Leviathan or The Whale

fact-checking editors have dismissed Ishmael’s airy claims. ‘Anatomical evidence from larger whales suggests a life of up to seventy or eighty years,’ Harold Beaver assured readers in a footnote to
Moby-Dick
in 1972. ‘But a longer span, stretching to centuries, is sailors’ myth.’ Now, in a belated confirmation of Melville’s musings, scientists are beginning to realize
that
ideas about how long whales may live have been substantially underestimated. The clues to this revision came from native Alaskans who still hunt bowheads in the Bering Sea. The Iñupiat have observed the whales for centuries, and their storytellers claim to have recognized individual animals over successive human generations. Since 1981, six stone or ivory harpoon points have been found in the blubber of whales–weapons that modern Iñupiats did not recognize, having used mostly metal harpoons since the 1870s.
    Long after Scoresby’s discovery, scientists came to their own conclusion: that these whales must be as old as the implements found in them. And as the Iñupiat hunted only young whales, being better eating, it seemed likely that there might be even older animals, hidden in the icy reaches. The bowhead’s Arctic existence seemed to slow down its life, extending it, decade by decade, century by century; a sentient entity suspended in vast vistas of time, virtually cryogenically preserved.
    Using a technique for dating animals from changes in the aspartic acid levels in their eyes, Dr Jeffrey L. Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California examined tissue from whales caught by the Iñupiat hunters. Most were twenty to sixty years old when they died; but of five large male bowheads, one was ninety years old, four were aged between 135 and 180 years, and one was 211 years old. Employing other methods for measuring radioactive lead in bone, and samples of skin collected from living whales, Dr Bada stated that ‘what we have assigned the bowheads are only minimum ages…These are truly aged animals, perhaps the most long-lived mammals.’
    Since it is unlikely that the oldest whales have been caught–that older whales could and most probably do exist–Bada’s assessment is hardly underestimated. Even as I write, a three-and-a-half-inch lance tip, made in New Bedford in the 1890s, has been retrieved from the blubber of a bowhead caught off Alaska. The consequences haunt me: that these whales swam the same seas that Scoresby had negotiated; that the same animals from which he had made his observations might yet be alive. It is also an exquisite revenge: born before Melville, the whales have outlived their pursuers.
    In his chapter entitled, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?–Will He Perish?’, Ishmael dismisses the idea that whale populations, particularly those of the great baleen species, were declining. On the contrary, he claimed, they had ‘two firm fortresses’, which, he averred, would ‘for ever remain impregnable…their Polar citadels…in a charmed circle of everlasting December’.
    Wherefore…we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s ark; and if ever the world is to be flooded again, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.

    In his fantasy, Melville saw a new dispensation, a watery version of Hawthorne’s prairie holocaust, Harry Hinton’s icy sanctuary come to life.
    It was recently announced that the earth entered a new geological epoch around the year 1800, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The era of the Holocene has ended, say the scientists; the era of the Anthropocene has begun. In one of the cathedrals in the walled city where the tsars of all the Russias lie in their monumental sarcophagi, there is a medieval mural of a whale. This fragile image has seen off Peter, Nicholas, Josef and Mikhail, surviving human empires like some Neolithic cave painting, like the stone within the whale. Now the whale’s citadels are rapidly receding, making the North-West Passage a permanent reality, opening continent to continent as fresh water locked into polar ice leaches into the ocean, and the world’s northern nations