Leviathan or The Whale

prepare to plunder the Arctic’s resources anew.
    What will this mean for the whale, as the sea rises to remind us of its power? Krill, which feed on the algæ on the undersurface of the ice, may diminish, and food sources for the whales are already becoming scarce at lower latitudes as warming oceans push them ever further north, only to find that those everlasting citadels have vanished. On the other hand, the mineral nutrients released by the same process in the Antarctic may have beneficial effects for the food chain and, perhaps, cetaceans. No one really knows. We are living through a vast experiment, one which may result in the flooded world that Melville imagined; a world that the whales will inherit, evolving into superior beings with only distant memories of the time when they were persecuted by beings whose greed proved to be their downfall.
    Having published his book, Scoresby returned to the sea in the newly built
Baffin
, taking leave of his wife and his family in Liverpool–had he but known it, for the last time. He returned home in September 1822, after charting the east coast of Greenland, to be told of his wife’s death. Disheartened, he made only one more trip, before giving up the sea for another vocation: that of vicar. As its erstwhile champion exchanged ‘the clatter of hailstones on icebergs’ for the sound of psalms from pews, Whitby’s whaling fleet dwindled to just ten ships. In 1825, at the parish church of St Mary’s, high on the hill overlooking the town, it was Scoresby’s sad duty to preach on the occasion of the loss of all hands on the
Lively
in an Arctic storm; and the
Esk
, his own former command, which sank just thirty miles from Whitby. The terrible toll of sixty dead added up to the end of an industry–as did the depletion of the whaling grounds, and the thousands of slaughtered animals.
    Scoresby became Vicar of Bradford–where his parishioners included the Reverend Patrick Brontë of Haworth village, and his young daughters–and turned his scientific attention to the mysterious forces of mesmerism. Instead of dealing in oil and whalebone, Whitby now traded in jewellery carved from the shiny black jet found in its cliffs and made mournfully fashionable by a perennially grieving queen. And by the time my own grandfather was walking along Bagdale on his way to Mass with his brothers and sisters, Whitby’s arched buildings of bone were dwarfed by the railway viaduct, overturned arks for a new age of extinction.

XI
The Melancholy Whale

    A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue…is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king.
    Blackstone
, Extracts from a Sub-Sub-Librarian

    On a bleak strand south of Skegness and its garish amusements, the sun was already beginning to set as I trudged through the damp grey sand. Something lay ahead in the creeping dusk, growing closer until its vague shape resolved into a discernible form. Before that, I smelled it. I can smell it still when I look at the pictures. Lying there, like a cod on a fishmonger’s slab, was a minke whale. Its shiny black skin had been entirely flayed, leaving a fishy-coloured beige, the texture of latex–except where the blubber had begun to turn blue-green.
    When I had last seen a minke, it was surfing over Stellwagen Bank, snatching breaths at the surface, briefly showing the sharp-pointed rostrum for which the whale is named,
Balænoptera acutorostrata
. (It owes its other name to a Norwegian sailor, Miencke, who mistook this, the smallest rorqual, for more valuable prey. Not for the first time, it occurs to me that whales are named for their usefulness to man, rather than for their innate beauty.)
    Then, in a rare moment of revelation, a minke had swum by the bow of the boat, clearly silhouetted below, its fins emblazoned like the chevrons on an officer’s sleeve. Now all I saw was a piece of dead matter that smelled like something between fish and meat. Its elegant flukes were reduced to raw cartilage; there was barely anything to indicate that it had ever been alive, save for its pale little penis hanging from the underside of its belly, flaccid and worm-like. I fingered it, then I walked back in the failing light, the moon rising like a bloody pearl out of the North Sea.
    This stormy eastern coast has always been a wrecking place for the whales, forever echoing to their plaintive blows.