Leviathan or The Whale

and fifty yards long by fifty yards wide. Unable to find open water, the animals surfaced every twelve to eighteen minutes, taking ten or fifteen breaths, then dove again, singing their distress. Their innate sense of community compounded the crisis as they rose to respire at one and the same time, a deadly synchronicity that caused some animals to be bodily squeezed out of this frozen hole of Calcutta and into the arms of the Inuit. In one day, they took three hundred whales.

    But of all the Arctic cetaceans, the bowhead or
Balæna mysticetus
is the most mysterious. It is perhaps my favourite whale, although I have never seen one, and probably never will. Closely related to the right whale–distinguished mainly by its lack of callosities–it is able to break through the ice with its massive bow-shaped head, thereby avoiding the pathetic fate of its lesser cousins. It also has the longest baleen of any whale, measuring up to fifteen feet in length. Hanging in crystalline water with its huge white jaws decorated with a ‘necklace’ of black spots, this ebony-grey giant seems to embody the silent, ominous spirit of the Arctic–although, like the humpback, it too sings a low, resonant song. Living at the top of the world, it is the first whale, one that struck even hardened whalers with a kind of awe. In 1823, the crew of the
Cumbrian
from Hull watched in fearful wonder as a fifty-seven-foot female bowhead circled their ship, then calmly pushed the vessel backwards with her snout to repel their invasion. For centuries the bowhead lived in icy obscurity; that was its salvation. Preserved by the very harshness of its environment, this vast creature simply vanishes when winter closes over the pole as though disappearing from a radar screen, upending its lacquer flukes and slipping back into the sea, along with its secrets. It has good reason to seek such sanctuary: the blubbery, baleen-heavy creature has learned to its cost that there is no hiding place so remote that it cannot be sought out by man.
    For imperial Britain the Arctic represented wealth and exploitation, and even its peoples were fair game. In 1847 Memidadluk and Uckaluk, ‘The Two Esquimaux, or Yacks’, were exhibited along with their artefacts to fascinated crowds in Hull, York and Manchester. Fish, flesh, people, blubber, baleen, oil: the Arctic was an index of unsustainable resources ready for the taking, and for the inhabitants of the northern ports of Hull and Whitby there seemed to be an invisible tie between their maritime fastness and the frozen seas beyond.
    The British came late to whaling. At the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, their ships had attempted to compete with the Dutch for the rich, unexploited Arctic grounds: ‘At that time, you see,’ noted a later chronicler, ‘whaling was like finding a gold mine. It was untapped wealth; the mammals had not been scared, and the rewards were immense.’ While the Dutch established their Spitsbergen factory at Smeerenberg, or Blubbertown, British whalers set out from Hull and even from Exeter. But their trade declined in inverse proportion to Dutch success; by 1671, the Netherlands was sending out 155 whalers to Greenland, and sometimes their annual catch would reach as many as two thousand whales. In 1693 there was a move to revive the British industry ‘formerly…very beneficial to this Kingdom’, as Sir William Scawen, London financier and merchant, told Parliament, ‘not only for the great Quantities of Whalebone and Oil which hath imported from thence; but also a Nursery for Seamen, and the Expence of Provisions for victualing the ships’. Scawen bemoaned that since 1683, ‘there hath not been one Ship sent from
England
to
Greenland;
so that Whalebone, which…was sold at Sixty Pounds
per Ton
, is now sold for Four Hundred Pounds the Ton; whereby
Holland
and
Hamburgh
draw out of this Kingdom above One hundred thousand Pounds for Whalebone and Whale Oil.’
    Soon enough, business turned back to the whale. In the 1720s the South Sea Company, recovering from the infamous financial scandal of the Bubble, invested in whaling on the advice of Henry Elking, who too had bemoaned Britain’s lack of initiative to be ‘a very great Mistake’. The company fitted up a dozen ships on the Thames and sent its fleet north, encouraged by a government tax exemption for all whale products. The rewards were discouraging–the squadron returned with just twenty-five