The Sea Inside

Transactions of the Royal Society
, ran to more than eighty pages.
    Hunter’s essay proposed a new equivalence. He sought to show the relationship between form and structure in all living creatures. And what better animal to choose than the whale, one which, as his exhaustive descriptions would show, was like us, and yet far from us too? Hunter would do his best to pursue his researches in unfathomable waters, without ever leaving the land; his cetacean specimens came to him, rather than the other way around.
    In 1783 a twenty-one-foot female northern bottlenose whale –
Hyperoodon ampullatus
, a strange, bulbous-headed animal, one of the deep-diving beaked whales – was captured close to London Bridge, the same bridge under which another female of the same species would pass, to certain sensation, more than two hundred years later. This eighteenth-century wanderer, fatally far from home, was acquired by the renowned whale-oil merchant Alderman Pugh, ‘who very politely allowed me to examine its structure, and to take away the bones’. Almost as surprising as the sight of Ben Franklin besporting himself in the same waters, the whale’s appearance underlined Hunter’s frustrations in obtaining specimens. ‘Such opportunities too seldom occur, because those animals are only to be found in distant seas, which no one explores in pursuit of natural history; neither can they be brought to us alive from thence, which prevents our receiving their bodies in a state fit for dissection.’
    Yet a surprising number of cetaceans ventured into the Thames during Hunter’s working life, as though auditioning for his collection. In 1759 a twenty-four-foot grampus (from the contraction of
grande poisson
), otherwise known as the killer whale or orca, was caught at the mouth of the river and brought to Westminster Bridge on a barge. In 1772 another grampus, eighteen feet long, was caught; in 1788 no fewer than seventeen sperm whales stranded on the Thames’s lower reaches; and in 1791 a thirty-foot orca was chased up the river as far as Deptford and killed.
    Meanwhile, down in Southampton, there were similary strange forays into the estuary, with similar results. Whales were not unknown here – in the town of Hamwic, bones from Anglo-Saxon whales were used as chopping blocks and worked into combs – and others had passed this way before and since. In May 1770 ‘a large fish was observed rolling up the river Itchen’, and was chased by anglers to Northam, where a nightwatchman saw it strand in the shallows and took the opportunity to attack it with a long knife, stabbing at its head. It proved to be a whale, probably a bottlenose, thirty feet long and six tons in weight. ‘There has not been anything of the kind seen in those parts in the memory of man,’ claimed the local paper, ‘it will therefore be shown at Southam, ton [sic] till the middle of the week.’ And in the summer of 1798 the compendious pages of the
Annual Register, or, A View of the History, Politicks, and Literature, of the Year
reported that ‘A Fish of enormous size having for several days past been seen swimming in this river, many fruitless attempts were made to take it’; this despite the efforts of Mr Richard Eyamy of the New Forest Rifles Light Dragoons, who managed to lodge a carbine ball in the whale’s flanks ‘which, it afterwards appeared, went through eighteen inches of solid flesh’.
    The animal, also confirmed as a bottlenose, was found the following day languishing on the mud at Marchwood, where three men attacked it, ‘forcing an iron crow down its throat, which evidently put it in great torture’. Towed back to the village of Itchen, it was put on public display – ‘three-pence each person’ – attended by ‘an immense concourse’ which flocked across the river from the fashionable spa town of Southampton ‘to see this uncommon natural curiosity’. These animals, once feared by the Anglo-Saxon author of ‘The Whale’ – who imagined them swallowing up sailors lured, like fish, into their ‘grisly jaws’ by their sweet-smelling insides – had become curiosities; but more than that, too. This was the golden age of British whaling, after all, and London was a whaling port, boasting the Greenland Dock, the largest of its kind in the world, surrounded by refineries which supplied oil to light the capital’s streets and whalebone to corset the fashionable men and women who strolled them.
    In search of fresh and yet