Leviathan or The Whale

righteous pursuit, ‘satisfactorily explained on the simple principle of the Divine enactment. It was the appointment of the Creator that it should be so.’ However, Scoresby’s own departure from the world would be as brutal as his butchery of the whales of the Arctic.
    An elevated pavement runs the length of Bagdale, passing the elegant terrace that overlooks a walled Quaker graveyard and, beyond that, Pannet Park, once decorated with whale bone arches, as were many other Whitby gardens. Here Scoresby lived, in a fine Georgian house with classical fanlights and carved sandstone porch. And here, on 28 April 1829, at the age of sixty-nine, he took up his pistol, and shot himself through the heart. ‘He appears to have been in a state of temporary derangement for several months past,’ the subsequent inquest found. It is impossible to know the reason why Scoresby took a pistol to his heart; it would certainly be too sentimental to read into his self-murder any sense of guilt over the five hundred whales he had killed, and for whose deaths he gave thanks to God.
    From his portrait, William Scoresby appears a refined version of his father; rational, scientific, pious, inquisitive; a combination of disciplines that the era allowed. He too had gone to sea as a boy, but had studied science in Edinburgh before joining the navy, and after his discharge went to London to meet Joseph Banks, the renowned naturalist who had sailed with Captain Cook. Banks received Scoresby at his house in Soho Square; he may have seen something of himself in this young man who spoke so eloquently of the Arctic regions he had already explored on his father’s whaling voyages.
    A year later, William took command of his first whale-ship, the
Resolution
, followed by the
Esk
. On his voyages, he sought to prove that the temperature of the sea was warmer below its surface. Sending his findings to Banks, the two men developed an instrument to more accurately measure the ocean’s residual heat: the ‘Marine Diver’, a brass contraption that could be lowered 7,000 feet into the water. For Scoresby, whaling was a way to finance his investigations. During the
Esk’s
perilous journey–when he nearly lost his ship to pack ice, and when his men may have cursed their captain’s curiosity–Scoresby made scientific notes in books and papers which flowed out over his desk: calculations, sketches, suppositions and descriptions, a fluid body of work which, for the first time, documented these unblemished seas.

    An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery
was published in two volumes in Edinburgh in 1820, and profusely illustrated with maps and engravings. Scoresby’s became the work by which all others were measured, a compendium of cetology and whaling techniques and the nature of the Arctic itself, complete with ninety-six snow crystals illustrated by this son of Captain Sleet in dizzying pages of repeated patterns.
    A polar counterpart to Beale’s Pacific travels, Scoresby’s text had a religious overtone, as if the animals and places and phenomena he catalogued were evidence of Eden; the book was later taken up by the Religious Tract Society and supplied to the American Sunday School movement as an affirmation of the Creation. For all its scientific rigour, there was no conflict between its author’s beliefs and his investigations. Scoresby’s faith echoed his father’s; and like his father, his avowed aim, by God’s grace, was to find the North-West Passage. But if the whale’s true nature could only be guessed at from its spouting, steamy surfacings, or an iceberg’s entirety could be seen only from below, so the deeper meaning of Scoresby’s facts and figures lay submerged.
    Section I. A Description of Animals, of the Cetaceous Kind, frequenting the Greenland Sea.
    Balæna Mysticetus:
The Common Whale, or Greenland Whale.

    ‘This valuable and interesting animal, generally called
The Whale
by way of eminence…is more productive of oil than any other of the Cetacea, and, being less active, slower in its motion, and more timid than any other of the kind…is more easily captured.’ Like Beale, Scoresby drew on his own observations to delineate the leviathan. ‘Of 322 individuals, in the capture of which I have been personally concerned, no one, I believe, exceeded 60 feet in length…’
    And how to convey that magnitude, that mass of whalish flesh, that cavern of ceiling-high