Our relations with cetaceans have always been charged with danger and delight, represented by the extremes of the Book of Revelation’s ‘beast out of the sea’, and the frescoed dolphin-riders of Pompeii. Rare, huge, and unknowable, whales have traditionally been omens, or metaphors for improbability — ‘very like a whale’, Hamlet chaffs the cloud-watching Polonius. They were long chased by daring Basques, Icelanders and Inuit, and prized whenever they washed up — they were declared ‘Fishes Royal’ by Edward II — but then they met 18th-century modernity.
Soon they were harried almost to extinction by fleets from New England as well as old, France, Holland and Norway, seeking baleen for corsets and chimney-brushes, oil to light the lamps of the Age of Reason, and ambergris to fix its perfumes. Taxonomised by Linnaeus in 1758, the sperm whale came increasingly to occidental attentions, its great head a-swim with spermaceti, its skin bearing scars of suckers of Kraken-like giant squid bested in black gulfs.
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