Leviathan or The Whale

Eighty years before my encounter in Skegness, another minke washed up near Mablethorpe, in September 1926. This time, the animal was still alive when it beached. Summoned from the Natural History Museum, Percy Stammwitz attempted to return the fifteen-foot female to the sea, without success, before claiming it as a specimen. Newspaper reports claimed that the whale lived for a day and a half after its capture, and that on its way to South Kensington, destined for the sand pits, ‘its blowing was audible notwithstanding the noise of the engine, until the lorry was within about 30 miles of London, when the animal burst a blood-vessel and died of hæmorrhage of the lungs.’ In truth, Stammwitz was aware that the whale was still alive when it was put on the lorry, but as it was not conscious, he reasoned that if he tried to kill the animal, it could suffer more if it regained consciousness in the process.
    In 1913 the Crown gave first right of refusal to the carcases of royal fish to the Natural History Museum, thereby recognizing their scientific as well as their commercial value. The Board of Trade requested that the Receivers of Wreck–then stationed around the country–should send ‘telegraphic Reports’ of stranded whales to the museum. The earliest records, compiled during the years of the First World War, were collated by the museum’s famous director, Sidney Harmer. They were sad casualty lists to mirror others being published at that time (when, as Harmer noted, coastguards had other matters to deal with): from a finback in the Firth of Forth, ‘at first supposed to be an aeroplane’, to a rare Sowerby’s beaked whale found at Skegness and which ‘appeared to have been killed by rifle-shots, perhaps in mistake for a German submarine’. The animal’s calf lay alongside it on the beach. Other whales died after swimming into mine fields intended to blow up U-boats.
    Thirteen thousand beached whales have been recorded by the museum, but as they span the twentieth century–each lost and expired cetacean plotted on a deathly map of the British coastline–only a few have been claimed for scientific research. The remainder represent a collective rebuke and a logistical dilemma, for even in death, whales present humans with gargantuan problems.
    From a modern office block overlooking Southampton Docks, the Receiver of Wreck administers a fourteenth-century decree. Since 1324, when the right was enshrined in the reign of Edward II, every whale, dolphin, porpoise and sturgeon found on English shores has become the property of the monarch. What was once a royal prerogative is now a liability. In the twenty-first century the Receiver of Wreck is, in effect, whale undertaker to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
    The Receiver, or her Deputy–the current holders of these ancient posts both happen to be young women–will be alerted by one of nineteen coastguard stations. A dead or dying whale might be floating at sea, a potential shipping hazard, or it may present a public nuisance as it is washed up. Sometimes a whale will appear on one beach, only to be carried by the tide to another. In this morbid game, it is the Receiver’s job to deal with the equivocal prize: a massive, stinking carcase. In remote locations, the whale is allowed to become carrion for birds; elsewhere, police cordons may be needed–less to shield people from zoonotic or interspecies infection than to protect them from the heavy plant machinery required to move an animal weighing many tons.
    These are expensive disposals. Small whales cost from £6,000 to £8,000 to shift; large whales as much as £20,000. A profitable right has become a public expense. When whales were unprotected, they were valuable commodities, bounties to be claimed by the Crown; now they are treated as managed or even toxic waste, a result of pollution, or of the large doses used to euthanize the animal. And although they soon decay–the epidermis peeling, the internal organs breaking down, swelling their bellies with gas–dead whales remain resilient. Their blubber is thick and hard to puncture, and carcases hang from mechanical claws like Indian mystics suspended from hooks. Sometimes a pair of excavators join forces to pull them apart; other techniques include the use of high-pressure water jets. One fin whale that stranded on the Isle of Wight, having drifted from the Bay of Biscay, required nine truckloads to cart it away piecemeal to the local landfill.