The wonder last month of a whale in London recalls an episode 350 years ago. In the summer of 1658, the appearance of a whale in the Thames at Greenwich gave rise to wide excitement. The best-known literary witness to the event is that of John Dryden. He recalls the phenomenon in his “Heroique Stanzas, Consecrated to . . . Oliver Lord Protector”, figuring it as an advance
tribute to Cromwell, who was to die three months after:
. . . first the Ocean as a tribute sent
That Gyant Prince of all her watery Heard;
And th’Isle when her Protecting Genius went
Upon his Obsequies loud sighs confer’d.
Adding natural-historical detail, the diarist John Evelyn reports the whale’s stranding at low tide. It “was killed with a harping iron, struck in the head”, whereafter with “a horrid groan, it ran quite on shore and died” (Diary, June 3, 1658). His description is corroborated by a newsletter from John Barber to Viscount Scudamore (June 8, 1658):
“The people of this Towne have gratified their eyes for almost a weeke together with a Succession of novelties: Green-goose-faire is the preface to the trapanning of a young whale betwixt Blackwall and Greenwich: a strange and unwonted spectacle here; it is sayd to be faeminine, & about 58. foot long, & about 12. in thicknesse; She was first discovered neare Blacke-wall, pursued by hideous cries of watermen, strucke first by a fisher man’s anchor, throwne from a bold hand, & then attempted by severall engines, V[iz.], musket-shot, resented his wounds soe highly that he made an outcry the most terrible that fancy could create; in fine they kill’d him, & drag’d him at a loyter [lighter, a boat used for lading] to Greenwich where then thousands of people in a day are to see him: men & ladies are carried on porter’s backes to him as he lyes in the water . . . to the great content of the beholders: a gent that I know, with 7. or 8. more were at once in his mouth: his tongue is the whole breadth of his mouth: of the tonge of some great whales have bin made no less then 4. tun of oyle, as I am told: but as for the throat of the greatest Leviathan it is no wider than the thicknesse of mans arme, which confirmes that of Jonas to be purely a miracle: This monster hath hugely inrich’d Greewich & Deptford, but is now remov’d to Blackwall to perfume that place, for he stinks intollerably: some say the protector doth challenge it, as being a fish royall, but had it bin but a sturgion the Lord mayor might have had it.”
(British Library, Add MS, 11043, f. 107)
The final comment here, at the Protector’s expense, is in a different spirit from Dryden’s compliment.
The more suggestive literary reference is that by Dryden’s colleague at Whitehall, John Milton. The opening book of Paradise Lost supplies the famous simile in which Satan on the fiery lake is compared to “that sea-beast / Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest that swim the ocean stream . . .”. Here the monster is first of all from the Book of Job 41:1 – “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” He threatens the “night-foundered” seaman who anchors on his side. Milton has rightly been understood to draw on a rich emblem tradition describing false hope, by contrast with Christ’s saints who “Anchor their fleshly ships fast in his wounded side” (as in Giles Fletcher’s description of Christ’s triumph after death).
Milton is often praised for such exotic epic similes, in this case bringing Satan, remote in time and place, only as near as something reported from the dark world of “the Norway foam”. But whatever Satan’s biblical and northern associations, Milton may have had a Leviathan in mind who had come rather nearer to London and been the talk of the town. For this was an event contemporary with Milton’s undertaking his epic: his nephew Edward Phillips reports him beginning it in earnest in 1658, “two years before the King’s coming back in” in 1660. Like the London Leviathan, Satan may not be so remote from us after all.
