Thar she blows! Reading, viewing, and thinking about whales
In which I talk about some Really Big Bones, recommend a terrific whale-related historical novel, and share a tall tale about whaling.
Close encounters of the bony kind
Last month I went to Edinburgh. I pored over museum and gallery exhibits, wearing out my little legs on the giant hill on which the city perches. One of the many thought-provoking objects in the National Museum of Scotland (free entry!) was this pair of lower jaw bones from a sperm whale.
In 1843, the crew of the whaling ship Woodlark, commissioned by the University of Edinburgh to find them some jaw bones, killed a whale off the Banda Islands (Indonesia). The bones they collected are perhaps six meters long.
On the return voyage, the whalers created scrimshaw: carvings on marine animal ivory or bone. On one bone is an image of a spouting whale below a cloud containing flags and whaling kit (harpoon, oars, swordly things):
Another scene records the capture: April 7, 1843, in the Banda Islands. In the background is a blurping volcano:
The Woodstock, captained by a certain William Hardie, “engaged in the capture of a sperm whale in a school of sperm whales” - dangerous stuff. You can just make out (on the reflection-ridden photo) a couple of whales emerging from the water. One of them, in the centre of the image, has begun to spout.
These bones are thought to be the largest known examples of scrimshaw art. Seeing the capture of an animal documented on its own remnants was a decidedly weird experience.
Takes and recs: Whaling, by Nathan Munday
This spring I attended my first literary festival - the Hay Festival, in Powys, in the Welsh Marches (the border region between England and Wales). It was thrilling, spell-binding, well organized and a little overwhelming. There were talks from at least 9am until well into the evening; tents were everywhere, with multiple authors giving talks simultanously; and a gigantic food hall tented local-ish picnic food providers. Live recordings of BBC radio shows took place in the BBC tent.
One of the events I attended was Welsh writer and trainee Christian minister Nathan Munday’s book talk about his first novel, Whaling (Seren Books, 2023).
Munday talked with Horatio Clare, another Welsh writer who had taught him in a creative writing class. As Clare told the story, Munday had written some early draft pages of Whaling in his very class. Clare had provided feedback, and suggested that Munday change a word, which he did; and this was now the worst word in the book.
At this point, Clare handed over to Munday to do a reading - of the very pages containing the alleged worst word, much to Munday’s chagrin and the audience’s amusement. We were invited to guess which word was Clare’s replacement.
The reading - the book’s first page and a bit - was electrifying. I thought I heard the ersatz word. When Munday told us the answer, I turned out to be right. When he shared the original word, the audience gave a soft, collective moan: part appreciation, part sorrow. In the context of his poetic, captivating reading, we were moved by the poetic, captivating word he had swapped out for something normaller. (See what I did there?)
No spoilers. You’ll have to see if you can guess the word yourself. Let’s see if I can sell you the book.
Whaling was inspired by an accidental day trip. As Munday told it, he had been at an academic conference in Boston, Massachusetts, and headed to Nantucket Island on a spare day. He visited the Nantucket Whaling Museum, where a tiny label piqued his interest.
In 1792, fifteen Nantucket whalers and their families (Quakers who had refused to fight for either side in the American War of Independence) had upped sticks and moved to Milford Haven, Wales.
To Munday, this actually meant something: a seaside town in west Wales. And he could not get this whalers’ migration out of his mind. Why had they moved? What happened next?
I forget whether the spine of the story was something Munday invented or whether it is part of the historical record, but it’s awesome either way: the arrival of the whalers was foretold (as the Welsh villagers came to believe) by an omen: a beached whale.
Equipped with a few historical details (but not too much, for fear they would stifle his writing), Munday spent the early months of COVID-19 brainstorming the story on postcards, trying to tell it from multiple points of view. The story unfolds around, beside, and in a whale that rots as you read.
What Munday has written is a breathtakingly original, beautifully poetic thriller that asks the reader to grapple with hard truths about how people treat one another, and why. His mission as a trainee minister informed the book’s message. He put it beautifully at Hay: “We are dilapidated mansions… there is such potential in humanity, but we take the wrong paths.”
Whaling is a story of immigration and fear, and about how those with power and platform can rile up a community into performing the most abominable acts. It is also a story of a whale, and of the smallness of humans in the world of the whale. We catch but the tiniest, basest glimmer of the whale’s-eye view of the world.
Don’t walk, run to the bookstore and order your copy now!
My best tall whale tale
I too have a whaling museum tale. This took place in summer 2013, one of the most idyllic, optimistic summers of my short little life. I was a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, a centre for the study of the history and culture of the early Americas. I met a bunch of fun scholars. Some of us went off on a day trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
We must have been the slowest, most earnest visitors in a while. One of docents took a shine to us, and came over to talk. He looked a bit like a whaler himself: wiry and weather-beaten.
His grandfather had been a whaler sailing out from Nantucket Island, back in the 1920s when everything was made of parts of the whale: soap, lamp oil, corsets (as I remember it). And when being a whale man was the coolest thing you could do…. there were no cats on Nantucket.
Could we guess why?
No, we couldn’t.
Apparently the reason there were no cats on Nantucket Island was that all the little kids would practise their harpooning on them.
Don’t blame me; I’m just repeatin’ what I ‘eard.
Notes, references, and links
I wrote an essay containing whales - Here Be Black Holes, in Aeon Magazine.
A bit more on the jaw bones in an issue of The Scotsman, from 2010.
Nathan Munday, Whaling (Seren Books, 2023).
The Hay Festival has its own digital subscription platform: the Hay Player. A YEAR’S subscription to masses of audio and video recordings is 15 GBP. And there are now several Hay festivals around the world!
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).