Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  In fact, in the town of Scoresbysund, now renamed Ittoqqortoormiit in the East Greenland language, there is a church, bright with gleaming brass and colour after the snow and leaden skies outside. From the ceiling of this church hangs a wonderful votive ship, with all the masts and rigging, and the name on its stern is Baffin, which was Scoresby’s vessel.

  Knowing all this, I’d expected that Whitby’s whale arch would be an ancient relic, linking the town with the waters around Greenland. I imagined the arch might even be one of those Scoresby himself had brought back—to signal a successful trip the whalers mounted a jawbone against the mast, so it would be visible to those waiting ashore. Certainly, Whitby’s arch is as celebrated as Edinburgh’s is ignored. It stands on a rocky scarp above the harbour. It stands, that is to say, in front of the grand white-painted hotels and above the amusement arcades and ice-cream stalls and the ‘Dracula Experience’ and the picturesque tent of Gypsy Lee, who, if you are feeling fear, or uncertainty, will help you by gazing into her crystal ball.

  But climb from the harbour, and you’ll discover that Whitby’s jawbone arch is actually brand new. Slender and pale, the jaw’s sides rise like the arms of a ballet dancer, and it frames a view across the harbour to the skeletal ruins of Whitby Abbey, high on their own clifftop opposite—ruined stone arches framed within an arch of bone. Turn a little and what it frames is the grey and depleted North Sea.

  It was a May day, Whitby was as thronged as ever with holidaymakers; a huge gang of bikers had roared into town. I spent a few minutes sitting on one of the many benches beside the whale ach looking down at the harbour, where an old lifeboat, all trigged out in bunting, was making a little trip.

  Folk strolled out along the harbour walls. A man puffing on a pipe sat beside me and we fell into conversation. He said, ‘This town lives on its past. Trades on it. Without the past it would be nothing.’ He said, ‘If I could travel back in time, just for a day, I’d go back two hundred years to the docks here . . . it would be fantastic to see all the sailing ships, and all the different people . . .’

  ‘When it was a whaling port?’

  ‘. . . Aw, the smell!’

  Much was pastiche, but amid that the whale jawbone we sat next to was entirely real. It attracted attention in a much more subtle way than the amusement arcades did; no bells and flashing lights, it just stood there. I watched as one man came along to the whale arch and carefully photographed it, very close focus, looking at the smooth texture of the bone, and the long groove and tunnel which, I presume, had once carried an artery. When the photographer had left, a woman came by, and she stroked the jawbone with her hand, looking wonderingly up to its apex. Perhaps she was trying to imagine the creature alive, a creature whose jaws were double her own height. After all, this is as close as many people will come to an encounter with a great whale.

  * * *

  The Edinburgh jawbones are, I believe, from fin whales. Fin whales occur all over the world. Whitby’s is a bowhead, which are found only in the Arctic. In Scoresby’s times whalers called bowheads the ‘right whale’—the right whale to hunt. For that, for being the ‘right’ whale, bowheads suffered terrible exploitation; their numbers are now reckoned to be just one hundredth of what they were before European whalers hoved into view. They are protected now, of course, but Alaskan Eskimos are licensed to hunt a quota of bowheads each year. A board beside Whitby’s arch explains that the jawbone was a gift from the people of Alaska. It was flown over from Anchorage and received with all due Yorkshire pomp and ceremony, and unveiled by Miss Alaska herself. It was given to replace an older arch, which had likewise been a gift—that one from the king of Norway, but which had weathered away. This is strange, this gifting of whalebones between nations. Whale jaws and pandas.

  From the whaling grounds east of Greenland, the ships pushed farther and farther west as they killed and killed the whales. The first lighthouses—mere gleams in the dark—were built partly, ironically, to protect the lucrative whaling fleet, and were themselves fuelled by whale oil.

  Not all whale parts have such elaborate or known histories as the Edinburgh or Whitby ones. Not all come from whales slaughtered. Sometimes whales strand, as we know, or wash up already dead. If you travel as far north as Caithness by the A9, which by then is pretty well the only road, you’ll find another jawbone. It overarches a field gate on the seaward side of the road. I suspect it came from a whale washed up, because there are no port towns nearby, but there are low cliffs and steep-sided geos. Neither are there office workers here to pass beneath it as in Edinburgh, or picture postcards or beauty queens as in Whitby. Grasses grow at its base; it’s been there a long time, and is now held in place by wires, so someone’s keeping an eye on it—and because of this concern, there’s something venerable about it, in the same way that an ancient yew tree seems venerable.

  Carry on further northwards, and when you reach the coast you’ll see, a couple of miles out in the tide­wrought Pentland Firth, the low, green island of Stroma.

  No one lives on Stroma now. From the mainland you can make out derelict croft houses, their kale-yards all gone to nettles. Despite that—or maybe because of it—the island has a carefree atmosphere. Sheep graze; the otherwise empty houses and hearths are knee-deep in sheep dung. When the last families quit for the mainland, certain things were left behind, understandably. There’s an enormous iron mangle at a gable end, and a broken cart, sinking into the peat, and a red phone box and, propped against a drystone wall, a huge whale’s vertebra. Mottled and mossy now, it looks like a piece of classical statuary, a winged male torso.

  I found it by chance on a visit to that island, and took a photograph. Though it was a bright May afternoon, with the thrift in bloom, and terns screaking overhead, in the photo the whalebones turned out silvery, otherworldly, as though moonlit.

  * * *

  The more you find of these relics, the more you look at them, indoors or out, the more they seem imbued with a particular presence. Whatever it is, a whale arch is not a triumphal arch; these are not trophies. All these bones, regardless of the species, share a solemnity and slightly luminous quality. We’re now in the Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, places with a long connection to whaling. In times past, large schools of pilot whales came by these islands, and if they were sighted everyone ran to their small boats to ca’ the whales; that is, drive them ashore to be killed for meat and oil. But this is big whale country, too; humpbacks are sighted annually, fin and sperm whales on occasion. At Sumburgh Head on Shetland, beside the car park that serves the lighthouse, where the cries and smell of guillemots reach you from the cliffs below, there stands the back of the skull of a sperm whale. It is as broad as it’s high and slightly curved, like a fragment of a chariot. Sheep treat it as a scratching post; there are always tufts of fleece adhering to it. Keep walking up onto the headland and, just before the white-painted wall of the lighthouse, the more delicate, streamlined skull of a minke whale lies along the ground.

  Of all the whale jaws I know of, the most majestic and unsettling is found not on the Northern Isles, but the island of Lewis. To travel across that island, east to west, is to cross an apparently empty landscape. Miles of undulating brown green peat-moor lie under a huge Atlantic sky, with the hills of Harris rising to the south. In summer, polythene sacks filled with newly cut peats wait at the roadside to be taken home. After crossing the moor, you reach the township of Bragar, where crofts and houses straggle loosely along the coast, and beyond that, on a clear day, you can see the Flannan Isles, and beyond them, the open Atlantic.

  It’s an unlikely place, being so domestic, but by one of these houses, a modern bungalow just few yards from the road, in a garden of long grasses and leggy blue geraniums, and accessed by a little garden gate, almost, if one can say this on Protestant Lewis, like a wayside shrine, is mounted the jawbone of a blue whale, and it is just monumental. Bound by iron hoops onto the ends of two stone walls, it’s twenty foot high, and deeper than my o
wn arm is long, but still with a tapering elegance. It comes with a terrible story—a whale’s story.

  In about 1920 the animal was sighted just offshore, already dead. It had died of wounds. An explosive harpoon which had been fired into the animal had failed to detonate, the whale had broken free of its captors and swum on, trailing fifty fathoms of rope, the harpoon head bitten into its flesh. At length it succumbed. Where it had come from, no one knew, but blue whales and fin whales were hunted off the Scottish coast then. A Norwegian-owned whaling station operated on Harris; its chimney and slipway still stand.

  Even now, the whale is not free of the wretched harpoon: the four-barbed head hangs like a pendulum from the jaw’s apex, where it swings a little in the wind. Swings in the wind. Despite the bungalow and the little garden gate and the flowers, the whole affair has a feel of the gallows.

  Of course, every whale relic represents a disaster for that individual animal, a death, a wreck, a stranding, a slaughter, and something of that atmosphere cleaves to their bones. But there’s something else, something about the whale. Maybe its just the scale that makes them appear to us as near mythic; part mammal, part architectural, inhabitants of an imagined otherworld. There’s a kind of whale-inspired religiosity which must have suited the Victorian mind—whalebone corsets and religiosity. Toads were said to have a jewel in their heads; render down a whale and what do you find but the arch of a church door. (Even Scoresby quit whaling in his thirties to take the cloth and become, in due course, vicar of Bradford.)

  By chance, I found Whitby’s old whale jawbones, the ones replaced by the Alaskans, housed within another relic—the decommissioned church which is now the town’s Heritage Centre; the bones were leaning across the arched west window. Recently, too, I learned that there is a jawbone arch—or part of one—within the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. Far from the ocean, the whale in hallowed ground, in the heart of Albion.

  But we’re in the North. Orkney and Shetland were where the whalers put in to take on crew and water before heading for the ice; Scoresby sent last letters home from Baltasound and Lerwick. It’s where they paid off those crewmen again. If they’d been trapped in the ice and obliged to overwinter, they came home in a pitiful state. The Orkney harbour town of Stromness had its own scurvy hospital. (Sometimes the crewmen didn’t return at all—Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror put in at Stromness to take on water, before sailing on to seek a Northwest Passage. They were last sighted by two whalers, entering Lancaster Sound and oblivion.)

  I mention Stromness in particular because, of all the whale relics I’ve come across in recent years, a favourite is in that town, and it’s easily the smallest. It’s tucked quietly into the town museum, one of those nineteenth­century troves, established by Literary and Philosophical Societies, which still retain their cabinet-of-curiosities feel; replete with objects which haven’t been filtered and ‘interpreted’ for us, and which remain rich places to spend a rainy afternoon. (Whitby also has a glorious Lit-and-Phil museum—maybe it’s a phenomenon of seaports, and the intrepid Victorian age.)

  At Stromness, there are the ghastly instruments common to whaling ports: flensing blades and lances, and the frame of an umbrella made of baleen, and a sperm-whale tooth etched with the image of a little whaleboat being snapped in two by a vast sperm whale, and tiny sailors plummeting into the sea. This was a favourite scrimshaw subject. William Scoresby himself drew such a scene—a little whaleboat tossed on high by a lash of a whale’s tail, as though the fight with the whale was a fair fight. That, of course, was before the invention of the exploding harpoon.

  The museum stands on its own little pier; its small windows look out onto the water. Upstairs are old stuffed bird skins in cases, various mammals, a turtle mounted on the wall and, in one particular case, a small assembly of objects that have defied categorisation. The careful taxonomy which has held among the birds and birds’ eggs and pinned-down butterflies has here failed, and these last things are grouped together because they share some quality—in this instance, roundness. It’s the kind of arrangement a little girl would make. There’s a neat pile of striped snail shells and, next to that, a coconut which washed up long ago on some Orkney shore and, next to that, three smooth brown pebbles, which are not pebbles: one is cut open so you can see it’s actually made of hair—‘Hair balls from cows’ stomachs’, says the label. And next to the hair balls is something shaped like an open purse, the size of your cupped hands. It’s thick but hollow, and wrapped over on itself, with one lip tucked under the other, leaving a fissure. It is a vessel made of the densest bone, and is smoothed and rounded as though it had rolled in the ocean for a long time. Because of the gap, it is somewhat like a mouth. However, it wasn’t made for speaking, but for listening. The label reads, ‘Whale’s ear drum’.

  These eardrums were prized. I’ve heard it said that, being strong to withstand great sub-sea pressures, they were the only things to emerge from the final furnace the whales’ carcasses were put through—the left-over bits that is. I’ve read—frankly, I’ve read as much as I can bear about whaling—how the whalemen slithered and groped in the whale-gore, seeking these eardrums. They took them home as keepsakes, fancying they could hear the sea in them, or whale song. Sometimes, though, they’re grotesque. Some whalemen painted the eardrums—there are two in Shetland got up as Punch and Judy—but mostly they are left plain, and sit quietly around the coast. As well as Stromness, there are whale eardrums that I know of in Aberdeen and Lerwick and Scalloway, and who knows how many in private houses. I find them beautiful and sad and complete; all that can be said about sea-waves and sound waves, song and utterance, is rolled together in these forms.

  The Stromness one is grey and old, and as you look at it lying on its shelf you have to wonder. What did it hear, in life? Across what distances? Whales apparently hear through their jawbones; they have no external ears as we do—so the very jawbones now raised around the country at large would, in life, have picked up sound waves in the ocean. What did they hear, these jaws, these eardrums? They heard us coming, that’s what.

  * * *

  How, these days, do you acquire a whale relic? Well, I suppose you could apply to the Eskimos of Alaska, but whales do die naturally, at sea, though we find that hard to comprehend, having killed so many ourselves. They’ve been living and dying long before humans set sail in pursuit of them with harpoons.

  Some years ago a fin whale washed up dead on the Scottish island of Coll. Every time a big whale washes up, even dead, a minor pandemonium ensues. In times past it would have been a bonanza—the bones would have been sprinted away for roof trusses; meat to carve up and eat; blubber for lamp oil. This time, the National Museum of Scotland laid claim to the carcass, as an ‘important addition to their collection’, and sent a truck over on the ferry to collect it. However, certain of the islanders had other ideas. Before the lorry arrived, someone removed the jaws and hid them—rumour says they were buried in the sand dunes. The islanders wanted them for an arch. An argument ensued, the museum prevailed, and one of the islanders said, plaintively, ‘It seems everything disappears, and we have nothing to remember the whale.’ I think she meant, ‘Everything disappears into a vault in a museum’; but this is another meaning to the whale arch, to whale relics, which that woman discerned—something elegiac. Such has been our violence toward these animals that we sense in a jawbone arch a memorial not just to that particular whale, but almost to whalehood itself.

  Almost, but not yet. What else did the whales hear, with their huge eardrums? They heard a sea change. The beginnings of deliverance. They’d have heard, felt, the drill bits biting into the seabeds, oil tankers sliding over the surface above, signalling a development in human technology.

  The whales heard the twentieth century come and go. And, though there are whaling nations still, and we’re not quite out of the woods yet (I’m thinking of Stewart’s Park in Aberdeen, where a broken whale jaw stands among the leafy trees), I suggest that if they ca
red to listen, if we could indeed whisper into those eardrums, they’d hear something, at least in this country, like atonement. Which brings us to the strange case of North Berwick.

  North Berwick is another pleasant seaside town. It sits at the southern side of the Firth of Forth, on an agricultural plain. Just inland of the town, however, there rises an abrupt, green cone of a hill called Berwick Law. It’s a long extinct volcano and, at 600 feet, quite a landmark, announcing to seafarers the entrance to the Firth. There had been a whale arch—or a succession of them—on its summit for 300 years. A wonderful place for one, high up in the weather, in view of the sea. But the weather did what weather does: the last arch was recently deemed ‘unsafe’ and, one day, a few years ago, it was taken away.

  The people of North Berwick missed their whale arch, and they got together and one thing led to another and now Berwick Law is again surmounted by a jawbone arch. Except—it’s not. It’s not plundered from a washed­-up whale nor supplied by Alaskans or anyone else. You toil up the grassy hill to the summit and, with the North Sea to the east and the hills of Fife to the north, there is the whalebone arch. It’s surrounded by a railing, you can just reach through and touch it, but when you do, it feels like . . . plastic. What they’ve installed on Berwick Law is not a whale’s jaw but a fibreglass replica.

  I don’t know what to make of this. Was it a principled decision not to source a real whale’s jaw? Certainly. And yet, and yet . . .

  I’d climb a hill to see a real whale’s jawbone. I’d take the kids, have them measure themselves against it and notice how the sun and salt wind has worn and changed it, transforming what was once alive. I’d like to view it against the sea’s horizon, note how it pulls animal body, land and sea together in one huge stitch. As I say, in the presence of a whalebone you look at the sea differently and, because attitudes have changed, you look out, always in the secret hope that there might be living whales out there, which one day might appear.