Bowhead Whales Carrying History

A bowhead whale spyhops off the coast of western Sea of Okhotsk - Photo by Olga Shpak

A bowhead whale is a dark-colored whale without a dorsal fin. It can grow 14 to 18 m (46 to 59 ft) in length and can weigh from 75 to 100 tonnes. The bowhead has the largest mouth of any animal, but is considered to be the Arctic's gentle giant.

They live entirely in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters, and do not migrate like other whales to low latitude waters to feed or reproduce. They are loners and are rarely seen in pods with other whales.

I read that in some mythologies whales were considered ancient wanderers who carried with them the history of the world. Bowhead whales are among the heaviest animals on Earth, second only to the blue whale.

The bowhead was also known as the Greenland right whale or Arctic whale and American whalemen called them the steeple-top, polar whale, or Russian whale.

Bowhead whales were killed in such large numbers by the American commercial whaling ships from 1848 to 1915 that only about 1000 of them remained. Thanks to protections for the endangered species, there are about 14,000 of the mammals in the Alaskan waters of the Arctic.

Bowhead whales have a huge skull and the name comes from the shape of the jaw, which resembles an archer’s bow. It can be more than 16 feet (5 m) long and makes up 30-40% of their total body length. They can use their skull to bust through thick ice. The Arctic waters are survivable because of their 17-19 inch (43-50 cm) thick blubber layer, which is the thickest of any whale species.

Instead of teeth, bowheads have about 350 large baleen plates that filter seawater allowing them to eat small animals, including zooplankton.

A recent discovery of a 200 year-old stone harpoon point in a whale confirms that some bowheads alive today may have been pursued by whale ships like the one that carried Herman Melville and could be older than the real-life whale that inspired him to write Moby Dick.

18th century engraving showing Dutch whalers hunting bowhead whales in the Arctic

More at www.smithsonianmag.com

The Whale

THE whale is the sperm whale. The Moby Dick whale.

But the leviathan of this post is The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea, a book by Philip Hoare.

Hoare goes to Nantucket, a Melville place, and checks in with Poe, Hawthorne and Thoreau. He consults the writing of Thomas Beale, the foremost authority on whales in the early 19th century. Beale influenced others - even the whaling paintings of Turner derive which inspired Melville who was new to writing.

Hoare finds whale information like Melville found and wrote about in those Moby Dick inter-chapters:

During World War II, whales were bombed from above because they were misidentified as enemy submarines. They were also hunted by Allied and Axis ships alike for meat and oil.

When John F. Kennedy was buried, in his coffin was a whale tooth. It was an intended Christmas gift, placed there by his wife. Hoare writes: "It was a potent act, the king of Camelot interred with the talisman of a heroic age."

The book is described as "part memoir, part nature writing and part literary criticism, the book takes readers around the world for an exhaustive look at the mysterious mammal."

Amazon.com Review

After reading Moby Dick, author Phillip Hoare was so captivated by the subject that he spent years trying to fathom the planet’s most enormous and enigmatic of creatures. Hoare's admitted mania for whales led him to write Leviathan, or the Whale—which was awarded the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for nonfiction. The book has finally migrated to this side of the Atlantic under a new title, The Whale. Hoare is not a scientist, but rather a biographer whose subjects have tended toward highbrow figures like Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde. In approaching cetaceans, the author’s non-scientific background works to great advantage. Similar to Melville, Hoare has captured a wide range of historical and scientific facts about whales, but has chosen to present them through an extremely powerful instrument--the literary imagination. The result is a deeply moving and thought-provoking biography of the planet’s toughest, yet most vulnerable of prehistoric survivors. The Whale takes us well beyond the limits of what we can see, hear or otherwise objectively "know" about whales, and offers a much more vivid sense of their true magnitude. --Lauren Nemroff

A "trailer" by Phillip Hoare about the search for Moby Dick.