Inscrutable lords of the deep

The sperm whale, more than any other whale, has captured the public’s imagination, to the point that when the average person envisions a whale, it is the sperm whale that they most often see.

As a child I definitely saw, in my mind’s eye, the whale that swallowed Jonah as a sperm whale (although I may have conflated this monster with the beast that swallowed Disney’s Pinocchio). Moby Dick was a sperm whale. The huge head, the low, long, tooth-studded jaw, the oddly placed eye, the fountainous blowhole, the massive flukes, and the legendary power of the sperm whale (the only whale known to have deliberately sunk ships) all combine to make it, as Dolin puts it, ‘the whale’s whale’.

It is rare that a factual book can answer pretty much every question one could pose about its subject and still leave the reader keenly aware of its abiding mystery. At up to 60 feet in length, weighing up to 50 tons, the sperm whale is a colossal creature; its brain is the largest, its skin the thickest of any animal.