Leviathan or The Whale

baleen? ‘When the mouth is open,’ observes Scoresby, as the latest captive was brought to book, ‘it presents a cavity as large as a room, and capable of containing a merchants-ship’s jolly-boat, full of men, being 6 or 8 feet wide, 10 or 12 feet high (in front), and 15 or 16 feet long.’ Such detail is as telling of its author and his time as it was of the whale. ‘The eyes…are remarkably small in proportion to the bulk of the animal’s body, being little larger than those of an ox,’ he continues, writing at his desk by whale-light, ‘nor can any orifice for the admission of sound be described until the skin is removed.’ As with so much of the whale, so little could be discovered until it was dead.
    Yet that tiny eye is all-seeing. ‘Whales are observed to discover one another, in clear water, when under the surface, at an amazing distance. When at the surface, however, they do not see far.’ In fact, they sensed one another’s presence by sound, even though, like Beale’s sperm whales, Scoresby considered bow-heads to be dumb. ‘They have no voice,’ he concludes, ‘but in breathing or
blowing
, they make a very loud noise.’ The ice echoes to these trumpets of watery elephants, effortlessly negotiating oceans that defeated mere unblubbered men. ‘Bulky as the whale is, as inactive, or indeed clumsy as it appears to be…the fact, however, is the reverse.’
    And age, Scoresby, sir, what of that? ‘In some whales, a curious hollow on one side, and ridge on the other, occurs in many of the central blades of whalebone, at regular intervals of 6 or 7 inches,’ replies the captain testily, somewhat irritated at my interruption. ‘May not this irregularity, like the rings in the horns of the ox, which they resemble, afford an intimation of the age of the whale?’ It took science two hundred years to catch up with another of Scoresby’s discoveries, one that lay buried, almost unnoticed, in his book. In his search for the fabled North-West Passage, he had, accidentally, opened the way to the whale’s most abiding mystery.

    Set with deliberate anachronism next to Scoresby’s technological Marine Diver is a drawing of a stone tool, a Neolithic contrast to an invention of the Industrial Revolution. ‘The master of the Volunteer, whaler of Whitby, when near the coast of Spitsbergen, July 19. 1813, shewed me part of a lance which had been taken out of the fat of a whale killed by his crew a few weeks before,’ Scoresby related, with a degree of cool amazement. ‘It was completely embedded in the blubber, and the wound was quite healed. A small white scar on the skin of the whale, alone marked the place where the lance had entered.’ But the telling fact was that such weapons were ‘in common use among the Esquimaux a century ago’.
    Scoresby found that these tools were ‘struck by some tribe of the same nation, inhabiting the shores of the frozen ocean, on the northern face of the American Continent, yet unexplored’. If whales had been caught in the Atlantic implanted with implements made on the Pacific coast like some early form of tracking device, then there must be a passage between the two oceans.(Three centuries earlier, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert presented his argument for a North-West Passage to Elizabeth I–a year before Frobisher’s expedition–he cited as evidence a narwhal horn found on the Tartary coast.) This was the Holy Grail for which Scoresby and his father had searched, the opening up of the northernmost world. In the pursuit, they were diverted from a yet more extraordinary finding: Scoresby’s Marine Diver may have plumbed the waters to reveal their depths, but this primitive artefact had uncovered the sensational secret of the bowhead.
    On 29 April, 1850, Herman Melville withdrew the two volumes of Scoresby’s work from the New York Society Library. As he read the
Arctic Regions
–which he failed to return for a year–Melville’s imagination was fired by the story of the stone lance. It led him to a startling conclusion. In
Moby-Dick
, Ishmael reports the finding, during the cutting-in of a whale, ‘of a lance-head of stone…the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before America was discovered.’ Even given his exaggeration, the idea was staggering: if Scoresby’s lance was a century old,
then
this meant the animal was even older.
    Until recently,