Read Online Leviathan or The Whale by Philip Hoare - Free Book Online

In all these pictures of whales–in paint, in teeth, in wood, in sheet-iron, in stone, in mountains, in stars–never was the distance between description and actuality so great. Never have words and pictures failed us so comprehensively.
    There is something about the sperm whale that leads me on, something that, even now, I find it hard to describe. No matter how many pictures I might see, I cannot quite comprehend it. No matter how many times I might try to sketch it, its shape seems to elude me. None the less, my curiosity remains, for all Ishmael’s caution. And as he lingers in New Bedford’s cobbled streets, calling into Carter’s for some last-minute apparel before his long journey ahead–even as he readies himself for his own close encounter–my fitful and increasingly dubious guide seems to challenge me to discover why ‘above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life’.

III
The Sperm Whale

    I know him not, and never will.

    The Tail,
Moby-Dick

    In some medieval past, someone pierced the head of the whale, releasing the waxy oil that filled it. As it hit the cool northern air, this hot, precious liquid became cloudy, looking for all the world like semen. Thus men came to believe that the leviathan carried its seed in its head. It may be saddled with an inelegant, even improper name, but it is also an entirely apt title, for the sperm whale is the seminal whale: the whale before all others, the emperor of whales, his imperial cetacean majesty, a whale of inherent, regal power. It fulfils our every expectation of the whale. Think of a whale, and a sperm whale swims into your head. Ask a child to draw a whale, and he will trace out a sperm whale, riding high on the sea.
    But the sperm whale also bears the legacy of our sins; an animal whose life came to be written only because it was taken; a whale so wreathed in superlatives and impossibilities that if no one had ever seen it, we would hardly believe that it existed–and even then, we might not be too sure. Only such a creature could lend Melville’s book its power: after all,
Moby-Dick
could hardly have been written about a butterfly.
    Scientifically, it is in a family of its own. Sperm whales–classified
Physeter macrocephalus
or ‘big-headed blower’ by Linnæus, the father of taxonomy, in 1758, but commonly called cachalots–are the most ancient whales, the only remaining members of the Physeteridæ which evolved twenty-three million years ago and numbered twenty genera in the Pliocene and Miocene. (In fact, Linnæus at first identified four species:
Physeter macrocephalus, P. catodon, P. microps
and
P. tursio
, but all are now known as one, with the pygmy and dwarf sperms–
Kogia breviceps
and
K. sima
–recognized as a separate family, Kogiidæ.) Relics of prehistory, they are, in one scientist’s words, ‘victims of geologic time…held in the rubbery bindings of [their] own gigantic skin’. Their nearest relation on land is the hippopotamus, although with their grey wrinkledness, small eyes and ivory teeth, they remind me more of elephants.
    The sperm whale remains a class apart. Its shape itself seems somehow unformed, inchoate, as though something were missing–a pair of flippers or a fin. It is an unlikely outline for any animal, still less for the world’s largest predator. To Ishmael, the whale was the ominous embodiment of ‘half-formed fœtal suggestions of supernatural agencies’. Now it is seen as a ‘generally benign and vulnerable creature’; from a fearful foe it has become a placid, gentle giant of the seas. The distance between these two notions is the distance between myth and reality, between legend and science, between human history and natural history. It is a mark of its magical nature–and a symbol of the fate of all cetaceans–that the sperm whale has achieved such a transformation, from wilful dæmon to fragile survivor.
    Physeter macrocephalus
may have been around for millennia, but we have really only