On Exmouth beach looking out to where the river meets the English Channel, Peter Riley tells me about the death of his mother. “It was lung cancer. She was a very healthy person; she’d been walking in the Lake District the previous month. Then, over the course of 10 days, I watched her die. I’d never seen a human do that before.” Riley steps over a rusty sewage pipe and stuffs his hands in his pockets. British beaches are perfectly miserable in autumn.
Riley’s mother came to the UK in 1978, fleeing her repressive Black Forest upbringing. In her new home, she cultivated an adopted accent pulled straight from the British sitcom, ’Allo ’Allo! “Right at the last moment she opened her eyes and said something. I don’t know what. Then she fell back . . . tried to get up one more time and then she finally died in my arms . . . Outside, right at the moment of death, the bird feeder collapsed.”
A few weeks earlier, Riley had seen something lying on the pavement, a little brooch in the shape of a humpback whale. He picked it up and put it in his wallet. The next morning his mum called to say she was feeling unwell. After her death, Riley took up a post at the University of Exeter, where his students know him as Dr Peter Riley, senior lecturer in American literature specialising in Herman Melville and 19th-century poetry. But I know him differently. To me, Riley has become a guide, with whom I share a peculiar, burgeoning curiosity.
It all started last summer when I spoke to a marine biologist, hoping to cover a mass stranding of about 50 pilot whales in Scotland. Apparently, one of them had experienced a prolapse and beached herself on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Then, in a strange show of fatal solidarity, the rest of the pod followed her on to the shore. It was grief beyond human capability. I wanted to understand.
There’s a common misconception about strandings. People think the whales die of suffocation when really they’re crushed under the weight of their own giant bodies. On a hot day, their thick blubber can trap the sun, overheating their insides. Towards the end of our conversation, the marine biologist said something odd: “Luckily, by the time we got there, no one had taken anything.”
“Taken what?” I asked.
He explained that sometimes his team arrives at a stranding to find the carcasses have been tampered with and that large parts of them have been hacksawed — sometimes chainsawed — off, usually the jaw, tail or, in the case of sperm whales, teeth. After some digging, I became increasingly fascinated by strandings. After some more digging, I got in touch with Riley.
Riley read to his mother on her deathbed. He read her “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman, as well as his own documentary novel, Strandings. Just a manuscript at the time, Strandings charts Riley’s descent into the ecosystem of beached whales, the secret cultures that surround them and how their dislocated spirits can sweep the land, carrying terrible revelation. Strandings, published by Profile in 2022, turned out to be more than a book. It was a testimony of whale madness.
Over the decades, Riley has spent a lot of time beside whale corpses, and their ghosts have haunted him relentlessly. He first crossed the oceanic Rubicon when he was 13 and a woman with blue hair and a comet tattoo asked him to help load a 15ft jawbone into the back of a Volvo 245. Riley, now 38, thinks she passed something on to him that day. Some kind of curse.
Riley is pretty. He walks slightly hunched, like the prettiness has been beaten into him with a stick. When Riley was young, his dad subjected him to a Myers-Briggs personality test. His dad’s reading was ENTJ, a commander, extroverted, intuitive. Riley’s came back as INTP, “a kind of queer jellyfish”. People say he looks like the nebbish actor Jesse Eisenberg and he hates it.
Riley’s whale madness didn’t explode in a sudden, devastating episode but rather ballooned gradually over time. As a teenager he began to skim local news looking for reports of strandings. If he found one, he and his mate, Theo, would go and get high and watch the unreal leviathan mutate into just another problem for the local council authority.
As he got into academia and began specialising, various programmes and fellowships introduced Riley to a subset of dedicated Melvillians who helped him accumulate other eccentric whale contacts. He started touring museums looking for whale fragments on both sides of the Atlantic. One day in Massachusetts, he happened upon Melville’s great-great-grandson, Peter Gansevoort Whittemore, at a marathon reading of Moby-Dick in New Bedford. After that, by pure serendipity, they kept colliding, first in Boston, then in the New York Public Library. Whittemore had the same sad eyes as his illustrious forebear.
By the time he started writing Strandings, his research had got out of hand and, like Captain Ahab, Riley lost control. He began to fear the whales. He’d see them in dreams. Through his research he met others like him: a woman who kept a sperm whale buried in her back garden; a market trader who collected their parts as “mementos of a faded British glory”; a kingpin figure who supplied high-end customers with whale “material”.
As we walk, Riley recounts a rumour about a local man who patrols the beach, searching for washed up marine mammals and beheading them with a shovel. Whether it is true or not, I’m starting to realise how the sea makes people lose their shit. It’s like Riley says, looking at the sea is like looking outside time, “it’s like amnesia”.
Whales have triggered two separate panic attacks for Riley. The most intense one, a near-hallucinatory episode, occurred during his wedding ceremony. His father-in-law mispronounced his name in the service, calling him “Ripley”. Suddenly, the groom was beset by proliferating associations from Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, whose whale display featured a preserved foreskin the size of a standard door. Riley entered a catatonic state at the altar.
On the way back to Exeter St David’s, Riley describes how there’s a metaphor encased within his whale problem. “It’s such an absolutely appropriate analogy for how I see myself . . . just a dead whale. It occurred to me that whatever struggles I had with identity, with my own masculinity, that was directly translatable. It’s a metaphor that’s so encompassing that I don’t have a choice but to be a part of it.”
Before boarding the train back to London, I tell Riley that I’m eager to meet him again. He can help me follow the whales to the other side, observing the forces marshalled around their stranded bodies and what the phenomena of strandings mean for the UK generally.
But Riley is hesitant. Strandings was a cathartic undertaking and, now that it’s behind him, he’s finally found a measure of peace. Here I am trying to pull him back to the whales. Riley has children and a family now. He’s cautious and doesn’t want to upset his loving equilibrium. He agrees to think it over, provided he’s a secondary character in this story. “I want to be Virgil,” he says, “not Dante.”
If you happen to find yourself reincarnated as a whale and, in some moment of electromagnetic confusion, become beached off the coast of Cornwall, the last thing you’ll see before your whale soul leaves your whale body will probably be Dan Jarvis throwing a large blanket over you.
Jarvis is the only full-time employee at the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR), a network of more than a thousand volunteers who respond to stranded sea life in the UK. In the realm of whale madness, the BDMLR occupies the deva, the light side of the spectrum. Its members are concerned fundamentally with life and the living. Last year, the organisation responded to 3,138 call-outs.
I’ve chosen to meet Jarvis at his seal hospital, located in a small windowless building off an A-road in west Cornwall. Inside, the pens are arranged in rows, most of them peppered in fish guts and excrement. The sound of seal cries is deafening, a sonic cross between a dachshund and a human baby. One of them is banging on the glass restlessly with its flipper. Anyone familiar with The Silence of the Lambs will forgive me for half expecting the last seal to be waiting upright and grinning beside a little painting of the duomo.
For about half an hour, I watch a small crew of volunteers painstakingly pin each seal down with a towel, force a feeding tube into one end and a thermometer up the other. Abandoned by their respective families, these seals don’t know how to eat yet. Their little bodies should be much pudgier by now and Jarvis, along with the other surrogate seal parents, has to help them catch up.
I keep having to remind myself that these are the lucky ones. Mounted in resin on the wall is a small section of netting removed from around a seal’s neck. They later found the animal had been carrying it for years and that, as she grew, she had been slowly decapitated. Scientists were baffled to find the animal’s liver had swollen to three times its original size; they’re still not sure why this happened.
Though seals make up the vast majority of BDMLR call-outs, the charity also responds to about 20 whale strandings a year. If these are relatively small whales, like the minke or pilot, there’s a chance Jarvis can refloat them using a pontoon mat. If it’s a larger species, it’s basically screwed and the BDMLR’s duty to animal welfare dictates it’ll have to be put down.
Sometimes this is done via lethal injection, but that becomes infeasible when the animal surpasses a certain size bracket. There’s simply not enough poison in local circulation to put down a 30-tonne humpback. More often, it’s a case of simply shooting them through the skull with a hunting rifle. But even that doesn’t work on the giants. Their skulls are too thick and Jarvis just has to keep them comfortable, watching them pass on, staring into one of their enormous eyes.
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael gives a detailed, anatomical account of the whale’s eye, but says little about the fathomless act of looking into one. Jarvis first looked into a whale’s eye when he was a child with his father, who used to volunteer for the BDMLR. A call has come through: a dead dolphin. We get into Jarvis’s car, and he tells me about his first stranding. “It was a minke whale, about 20-feet long. Its skin was like wet paper, some of it was sloughing off on the rocks. To look into the eye of an animal like that and to just wonder what it’s thinking . . . They’re intelligent creatures, they must have an understanding of what’s going on. There’s a lot of wonder in asking, ‘How does it perceive me?’”
How does the whale perceive us? It’s something that concerned Riley too, who recalled once meeting a diver who had come face to face with a sperm whale off the coast of Australia. The thing just hovered there, scanning, making little clicking noises, mapping him with sound. The diver had been depicted in whale thought, but what image came into focus at the other end?
Jarvis contends that whales must have some understanding of death. If a calf dies, the mother will push it towards the surface for it to breathe. Pods have been known to ferry their dead around for days, desperately attempting to nurture them back to life. Stranded whales panic before the moment of death, which presupposes, at the very least, an instinctual interpretation of existence and an aversion to non-existence.
“One fin whale on the Helford estuary was in the process of dying when we got there,” Jarvis continues. “You could hear the whale from miles away because it was beating its tail bloody on the rocks, making this enormous sound a bit like a giant whip being cracked. It was quite terrifying . . . ” When the whale went still, Jarvis realised that the rocks behind it had all been flattened.
If you report a whale stranding, the first thing the BDMLR will tell you is not to touch it. Dead whales are rife with disease and living ones can kill you with a single swing of their massive appendages. These warnings don’t tend to deter people much. Strandings have a tendency to become febrile public occasions. A few years ago, another fin whale washed up dead not far from here and Jarvis went to look at it with his mother.
By the time they got there, the creature had already begun to decompose. Its bones were exposed, and bits of it were scattered across the beach. “It was an absolute circus,” he says. “There were kids climbing all over it . . . This decomposing bloody carcass . . . A complete free-for-all, people taking parts of it away with them. We just had to walk away because it was beyond our ability to control the situation — over 50 people using its body as a playground.”
It’s a good thing when Jarvis is the last thing a stranded whale sees before it dies. One hopes its soul doesn’t stick around long enough to see it chopped up and dumped on James Barnett’s postmortem table. I visit him the night before I leave Cornwall. He’s agreed to meet me at a cabin off the back of an industrial estate, but I’m late because the roads are pitch black and the cab has trouble finding the turning in the driving rain. Nirvana is whispering out of the tinny back-seat speakers as we pull up.
Opening the door to the unit, Barnett shows me where he spends the odd evening “PM”ing deceased whales, trying to figure out how they died for an institution called Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP). If the BDMLR occupy the deva realm of the whale mad, CSIP tends towards the naraka, the deathly. The room smells faintly of entrails. His tools are lined up in neat little rows: loppers, scalpels, bone saws.
About a third of all whale postmortems in England and Wales happen here. Barnett had a pilot whale a couple of months before; it took about five people and an engine hoist to lift it. “It was June, the hottest day of the year, and it was absolutely baking,” he says. Having got the creature on to a gurney, Barnett and his team set about collecting samples: blubber for detecting pollutants, muscle and liver for toxicology, ribs for stable isotopes, urine and faeces for biotoxins. In the corner is a large sack of sawdust used to mop up the blood.
CSIP has been around since 1990, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It’s a bit like the TV show NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service, but for dead whales. Right now, CSIP is busy trying to get to the bottom of why a new strain of avian flu has begun affecting cetaceans, the biological infraorder that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Barnett tells me the flu doesn’t seem to be able to pass from mammal to mammal, but it could always mutate.
He has been working with marine animals since he left university in the 1980s, initially taking a job at a zoo before moving to the seal hospital where Jarvis works. In 2007, he stopped working on living beings and began to focus on the dead.
The first stranding Barnett encountered was in 1997 on Pegwell Bay in Kent. It was a killer whale. Without realising how malnourished it was, Barnett and his team mistakenly refloated the animal. “It should’ve been put down straight away,” he says. “But we were still in our infancy then.”
His first whale postmortem was a 15-metre-long fin whale that had washed up in Devon in 2010. With creatures that size, the procedure is always carried out on the beach and presents various logistical difficulties. “First of all you’ve got to try and get into them. We had to use a winch and a Land Rover to pull some of the skin, blubber and muscle off to get access to the internal organs. Luckily, it was on its back. We couldn’t get access to the brain.”
Their brains are huge. Part of the reason is thought to be because of their ability to echolocate, for which they need to process large amounts of sensory information. Like dolphins, toothed whales use this skill for hunting. Though the theory is widely contested, some scientists have postulated that the sperm whale is so adept at it, that it’s able to emit a kind of sonic blast strong enough to stun a squid. Baleen whales, on the other hand, like the humpback and the blue whale, graze on smaller organisms like plankton and therefore have less need for it. They do emit vocalisations to an astonishing frequency range, although scientists don’t have the ability to translate what they’re saying — or, indeed, singing — to each other.
The brains of humpback whales, fin whales, killer whales and sperm whales have also been shown to contain something called spindle neurons — specialised brain cells credited with allowing humans to love and to suffer emotionally. These are thought to be three times as prevalent in whales proportionately.
Like Jarvis, Barnett understands humanity’s fascination with whales. He’s seen it plenty of times at strandings. “I’ll never forget this minke whale standing at Portreath on the north coast,” he says. “It was just gradually falling apart, and there was this continual trail of people walking back across the beach with bits of anatomy. Most people will take vertebrae, ribs . . . usually bones.”
As Barnett drives me back to my hotel, I wonder aloud about the heart of a whale. Barnett tells me he’s never actually managed to get at the heart of one of the great whales but that a lab in Scotland managed to cut the whole thing out. “You know those duffel bags when they’re filled up. It was about the size of one of those.”
Waving goodbye at the front door, I’m suddenly overtaken by a fit of anxiety. It’s freezing outside in the Cornish winter, but I wait a while, trying to get my breathing under control. Materialising in the air above me, a man in a lab coat triumphantly lifts an enormous beating heart over his head.
I should come clean. I began writing this piece following a terrifying depressive low. It came suddenly, like a curtain being lowered for a scene change and then never coming up again. My depression was carving a canyon, and the whales followed along behind, transforming, just as they did for Riley, into metaphors. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, how their stranded bodies seem to encapsulate, in such a consummate way, how I’ve been feeling.
Cetaceans are unusual for their peculiar evolutionary about-turn, their journey from sea to land and back again. This perplexed palaeontologists for years. Some contended they came from marine reptiles, others from marsupials. Eventually, in the 1990s, genetic data showed that whales came from a branch called Artiodactyla, the evolutionary line that spawned cows, pigs and camels. One suspected ancestor, Pakicetus, resembled a disturbing mix between a rat and a wolf.
After they reclaimed the water, the cetacean metamorphosis occurred, in evolutionary terms, extremely quickly. In the space of about 10mn years, whales went from four-legged land mammals to the creatures we know today. They ballooned in size; they stopped sleeping; their saliva disappeared; their lungs and skin changed; even their blood.
It seems, somewhere along the line, whales made an irrevocable decision. When one of them washes up on the shore, it’s almost as if they’re trying to go back. But they can’t go back. They’ve made a promise that cannot be unmade, even if they’re willing to die trying. Whales will often beach, refloat, then stubbornly beach again. In Riley’s words, a stranding is an instance when a whale discovers that both its home and itself have been irretrievably altered.
As humans, we see our own biological pathos in strandings too. How many times, hundreds of millions of years ago, did those early vertebrate terrestrials try and fail to colonise the land, not having developed the requisite appendages and lungs? How many fishapods died floundering in prehistoric mud? When whales strand, they remind us of our own fragility and unlikely origin.
Riley and I aren’t the only ones who feel this way. The God of Abraham also had a somewhat schizophrenic relationship with whales. In the King James Bible, they’re the first animals created in the book of Genesis when He concocts the universe. He, like us, sees fragments of Himself in their gargantuan consciousness. In the Book of Job, God invokes the leviathan to justify the destruction and torment He inflicts on His most loyal subject. Later in the Old Testament, having been cast into the water, Jonah is engulfed by a whale and, in a strange way, becomes God, leading to his renewed faith and eventual salvation.
Sigmund Freud seems to think, somewhat predictably, that my whale problem stems from an absence of breastfeeding during infancy. In The Future of an Illusion, having been prompted by French mystic Romain Rolland, he discusses a trance-like affectation referred to enigmatically as “the oceanic feeling”.
Rolland interpreted the oceanic feeling romantically, as a “sensation of eternity”, a sense of nature enveloping the self, even erasing parts of it. For Melville’s Ishmael, Rolland’s oceanic feeling is an antidote to suicide, a cure for the mundanity of contemporary life, in contrast to Ahab, whose oceanic feeling ends up killing him, eddying him into obsession and fanaticism embodied by the white whale.
For Freud, the oceanic feeling was the “primitive ego-feeling”, more natural in babies, who have not yet learnt that they are separate entities from the breast. My oceanic feeling, Riley’s, Ahab’s, Ishmael’s, can therefore be psychoanalysed as shrapnel from our infant brains, embedded in the rigid rationalisations of adulthood.
Or maybe it’s just Britain? In other cultures, whale strandings are a harbinger of prosperity, bringing resources from the deep in abundance. For the Māori people of New Zealand, strandings are interpreted as a homecoming. In Britain however, strandings have historically been an ill omen, an augur of catastrophe, as Riley notes in his book, like an eclipse or comet.
This probably has something to do with that weird phenomenon popularly referred to as “the British character”. For an island nation that’s always intuited its impenetrable coastline as an existential barrier, separating its inhabitants from the impolite chaos beyond, strandings are a terrible breach, a foreign incursion from the deep.
This goes all the way back to, but by no means began with, the Anglo-Saxons, who reserved a special name for the sea: hron-rād or whale road. Wander the British Museum for a while and you’ll come across the Franks Casket, a mysterious eighth-century box made from a stranded whale’s bone. Around the rim is a runic inscription describing the origin of the material: the terror-king became sad where he swam on the shingle.
Britain’s cetaphobia, boosted by Thomas Hobbes, persisted into the modern age. In the early 19th-century wars, Napoleon compared the geopolitical tensions of the age as a struggle between the French elephant and British whale — the behemoth versus the leviathan. When Prime Minister William Pitt declared that Britain would remain neutral after the Revolutionary National Assembly passed the first French constitution in 1791, the cartoonist James Gillray depicted the British whale as a rotting carcass.
Indeed, this preoccupation survived into my own lifetime. The dying whale is still received as a kind of fallen godhead. When I was 10, a juvenile female northern bottlenose whale got lost and ended up in the Thames, drifting along among the sludge and London run-off. The tabloids nicknamed it Willy, and Londoners flocked to watch it swim past the Dartford Crossing towards the financial district.
Willy died after suffering convulsions and renal failure. After Willy’s death, scientists pointed out that Willy was actually female, but everyone had moved on by then. Two years later, the financial crash hit Canary Wharf not far from where Willy’s journey ended. A similar Thames whale arrived a few months before the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, one fallen leviathan paying its respects to another.
If I can’t get a better handle on my depression then perhaps the British state should have a better handle on strandings, I think to myself as my train pulls back into London. Which brings me to the Receiver of Wreck.
Tucked away in an open-plan office in Southampton, the Department for Transport employs four people to administer the somewhat murky legal framework encompassing the array of stuff that emerges from the deep surrounding Britain’s 11,000-mile-long coastline. Overseeing this operation is a 52-year-old former detective named Stephen White, known officially as the Receiver of Wreck.
If unclaimed for a year, wreck material from inside UK territorial waters becomes property of the crown. Failing to report wreck material to the receiver is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £2,500 per item recovered. However, most people don’t know this law exists and enforcing it has long been a tricky task.
To carry out his duties, White has been granted a number of statutory powers. Up until the 1995 Merchant Shipping Act, receivers had the power to bear arms with which to “kill, maim or hurt” anybody obstructing their official capacities. Nowadays, those powers have been reined in, although White can still issue a search warrant, claim right of way across private land, use force if necessary, as well as grant any aforementioned power to others. Receivers can also legally commandeer a vehicle, but White only took the job last year and probably hasn’t got around to that yet. “Every young kid dreams of shipwrecks and what’s at the bottom of the ocean that you can’t see,” White says. He gets to “interact with museums, people and, to some extent, animals. It’s so unique.”
Also part of the receiver’s remit is “royal fish”. These are whales and sturgeons that, according to William Blackstone’s 18th-century Commentaries on the Laws of England, possess a “superior excellence” making them uniquely suited to royal use. This label was later extended to include porpoises. Essentially, the crown claims ownership over strandings, not that the crown has much use for them. “In terms of the royal fish prerogative,” White says, “this goes back to Edward II in 1322, and a statute that dictates, ‘the King shall have . . . throughout the realm, whales and great sturgeons taken in the sea or elsewhere, except in certain places privileged by the Crown.’”
Though this is mostly a formality now, the British state still comes down on any unauthorised profit from royal fish. Last year, Tevita Lavaki, a former lance corporal, had his house raided by Thames Valley Police’s rural taskforce, which found £18,000-worth of sperm whale teeth. Lavaki pleaded guilty to breaching wildlife regulations and was sentenced to 120 hours of unpaid community work.
In the case of sturgeons, White has a duty to let the King know how many have been found. “Not many,” apparently. Whale strandings present different challenges. Mostly, the receiver is concerned with making sure their massive carcasses are disposed of properly and that the public aren’t privy to the dismemberment before being loaded on to a truck. “It’s a large animal which needs to be removed,” White says. “But without sounding too crude, there’s going to be bodily fluids coming from that carcass, and the smell is going to be horrendous as well. Some people don’t want to see the gruesome side of things.”
Whale disposals have been known to go wrong in the past. In 1970, when a 45-foot-long sperm whale got stranded at Florence beach in Oregon, the state’s Highway Division, in consultation with the US Navy, made the convincingly American decision to blow it up. The explosion was caught on film and was so violent that it blew chunks of biological matter on to nearby buildings and parking lots. “Here comes pieces of, err, whale,” you can hear one woman saying from the crowd before spectators rapidly evacuate. A reporter on the scene at the time anointed perhaps one of the best ever news packages with the immortal line: “the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”
Riley and I are sitting at a café in Barnet, north London, drinking a blue whale.
I’ll explain. Riley had been thinking about visiting Barnet for a long time, for one reason: a Grade II-listed house called The Whalebones, outside of which is potentially the biggest whale bone arch in the country, made from the bottom jaws of the largest creature to ever live, a creature whose tongue weighs roughly the same as an elephant.
You can see the arch looming out of the tree line a hundred yards away as you approach, serving as a quasi-magical doorway between Barnet Road and the private residence of an Irish family who bought the house a few years ago. Riley located the arch via a book called Whales’ Bones of the British Isles, a directory of whale fragments self-published by an enthusiast named Nicholas Redman. (Sadly, Redman never replied to any of my many attempts to contact him.)
“A blue fucking whale!” Riley exclaimed as the arch came into view, marvelling at how the vibrations of the universe had severed the mouth of the leviathan, bringing it all the way here to an area Londoners jokingly refer to as “the north pole” for its position at the end of the Northern Line.
Even reduced to a garden ornament, a blue whale still inspires reverence. I’m reminded of a scene from David Attenborough’s The Life of Mammals in which even he, humanity’s chosen ambassador to the natural world, can’t help but look like he is about to cry when a blue whale breaches the waterline next to his boat.
The arch itself was about five metres tall. (If the creature was to extend downwards into the ground, it would carry on for another 20.) Flakes were peeling off the bone, around the nerve cavities, almost like the bark of a tree, only harder and more brittle. Having lingered under it for a while, I found myself unconsciously prying at a piece. I don’t know why I did it. I just did. When it came off abruptly between my fingertips, Riley suggested we bring it back to a café, crumble some in our tea and have a chat. So, here we are. A small section of blue whale resting next to a piece of almond cake as we talk.
Riley is fresh from another stranding on a beach in Cornwall. “Ironically, the dead whale was the most alive thing on the beach that day,” he says. “As soon as one of these creatures turns up, a whale commons arises spontaneously. You get all these people just looking at it in wonder and, because of the perimeter fence, they’re continually transgressing this idea of securitised space.” There is, he thinks, an element of prefigurative politics about the phenomenon of stranding. “It’s this thing that makes us ask questions we’ve forgotten how to ask.”
I tell Riley about how I’ve been feeling, about the whale heart, the metaphors, the depression and the oceanic feeling. He understands completely. “In its most basic form,” he tells me, “a stranded whale is something that the id throws up from an unknowable depth. It’s a tangible dream which is also the deadest, most corporeal, stinking form imaginable. So it’s caught between two realms, but I don’t think it’s weird. It’s just coded as weird.”
Deep down, Riley actually resents scientific bodies like the BDMLR and CSIP, because of their narrow way of interpreting whale strandings. “My book was not about marine rescue. I think it speaks to the piety with which we think about the natural world and what we fail to see. These dead presences sprawl in our world, underpinning everything: political history, social history, political economy, even our own bodies. But we can’t see any of this. It’s the limits of scientific rational horizons.”
Riley takes a long swig from his mug. “I’m not dismissing that perspective, but there’s always an ‘and’. My problem with animal welfare is that it’s so myopically focused on the animal in question that you start not thinking about capital. In terms of depopulation of natural life on planet earth, that’s actually the problem.”
I think about Jarvis and his enduring love for aquatic mammals. Jarvis was a dedicated soldier in what seemed to be an endless, losing battle. Forever responding to the sad consequences of fishing, plastic pollution, oil and gas extraction and climate change. “If you fucking cared about animals, it wouldn’t be about feeling a particular emotion for said whale,” Riley elaborates, “but rather basking in sublime magnificence which that dead presence erupts. The blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds . . . I’m distrustful of the sadness I feel about strandings, the feeling that we’ve at last reached some historical terminus where we can feel pity for an animal. Fuck that! Sorry, is this boring? Am I boring?”
As we talk I find myself thumbing the blue whale fragment. Predictably, the conversation finds its way to Moby-Dick. I’ve been rereading Melville’s epic and, upon revisiting it, have started to identify more and more with Ahab. Riley looks concerned. “Ahab’s monomania is an attempt to hang on to a feeling of self-determination and power that he feels is being loosened,” Riley says, moving seamlessly from conversation to lecture. “He’s been unmanned by the whale. The idea that he could be defrocked in some way is intolerable. But this oceanic feeling you mentioned earlier — like all open-hearted, queer perspectives — provides you with the ability to see alternate possibilities and to unthrone yourself.”
“Which Ahab can’t do,” I say.
“Yes, which Ahab fucking can’t do! No matter how much Stubb and Starbuck tell him to listen to what his life could be if he stops being such a dickhead.” Riley takes a moment to laugh at his own unintentional pun. “Ahab could’ve found redemption, but he refuses and dies and kills everyone else as well.”
Unlike in Ray Bradbury’s 1956 adaptation, where the Hollywood Ahab — played by a salty Gregory Peck — re-emerges from the deep still harpooning Moby-Dick, crucified on his own tragic nemesis, Melville’s Ahab dies in the manner of Lady Macbeth, quickly and ingloriously. Caught up in the harpoon line, he is wiped from life. Almost a century later, Bradbury finally allowed Ahab a hero’s death. I’m still on the fence as to which version I prefer.
Boarding the Tube, we get talking about where they all end up, all those dead presences, the whale fragments that, as Riley puts it, “underpin everything”. Surely someone somewhere must be keeping tabs on them? They can’t all just end up in people’s gardens? Readying himself to alight at Waterloo, Riley warns that the answer involves a man named Richard Sabin and one of the strangest rooms I’ve ever seen.
Due to strict security protocols I can’t tell you exactly where this room is, but I can say that it’s not where you’d expect. The building in which it is housed is deliberately unassuming. Residents opposite will see it everyday from their windows, never thinking twice about what goes on in there or the enormous vault of macabre treasures within.
Entering the building, I encounter a security guard who wearily mans the door. “You from the paper?” I nod and he gestures for me to follow him into a lift and out across a large loading bay, eventually arriving in front of two massive red industrial doors. The guard unlocks them, points me inside, then scurries upstairs.
On the other side of the door, thousands of dead eyes watch me as I cross the threshold. Continuing in front of me is shelf after shelf of dead mammals. Two elephant skeletons stand guard over hundreds of taxidermied heads: elks, bison, cows, zebras, a trio of black, brown and polar bears. Just past them, cut from the base of the neck, giraffe heads sit crowded together like brooms in a cupboard.
Rounding the corner, the vault opens up, and I see the crux of it. Whale bones, too many to count. Jaws of the great whales are stacked in rows: blue, fin, humpback, their baleen still attached. Dotted about, researchers are scanning cross-sections of material, rendering 3D images on laptops. There’s an entire sperm whale skull larger than a Volkswagen Beetle and, a few rows behind, a man with a long, white ponytail, sporting shades and a skull ring. “I know,” he says, immediately gauging my disbelief. “It’s a strange place but I’m used to it.”
Of all the whale mad, Richard Sabin has, by far, done the best job of translating his cetacean problem into a vocation. For more than 10 years, he’s been the principal curator of mammals for the Natural History Museum and oversees its research collection, a facility that comprises close to 3,000 skeletons of whales, dolphins and porpoises collected for scientific investigation.
Most of the large whales here either stranded or fell victim to whaling. Needless to say, they all died full of fear and their fat ghosts are restless. Next to a set of enormous remains is a framed newspaper extract from 1658 entitled “London’s Wonder”. The article details how, having stranded in Greenwich, that same whale that set out to visit Cromwell was set upon by a frenzied crowd of Londoners wielding “harping irons, spits, swords, guns, bills, axes, hatchets and all kinds of sharp instruments . . . the blood gushed out of her body as the water does out of a pump”. The city had violently stripped and digested her and kept her here in its bowels.
Just behind her, in a glass case, another familiar face, or rather, familiar name: Willy, the one who swam up the Thames and died in 2006. Sabin was quick to put out a statement during the media fervour surrounding the Thames whale. “There is little doubt in my mind,” he wrote, “that people have invested varying degrees of emotion in the Thames whale and what it represents to them.”
After her death, she was taken to a dock in Gravesend before being scrubbed of parasites, dismembered, frozen and brought here. She’s been in this room since, immaculately preserved. A scientist is busy scanning a section of her vertebrae, plotting its morphology.
Willy isn’t the only Thames whale in here. Sabin explains how another was unearthed during construction of a new jetty for the O2 Arena in Greenwich, back in 2010. As the foundations were being pushed into the mud, archeologists on a watching brief saw enormous bones emerging. “It was the headless skeleton of a north Atlantic right whale,” Sabin says. “We carbon dated it, and the results came back 1590 to 1650AD. It shows you that these animals have been in the Thames over millennia.”
The god of the underworld goes by many names: Hades, Hel, Anubis, Ah Puch, Mictlantecuhtli. In whale, a direct translation might as well be Sabin. In his own strange way, he occupies the end of the line for stranded whales. First they’re nurtured into death by Jarvis, then examined by Barnett and, finally, kept by Sabin. “This is the third stage if you like,” he tells me as we walk between the bones. “This is long-term research outside of strandings. This collection covers more than 300 years of collecting history.”
“The strandings programme” itself started here. That’s to say, scientists in the late 19th century became frustrated when their efforts to study the biology, ecology and taxonomy of stranded whales kept running up against the royal fish prerogative. In 1913, an agreement was struck between the crown, the receivers and the Natural History Museum that scientists would be notified of strandings, permitted access to carcasses and be allowed to build a cetacea collection. This has become, according to Sabin, the longest-running research programme of its kind in the world.
Sabin began his career working with human remains, but found them too relatable. At university he came across a stranding in the Hebrides and scales of anatomy he’d never encountered before. He became interested in marine mammals and their evolutionary journey out of, then back into, the water.
Cetacea passed the point of no return, according to Sabin, around eight or nine million years ago, when their pelvis detached from the vertebral column and they could no longer support their weight on land. “No going back?” I ask, and he nods. “That’s it,” he says, gesturing to a sample of small pelvic bones on the far side of the room.
Hailing from Birmingham, Sabin grew up about as far away from the sea as a Brit can get. But the oceanic feeling found its way up the M5 from Gloucester and snatched him. Passing drawers filled with narwhal horns, Sabin describes the ungodly encroachment of strandings on the British imagination. “When it’s you and some sand and some sea and you’ve got an ice cream in your hand, that’s fine,” he says. “But then when something suddenly plops out of the ocean, this big animal, it’s kind of terrifying. Storytelling has been really important in British culture and those animals have become symbols of the unknown. That liminal space which strandings provide gives us the opportunity to get close to them.”
Sabin goes on, telling me about a particularly inaccessible stranding he attended on treacherous mud flats. “People will take incredible risks to get close to whale carcasses,” he says. Sabin and his team had to be helicoptered in. “We were in survival suits; we had radios; we’d done risk assessments. We got to the carcass and, after about 15 minutes, a local man and his son popped along on top of the mud in T-shirts ready to take a sample. They wanted to take some flesh.”
The British empire weighs heavily on the collection here. Aside from being compared with a whale during the course of its expansion, the empire literally ran on whale bodies. First, British whaling ships pillaged the north Atlantic, launching from London to colonies in North America. After the American Revolutionary War, the whalers of the British empire moved southward.
In the 1820s, an inventor called William Congreve fitted their ships with explosive rocket-propelled harpoons. The invention made killing whales much easier, though most of them sank. A century later, during the first world war, roughly 58,000 whales were killed to provide Britain and its allies with oil.
Like the spoils of the British Museum, the creatures immured here by the Natural History Museum are an imperial bounty. “We’re still trying to understand the scale of the slaughter from the early 20th century,” Sabin says. “But as a byproduct of that, parts of these collections were built, and we don’t deny those histories.” We all know the British state has a number of skeletons in its closet; very few of us knew those skeletons were so large.
As we close our tour, I ask if Sabin has any whale material at home. He doesn’t. In fact, Sabin keeps his whale madness strictly confined to this room and his work with the strandings programme. His house is not decorated with pictures of whales. He doesn’t dream about them either. “There’s such a lot attached to these specimens,” he says, “the stories and, in many cases, the brutality. You have to step back from it.”
I leave the collection, and emerge into the first sunny day of the new year. Looking down at my feet, I see the pavement and, below that, thousands of whale bones. When I began this project, I never expected dead whales to be this mobile. They seemed to have embedded themselves at every level of society. Like it or not, they’ve become a vital part of our collective consciousness.
Ducking into a café, I realise that the chunk of blue whale is still in my pocket. Suddenly, I picture Riley, Barnett, Jarvis, the receiver, Sabin, all marching along together, leading a trail of cetacea behind them. A ballad of skeletons stretching back in a long merry line. Somewhere in the distance, a car backfires and a stranded whale explodes, blubber rains down. Almost instinctively, I feel the need to be rid of the fragment of bone I’ve been ferrying or to return it somehow to the sea.
Over the past few months, the whales have bent my life under the weight of their massive bodies. These days, it almost feels claustrophobic, like something’s waiting for you out to sea, trying to get close. I’ve seen it time and again while researching this piece. The whales have made their mark.
For a long time, I’ve been sizing up whether to attend a stranding myself. But, apart from the many logistical challenges, something’s been holding me back. There’s that lingering question: if I attend, will I become wedded to the whales for ever? Will I move to the coast, searching for updates on strandings message boards? Will I become my own Ahab?
Riley, Barnett, Jarvis, Sabin and the British state all share one thing in common: a run-in with an enormous stranded whale. An encounter which, to varying degrees, has shaped the rest of their lives. To paraphrase an ancient casket, it seems that those who visit the sad terror king return never quite the same as when they left. Before I know it, I’ve flushed the bone down the toilet. It’s a solemn moment. The water swells; it spins; white surf beats against its sides; then all collapse, and the great shroud of toilet water rolls on as it rolled last time I used it, five hours ago.
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