairway turns creakingly on itself, without obvious means of support. It is early in the morning; the house is empty. I open door after door, finding bedrooms filled with exquisite marquetry wardrobes, elegant chaises longues and beds covered in embroidered velvet. On one trunk lies a discarded military frock