Leviathan. Philip Hoare

help but agree with Ishmael: this calcium scaffolding can hardly indicate the true shape of the animal. One might tell the form of a human being from its bones, but who could imagine the reality of this creature?

      As in death the enigmatic sperm whale gives few of its secrets away, so in life it sees us from another angle. Its eyes are so positioned as to prevent the animal from seeing straight ahead (although their siting on its wedge-shaped head, at the point where it narrows down to the jaw, is such that a whale can see below itself in stereoscope–presumably a useful tactic in hunting–and will swim upside-down to scrutinize objects above and, perhaps, to feed on them). For most of its life the whale must regard the world in two halves, Ishmael deduces; its head gets in the way, ‘while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him’. It seems odd that such a powerful creature should be so benighted. This blindness is also the reason, says Ishmael, for the sperm whale’s ‘timidity and liability to queer frights’. A ‘gallied’ animal would sound deep into the ocean, beyond the reach of man and his harpoons.

      In such a silent flight, the sperm whale could not be outdistanced. More than any other marine mammal, it is a master of the sea. Using its muscle-bound tail, it can power its way thousands of feet below, its paddle-shaped flippers tucked into its flanks as neatly as an aeroplane’s undercarriage. And once below, it can stay down for up to two hours. To achieve this feat, a whale must spend much of its time breathing at the surface–its ‘spoutings out’, as the sailors called them–taking some sixty to seventy breaths in ten or eleven minutes.

      …the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.

      The Fountain, Moby-Dick

      Whereas humans inefficiently hold their breath to dive, whales supercharge their oxygen-carrying hæmoglobin blood cells before sounding, often in exactly the same spot at which they surfaced, perhaps to be sure of their survey of the food below. On these stately travels into the deep, they are accompanied by remora, sickly grey attendants suckered to their wrinkled flanks like imps; ‘fish, to be sure, but not quite proper fish’, they are parasites lacking individual motion, dependent on their hosts without whom they would flop to the ocean floor. Even more dæmonic are the lampreys, ‘wriggling, yard-long, slimy brown creatures that repel even the zoologist’. These attach themselves to the whales with rasping mouths, leaving love-bite scars on their huge but helpless victims.

      Commonly, a sperm whale will dive between three hundred and eight hundred metres, following a U-shaped trajectory. Once it has reached its chosen depth, it will swim horizontally for up to three kilometres, presumably foraging. Occasionally, the whale will dive even deeper. Dead sperm whales have been found entangled in underwater cables 1,134 metres down–although that figure does not measure the drowning agony of the whale, its jaw caught in the insulated wire.

      In 1884, a cable-repairing steamship operating off South America pulled up a cable in which a dying whale was trapped, its entrails spilling out; the wire itself was found to be bitten in six places. In another insight gained at mortal expense, a sperm whale caught south of Durban in South Africa in 1969 was found with the remains of two Scymodon sharks in its belly. Since such fish are bottom dwellers feeding at three thousand metres, this was proof of the whales’ extraordinary diving abilities. Much of what we know about sperm whales was discovered by those whose primary interest was to kill them. Whales died that men might describe them.

      Nor are they easily replenished. The sperm whale has the lowest reproductive rate of any mammal–females produce single calves only once every four to six years. It is also the most sexually dimorphic cetacean: males may be twice the size of females. The sexes live apart for most of their lives, the males growing larger and all the more attractive to their potential, if fleeting, partners. This also has the benefit of maintaining the supremacy of their species: the vast distances they travel ensure that the global population of sperm whales is surprisingly genetically similar.

      Moving south to breed, males fight for the females’ favours. The distorted jaws–some even tied in knots; Moby Dick’s own mandible is described as sickle-shaped as it scythes off Ahab’s leg–that Beale saw are evidence of these ferocious but short-lived battles, as are teeth marks on the animals’ heads, backs and bellies. Although they have no territory to defend like rutting stags, whales will take bites out of each other’s blubber, ramming one another with pugnacious foreheads which in males become almost obscenely extended.

      Successful suitors mate belly to belly, with females underneath–more hominum, in Ishmael’s discreet words. Gestation lasts fifteen months; calves are nursed for at least two years, sometimes communally, and thirteen-year-olds have been known still to suckle. ‘The milk is very sweet and rich,’ says Ishmael; ‘it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.’ Lacking lips, calves take the milk into the side of their mouths as it is squirted from their mothers’ teats, a technique first identified by the surgeon Sir William Wilde, father of Oscar.

      Sperm whales have the most complex social structure of any animal other than man. Like other toothed whales, they travel together, separated by sexual maturity into reproductive and bachelor groups. Females and immature whales swim together in groups of twenty to thirty, dispersed over a wide area; they prefer warmer waters, possibly because fewer killer whales–their only natural predators–are found at such latitudes. Communal care confirms these extended bonds: when a mother dives for food, she will leave her calf–which cannot yet follow her–in the care of other females or juvenile males in a cetacean crèche. Large males have been seen gently carrying calves in their mouths, although the fact that they simultaneously exhibit extended penises probably means that this has more to do with mating than nursing.

      In their teens and twenties, young males join bachelor groups, as though entering a rite of passage. They attain maturity at nineteen (females become sexually mature as early as seven years old), but do not mate until their twenties. They travel further in search of prey; adult males roam more than forty degrees latitude north or south, forming loose concentrations spread over two hundred miles or more. Eventually these groups reduce in size until, in middle age, the males become solitary, roving as far as sub-polar seas to find new feeding grounds before returning to warmer waters to mate.

      In the interests of order, the whalers subdivided their subjects, applying human terms of trade and organization to marine mammals:

      Pods, or gams: up to twenty whales

      Schools, or shoals: twenty to fifty whales Herds, or bodies: fifty whales, or more

      Single bulls were schoolmasters, groups of females were harems, and young males, bachelor schools of ‘forty-barrel bulls’. Ishmael gives us a memorable description of a nursery into which the Pequod sails. He looks down through limpid waters, to where

      another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales…and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast…even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight.

      None of this, however, prevents the crew from laying into the innocent scene. It is one of the cruellest aspects of its historical fate that this most hunted of whales is built for a long life, a longevity indicated by the slow beating of its huge heart at ten times a minute; a shrew, whose heart beats one thousand times in a minute, lives for just a year. It is as if the animal’s life history had been slowed down by virtue of the millions of years its species has existed. At forty-five, a sperm whale is middle-aged, and has achieved its optimum size; like a human, it enters old age in its seventies. Females live into their eighties and perhaps to one hundred years or more, although none is known to have given birth after their forties. Rather, these matriarchs assist other females ‘in ways we do not yet understand’, as Hal Whitehead, one of the great modern experts on sperm whales, says. He calls these older females ‘sages’, raising images of elderly, grey-haired grandmothers, teaching their sons and daughters how to raise their children and passing on memories of good feeding grounds.

      Given their slow breeding and the centuries of hunting they have endured, it is a testament