Because the by-products from whales had such value, the law honoured them with the same treasured status as other forms of wreck. And since the Crown had the authority to appropriate whatever the sea provided, it appropriated dead whales too. The 1324 Statute de Praerogativa Regis not only established the Crown’s claim to all wreck on British foreshores, but extended that claim to include ‘great fishes’. If a whale was washed up on a British beach, the Queen was supposed to get the tail and the King the head, it being (erroneously) considered that the tail yielded more whalebone for corsetage than the head. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the British found far fewer uses for a dead whale. Baleen had been replaced by plastic, spermaceti oil by electricity, and whale meat by foods that were actually edible. Dead cetaceans came to be regarded as useless for anything other than zoological research. In 1913 the Crown handed over its prerogative to the Natural History Museum in London, giving them first refusal on any future strandings (though in theory, the Queen could still assert her legal right to demand a portion of humpback or minke for herself. According to Kennedy’s Law of Salvage: ‘It has not infrequently happened . . . that a captor has offered a sturgeon to Her Majesty the Queen and that her Majesty has been graciously pleased to accept such a gift.’) Though the logic behind the practice of treating whales as wreck has long gone, the legal connection remains.
It remains a matter of debate why cetaceans beach themselves, but they always have, and they continue to do so. Since no-one really knows why a whale would voluntarily leave its native element to die in a hostile one—and to keep returning there despite repeated attempts at refloating—the explanations have been varied and imaginative. It is thought that beached cetaceans may have been chased ashore by predators, disorientated by sonar interference from ships and military installations, or harried away from their natural feeding grounds by drilling and fishing. Strandings can occur singly or en masse, and there have been occasions when over fifty dolphins or whales have simultaneously chosen to commit hara-kiri on Britain’s unwelcoming coastline. Unlike those deaths caused by human malpractice—dolphins trapped in nets, porpoises tangled in long-lines—those cetaceans which do strand themselves tend to be in good physical condition when found, and are therefore of interest to zoologists trying to identify the whys and wherefores of their behaviour.
Which is how Sabin—a gentle, wry man with an evident passion for his job—came to be responsible for 7,500 assorted cetacean parts, several jars of nematode worms, and a pair of sperm whale eyeballs. Any whale, dolphin or porpoise washed up along British coasts is reported to him, logged on the Natural History Museum’s strandings database and then either claimed for science or disposed of. All of which sounds quite straightforward in print, but is less so in reality. There are some very interesting logistical difficulties in getting, say, a 16-ton, 40-foot fin whale from some stormy cove in the Outer Hebrides to inner London. In the early days, says Sabin, ‘Most of the big animals were brought back here. How, I’ve no idea, but they brought humpback whales, sperm whales, into central London and de-fleshed them.’ By what means, exactly? ‘We’ve got photographs of humpback whales being lowered into a pit in the ground at the back of the museum where the Darwin Centre is now. They’d be left in the ground to rot for a few years, then the bones would be pulled up, cleaned, pinned and put on display in the whale hall.’ So the museum had decomposing whales on site in the middle of Kensington? He smiles. ‘Yes.’ In fact, whales were buried and left to rot in the grounds right up until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war, the museum began to use less challenging methods of preservation. Either full-scale models would be made out of plaster or fibreglass, or the bones would be buried where they had been found. It may or may not comfort any Kensington residents to know that the museum has recently began stripping the corpses of some of its specimens with the help of flesh-eating beetles—though this does not, as yet, include whales.
Sabin leads me off into a large ante-room filled with locked metal cabinets containing a few of the museum’s several million specimens. On a trolley by the door are two large skulls. One, weirdly asymmetrical and punctured by a cancerous hole, belongs to the same pygmy sperm whale as the eyes. Below it sits the lower jawbone, which looks at first sight like a rare and elegant flower; two graceful flutes of translucent bone joined by a pale stem. The other skull is older and in less good condition, worn almost to lacework by age. The skull belonged to a bottlenose dolphin who found her way up to Tower Bridge on the Thames three years ago. She was sick, malnourished and very much weakened by several weeks in fresh water. When she died, Sabin and the River Police retrieved the corpse. ‘The police,’ says Sabin, ‘were quite upset by the process—we used a body bag that would normally have been used for a human retrieved from the river. They said, “Well, we’re used to pulling people out of the river, but dolphins are a different matter”.’
He personally deals with only those strandings (like the dolphin) which present problems, or which, because of the rarity of the species, most interest the museum. The rarest are the whales—sperm whales, minkes, killers, sei whales and fin whales—which occasionally turn up in British waters. ‘If you look at the total number of UK strandings each year, you’ll find that 50 per cent of all the strandings reported to us are harbour porpoise, and that the Scottish strandings normally account for 30 per cent of the total. We don’t get that many from Northern Ireland—that’s not because they’re not reported, it’s just that the geology of the coastline is such that most of the animals get washed away from the coastline when they get into difficulties. We tend to see sperm whales off the north and east coast of Scotland, but rarely do you get those big, big animals in the North Sea. Things like common dolphins you see along the south-west coast of England, harbour porpoise in Cardigan Bay, bottlenose dolphins around the north-east coast of Scotland—particularly the Moray Firth area—and things like white-sided and white-beaked dolphins around the north and west coasts of Scotland. But it does depend on the time of year.’
Having either recorded the details of a stranding or retrieved the carcass, Sabin will log all the information onto a database: height, weight, size, condition, area, evidence of disease or injury. Ultimately, he hopes that hidden within those cautious statistics will be the image of something bigger and bolder; an explanation of why strandings happen in the first place.
Once in a while, however, he finds that he and the museum have got competition. Just as there are ship-wreckers, so there are whale-wreckers too. During both world wars, the numbers of reported strandings decreased, not because fewer cetaceans were beaching themselves, but because more people had begun eating them again. In peacetime, Sabin occasionally finds that what was reported to him as a 2.5-ton whale has been reduced to a 1.2-ton whale by the time he has raced to the beach. ‘I was called out to a 60-foot fin whale stranded on the Pembrokeshire coast in 1995. It had been dead for about three or four weeks and was really badly decomposed, to the point where the skin and blubber of the animal had started to get quite tough and split, and the skeleton and skull had started to slide out of the skin. I got a phone call on the Friday to say that this thing was on the beach in a fairly inaccessible cove that you needed more or less to abseil down to get to, and I couldn’t get a team together until Monday. We jumped into the Land Rover, drove up there, and by the time we got to the cove, the skull had gone, most of the vertebrae had gone, virtually all of the ribs except one had gone, and one of the scapulae had gone. I discovered that a local fisherman had backed his boat up as far as he could into the cove, tied a rope around the skull, and used his boat to pull the skull off.’
Why on earth did he want it? ‘He took it across the bay and around the headland over to the National Museum at Cardiff. He called them and said, “I’ve got this whale skull, how much will you give me for it?” They said, “That’s a Royal Fish, you’ve broken the law, mate; we can’t do anything for you.” They told him to contact the Natural History
Museum, but he just cut the rope and the skull went down.’
Sabin also found there had been other visitors to the site. ‘Most of the bones had vanished by the time we got there. I ended up with one rib, one scapulae, and about six of the tail, the cordal vertebrae, and that was it—the whole thing had gone. It just amazed me how resourceful people can be, but also how much these things still mean to people, and the risks that people are prepared to take. We heard all these stories—there’d been a pregnant woman and two children sitting down there next to the carcass having a picnic. And when they’d finished, they took a couple of the vertebrae, stuck them in a couple of bin liners, and went back up the cliffs. Rod Penrose, who does all of the recording work for us in Wales, said that there were people with the bones in their gardens, that one of the scapulae appeared hanging up outside a workshop. It had been cleaned and sign-written; traditional things to do with them, but a bit annoying as far as we’re concerned.’
But it is with those strandings unwanted either by science or by wreckers where the biggest problems arise. Since the Natural History Museum already has most of the specimens it needs, someone has to find a way of disposing of the surplus. Unfortunately, trying to find a way to get rid of a putrefying minke presents a whole new set of problems. Which is why a young woman sitting in a dank Southampton office block is empowered—or compelled, depending on your point of view—to deal with dead dolphins in the same way that she would deal with looted Saabs.
When I ask Sophia Exelby, the UK’s Receiver of Wreck, about whales, she smiles. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it’s one of the less salubrious parts of the job.’ When Sabin and the Natural History Museum can’t put a stranding to good zoological use, Exelby is responsible for ensuring its removal. Which, it turns out, is more complicated than it sounds. ‘Now, of course, whales are what’s technically termed a “managed waste-product” under EC regulations, which means that you can’t do what might be considered to be the most sensible thing, which would be to tow them back out to sea, weigh them down and sink them naturally. So you then have to think of other methods of disposal—incineration, burial—either in situ or on a landfill site. Certainly in the past various methods have been tried, such as blowing them up and burning them; things that don’t prove terribly successful. The dolphins are so small that it’s no problem for someone just to put them on the back of a pick-up truck and drive them to the local landfill site. They’re easy to deal with—it’s the big whales that are the real problem.’
Those of a ghoulish disposition may find it educational at this point to type the words ‘exploding whale’ into an internet search engine. In 1970, a 45-foot, 8-ton Pacific grey whale stranded itself on a beach in Florence, Oregon. The US State Highway Division decided that neither burial nor dismemberment were suitable options, and that the best method of disposal would therefore be to blow it up. The final clear up would, they hoped, be completed by seagulls and scavengers. News of the stranding had got around, and by the time the Division had stuffed the whale’s belly with half a ton of dynamite, a large crowd of spectators and a local TV news crew had gathered on a beach nearby. The resulting video shows the detonation, accompanied by an admiring murmur from the crowd. Then there is the unmistakeable sound of curiosity turning to fear. Blasted high into the air by the explosion, half-ton lumps of decomposing whale blubber began to rain down on the spectators and their cars. No-one was badly hurt, but the seagulls kept their distance. In the end, the Highways Division was forced to bury the remains.
Since dynamite is evidently not a possibility, those responsible for British strandings often find themselves confounded. In isolated parts of the country, cetacean carcasses are often left to decompose naturally. But in more populous areas, there is no chance of waiting for time to do its work.
Down on the seafront at Deal in Kent, Andy Roberts mans the coastguard station. But the crisis he dealt with three years ago was not of human devising. A whale had been spotted, stranded alive on a beach at Sandwich. Initially, it was thought to be a minke whale—the most frequently stranded of all whale species. Roberts got in touch with the RSPCA, a local marine-life organisation, and the local vet. When the vet arrived, it transpired that they were dealing not with a minke, but with a humpback whale—in fact, the only humpback to have stranded in Britain for the past hundred years. Humpbacks are filter feeders between four and six metres long at birth, and up to 19 metres long when fully developed. This particular humpback was around ten metres long, and, ‘not well—not well at all,’ Roberts says. ‘I remember standing next to the whale and asking the vet what the prognosis was. The vet put his arm around my shoulders, led me about 40 yards away from the whale, and whispered, “not so good, I’m afraid”. It was odd, that thing of leading me away—I think he felt very emotional about it, almost as if it was his granny dying, and that you wouldn’t say anything about her condition in her presence.’
Since it was evident that the whale would not survive to be refloated, the decision was made to have it put down, or—more correctly—to ‘euthanase’ it. Unfortunately, ‘euthanasing’ a whale was evidently going to take something far stronger than the barbiturates commonly used to put down dogs or cats. ‘They used a drug called Imobilon,’ remembers Roberts, ‘which is ten thousand times more powerful than morphine. Most vets only carry enough to kill a horse, so the vet had to contact all the other vets in the area and see if they had further supplies. He ended up with enough to kill an elephant, but that still wasn’t going to be enough, so then he contacted Howlett’s Zoo nearby. They’ve got elephants, so they need to keep supplies of Imobilon, but they wouldn’t come out because of the foot and mouth outbreak. So in the end, the vet injected all the Imobilon he had into the whale. Gradually his breathing and heart rate slowed, and he died.’
Once dead, the responsibility for the whale passed from the RSPCA to the Natural History Museum and HM Coastguard. Having completed a postmortem on the whale, the Museum vets established that the humpback was a young male, 10.66 metres long and 16 tonnes in weight, malnourished, and suffering from a kidney disease—the most likely reason for the stranding. Having completed the tests, the various different organisations then had to find a way of disposing of the body. It was generally agreed that neither burial nor incineration were possible, and because of EU rules it was necessary to take the whale’s remains to a nearby landfill site. Matters were further complicated by the risk of contamination by Imobilon, and the difficulties in keeping the public away. ‘You don’t really have that much chance of disguising a 30-foot humpback whale, do you?’, Roberts points out. ‘His flukes were about 15- to 20-foot across, and this whale had to be driven through the historic town of Sandwich with a bit of plastic over it, without anyone seeing it—it was tricky, believe me.’
Tess Vandervliet, Roberts’ colleague at the coastguard station, remembers the difficulties they had in wrapping the whale and lifting it onto a low-loader. When they did finally complete the loading, Vandervliet went with the truck to the landfill site. It was then that the organisational difficulties of the stranding gave way to more profound considerations. Throughout the conversation, Vandervliet refers to the humpback as ‘she’, despite knowing that it was male. Listening to her, I realise that there’s a kind of logic to this switch of gender—‘she’ not only rescues the whale’s identity but softens it, rescuing the humpback from being just a lump of intransigent blubber to a creature which once had a far richer story than the one which ended on a Sandwich beach. As Vandervliet says, ‘I found it quite upsetting, the way she was disposed of, just pushed into a huge hole like that. It was such an undignified end, so ungainly. The landfill site was the only possible option, but it was still terribly sad; I cried while it was happening. You look at humpbacks and they’re such wonderful, elegant creatures in the water. But when they’re dead, they’re just this huge lump to be disposed of.’
In the past, whales were too useful for their own good. Now they have no use at all, except as souvenirs, speci
mens, or jokes. Which, you wonder, is ultimately the worse fate?
***
A few miles further down the river in Wapping, Bob Jeffries deals with some equally malodorous aspects of the past. Jeffries is a part-time curator at the Thames Police Museum, in which the best and worst of London’s liquid history is preserved for the edification of interested members of the public.
To get to the museum you walk through the police station, out into the central courtyard, up an iron staircase and in through a locked door. The door divides this world from the next. On one side are all of London’s current policing troubles—surveillance, terrorist threats, politicisation—and on the other are its criminal dead. The room has the look of an historian’s pet project, a small local museum evidently maintained with more enthusiasm than money. Two long display cabinets run the length of the room, containing an assortment of old policing equipment: a rattle—used for summoning help before whistles were introduced—a cutlass, a book of punishments, and an eighteenth-century map of the river. Ranged around the side are several portraits of ex-superintendents, a copy of the official directions for the funeral of Winston Churchill (all lifting cranes along the Thames to be kept at half-mast until the procession had passed by), a seek-and-search lamp stamped with the words ‘Do Not Remove—Needed for Marchioness Enquiry’, a Schermuley line-throwing rocket apparatus, two crossed standard-issue swords and several models of police and coastguard cutters. Two male mannequins in waterproof boaters stand guard in sealed cabinets, sagging under the weight of black coats made of such heavy material that they must have taken an effort of will to put on, let alone run in. Jeffries unlocks the cabinets and holds them open. We both gaze at the figures. ‘I’m not sure these two know which side they’re playing for’, Jeffries says eventually, pointing to the dummies’ hands. Both have bright red painted fingernails. ‘Nowadays, I suppose they’d call that diversity.’
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