Leviathan or The Whale

from a blue whale, were only erected in 1962, and have since been replaced by the jaws of a bowhead, presented by the people of Alaska. But down in the town, whale bones were used as timbers for roofs and walls. Entire houses and workshops were constructed from these giant ribs and jaws. If a man might stand within a whale’s mouth, why not make a more convenient shelter for himself and his family, swapping bones for bricks? After all, the whale had no need for them now.
    The expansion of the whaling fleet was almost frightening in its speed. In 1782 there were forty-four British whale-ships operating in the Greenland Sea. Two years later, that figure had doubled; and by 1787, 250 ships were sailing from British ports–only for a new war to erode their returns; ‘greenmen’ were imposed on whale-ships as a means of training them for the navy, while experienced whalemen were in turn impressed to fight Napoleon.
    As a young sailor, William Scoresby had himself been captured off Trafalgar, and in a daring escape, managed to evade his Spanish jailers, stowing away on a British ship exchanging prisoners of war. Back in Whitby, Scoresby enlisted on the whale-ship the
Henrietta
, rising quickly to the rank of Specksioneer (a Dutch-derived term for principal harpooneer), then to captain. It was the beginning of a career that would claim the lives of no fewer than 533 whales.

    Scoresby was a powerfully built man of great vitality and his talent for whaling was undeniable. On his second voyage as master of the
Henrietta
, he returned with eighteen Greenland whales; in the next five years, the ship took eighty more animals, yielding nearly 800 tons of oil. Soon Scoresby was commanding a larger ship, the
Dundee;
on her first voyage she garnered an unprecedented thirty-six whales. Scoresby’s heroic status was only reinforced when his ship faced a French warship off the Yorkshire coast and destruction seemed imminent: at the last moment the
Dundee uncovered
her eighteen-pound guns, at the sight of which the enemy turned and fled.
    In 1803 Scoresby took command of a new, double-hulled vessel with metal plates on her bow, enabling her to plough through Arctic ice. With the
Resolution
sailed his own son, also named William, fourteen years old and about to become a whaler, explorer and inventor in his own right. He had a heady precedent to follow. Scoresby Senior had come closer than any other man to claiming the £1,000 prize offered to anyone able to sail north of the eighty-ninth parallel in pursuit of the fabled North-West Passage, a search which ‘laid open the haunts of the whale’. He had also devised an enclosed crow’s nest, an ingenious contraption with a protective framework of leather or canvas, storage space for telescope and firearm, and flags and speaking trumpet for communication with the crew or other ships. It was an eccentric device to Ishmael, who satirizes Scoresby as ‘Captain Sleet’, standing in his invention, armed with a rifle ‘for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters’.
    Scoresby was no ordinary seaman, often writing his ship’s log in verse: ‘So now the Western ice we leave/ And pleasant Gales we doe receive’. He also kept a pet polar bear, which he would walk on a leash down to Whitby harbour to fish for its lunch. Scoresby presided over the peak years of British whaling, the personification of this national harvest. By the summer of 1817, columns in
The Times
were being devoted to reports from Berwick, Greenock, Peterhead, Aberdeen, Montrose, Dundee, Kirkcaldy, Leith, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle, London and Whitby as whale-ships returned laden with blubber and bone.
    In 1823, after a long and successful career, Scoresby gave up the sea and retired to Whitby. He had never questioned the right of man to take the whale; rather, he reasoned that whaling was a tribute to man’s ingenuity and God’s grace. ‘We are led to reflect on the economy manifestation respect to the hugest of the animal creation, whether on earth or in the ocean, whereby all become subject to man, either for living energy or the produce of their dead carcasses.’ ‘The capture of the whale by man, when their relative proportions are considered, is a result truly wonderful,’ Scoresby declared. ‘An animal of a thousand times the bulk of man is constrained to yield its life to his attacks and its carcase a tribute to his marvellous enterprise.’ His was a