Malcolm Clarke

Malcolm Clarke is a former whaler and the creator of a museum on Pico whose exhibits draw on his experience at sea and his long-standing interest in sperm whales. His account brings two kinds of knowledge into view: the immense scale of commercial whaling he witnessed in the South Atlantic and Southern Ocean, and the close examination of whale anatomy and feeding that later shaped his collection. The museum does not erase the violence of the industry that made such study possible; its objects preserve evidence of both the animal’s biology and its conversion into usable materials.

From ambulance service to the whaling fleets

Clarke was born in Birmingham and grew up by the River Thames. During National Service he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, driving ambulances from Aldershot to a military hospital at Netley on the shore of Southampton Water. In the 1950s he joined whaling fleets operating in the South Atlantic and the Southern Ocean, a transition from military medical work to an industry organized around the capture and processing of whales.

His memories convey the scale of that work in figures rather than general impressions. In a single season, Clarke saw 30,000 whales taken; at times, a fleet caught as many as 24 in one day. He recalled that the ships were kept continuously occupied. These numbers place his experience within an industrial operation in which the killing and processing of whales proceeded at a pace that is difficult to comprehend from an individual specimen or a museum display. Clarke’s recollections are therefore not simply a record of life at sea: they give the exhibits a direct connection to the intensity of twentieth-century whaling.

A collection built around whale biology

After his years with the fleets, Clarke’s attention turned particularly to what whales ate. Buckets of squid beaks in the museum represent the evidence that caught his interest: the contents of sperm-whale stomachs could include many species that had not yet been identified. In one animal, he found 18,000 beaks. The finding gave him a sustained interest in the relationships between whales and their prey, though it also produced an ironic reversal. Clarke came to say that he found whales annoying because they consumed so many of the animals he studied.

The museum makes anatomy visible through objects of different scales. Its most prominent display is a life-size cross-section of a female sperm whale, painted across the plaster walls and continuing around a corner. Beside it, a sample of the spermaceti sac lets visitors examine a material associated with the whale’s head. A separate piece of blubber demonstrates the density and resistance that made it difficult for whalers to cut. These displays translate an enormous animal into parts that can be inspected, while also recalling the practical demands of processing its body.

Clarke’s exhibits likewise explain how a sperm whale functions. One diagram shows the shared internal passage of the trachea and oesophagus and how one route can be closed while the whale feeds, preventing water from entering the lungs. Another addresses the blue-shifted pigments of the whale’s eyes, suited to the changing light of deep water. A hinged wooden model illustrates Clarke’s explanation that the whale may adjust buoyancy by changing the temperature of oil in its head. He also allows for a competing interpretation: that the spermaceti functions in focusing the animal’s sonar clicks. A section of bone reveals honeycomb-like spaces that, when filled with air, would respond to changes in pressure during a dive. The exhibits give visitors mechanisms to consider without presenting every scientific explanation as settled.

Ambergris and the limits of explanation

Among the museum’s materials is a piece of ambergris, which Clarke presents alongside a diagram indicating its origin in the sperm whale’s digestive system. The account complicates the substance’s commercial and cultural associations: ambergris has been prized for its role in perfume, yet its formation is connected to the processing and passage of indigestible material from the whale’s food. Its presence in the museum makes an elusive commodity available for examination, but does not make its precise formation fully understood.

The text places Clarke’s explanation beside a longer history of attempts to account for ambergris. Thomas Beale argued that it consisted of hardened waste from the sperm whale, while earlier authorities associated it with sick animals. Modern cetologists, by contrast, are described as thinking that it comes from healthy whales. The process outlined in the book involves squid beaks and other material that the whale cannot digest, a chemical response in the digestive system, and the occasional formation of ambergris—reported to occur in as few as one whale in a hundred. Once expelled, it may harden and change in the water. Clarke’s specimen thus occupies a useful middle ground between tangible evidence and unresolved biological questions: it can be handled and studied, but its unusual origin remains more complex than a simple account of a valuable substance suggests.

The museum as witness and interpretation

Clarke’s museum is presented as the product of one person’s sustained commitment, not as a detached storehouse of specimens. A painted whale cross-section, preserved materials, diagrams, and models arrange the animal as both a scientific subject and a record of human use. Their explanatory purpose is clear, but so is their proximity to the whaling industry: Clarke learned about whales while participating in fleets that took them on a vast scale. His collection therefore holds a tension between study and extraction without resolving it into a simple conversion from whaler to conservationist; the evidence records his fascination with whale biology, but does not describe him as an advocate or state that he rejected his former work.

Outside the museum, Clarke built a life-size whale model from tubular scaffolding on a rocky ledge overlooking the ocean. Its form extends the collection beyond the walls, turning the whale into a structure that can be approached at human scale. In conversation, he also recounted reports of sea monsters: a fisherman’s account of a giant squid beside a boat, and a pilot’s sighting off Durban of what appeared first to be wreckage and then to move like a long-necked creature into the sea. These are reported stories rather than verified observations by Clarke. Their place in his conversations shows that his interest ranges beyond what the museum can classify, from anatomical evidence toward the ocean’s persistent uncertainties.

Clarke’s significance in the book lies in this combination of participant, collector, and interpreter. He supplies firsthand numbers that expose the scale of whaling, while his museum attends to the particular structures and materials of the sperm whale. The exhibits make some features legible, from feeding and buoyancy to the origin of ambergris, but they do not make the animal entirely knowable. Clarke’s career and collection thus hold together an industrial history of taking whales and a continuing effort to understand them as living creatures.