Free Leviathan or The Whale by Philip Hoare

‘portcullis’, hanging ‘like a ship’s jib-boom’. I cannot help but agree with Ishmael: this calcium scaffolding can hardly indicate the true shape of the animal. One might tell the form of a human being from its bones, but who could imagine the reality of this creature?
    As in death the enigmatic sperm whale gives few of its secrets away, so in life it sees us from another angle. Its eyes are so positioned as to prevent the animal from seeing straight ahead (although their siting on its wedge-shaped head, at the point where it narrows down to the jaw, is such that a whale can see below itself in stereoscope–presumably a useful tactic in hunting–and will swim upside-down to scrutinize objects above and, perhaps, to feed on them). For most of its life the whale must regard the world in two halves, Ishmael deduces; its head gets in the way, ‘while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him’. It seems odd that such a powerful creature should be so benighted. This blindness is also the reason, says Ishmael, for the sperm whale’s ‘timidity and liability to queer frights’. A ‘gallied’ animal would sound deep into the ocean, beyond the reach of man and his harpoons.
    In such a silent flight, the sperm whale could not be outdistanced. More than any other marine mammal, it is a master of the sea. Using its muscle-bound tail, it can power its way thousands of feet below, its paddle-shaped flippers tucked into its flanks as neatly as an aeroplane’s undercarriage. And once below, it can stay down for up to two hours. To achieve this feat, a whale must spend much of its time breathing at the surface–its ‘spoutings out’, as the sailors called them–taking some sixty to seventy breaths in ten or eleven minutes.
    …the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
    The Fountain,
Moby-Dick

    Whereas humans inefficiently hold their breath to dive, whales supercharge their oxygen-carrying hæmoglobin blood cells before sounding, often in exactly the same spot at which they surfaced, perhaps to be sure of their survey of the food below. On these stately travels into the deep, they are accompanied by remora, sickly grey attendants suckered to their wrinkled flanks like imps; ‘fish, to be sure, but not quite proper fish’, they are parasites lacking individual motion, dependent on their hosts without whom they would flop to the ocean floor. Even more dæmonic are the lampreys, ‘wriggling, yard-long, slimy brown creatures that repel even the zoologist’. These attach themselves to the whales with rasping mouths, leaving love-bite scars on their huge but helpless victims.
    Commonly, a sperm whale will dive between three hundred and eight hundred metres, following a U-shaped trajectory. Once it has reached its chosen depth, it will swim horizontally for up to three kilometres, presumably foraging. Occasionally, the whale will dive even deeper. Dead sperm whales have been found entangled in underwater cables 1,134 metres down–although that figure does not measure the drowning agony of the whale, its jaw caught in the insulated wire.
    In 1884, a cable-repairing steamship operating off South America pulled up a cable in which a dying whale was trapped, its entrails spilling out; the wire itself was found to be bitten in six places. In another insight gained at mortal expense, a sperm whale caught south of Durban in South Africa in 1969 was found with the remains of two
Scymodon
sharks in its belly. Since such fish are bottom dwellers feeding at three thousand metres, this was proof of the whales’ extraordinary diving abilities. Much of what we know about sperm whales was discovered by those whose primary interest was to kill them. Whales died that men might describe them.
    Nor are they easily replenished. The sperm whale has the lowest reproductive rate of any mammal–females produce single calves only once every four to six years. It is also the most sexually dimorphic