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. Humans have found uses for almost every part of the whale’s body: baleen from its mouth was used wherever a combination of strength and flexibility was required, in umbrellas, hats, suspenders, canes, fishing rods, shoe-horns, mattresses and, most famously, in corsetry, while whale oil illuminated millions of homes, and later lubricated an increasingly mechanised manufacturing society.

Few animals have been so regularly and routinely dissected while revealing so few of its secrets. Herman Melville wrote that ‘the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.’ Dolin points out that this statement is as true today as it was 150 years ago. The oil for which the sperm whale was primarily hunted, located in a vast tank in its head, remains a puzzle.