The Sea Inside

History Museum in London, in the shadow of its own illusory blue whale, seeks to prove Ishmael wrong. It tells the story of the twentieth-century cull: from almost nothing to tens of thousands in 1939 – the year in which the museum’s model was first displayed – when forty thousand were taken in the Southern Ocean.
    Until then they’d been too fast for humans. That was why the colonisers of Sri Lanka – the Dutch, the Portuguese, the English, all whaling nations – did not even try to hunt these whales. It was another reason for their absence in the island’s history: their sheer size and speed eluded human contact, as if they were too fast and too big to see. For a Buddhist, the sense of being there and not being there would have been perfectly understandable; for others, the distance was a challenge to be closed, by explosive harpoons fired from high prows. New factory fleets from Norway and Japan and the Soviet Union did their work. By the mid-twentieth century, the hunt was at its height; hundreds of thousands of hunted whales were under-reported by the Russians. Under Stalin’s Five Year Plans, each harvest had to be better than the last, and whales became part of that relentlessly expanding demand.
    Great fleets of whale-catchers scythed through the seas, one of them, the
Storm
, captained by a woman, Valentina Yakovlevna Orlikova. Her photograph, published on the cover of a 1943 magazine,
Soviet Russia Today
, shows Orlikova with high cheekbones, dark hair and svelte figure in uniform, gold braid on her cuffs and a collar and tie at her neck. An even more glamorous photograph of her appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar
, causing Anaïs Nin to fall in love with this ‘Hero of Social Labour’, a Soviet Ahabess armed with a missile-harpoon. In forty years’ hunting in the Antarctic, Orlikova’s superiors reported a total of 185,778 blue, fin, sperm, right, grey and other whales; the true figure was 338,336. In a cold-war world of misinformation and opposing ideologies, whales were the ultimate losers.

    In 1963 the first ‘International Symposium on Cetacean Research’ was held in Washington, DC, attended by scientists from many different disciplines. The Symposium sought to gather the latest knowledge about whales, and present the case for the fragility of their species. It marked a new awareness and urgency; its chairman, L. Harrison Matthews, appealed for ‘some friend of science’ to supply the means to fit out a vessel of discovery, to fund a search for answers to these questions before it was too late. ‘The cost of one long-range missile would cover the whole project,’ he added. It was a telling comment, one year after the Cuban crisis and its threat of nuclear war. By the time Remington Kellogg, director of the Smithsonian, came to unveil his museum’s own life-size blue whale in 1969, he could deliver to the assembled audience an updated toll, accurate to that precise moment –

    329,946 blue whales dead

    – most of them on his own watch, as the half-life of whales ticked away to doomsday. It was only now, now that it was too late, that this well-meaning scientist and instigator of the International Whaling Commission, who had devoted his career to collecting data, realised that he had spent most of his life ‘working for the enemy’, as D. Graham Burnett, the historian of science, reflects. It was a neat, horrific formula for hip-booted scientists standing knee-deep in the gore of whaling stations as they traded whisky for foetuses:

    Collecting data while animals died + animals dying so that they could collect data = science as self-fulfilling prophecy.
    Even now, in the bright new era of modern cetacean science, we insist on assimilating the whale. We may have instituted less violent means of investigating their physiology and movements, yet we endeavour to dart or tag them, tracking them by satellite with GPS to provide us with neat data sets although these techniques can be deleterious to the animals themselves, causing infection or even restricting movement. In effect they become remote-controlled models to our will, mapped, suborned and co-opted into our world, rather than left alone in theirs.
    Out in the Indian Ocean, we watch as a huge vessel looms into view. The grey-painted, block-like ship with shuttered windows was previously used to transport troops during the war. Now it has been commissioned to take passengers out to see the whales. ‘Big sound, very bad – whale