Leviathan. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ fear the flagrant activities of its performers should offend genteel dispositions), and in September 1877 a beluga whale arrived in Westminster, in the centre of the world’s greatest city. The nine-foot, six-inch specimen had also been caught–along with ten others–off Labrador, where it had stranded at high tide and was netted by Zack Coup and his men. From there it began its long journey to London.

      Taken in a narrow box by sloop to Montreal, the whale was put on a train to New York–a trip that took two weeks. The animal spent seven months at Coney Island’s Summer Aquarium where ‘he contracted his habit of swimming in a circle’, before being taken out of its tank and put on a North German Lloyd steamship, the Oder, bound for Southampton. During the voyage, it was kept on deck in a rough wooden box lined with seaweed, and was wetted with salt water every three minutes. Despite such intensive care, the whale had already begun to live off its own blubber.

      At Southampton the beluga was transferred to the South-Western Railway, travelling on an open truck to Waterloo Station and to its final home, an iron tank forty-four feet long, twenty feet wide, and six feet deep, at the Royal Aquarium, a grand gothic structure recently built opposite the Houses of Parliament. The whale waited as the tank took two hours to fill. ‘He had been lying still in the box breathing once every 23 seconds. He flapped feebly with his tail when he felt them moving the box. He fell out of it sidelong into the water and went down to the bottom like lead.’ The animal was allowed three hours of privacy before the public, ‘in great numbers’, were admitted to view it from a specially built grandstand.

      The Times did not feel this was the right way to treat a whale. ‘It is not likely he will live long in fresh water, although he comes up at intervals from ten to 100 seconds to breathe, and sometimes spouts the water up through the wide nostril which he has in the middle of his forehead. Noise or jarring caused by the workmen occasionally makes him stay beneath the water for two minutes at a time.’ The beluga was fed live eels, but it was noted that its high dorsal ridge, ‘which should be rounded with fat’, stood up ‘precipitously on his back’.

      ‘Should he succumb to the unfavourable conditions of life in this city, no whalebone will be extracted from this monster,’ the newspaper added. ‘Nor is the white whale very rich in blubber. But his coat will make porpoise-skin boots.’

      The Times’s suspicions were correct, even if its assignation of gender was not. In what appeared to be delirious behaviour, the whale–which was in fact a female–swam up and down the tank rapidly, hitting its head on the wall. Then, ‘having somewhat recovered, it again swam several times round the tank, again came into collision with the end of the tank, turned over, and died.’

      Nor was the indignity over, for the body was taken out of the tank and exhibited to the public the next day. A plaster cast was made, and a necropsy performed by eminent naturalists and physicians. They discovered that far from starving, the whale had a full stomach–but also highly congested lungs. The fact that the animal had been kept on open deck on its way over the Atlantic, and, rather than keeping it alive, the regular dousing it had received, had resulted in rapid evaporation between soakings, causing it to catch cold.

      The Westminster whale’s public demise prompted correspondence from persons in high places. Bishop Claughton of St Albans, a poet in his own right, complained that it was ‘the creature of which the Psalmist speaks as placed in its element by the Great Creator’, and it was not man’s right to take him out of it. William Flower of the Royal College of Surgeons–later to become the first director of the Natural History Museum–had attended the necropsy, and countered that the ‘supposed marks of ill-usage’ on its body ‘were the consequences of the eels in the tanks having after its death nibbled the edges of its fins’. Professor Flower claimed the entire process was justified for ‘the advantage to scientific and general knowledge to be gained’. But then, his own institution had benefited from the donation of the internal organs, which would ‘make very interesting preparations’.

      Back in New York, Barnum’s whales met with their predicted fate. Victims of equally inappropriate conditions, like fairground fish brought home in plastic bags, they too had died within days–only to be replaced by successive specimens until a fire destroyed the museum in 1865. Futile attempts were made to rescue the last beluga, until a compassionate fireman smashed the tank with a hook, ‘So the whale merely roasted to death instead of undergoing the distress of being poached.’

      Faced with this modern captive on Coney Island, I felt a mixture of fascination and pity. It was as out of place as a tiger in a Manhattan apartment. The animal ought to have been swimming free in Arctic waters. Instead its pure white skin was soiled by its civic capture, as if the green algæ that covered the prismatic glass had contaminated it, too. It was struck dumb by the silence of that afternoon, and all the afternoons that stretched ahead. The beluga is the most vocal of all whales, known by sailors as the canary of the sea; here it was as caged as any tame songbird. As it hung there, this shrouded convict imprisoned for someone else’s sins, I dared to touch it through the thick glass, as if something might pass between us. I waited for it to raise a flipper. But it didn’t, so I turned away, unable to take its stare any longer.

      After years living in London, the city had begun to press down on me. I sometimes felt as if all the sky were sea, and we citizens mere bottom-feeders, held down by its great pressure as we moved around the caverns and boulders of the streets. I lived on the borders of the City, within sight of the Docklands; over the years I watched the replicating skyscrapers rise up from the London clay like crystal stalagmites in a schoolboy’s jam-jar experiment. At night I would dream that the tower block in which I lived was surrounded by water, inundated by the expected flood; that from my ninth-floor eyrie I could look down to see whales and sharks circling below. In other dreams, I saw a stone-walled harbour and a mass of marine animals caught within it, squirming and writhing to get out.

      A place that had represented all my youthful aspirations now felt like a viral infection; and although, like a dose of malaria, I would never quite shake it, I was gradually, incrementally, leaving my old life behind. With the death of my father, and my mother living alone, I found myself spending more time back south. It was a kind of consolation, for grief and loss, for the severing of other emotional ties. I felt set adrift, anchorless–yet also a kind of convergence, a symmetry. It was the comfort of the old, but I saw it anew.

      I replaced the treeless view from my ninth-floor flat with daily visits to the shore; the hard edges of the city with unconfined green and blue; stalking flea-bitten pigeons with black and white oystercatchers picking their way along the beach at low tide. My eyes stretched with the relief you feel when you look out over to the horizon from a train window, rather than onto the foreshortened visions of the street. Instead of superstitiously picking up pennies from the street, I combed the beach for stones with holes guaranteed to ward off witches, creating miniature avalanches as they piled up on my dressing table back home. And I stood looking out to sea, watching transatlantic ships sail by like Fitzgerald’s boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, waiting for a future that might never come, like the man who fell to earth. As consoling as the water was, it sometimes served only to make me restless in my suburban exile.

      Five years after my first visit to America, I took a train to Boston from New York’s Penn Station. Having bought a map of New England from the bookstall, I began to trace my route along the coast. The name itself–a New England–seemed romantic, optimistic; both familiar and strange at the same time. The names on the map evoked the country I had left behind–Manchester, Norwich, Warwick–as Manhattan gave way to sharp sun and wide beaches and picnicking families, apparently unaware of the train hurtling past behind them. At the end of the line, I walked down to the harbour and boarded the ferry, watching Boston recede in a sequence of small islands, to the toll of a bell fixed to a buoy:

      fuller of dirges for the past, than of monitions for the future; and no one can give ear to it, without thinking of the sailors who sleep far beneath it at the bottom of the deep.

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