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Jul. 2003 No.27 |
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Stranded whales in the culture and economy of medieval and early modern Europe
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Klaus Barthelmess
Whaling historian and collector
Whaling museum consultant |
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The
Japanese word "isana" is a perfect rendition of what we now call the
psychological archtype of the "Great Fish", which in all maritime cultures
is represented by the whale - analogous with the "Great Bird" or the
"Great Land Animal", which in other societies may be represented by
the eagle, condor, elephant, buffalo, bear, tiger, etc. Throughout history, all
these animals have not only been the object of spiritual veneration, but also
of material exploitation. Whenever such a Great animal by chance became available,
the awe it inspired did not prevent humans from scavenging its big body for useful
materials. Whereas the consumed protein resources from a stranded whale did not
leave traces in history, both the material and the spiritual culture it inspired,
have.
The earliest example of European
poetry about a stranded whale is an Anglo-Saxon inscription on a whale bone casket
of about 700 AD. The material is properly identified in Northumbrian runes: HRON SBAN,
whale bone, and then follows the story of the beached whale and its plight. With
some effort, experts of Anglo-Saxon culture have been able to discern an intricate
system of runic magic in the inscriptions on this whale one casket. The explicit
identification of the material strongly suggests, that magic properties were also
attributed to whale bone. The high craftsmanship and the presumed magic aspects
of material and inscription make it likely that the casket may have served as
a container for precious gifts dealt out by a laird or warlord to his vassals
in ceremonies intended to shape strong bonds of allegiance, something of utmost
importance in early Germanic societies (for more detail see www.frankscasket.de).
Many sources testify to the
economic importance of stranded whales to medieval maritime societies in Europe.
Most are legal texts protecting the claims of feudal landowners to whales beached
on their shores (as to wrecked ships). A Norman ruler of Sicily, Robert Guiscard
(1015-1082) participated in the killing of a stranded whale and had the carcass
distributed according to old Norse legal custom. Some 13th- and 14th-century sources
from Britain give evidence that baleen was in demand for military (composite crossbows,
armour plating, tournament swords, perhaps helmet plumes) and fashion purposes
(garment stiffenings), but most of the supply was probably covered by imports
from the organized inshore fishery for right whales carried out in the Bay of
Biscay
In his huge manuscipt about
animals of ca. 1260 AD, Albert the Great provides for the earliest reference to
a series of sperm whale strandings in the North Sea - where this species only
occurrs erratically - in the 1250s. Promoted to the art of literature the greasy
topic is again by medieval poet Jan van Heelu. In his rhymed chronicle of ca.
1290 he compares a military ambuscade with a whale that strayed too close to shore,
finding itself eventually trapped by a net. |
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Among
the tosephot, a community of learned Jews in 12th/13th century France, it was
discussed whether scaly, kosher fish found in the stomach of a whale - which is
not a kosher animal - may be eaten by the abiding. From this it can be inferred
that fish-eating, stranded rorqual whales were at the root of this academic religious
debate.
The order of nature, or in Christian faith, of God's creation, had assigned whales
the watery element. When whales left their assigned element, i.e. became stranded,
the order of the godly creation was infringed upon. In Christian medieval and
early modern thought, people did not seek to investigate the reason for this disorder,
but rather attempted to interpret the meaning of this event within the framework
of the godly plan for human salvation. Thus - in spite of the unexpected windfall
of valuable commodities that could be manufactured from their blubber, meat, bones,
baleen or teeth - stranded whales were interpreted as a harbinger of evil fate,
as a portent of bad luck, or a mean omen. At any rate, they were events worth
recording for future generations. Thus, from about the end of the European middle
ages, stranding records start to become gradually more frequent.
Two large bones of whales
that strayed into the Trave estuary, Baltic Sea, were suspended as a memorial
outside Lubeck's ramparts in the 13th century. There is evidence for about 200
cases of whale bones hung in European churches, castles, and town halls - many
of them now lost - which can be interpreted as "hierozoika", a Greek
word designating items from the animal world hallowed by being mentioned in the
bible. These bones mostly originated from stranded whales (a few from prehistoric,
fewer still from large exotic animals), they were often interpreted as bones of
the biblical giant Goliath or of Leviathan, and were sometimes traded long distances
to be found hundreds of kilometers from the sea. Whale bones as "hierozoika"
sanctioned political power of the church, feudal lords or municipal governments,
and they were welcome diplomatic gifts between these institutions. In the country,
landowners sometimes set up the paired jawbones of stranded baleen whales as arches
in their gardens.
Another way of recording
whale strandings for posterity was painting the huge "fish" for display
in the same type of buildings, i.e. churches, castles or town halls. We know such
commemorative, "public" paintings of stranded whales from the Mediterranean
all around Europe to the Baltic Sea, frequently executed in a monumental format
between the 1430s and the 1830s. Many of them have been lost. A noteworthy, surviving
example is a life-size "portrait" of a minke whale stranded in the Weser
estuary in 1669, painted by a student of Rembrandt on a 3.70 x 9.40 m canvas.
For three centuries it had hung in the town hall of Bremen, was discarded in the
1960s, luckily retrieved and after restoration is now on display in the German
Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven (incidentally, the earliest realistic depiction
of this species).
The spread of the letterpress,
invented in the 1450s, brought about another potential for recording noteworthy
events - such as whale strandings - or rather, disseminating the news of them
to a larger clientele, who were willing to pay up to half a day's income for a
printed broadside or pamphlet. Usually illustrated by a spectacular woodcut or
engraving, a typeset text told the pertaining news story, often in quite a dramatic
style, for mountabanks peddled these imprints by yelling the stories to an illiterate
audience on marketplaces and fairgrounds. The oldest pamphlets on stranded whales
known so far date from the 1530s. In medieval Christian tradition, they continue
to interpret the "meaning" of a whale stranding, but gradually over
the centuries, the prodigious aspects step behind more empiric ones. |
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Besides
the "political profit" of displaying spectacularly big whale bones or
huge commemorative paintings in public buildings, the commercial exhibition of
entire mounted skeletons, of body parts in the flesh, or even entire carcasses
of stranded whales, also has a long history in Europe. It started already in Antiquity.
Bones from a whale stranded in present-day Israel were shipped to Rome to be set
up for public edification by an organizer of circensic games in 58 BC. Another
whale skeleton could be admired in 4th-century Carthage. In northern Europe, records
of commercial exhibitions of whales set in in the 1450s. In 1549, duke Cosimo
de Medici set up a sperm whale skeleton in a loggia of the Palazzo Vecchio of
Florence (accompanied by a mural painting). The dried head and flukes of a sperm
whale stranded near Antwerp in 1577 were transported on a cart over much of Flanders
and Germany. Swiss entrepreneurs bought the skeleton of a fin whale stranded near
Arles, France, in 1619. A unique broadside illustrates how the skeleton was set
up in showrooms: the vertebrae were laid on two parallel poles, the ribs suspended
perpendicularly, the jawbones laid on the floor, the skull hung by a pulley block
from gallows or the ceiling, and the shoulder blades were mounted as a vertical
tail fin. Town officials were sometimes bribed with souvenir bones from the whale,
which explains the presence of "stray" whale vertebrae, ribs or flipper
bones in town halls hundreds of kilometres from the sea, as well as decreasing
measurements of the displayed skeleton in some updated editions of the pertaining
broadside. Transport logistics having been solved early on, improved preservation
methods brought about a real "boom" of commercial whale exhibitions
in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some enterprizes had several whale carcasses on
tour simultaneously, but these originated not from stranded animals, but from
whales bought at whaling shore stations.
Besides differences, scholars
of Japanese culture will recognize a few similarities between European and Japanese
ways of dealing with stranded isana, the Great Fish. The humpback whales stranded
at Shinagawa in 1798, e.g., inspired ukiyo-e artists and poets for two generations.
Some whale shrines had torii made of whale jawbones. One  ban-woodcut
by Yoshitoshi shows a commercial exhibition of a rorqual whale at Fukugawa in
1875.
Following the recent paradigmatic
change in contemporary western civilisation, whose dominantly metropolitan lifestyle
has increasingly alienated it from nature, whale strandings now inspire a culture
of public larmoyance. Awe and curiosity have given way to pity and a faddish environmental
pessimism. Some western "whale huggers" even stricture children who
- innocently seeking a little high ground above the adults - climb upon the carcass
of a stranded whale! Such modern irrationality likewise is an expression of the
perennial validity of the psychological archtype of the Great Fish. But unlike
the irrationality of awe the Great Fish inspired in the past, permitting at the
same time its material exploitation, the new western attitude is preemptive, dogmatic
and intolerant. |
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| 1. Italian broadside on the stranding of a 13.5 m whale near Ancona, Italy, on 25 February 1602. Engraving, 22.1 x 33.1 cm. This broadside was possibly sold by the owners of a travelling exhibit featuring the skeleton of this whale. Barthelmess Whaling Collection, No. 846. |
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| 2. Fairly realistic woodcut illustration, 8.7 x 13.4 cm, of a half-rotten pilot whale washed ashore near Katwijk, Holland, on 20 September 1608. In the appertaining pamphlet the condition of the carcass is compared to a "rotting" peace treaty between the Netherlands and Spain. Barthelmess Whaling Collection, No. 241. This pamphlet and the previous broadside have been described in detail by Ingrid Faust, Klaus Barthelmess & Klaus Stopp: Zoologische Einblattdrucke und Flugschriften vor 1800. Vol. 4: Wale, Sirenen, Elefanten. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2002, which comprehensively catalogues 145 European broadsides and pamphlets about whales stranded between 1531 and 1792 (in German; ISBN 3-7772-0205-3). |
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| 3. Minke whale found floating dead on the Doggerbank, North Sea, on 9 January 1787. Pencil and watercolour drawing by James Sowerby (1757-1822), ca. 25 x 23 cm. After examination by scientists like John Hunter and Sowerby, the 17-foot carcass was commercially exhibited at the Lyceum, Strand, London, from 29 January till around the 12 February 1787. This drawing is probably the second oldest depiction of this whale species. The dorsal fin had been cut off. Barthelmess Whaling Collection, No. 709. |
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