Jonathan Mirsky
ANIMALS BEFORE THE FALL
Leviathan, or The Whale
By Philip Hoare (Fourth Estate 448pp £18.99)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

When Prince Charles eventually becomes king, during 'the most sacred part of the ceremony' he will be anointed on his head, heart, shoulders, hands and elbows with 'ambraegrisiae 3iiij', a fragrant amber-coloured oil. Charles, a keen ecologist, will know this as ambergris, which comes from whales. That might worry him a bit. What may cause him more concern is that this nearly priceless substance (used by French parfumiers like Chanel, Dior and Givenchy), is actually extracted from, to use Philip Hoare's exact words, 'whale shit'.

Amazing? This tremendous book - not long enough in my voracious view - tells us many astonishing things about man's most tremendous prey, the whale. John F Kennedy's widow, for example, placed a whale tooth carved with the presidential seal in her assassinated husband's coffin. Right now, as you read this, whale oil lubricates the Hubble Space Telescope, 'while the Voyager probe spins into infinity playing the song of the humpback to greet any friendly aliens - who may wonder at our treatment of the species with which we share our planet'.

Fearing deep water, Philip Hoare learned to swim late and became transfixed by whales, with which he has swum. Now, in this wonderfully written and poignant book, he tells us what he knows and what we should take in: 'Whales defy gravity, occupy other dimensions; they live in a medium that would overwhelm us, and which far exceeds our earthly sway moving through a world we know nothing about. They are animals before the Fall, innocent of sin.' But he notes, too, that whales 'have bad breath and shit reddish water'. And emit ambergris.

Whales are at least as sociable as elephants and probably a lot smarter. Sperm whales (so called because that was how early whalers perceived the cloudy oil in their heads) travel in families that click in their unique languages. These clicks also act as sonar, identifying possible food or dangers far away. The sounds of one kind of whale can be heard by its fellows on the other side of the Atlantic. When threatened, sperm whales cluster in circles with noses or flukes pointing outwards, sheltering their calves. If a mother dives for food, other whales guard the calves, and males have been seen gently holding baby whales in their giant jaws. One of the reasons whales beach themselves, as one did on the Hampshire coast in late July, is that 'entire families follow a stricken relative to strand on a beach'. If a female is attacked, her companions gather around her and, naturally, the planet's greatest predator - mankind - exploits this tendency in order to massacre them. Despite what you read in Moby-Dick, sperm whales are 'gentle giants faced down by militant dolphins'. As for Moby-Dick, published in 1851, which Hoare refers to reverently, chunks of it 'are filched directly - one might say almost brazenly' from the first great study of the sperm whale, by Thomas Beale, published in 1839.

Although whales had been hunted by American Indians, who usually got at them just offshore in their canoes, it was the early eighteenth century when the great whaling voyages, sometimes lasting years, set off from Nantucket and New Bedford. In its time New Bedford was America's richest city, based on an industry worth millions of dollars annually to its largely Quaker entrepreneurial population. What was the prize? Whale oil, first extracted and purified in 1748 by a Sephardic Jew, Jacob Rodriguez Rivera. The result of this complex process - described minutely by Hoare - 'made fortunes'. It burned in countless lamps and candles all over the world with its pure, nearly smokeless light. One million gallons of whale oil went to Europe annually. Whales were chased and murdered in their tens of thousands all over the world by badly paid and horribly treated crews, many of them escaped slaves, Indians, and men from Portugal's outer islands.

But New Bedford and its several dozen sister whaling ports were almost immediately reduced to ghost towns by the discovery in 1857 of oil in Pennsylvania. No whaling ship left Nantucket after 1869. I suppose after that the whalers' wives, widows as they were called, gave up the plaster dildos ('he's-a-homes') which they had used while their husbands spent long years at sea.

Sperm whales are huge and sometimes centuries old. How do we know that? Because whales killed in the Atlantic have been found with stone arrow tips in them. The Indians who made these had stopped producing them long before - and, what is more, had attacked the whales in the Pacific, so it is supposed that the whales travelled through some unknown (to us) north-west passage. We know that whales plunge to the deepest depths because of what has been found in their stomachs - creatures which exist only very far down - and because whales have been entangled in undersea cables over a thousand feet beneath the surface. They don't drink, can go for months without eating, stay under water for two hours, and can be described as huge oxygen factories. Whales have the biggest brains on the planet, brains which, it is now thought, interact with their environment and with each other in sophisticated, and still ill-understood, ways.

Ill-understood all round, the whale. Hoare does well to tell us that much of the economic wealth that built capitalist America derives from whaling, 'a pattern of plunder ... it was as if the antediluvian beasts had to die in order to assert the modern world'. Even now, despite the 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling, Japan, on the bogus grounds of 'research', kills thousands of them every year, using harpoons fitted with charges.

The only story Philip Hoare misses in this splendid book is one I recall soon after the opening (in New Bedford), over fifty years ago, of John Huston's Moby Dick. Moviegoers were urged to come and thrill to this great epic of the sea, 'with Gregory Peck in the title role'. It was, as the New Yorker observed, 'A whale of a part'.

JONATHAN MIRSKY has never seen a whale, although he would love to. He has swum with many sea turtles.