Leviathan or The Whale

visitors. Yet its bones represent only a reduction of the animal. Alive, it would not have fitted into this huge chamber. Its forehead would have nudged the doors, and its flukes would have squashed against the landscapes hanging on the far wall, like a salmon squeezed into a goldfish bowl.

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The Whiteness of the Whale

    Deathful, desolate dominions those; bleak and wild the ocean, beating at that barrier’s base, hovering ’twixt freezing and foaming; and freighted with navies of ice-bergs…White bears howl as they drift from their cubs; and the grinding islands crush the skulls of the peering seals.
    Herman Melville,
Mardi

    Driving north from Burton Constable, the years fall away with the coastal road, running through familiar names: Bridlington, Filey and Scarborough, childhood memories of amusement arcades and fish and chips, and the burnt-sugar smell of candy floss, and pale green gas-mantle lamps hissing into the night, as fragile as the moths that flutter round them while my mother made tea in our caravan.
    If the past is a contraction of what has passed, then the future exists only if we imagine it. These resorts recede into memory, and safe fields yield to wild moorland, wide expanses of nothingness book-ended by impenetrable plan-tations of black conifers. The car radio turns into white noise as we pass the giant white golf balls of the Fylingdales listening station. Then the road descends to Whitby, another half-hidden place, with its ancient red roofs and its steep streets and snickleways coursing down to its horseshoe harbour.
    Here, among these narrow terraces, lived my great-grandfather, Patrick James Moore; a Catholic, too, albeit born to rather less propitious circumstances than the tenants of Burton Constable. The son of a Dublin blacksmith, he had joined the general exodus from Ireland, passing through the same Liverpool docks that Melville had explored; one of Melville’s shipmates on the
St Lawrence was
an Irishman named Thomas Moore. By 1882 Patrick Moore had arrived in Whitby, with his wife Sarah, a housemaid from Faversham who, six months after they were married, gave birth to their first child, Rose Margaret. Perhaps that’s why they lived in a poor part of town at Grove Street, close to Scoresby Terrace; although at the end of the lane were the riverside works where James Cook’s ship, the
Endeavour
, was built.
    It was there that my grandfather, Dennis, was born in 1885. He would grow up to be a tailor, making suits for J.B. Priestley and an overcoat for Winston Churchill, but by the time I knew him, at the end of his life, he had retired to Morecambe–known as Bradford-by-the-Sea–where he would die in a home facing the great expanse of the bay. I have only vague memories of his visits to us: a dapper, white-haired old man dressed in elegant dark suits. He always wore a watch and chain and, as my parents told me, had such a passion for reading that he would often miss his bus stop, so engrossed was he in his book. I was a young boy, and I had no idea that my grandfather had been born in a town that lived with the memory of whales.
    Still less did I know that, around the same time as my young grandfather was playing in its streets, Bram Stoker was holidaying in Whitby, a stay that inspired his most famous work, the sensational story of
Dracula
. In it, Stoker’s heroine Mina climbs the steps to the town’s clifftop graveyard, where she meets an elderly man who had sailed to Greenland ‘when Waterloo was fought’, and who tells her ‘about the whale-fishing in the old days’. This old sailor, nearly one hundred years old, is a relic of Whitby’s past, and an industry carried out, not in the balmy seas of the Pacific, but in the freezing wastes of the Arctic: the wilderness at the top of the world.
    In Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
, published in 1838, a sixteen-year-old stowaway sails on a mutinous whale-ship out of New Bedford. After murder and shipwreck, Pym and his companions are forced ‘to this last horrible extremity’–to dine on their young shipmate, Richard Parker. Poe’s tale–which Melville must have read–was inspired by the fate of the
Essex;
it also had a strange reverberation forty years later, when the survivors of a shipwrecked yacht sailing from Southampton for Australia ate their own cabin boy. By remarkable coincidence, his name was also Richard Parker, and his memorial in the local churchyard,