A Whale in the Thames



They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. (Jonah, 2:8)


The unprecedented appearance of a bottlenose whale in the Thames in the first month of the year would undoubtedly have been seen as some form of portent in times gone by. Like storms of scarlet hailstones, or untoward silver showers of mackerel, it would have provoked mingled excitation and foreboding. It would have spoken of the Lord's benediction, or his wrath, depending on whether the temper of the times was benign or malcontent.

In Christian myth, the whale is a fiend, known as the devourer of Jonah in the Old Testament story (Jonah, chapters 1-2), still cited as fact by Jesus (Matthew12:40). In the early years of the twentieth century, an English Jonah, a fisherman named John Killam, was alleged to have been swallowed by a whale in the South Atlantic, and later safely disgorged when the beast was harpooned by his shipmates on the Star of the East. After medical attention, he went on to live a normal life, although it is said his skin was stained a bluish-white, supposedly by cetacean gastric acid. The tale was thought to give retroactive credence to the biblical myth, until it was given the lie by Killam's wife in an interview with a sceptical journal, the Expository Times, in 1907.

The hardy persistence of Jonah stories reflects a wish to believe in a benign form of predation, in a utopia in which ravening beasts, having swallowed us whole, will obligingly spew us forth once more, largely unharmed if perhaps a little digested. A rorqual whale that ran aground off the Norfolk fishing port of Gorleston in 1891 was put on public display for several days after beached exhaustion had finished it off. It was then stuffed and carried in triumph to the London Aquarium and thence around the country, so that all could see its devouring days were done. The Thames whale, thrashing its way under Chelsea Bridge and beaching on the shingle beneath Battersea power station, lay at risk only of the indignity of being rolled on to inflatable cushions for re-immersion, rather than succumbing to the taxidermist's tender mercies.

As onlookers crowded the bridges to view the whale's progress, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society cautioned against the temptation of the news media to give it a name. 'It would be too painful if it passes away.' And lo, before very long, it passed away. A whale in the capital is no longer a divine portent, only the potential star of a real-life animatronic movie unfolding before us. This, and not the disproof of some whiskery old maritime yarn, is the true evidence of secularisation.

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