Leviathan. Philip Hoare

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      LEVIATHAN

      or,

       The Whale

      

      

      Philip Hoare

      

      

      

Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Fourth Estate

      Copyright © Philip Hoare 2008

      

      Philip Hoare asserts the moral right o be identified as the author of this work

      

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      

      HarperColinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007230143

      Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007340910 Version: 2017-01-04

       For Theresa

       Contents

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Prologue

       I Soundings

       II The Passage Out

       III The Sperm Whale

       IV A Filthy Enactment

       V Far Away Land

       VI Sealed Orders

       VII The Divine Magnet

       VIII Very Like a Whale

       IX The Correct Use of Whales

       X The Whiteness of the Whale

       XI The Melancholy Whale

       XII A Cold War for the Whale

       XIII The Whale Watch

       XIV The Ends of the Earth

       XV The Chase

       Keep Reading

       Bibliography

       Picture Credits

       Acknowledgements

       Index

       Also by Philip Hoare

       About the Publisher

      There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, on the deep Stretch’d like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.

       John Milton, Paradise Lost, quoted in title page to the first, English edition of Moby-Dick

       Prologue

      For thou didst cast me into the deep,

      Into the heart of the seas, And the flood was round about me; All thy waves and billows passed over me.

      Jonah 2:3

      Perhaps it is because I was nearly born underwater.

      A day or so before my mother was due to give birth to me, she and my father visited Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, where they were taken on a tour of a submarine. As she climbed down into its interior, my mother began to feel labour pains. For a moment, it seemed as though I was about to appear below the waterline; but it was back in our Victorian semi-detached house in Southampton, with its servants’ bell-pulls still in place and its dark teak staircase turning on itself, that I was born.

      I have always been afraid of deep water. Even bathtime had its terrors for me (although I was by no means a timid child) when I thought of the stories my mother told of her own childhood, and how my grandfather had painted a whale on the outside of their enamel bathtub. It was an image bound up in other childish fears and fascinations, ready to emerge out of the depths like the giant squid in the film of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with its bug-eyed Nautilus, Kirk Douglas’s tousled blond locks and stripy T-shirt, and its futuristic divers