Fathoms: The World in the Whale

by Rebecca Giggs

between 1530 and 1610, Basque whalers hauled more than forty thousand right whales (many of them slow-swimming pregnant females), decimating the whales’ shoreside populations and emptying their nursery waters.

Idioms and jokes that make slender sense today—How are you? Not as good as the priests!—flew ear to mouth, mouth to ear, even, inexplicably, in dialects where “priest” was an alien idea.

Shoreline whaling had been seasonal, but pelagic whaling roved between whale species, picking up migratory whales at all stages of their journeying: the industry could run down the coast and the calendar (a grace note of the restlessness that would come to characterize all capital in centuries to come).

Pelagic whaling was America’s fifth largest industry, employing some seventy thousand whalemen annually, with more than seven hundred vessels at sea on multiyear voyages (a metalsmith in New Bedford made and sold on average 1,463 new harpoon heads each year). One in six American whalers were recorded as African American.

CONNECT–I–CUT rolls under their touch and they inquire of the word, its feeling as a sensation; a texture, a sculpture, an animacy. So Connecticut makes landfall soundlessly, dressed in the disguise of its anglicization, having crossed an earlier border from Algonquian where once it was “Quinnehtukqut” (meaning “beside a long tidal river”). A touchstone, a dashed track.

By 1856, the price of whale oil had hit $1.77 US dollars (USD) per gallon. Whalers spoke of sperm whales traveling the oceans in veins, like gold. A fitting metaphor, not only because whales were a precious lode, but also as the animals were proving to be a finite resource in the way of a mineral deposit.

Whales occupied expanding regions of whalelessness. If the animals knew it, or sensed it, it might have felt like falling into an abyss, but without falling at all.

People of the nineteenth century—across an array of classes, professions, and life stages—dressed in, slept, and dreamed on the stuff of whales; they cooked with, played with, desired with, and made art from, looked through, healed with, explored via, were disciplined by, disciplined with, and made divinations, out of whales.

Spermaceti, a sort of natural wax, resembles solidified coconut cream. A high-grade, long-burning, and noncorrosive substance, spermaceti was prized for use in industrial hardware (looms, trains, guns) and, most particularly, as an illuminant.

Yankee whalers pioneered on-deck processing of dead whales.

Unprofitable scraps of blubber, skin, and tissue—to the workers known as “kreng”—were fed into the flames beneath the try-pots, so that a dead whale fueled its own dismantling.

It took thirty-six hours to butcher a whale—a mephitic, spattering task. On average, each humpback yielded thirty-seven gallons of stable oil, rich in triglycerides.

There was added work to be done excavating the heads of sperm whales for liquid spermaceti, which turned opaque, as if by magic, when it was exposed to the air.

Baleens are the bristly combs some whales have in place of teeth (envision a mustache inside your upper lip). Pliable as fingernails when ripped fresh from a whale, the baleens—also colloquially known as “whalebone” (one word, distinct from a whale’s skeleton)—dried stiff and could be split or remolded by steaming or soaking in hot water.

Persistent beauty standards—the flummoxing hourglass ideal for women’s bodies—may have been reinforced via societal duress, but the shape was obtained via the strictures of baleen: whale-buttressed garments, compressing women’s rib cages to a cinch. That we still have this body form as an archetype in culture is a legacy of whaling; the shrinking of the feminized figure at its waistline happened in lockstep with the vanishing of whales.

Whale valentines. And when these women undressed at the end of the day and were released from the clenching columns of their fashion, when they peeled off any busk from the skin that reached from between their cleavage to above their navel: Did they then see there the red imprint of those engravings?

A few good bones might go to a piano company to supply white keys (voiceless in afterlife, whales nonetheless continued to resonate in a major chord).

Tales about being engulfed by whales are, by and large, morality tales. Salvation and redemption are their overriding themes.

Jonah is a prophet who rejects prophesy and flees his fate. He is commanded to foretell the ruin of Nineveh (a great Assyrian city, fallen into renowned wickedness) but fears that, upon hearing of the prediction, the Ninevites will repent and his God will forgive them, thereby rendering the prophecy false.

Jonah ends up in the ocean, where he is consumed by “a great fish,” in the belly of which he survives, praying for deliverance even at the cost of being branded a false prophet. Ultimately, what he bitterly fears does come to pass—having been released from the castigatory whale onto the shore, Jonah delivers his dire forecast, the Ninevites fast, pray, wear sackcloth, and sit in ashes, and then they are redeemed; Jonah is an object of satire. God’s punitive disaster never sweeps over Nineveh.

Anthropologists have speculated that the man was put inside the whale to call on powers remedying an illness; the interior of the whale, a place of healing. Professor of Indigenous Research, Dennis Foley, posits the man may not be in the whale but riding it, surfing the immense animal to shore for a feast, at a time when Eora tribes had begun to starve. In both interpretations—whale as hospital, whale as reprieve from hunger—the animal brings the possibility of renewal.

The Australian philosopher and ethicist Thom van Dooren has an idea I’ve long found compelling: that when animals die out, the cultural and ecological relationships that furnish their existence can be experienced as a kind of nonstop haunting.

Van Dooren is interested in the kinds of stamina that attend extinction and endangerment—how vulnerable animal species (he focuses on birds) don’t just disappear in a snap but continue to be revealed after their passing in different varieties of fortitude and mourning, both in human societies and in the live...

Dooren talks of “haunting” he means to refer to both physical and symbolic connections sustained after the vanishing of animals. The way, for example, the ornate shape of a blossom’s throat might have coevolved with the ribbon-length tongue of a pollinating bat that has since been killed off. The apparent senselessness and surplus-ness of that flower might then emanate a kind of strangeness. So long as such a feature doesn’t steer its proprietor into coextinction (so long as other pollinato...

that the too-muchness of the flower might point out a ...

Van Dooren also studies communities that have attributed a symbolic quality to an animal and how those cultural narratives are experienced when animal populations ebb, become rarer and perhaps more exotic, or when they are extinguished. Take the huia (not one of van Dooren’s subjects, but nonetheless illustrative): a red-cheeked wattlebird, favored by hatters and taxidermists in early twentieth-ce...

Mimicry of the huia’s call passed from human generation to generation, enclosed within a stalking ritual, despite the real huia’s perishing. So people continued to fill the fo...

An acoustic fossil: like the bra...

product discontinued since childhood, the imitative call accrues its mournful power from the extinguishment of the bird—though in the Maori tradition it isn’t clear whether the profundity of the huia’s sound derives from the memory of the living bird, or if its call ...

Perhaps whale dreams, without real whales to satisfy their inference, were received as dictates from the realms of the ancestral past instead of the animalic future.

The word is “defaunation.” “The loss of a place’s absolute animalness” is how the journalist Brooke Jarvis puts it, a depletion of abundance.

that across seventy-four Yankee voyages between 1846 and 1901, at least 5.3 million pounds of meat (other than whale meat) went into the bellies of whaling crews, metabolized for the ergs of energy needed to labor over killing more whales.

Whaling wasn’t simply an economic phenomena, dismembering whales into commodities, commodities into profits, and connecting people through trade. Whaling was also an ecological force. The killing of whales threaded together disparate organisms, picking up and relocating creatures over the sea that would otherwise have remained unconnected in their biomes.

One purpose a petroglyph serves is to dilate a person’s perspective outward, to consciousness of a bigger landscape and to relatedness between animals.

The inscrutability of the petroglyphs points not just to the depth of their historical provenance but to the cultural securities that surround the stories, embedded into the rock.

One underrepresented truth of the world: things that have been removed from the past exert their pressure on the present moment, just as much as the things that persist.

Yet from 1900 to 1999, an estimated three million cetaceans were killed and removed from the world’s oceans—more whales than had been hauled in all previous centuries.

Why did whaling, in fact, accelerate in the twentieth century?

After the war, the industry bifurcated more distinctly into whaling for meat and whaling for oil: the former was dominated by the Japanese, the latter by the USSR.

Whaling’s second wave entailed the exploitation of species that had, for the main, eluded whalers in earlier decades—blue, fin, and sei whales, as well as the small but quick minke.

Radar, masterminded during World War II, enabled whalers to identify their quarry from a range that was, if not outside the whales’ perception, then at a distance at which the ship’s noise had not yet spooked the animals.

Whale oil proved elemental to the glycerol used for nitroglycerine in explosive munitions in World War I, and was also used to stave off gangrenous trench foot. A single British battalion has been estimated to have gone through ten gallons of whale oil every day.

Whale oil also expanded into two cornerstone goods of working-class life: soap and margarine.

That some of the world’s largest animals should have melted into toast, or become iridescent bubbles to pop midair, seems an almost miraculous act of transubstantiation.

After World War II, whale products became paradoxically more personal and more stratospheric. The industry found niches in products like lipstick, perfume, and colored leather gloves. A hormone gland behind the whale’s brain, bioprospected by the pharmaceutical industry, became an active ingredient in drugs treating arthritis

General Motors used spermaceti in the transmission fluid of its vehicles up until 1973, when the US Endangered Species Act came into force.

After World War II, Japanese whaling came to represent an assertion of self-sufficiency.

The Japanese people were starving and crippled by vitamin deficiencies. Dished out to elementary and middle school children, whale meat became a symbol of the nation’s resilience. The Japanese hunted mostly minke and disavowed the electrified harpoon because it blistered and toughened the product. Whaling sustained the cultural logic of national recovery and has continued to be subsidized by the Japanese government to this day.

Soviet whaling did not commence until the 1930s, but surged after World War II and through the Cold War. The Soviets needed spermaceti for military programs because its synthetic replacements had been embargoed by Western governments. There was also a moderate appetite for whale meat in the USSR—but production was largely untethered from demand; the animating motivation was nationalistic.

Soviet officials, consistent with bristly Cold War posturing, were eager to build a maritime industry that exceeded the scale and prowess of other nations.