The Sea Inside

more interesting specimens, Hunter commissioned a surgeon – ‘at considerable expense’, he noted – to sail to the Arctic with a British whaler. Unfortunately, the young man returned with little more than a sample of whale skin covered in parasites. However, Hunter need not have looked so far; the whales came to him, presenting the scientist with a remarkable roster,
viz
:

Of the Delphinis Phocaena, or Porpoise, I have had several, both male and female.
Of the Grampus I have had two; one of them, (Delphinus Orca, Linn. Tab. XLIV.) twenty-four feet long, the belly of a white colour, which terminated at once, the sides and back being black; the other about eighteen feet long, the belly white, but less so than in the former, and shaded off in the dark colour of the black.
Of the Delphinus Delphis, or Bottle-nose Whale (Tab. XLVI.), I had one sent to me by Mr. J ENNER , Surgeon, at Berkeley. It was about eleven feet long.
I have also had one twenty-one feet long, resembling this last in the shape of the head, but of a different genus, having only two teeth in the lower jaw (Tab. XLVIL); the belly was white, shaded off into the dark colour of the back. This species is described by Dale in his Antiquities of Harwich. The one which I examined must have been young, for I have a skull of the same kind nearly three times as large, which must have belonged to an animal of thirty or forty feet long.
Of the Balaena rostrata of Fabricius, I had one seventeen feet long. (Tab. XLVIII.)
The Balaena Mysticetus, or large Whalebone Whale, the Physter Macrocephalus, or Spermaceti Whale, and the Monodon Monoceros, or Narwhale, have also fallen under my inspection. Some of these I have had opportunities of examining with accuracy, while others I have only examined in part, the animals having been too long kept before I procured them to admit of more than a very superficial inspection.

    This fine selection of cetaceans lined up in Hunter’s showrooms, a deceased menagerie to equal the living one at the ’Change. Almost by default Hunter, practised in cutting up human beings, became a whale-dissector extraordinaire. Under the surgeon’s knife these whales exposed their inner beauty to the world, the visceral evidence which would triumphantly proclaim them
mammals
, not
fish
– a deception in which even Carl Linnaeus had initially been complicit. Pinned to the Swedish professor’s door in Uppsala was a cartoonish drawing he had been given of a bottlenose and calf, a contrast to Hunter’s accurate engraving. Its umbilical cord may have convinced Linnaeus otherwise, but the distance between these two depictions spoke of a vast advance which Hunter himself had pioneered.

    Hunter dug and delved into the world of the whale. The ‘œconomy’ of which he wrote was the physical organisation of the animal, one which he was determined to order in an enlightened fashion. Yet the whale withheld as much as it revealed and, almost in spite of himself, Hunter resorted to poetic imagery to encompass its beauty. Faced with a sixty-foot sperm whale, for instance, he noted that the bones of the animal gave little clue to its real shape; that the spaces in between were ‘so filled up, as to be al-together concealed, giving the animal externally an uniform and elegant form, resembling an insect enveloped in its chrysalis coat’. Such sleekness merely made these mammals more mysterious, uncluttered as they were by the impedimenta of their land-dwelling cousins with their fingers and toes and feet and hands. The whale was streamlined to its medium, lithe and unencumbered.
    But beneath its lustrous layer of blubber, Hunter found that a sperm whale’s heart would not fit in a tub; that its tongue was like a feather bed; and that its oil was like butter, ‘unctuous to the touch’. The piked whale – which we would call a minke – had five stomachs, as had the porpoise and the grampus, but the bottlenose had seven; Hunter was particularly interested in whale guts. He even observed that, in the interests of science, his sometime pupil Mr Jenner had gone so far as to taste the milk with which the bottlenosed whale suckled its calves, and found it ‘rich like Cow’s milk to which cream had been added’.
    Little escaped Hunter: his report is extraordinarily detailed, a work of beauty in itself, with a sense of deep focus and scientific rigour. He further noted how the nerve endings in a whale’s skin indicated a sensitivity which might be even