New Bedford’s museum is compendious; almost every known image of the whale is represented here. Most splendid of all is Esaias van de Velde’s Whale Beached between Scheveningen and Katwijk, with elegant sightseers of 1617, which shows just one in a series of sperm whales thrown upon the coast of the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such strandings were emblems of the country’s fortunes at a time of flux, and in scenes of composed disaster they were replicated in engravings and even on Delft plates and tiles. They were narratives of the Dutch Golden Age–and the threats to it–and in one extravagant and remarkably accurate image, Jan Sanredam depicts a sixty-foot-long sperm whale washed up at Beverwijk on 19 December 1601.
The whale lies between land and sea; its physicality is startling, almost overwhelming. Arranged along the length of its belly are finely dressed visitors in doublets and ruffs–among them, the artist himself, seen in the foreground with his assistant holding up his cape as a screen while his master sketches. As they strike poses or perch on horseback, there is a strange, allegorical distance between them and the whale, as if they existed entirely in other dimensions. Here a whale, there the people.
Even the dogs stare.
The most prominent figure at the centre of the picture–and to whom it is dedicated–is the beplumed Prince Ernest, Count of Nassau. He was hero of the recent war against Spain, yet he uses a handkerchief to protect his aristocratic nose from the stench. Others clamber onto the whale itself; one officer plunges his sabre into its spout hole.
They crawl like ants, these humans, over and around the ravished animal. Behind its massive but now impotent tail, over which a rope has already been thrown, carriages convey more silk-clad noblemen, and tents have been set up to cater for the crowds which appear to be arriving in droves. Had it been stranded across the English Channel, this creature would have been the property of the Virgin Queen; Elizabeth I was fond of whale meat. Here in Holland, it was the subject of artists who sought to capture the strange mortality of such natural phenomena. In 1528 Albrecht Dürer, who was nearly shipwrecked, and subsequently suffered a fever which precipitated his early death when trying to reach a stranded whale ‘much more than 100 fathoms long’ in Zealand, reported that the local population were concerned by ‘the great stink, for it is so large that they say it could not be cut into pieces and the blubber boiled down in half a year’. Such incidents seemed harbingers of death: the Scheveningen whale took four days to die, at which point its bowels exploded, fatally infecting its audience.
Full of potent signs and wonders, Sanredam’s picture is framed with the apocalyptic events foretold by the coming of the leviathan. A pair of cherubs supports a cartouche containing a recent earthquake, Terra mortus. On either side, we see eclipses of the moon and sun, themselves flanked by halves of the severed whale, its future fate. Meanwhile Father Time looks down from one corner, and a winged Angel of Death aims his bow from the other, symbol of the plague that had recently ravaged Amsterdam. In a picture so rich in imagery, it is notable how one’s attention is drawn to the animal’s extended penis. Like a sixteenth-century codpiece, it makes a statement of virility, or its lack; its flaccidity is a counterpoint to the prince’s upright plume, and the whale’s name. From a zoologist’s point of view, however, it is proof that only bull sperm whales venture this far north.
New Bedford’s museum is full of whales as seen by men. Whales spouting blood as sailors ride them like jockeys. Whales belly-up, gasping as harpoons and lances are teased into their undersides. Whales painted in Hollywood style, apparently triumphant. What would Ishmael say if, while awaiting his whaling passage, he decided to loiter a little longer in the port–say, a hundred and fifty years or so–and paid his seven dollars at the cash till to cast a critical eye over this collection?
In the chapter entitled ‘Of The Monstrous Pictures of Whales’, our stern narrator takes issue with such ‘curious imaginary portraits’. He lays the blame with the ancients as the ‘primal source of all those pictorial delusions’; but the worst offender of his day was Frédéric Cuvier, brother of Baron Cuvier, the distinguished French scientist. His Sperm Whale of 1836 was, as Ishmael put it bluntly, ‘a squash’. It was a question of attribution. Advised by the French Academy that there were no fewer than fourteen species of sperm whale, artists duly delivered images more like fashion plates of Directoire dandies, whales corseted and collared à la mode, sleek with fish tails, or with disproportioned bellies and misplaced eyes.
What did whales really look like? Ishmael acknowledges that there are good reasons for such glaring errors. These animals were seen in their entirety only when beached, he notes, and ‘the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait…So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.’ The remarkable thing about his statements–which are never less than remarkable–is that they still hold true. Cetaceans remain unfathomable. The whale would stay ‘unpainted to the last’,
And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by doing so, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
Similarly, turning the pages of old books, whaling prints resemble Renaissance masters, only with something fatally wrong: not angels announcing virgin births, or merchants’ wives sitting calmly in tiled parlours, but the frenzied struggle of a gigantic animal in its death throes. The stillness of such images seems to accentuate their strangeness, to widen the gap between what they are, and what they seek to portray. 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’.
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