Wednesday 1 July 2009

very like a whale


I wonder if I have mentioned at all that I loved with a fiery passion Philip Hoare's Leviathan? It won the Samuel Johnson prize last night. This reminded me that it has been AGES since I told any whale stories. What must you think of me?

The Williams Scoresby. Dad was a great whale captain, who got close to the North-West Passage, who devised the enclosed crow's nest and was satirised by Melville as 'Captain Sleet', and who often wrote his ship's log in verse, viz.
So now the Western ice we leave
And pleasant Gales we do receive.

He kept a pet polar bear which he walked through Whitby, and retired in 1823, regarding man's capture of whales by men, 'when their relative proportions are considered, is a result truly wonderful.' He had a very big house and on 28 April 1829, aged 69, he shot himself through the heart. No one knows why.

His son was navy boy, had sailed with his dad, and was also an Edinburgh scientist who met Joseph Banks. He whaled to finance his scientific interests, and his book, An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery (1820) was one of the monumental works of early cetology. It was a major source for Melville, who fisctionalised him as the various authorities Zogranda, Fogo von Slack, Dr Snodhead and Captain Sleet (and people say Melville can't do comedy).


I will leave you with a fact that Scoresby fiddled around with: he found buried spear heads in whales and said they were the sort of weapons used by Esquimaux a century earlier. Modern science came to terms with this much, much later. Some large male bowheads, it transpires, have been caught in their late hundreds, and one at 211.*

There are probably older ones. As Hoare writes: It is 'an exquisite revenge: born before Melville, the whales have outlived their pursuers.' Phyrric, though.

*Dr Jeffrey L Bada of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California ages whales by measuring changes in the aspartic acid levels in their eyes. Don't do this with your friends or pets, even if you suspect they are lying to you.

1 comment:

Holly said...

Esquimaux

Please can we only have that spelling from now on?