Cetancients – Katie (Tom) Walters

Blue Whale Model, Natural History Museum

Suspended in the centre of the mammals gallery, and utterly dominating the room, the natural history museum’s blue whale model is an iconic aspect of the Natural History Museum collection, and beloved by members of the public. It has been a part of my life for so long that I cannot remember the time before I first saw it, although I know from speaking with my parents that I was already fixated on whales before my first visit.

Cetaceans are as central to the existence of the Natural History Museum as they are to my own life. The museum’s first superintendent, Richard Owen, initially proposed the construction of a dedicated national museum of natural history due to frustrations with the lack of space for natural history collections in the British Museum. His proposal made specific reference to a need to share complete whale skeletons with the public, to allow them to understand the true scale of these enormous creatures.

Though Owen would not live to see its construction, the blue whale sculpture is a natural extension of his vision; an attempt to represent the largest mammal on earth in a way that the general public can connect to. Constructed from wood and plaster over the course of two years, the model was unveiled to the public in 1938, and represented a substantial feat of both engineering and scientific sculpture from taxidermist Percy Stammwitz and the Natural History Museum’s modelling team.

At the time of its construction, the model sat at the cutting edge of cetology, but by today’s standards it is a poor imitation of a whale, rigid and bloated in comparison to the sleek frames of actual blue whales. In the 1930’s, cetologists did not know what whales looked like in their natural environments, and what limited understanding they did have was based on photographs of dead whales, taken during whaling and natural strandings, which were distorted by a lack of support from the water and the beginnings of decomposition. The Natural History Museum’s model is based on measurements from whale #112, a female blue whale killed by a British research team in 1925.

The first images of blue whales in their natural environment would not be taken until the mid 70’s, meaning that humans had walked on the moon before we understood what a blue whale really looks like.

Though we now have a much better understanding of blue whales than we did in the 1930’s, underwater photographs of whales are still a rarity, and despite their immense size, there is a great deal about the lives of these elusive creatures that remains a mystery to humans.

Despite its inaccuracy, the Natural History Museum blue whale model has substantial historical significance, telling us as much about human history as it does about whales. It remains beloved by the public, and for many museum visitors will be the closest they ever come to contact with an actual whale.

ILLUSTRATION??

 

I meet you when I am five years old

A mess of frustration and wonder,

And desperately hungry for life.

I am already looking for you.

I have been gathering giants in my pockets,

Sinking my teeth into anything Bigger Than This;

Fixated on the moment where ocean

Meets skin. When a body becomes unknowable.

I am a catalogue of fish facts, and you –

you are the biggest of all.

I want to swallow you whole. Run my hands

Across your fibreglass skin,

Make you real. In the ocean, whaleskin pulses with life,

And you are its rigid ambassador,

Suspended from the ceiling, aching to move.

I will chase you for the rest of my life,

A promise against the horizon.

Full of potential, and too big to see all at once.

 

 

Blue whale skeleton at Husavik whale museum

 

Your ribcage is a Cathedral

Where I worship the god of

Lost things. Curled up in the

Place of your heart is the

First time my body does not

Feel too big.

Churches are so often built

In the language of bone.

You are a home for waifs

And strays. I walk out of the

Storm and into you. Speak

No curses,

Only silence. If we are built

In the image of gods, I am

Built in the image of you. Too

Large for the space that

Contains me and braced to

Decay.

I use my knuckles as rosary

Beads. Count my prayers in

The ruin of you. May my body

Be a gift to smaller creatures.

May my ribcage be a chapel.

May I be home.

 

 

Whale watching

They tell us that you will be easy to mistake

For the crest of a wave. I won’t understand

How true this is until we are at sea, and

Surrounded by the potential of whales.

We watch for your breath. This is how I will know you,

By the warmth of your lungs. Mist over water.

I turn on my heel; everything I see is you.

The collision of ill-tempered waters.

Sea-spray, and the wake of our boat.

I hold your name at the back of my tongue,

Swallow it back. I’m frightened to waste it.

All the hoping and searching and longing,

Spent on cold water and air. In time, our guide

Will permit me to believe, pointing to the

Fluke of your tail as you dive,

And I will not cry. I will note that you seem

Somehow smaller than I was expecting, and less still

Slipping lithely through the fingers of the ocean,

Or resting in her palm, hanging in the lull between peaks and troughs.

You are as natural as breathing; unspectacular,

And the stuff that life is made of.

You cast long shadows. I will never again be unwhaled.

Your great tail will follow me home, In the corner

Of my eye, I see whales. Always whales.

In the movement of headlights, the shadow of a streetlamp,

Reflections in the window of the bus.

 

Prehistoric whales

The evolutionary pathway of cetaceans took their earliest ancestors out of the ocean and onto land, and then slowly returned them to the sea. Archaeoceti is the name given to the evolutionary ancestors of modern cetaceans, and the grouping encompasses a number of steps in the evolutionary chain.

The oldest known member of Archaeoceti is Pakicetus, a slender wolflike creature with long legs and a narrow tail. Pakicetus had already begun the cetacean family’s transition towards life in the water, wading on the shoreline to hunt. Over the centuries, these mammals became better adapted to the ocean; their legs shortened and eventually became the pectoral fins of modern whales, while their tails grew stronger and more muscular, propelling them through the water.
Maiacetus was a point in that gradual transition. It is clear from the strength of Maiacetus’ pelvis that the creature was able to walk on land, but their short legs and flat digits were adapted to swimming, making movement on land difficult and tiring. They lived much of their lives in the water, but lacked proper blowholes and gave birth on land, meaning they were not fully aquatic as modern cetaceans are.

My disabilities mean that my ability to walk is limited. Like Maiacetus, I am poorly suited to life on the land I depend on.

Illustration:

 

Love song for Maiacetus

Improbable shorebound beast,

Let me love you. Your thickly muscled

Body, your stubborn sea-legs.

Bones that long for the ocean, and

Lungs that depend on the land.

I promise you, I understand.

I know what it means to carry legs that can

No longer serve you. How heavy they feel,

How they tremble beneath you,

How they greet saltwater like an old friend.

One day, in the distant future,

A beluga will carry

This effortful life

As a small shard of bone

In her pelvis.

A memory of you,

The strange grandfather

You were.

But right now you are achingly alive.

Bask in your awkward in-betweenness,

The not-quiteness of your freshly balding skin.

Becoming will arrive when she is ready.

Grow not into a whale; I love you

Like this.

 

 

Blue Whale skeleton at Natural History Museum

Hope is a blue whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling of Hinzte Hall at the Natural History Museum. She has been part of the collections since her death in 1891, and hung for decades above the blue whale sculpture in the hall of mammals, an outdated misrepresentation of her appearance in life. In 2017, she was remounted and moved to Hintze Hall, replacing a diplodocus statue to become the new public face of the museum.

With this move, she was given her name, Hope, as a “symbol of humanity’s power to shape a sustainable future.”

Hope was killed by a man named Ned Wickham after she became stranded on a sandbar in Wexford. Her body was sold at auction, before being butchered for her meat and her blubber, which was a valuable industrial commodity at the time. When she died, the people of Wexford recognised her as a whale, but could not identify her species. In news reports of her death, she is described as a “monster”.

Hope’s public life straddles three centuries, and immense changes in public understanding of what it means to be a whale. She has been a terrifying sea monster, a valuable commodity, and an emblem of what could be lost to climate change. Her existence has been repeatedly defined and redefined by her relationship to human society.

In 2018, new research revealed that in the last year of her life, Hope had most likely become a mother for the first time. Before her death, she had a complex social existence amongst her own kind, that remained completely unknown to humans for the 130 years that we’ve been the guardians of her remains.

Illustration: collage of rubbish showing Hope as a living whale with her skeleton overlaid on top.

 

Hope

When you rose, aching from the sea

And felt, for the first time,

The land-mammal weight of the sky,

The heft of fat beneath your skin that had once

Held you buoyant as the moon,

A young man walked out from the land

And felled you like a tree.

How brave he was.

To bet the nascent sinew of his shoulder blades

Against the monster of you;

Great unknowable sea-beast, marriage of

Tempest and skin.

I know you now, and I am sorry.

I visit you at the museum, feed recycling

Into your ribcage, take

Communion with your bones.

The world as I know it

Is dying. You, who have held

Devastation tight beneath your tongue,

And swallowed still,

Tell me that there is

Something more than this.