Leviathan or The Whale Read online

  As Stormy bears witness, an angry whale is a dangerous whale. These are not the equivalent of cetacean cows grazing over verdant oceanic pastures (although they are closely related to ruminants, and have multiple stomachs to digest their food). Rather, they are surprisingly flexible creatures–much more so than other baleen whales, despite being twice as heavy as humpbacks, and positively barrel-shaped compared to the streamlined but largely unbending finbacks–able almost to touch their flukes with their snouts, an act of acrobatics necessary for turning in tight circles when pursuing their minute, ever-shifting prey.

  On his computer, Stormy runs video clips of entanglement scenes. The sheer muscular power of the animal is vividly apparent. Twisting and turning like a gigantic salmon, the whale’s tail thrashes in a manner that brings those nineteenth-century scenes alive. With one flick of the tail, this wilful creature could truly send a boat flying into the air, ‘his very panics…more to be dreaded than his most fearfulness and malicious assaults!’ as Ishmael observes.

  Stormy’s relationship with the right whales is intimate by virtue of such close encounters. He speaks of the prehistoric vision they present, the sun glinting through their baleen. And while he finds the use of the word ‘intelligent’ less than useful in conjunction with animals, he does not hesitate in calling them ‘wicked’, creatures that know their power. The whalers knew this well. Unable, like the sperm whale, to see straight ahead or behind, the right whale could ‘sweep with his tail or flukes from one eye to the other, thus rendering any approach to his body, from abreast, impossible or highly dangerous’.

  After a rescue, Stormy often cannot remember what he has done. He reasons this is because his short-term memory deals only with essential details; only when he watches the playback does he relive the moment. Once, a fishing hook on the line snagged on Stormy’s lifejacket as the animal dived, threatening to take him down too, like Ahab tethered to Moby Dick. Mayo had split-seconds to cut himself free; in the water there would be no escape as the momentum dragged back his arm, making it impossible to use his knife.

  …And were the whale then to run the line out to the end in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea…

  The Line, Moby-Dick

  On his computer, Stormy’s colleague, Scott Landry, shows me other images of entanglement: animals with nylon line cutting so deep that the flesh has begun to grow over it, even as it weeps and bleeds; whale lice or cyamids colonize these weakened areas, signs of an ailing animal. It is upsetting to see sleek bodies turning ghostly grey, sapped by the cords that bind them. Byproducts of global endeavour rather than subjects of it as they once were, they must have sinned mightily to be so ill rewarded by fate. A last picture shows a dead whale on a beach, livid and pink, visibly diminishing as a recognizable creature, although its eye still stares and weeps.

  We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth.

  Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1926

  In the late winter and early spring the Center’s research vessel Shearwater sails out to measure the levels of zooplankton in the bay. The theory is that these levels are accurate indicators of whether this habitat can support the whales. If the count rises above 3,750 organisms/m3, then the density of oil-rich cope-pods and other colourless animals–each looking, under the microscope, like little watery extraterrestrials as they row themselves in eccentric circles–will sustain the population. If not, any whale calling on this historic feeding ground will find it wanting and move away. From such minute and methodical study, leviathans follow.

  Zipped and velcro’d into a padded, astronaut-like survival suit to forestall my death from hypothermia should I tumble over the side of the boat, I sign away any claims to public liability and, duly approved by the federal government, I climb the metal ladder to the Shearwater’s upper deck, facing the bright sun and chill wind. Despite instructions on how to focus just below the horizon and see with my peripheral vision, the unchanging surface and the sea’s motion lulls me into a kind of sleep. ‘There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves,’ as Ishmael says, watching for whales from the mast-head, ‘everything resolves you into languor’.

  Nothing breaks the monotony, not even a bird. It is as if the whole world had been chilled. After six hours’ searching, my eyes begin to ache. Everything is flat, almost soporific in the icy winter air. The long windsock-like sample nets trailing emptily from the stern prove a negative: there is not enough food here for whales.

  It is not a good sign. Cold water holds more oxygen, and so supports more food than southern seas, but rising temperatures have driven plankton north by a latitude of ten degrees, while warming oceans absorb more carbon dioxide, acidifying the whales’ environment. The spotter plane circling overhead sees not so much as a blow, and the sun and wind burn my face for looking. Perhaps we were just not worthy that day.

  Three months later, I sailed on the Shearwater again. It was early May, and the right whales had not appeared in any numbers; the plankton counts remained frustratingly low. But then Stormy reported a change in the circumstances.

  From Provincetown’s harbour, the boat made for the western side of the bay, eight or ten miles towards Plymouth. We sat on the upper deck, watching porpoises slip through the water, fleet and shy; it was easy to see why sailors called them sea pigs as they snorted and shuffled through the waves. Then we saw something else: a low dark shape gliding along the surface. It seemed almost inconsequential; but as we drew closer, I realized it was a right whale. Slowly but surely, the animal was moving like a lawnmower, purposefully harvesting the now plankton-rich waters, called here by some collective memory, or perhaps by smelling or even hearing its food. As the Shearwater closed the distance between, I put down my field glasses and looked on in amazement.

  One, two, three, four, five whales now appeared around us, baleen plates glinting in the sun like enormous musical instruments. Suddenly their incongruous beauty was revealed, the strange bonnet at the top of their heads, covered in pale growths like lichen on a tree. As they floated, buoyed up by their bulk, they looked more like plants than animals, or maybe shiny rocks, kept glossy by the water running over them. Only behind and below was their power evident, their broad flukes barely breaking the surface, effortlessly manœuvring their bodies.

  They were giant, living jigsaw puzzles: no matter how hard I looked, I could not grasp the entirety of the creatures, the sense of their structure, the components from which they were made. It was as if they were shifting in and out of focus. As we came up behind one animal, I saw how broad was its back; how it shelved out from its spine like a great table, and I could imagine why Brendan the navigator and his monks landed on a whale and, presuming it to be an island, lit a fire and said Mass in thanks for their salvation.

  Abruptly, one animal approached the boat, so close that Stormy–who was standing on the bowsprit, held out over the waves–could have reached out and patted its rough head like a dog. Instead, he focused his camera to record the pattern of callosities, which appear at the same points where hair grows on the human face–brow, chin, upper lips–and which give each animal its identity, a rough physiognomy queasily underlined by the fact that they are infested with pale whale lice, the minute scorpions that crawl around their host’s head, eating its dead skin. As Eric Joranson, one of the mates on the whale
watch boats told me, the lice will also colonize a human given half the chance, and are difficult to dislodge once they do. When a whale lies dying on the beach, they leave it like rats off a sinking ship. None the less, these parasites may also assist the whale: since they eat the same copepods, it is possible that they lead it to its food, acting as minute sensors.

  As the whale passed us, it was as if it were paying court to its champion, nodding its head serenely towards Stormy as it passed. It then swung around the boat, and next to me. Looking down into the water, I could see its great white jaw swinging open like some massive hinged door, wide enough to garage a car–the largest mouth of any living creature. Now I could see the entirety of the animal, hanging below, an iceberg suspended in its element. It was also deceptively fast, creating a wave in front of its snout with the weight of its fifty tons. Silently gaping as it passed by, both aware and unaware of us, it was like watching a dinosaur, an animal whose physical presence was belied by its air of fatality. It also smelled, a deep insupportable smell, somewhere between a cow’s fart and a fishy wharf, a pungent reminder of its function as a processing plant for plankton.

  Then it was gone to join the others, apparitions that, for all their size, were quite dreamlike. It was hard to look on these huge creatures and think of a time when they might not be there. Barely a mile away, shipping was moving in and out of Cape Cod Canal and under the distinctive hump of the Sagamore Bridge. It was a lesson in the nature of survival. Paying scant attention to anything other than their food and themselves, they would not know, could not see, the tanker or the container ship steaming towards them. Later that day, the Shearwater alerted shipping to their presence in the bay. What was a day trip for me may have saved a whale’s life.

  As we turned to leave, a black shape broke the horizon. A whale was breaching, lazily launching itself into the air before landing with a distant crash. Then it began to slap down on the surface with its tail, the sound ricocheting off our boat as a cannonade. As it held its flukes emblematically against the sky, infused with its own life and power, we turned our backs on the whales and left them to their lunch.

  Ham. Do you see yonder cloud, that’s almost in shape of

  a camel?

  Pol. By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.

  Ham. Methinks, it is like a weasel.

  Pol. It is backed like a weasel.

  Ham. Or, like a whale?

  Pol. Very like a whale.

  Hamlet, Act Three, Scene II

  Hamlet was right, for all his teasing. Whales are like clouds. They change shape, forming and re-forming as they pass through the great expanse of the sea and over its drowned mountains and valleys, just as the clouds drifted over the snowy peak that Melville watched from his window in a Massachusetts meadow. In whale bone carvings, the Inuit represent the whale’s breath as a feather. Cartoon whales spout their own personal weather, their own head of steam. To its prey, the white belly of a humpback, too, appears as a cloud, albeit one that might consume it.

  And as clouds create atlases in the air, so whales are countries in their own right, planetary communities of barnacles and sea-lice wandering on their own continental drift. International ambassadors of nature’s undiscerning power, they are stateless nations, invested with something beyond their mere presence. ‘By art is created that great Leviathan,’ wrote Hobbes, ‘called a Commonwealth or State.’ As plundered colonies, they remain under attack, invincible yet vulnerable, defenceless for all their size. It is the whale’s fate to share man’s air, and so risk its life in the process of sustaining it, caught in a bind as much as any philosopher perplexed by the human condition.

  The whale lives between worlds; that is its miracle, and its folly. What did it do to deserve such a fate? Spurned by Noah (it could hardly fit in the ark), it pays the price for its self-exile, having forsaken the land for the sea.

  I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.

  The Fossil Whale, Moby-Dick

  The earliest whale-like creatures can be traced back fifty million years to the Eocene and the Tethys Sea, an ancient ocean whose vestiges now form the Mediterranean and Caspian seas. Their ancestors included Pakicetus, a four-legged and fox-like creature which in turn gave way to Ambulocetus natans, a kind of giant otter, and other so-called ‘walking whales’ such as Kutchicetus and Rodhocetus. Recent discoveries point to another missing link between whales and land-dwellers: Indohyus, a deer-like ungulate which possessed a similar bony structure in its auditory system to that of cetaceans; being a herbivore, it became semi-aquatic to escape its predators. Drawn to the water’s edge, the mesonycids’ descendants would become horses, bison, camels, sheep–and cetaceans.

  The first whales, the archæocetes, were quite as global in range as their descendants–although the serpentine remains of Basilosaurus cetoides convinced Victorian palæontologists that it was a marine reptile when its fossilized skeleton was found in the Deep South in 1832; Ishmael claims that ‘awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels’. Only Sir Richard Owen, inventor of the dinosaur, recognized this ‘annihilated anti-chronical creature’ as a ‘pre-adamite whale’ which he renamed Zeuglodon, ‘one of the most extraordinary of the Mammalia which the revolutions of the globe have blotted out of the number of existing beings’.

  Around thirty-five million years ago, the whales divided into mysticetes and odontocetes, leaving the archæocetes to become extinct; although some scientists believe that sperm whales are genetically closer to baleen whales than they are to other toothed whales. Similarly, recent fossil discoveries of the baleen whales’ antecedents have revealed animals with huge, baleful eyes and jagged teeth, quite unlike their benevolent, modern counterparts.

  Given the lacunæ in the fossil record and our ignorance of great swathes of time, the evolution of the whale remains obscure. Traces of their land-borne origins can be seen in the residual hind limbs of embryo whales, as if their prehistory could be read there–but then, we are all whales in the womb, swimming in amniotic seas. Occasionally a sperm whale is born with an extra pair of atavistic fins, while one humpback was recorded with freak limbs a yard long, a strange being, neither one thing nor the other, like a Barnum mermaid made from a fish and a monkey.

  The whales made good use of their freedom from the land. It is the buoyancy of the sea that has allowed them to develop into such mighty animals: if they still had legs, they would not be able to stand on them, so great is their weight. Such an evolutionary genesis both refutes and reflects the hand of the Almighty: as one Victorian handbill, advertising the exhibition of a whale’s bones, claimed:

  Who can contemplate this mighty skeleton…without adoring the Mind that formed it? Where can we better cultivate a sentiment of devotion than in the presence of work so expressive of the various attributes of the varied God?

  Yet for an era whose beliefs were under threat, the whale had a kind of equivalence with the origins of the earth and the newly discovered animals of prehistory; if these cetacean giants survived the flood, then so might other monsters. ‘Leviathan is not the biggest fish,’ as Melville told Hawthorne, ‘–I have heard of Krakens.’

  In the first half of the nineteenth century sea serpents were sighted, with remarkable frequency, off the coast of Massachusetts. Witnesses claimed to see huge animals with snake-like bodies and heads held high out of the water. Unlike many such fantastical monsters, however, these beasts were seen by hundreds of people for hours at a time, and no less a body than Boston’s Linnæan Society published its findings on the subject in a pamphlet, a copy of which is lodged in the British Library, stamped with the name of its owner, the naturalist Joseph Banks.

  ‘In the month of August 1817, it was currently reported on various authorities, that an animal of very singular appearance had been recently and repeatedly seen in the harbour of Gloucester, Cape Ann, about thirty miles distant from
Boston,’ noted the society, whose members were all Harvard graduates and one of whom, Jacob Bigelow, was a renowned scientist and inventor of the term ‘technology’. ‘It was said to resemble a serpent in its general form and motions, to be of immense size, and to move with wonderful rapidity; to appear on the surface of the water only in calm and bright weather; and to seem jointed or like a number of buoys or casks following each other in a line.’ In response, the society appointed a committee ‘to collect evidence with regard to the existence and appearance of any such animal’. It was a court of law called to consider the existence of sea monsters; and although its findings might have certified a hippogriff, it is hard to conclude that the witnesses did not see what they say they saw.

  Amos Story of Gloucester, mariner, said the animal had a head shaped like that of a sea turtle, ‘his colour appeared to be a dark brown, and when the sun shone upon him, the reflection was very bright. I thought his body was about the size of a man’s body.’

  A Monstrous Sea Serpent,

  The largest ever seen in America,

  Has just made its appearance in Gloucester Harbour, Cape Ann, and has been seen by hundreds of Respectable Citizens.

  Solomon Allen of Gloucester, shipmaster, saw it three days running, ‘nearly all day from the shore…I was on the beach, nearly on a level with him…He turned short and quick, and the first part of the curve that he made in turning resembled the link of a chain.’