Scoresby’s Recorded Discovery of a Stone Spear Inside a Whale

William Scoresby’s 1813 account of a stone lance found inside a whale turned a small remnant of an old wound into evidence about the whale’s movements and possible lifespan. Its significance reaches from Scoresby’s search for a northern passage between oceans to Herman Melville’s use of the discovery in Moby Dick, and, much later, to renewed scientific attention to how long bowhead whales may live.

The Lance in the Whale

On July 19, 1813, near the coast of Spitsbergen, Scoresby was shown part of a lance that the crew of the Volunteer had found in a whale killed a few weeks earlier. The stone weapon lay embedded in the blubber. The wound had healed; only a small white scar on the whale’s skin marked where the lance had entered. The animal had survived an injury inflicted by a tool associated with people living far from the whaling grounds where it was eventually killed.

The account placed the discovery beside a very different instrument: Scoresby’s Marine Diver, an industrial-era device for exploring underwater depths. Their juxtaposition set a modern technology against a much older tool, and gave the stone lance a meaning beyond its immediate presence in the whale. Scoresby understood such weapons to have been in common use among Indigenous people a century earlier. He considered it possible that the lance had been made by a people living on the northern coast of the American continent, then still unexplored by Europeans.

A Passage Between Oceans

For Scoresby, the object raised a geographical possibility. If a whale encountered in the Atlantic carried a weapon associated with the Pacific coast of North America, the animal might have travelled between the two oceans. The lance thus became indirect evidence for a Northwest Passage, the northern route that Scoresby and his father had sought to find. It did not prove that the whale had crossed such a route, but it suggested that the animal’s travels could connect distant regions before human explorers had charted them.

That possibility had an earlier precedent in arguments for a northern passage. Three centuries before Scoresby’s discovery, Sir Humphrey Gilbert had cited a narwhal horn found on the Tartary coast as evidence in presenting the case for such a route to Elizabeth I. In both instances, an animal-derived object carried an inference about movement across a largely unknown world. Scoresby’s lance offered a particularly striking version: rather than a specimen found on shore, it had travelled within the whale itself.

Melville’s Literary Adaptation

On April 29, 1850, Herman Melville borrowed both volumes of Scoresby’s Arctic Regions from the New York Society Library. He kept them for a year, and the account of the stone lance fed his imagination. In Moby Dick, Ishmael describes a stone lance-head discovered during the cutting-in of a whale and wonders whether it might have been thrown by an Indigenous person long before the European discovery of America. Melville transformed Scoresby’s recorded incident into a literary conjecture about the animal’s age.

The transformation makes the whale’s body a record that outlasts ordinary human memory. The embedded weapon establishes that the animal had survived an attack from an earlier time; the healed wound makes that history legible only through the trace left behind. Melville extended the inference beyond what Scoresby’s account could establish, but the crucial imaginative leap—the whale carrying a human artifact from a distant past—came from the recorded discovery.

Evidence of Whale Longevity

For decades, editors and scientific commentary treated claims of century-long whale lifespans as sailors’ myth. A 1972 footnote to Moby Dick, for example, put the expected lifespan of larger whales at roughly seventy or eighty years and rejected the possibility of much greater age. More recent evidence from bowheads in the Bering Sea has reopened the question. Iñupiat hunters and storytellers have described recognizing individual whales across successive human generations, and, since 1981, six stone or ivory harpoon points have been found in whale blubber. Modern Iñupiat hunters did not recognize these older weapons, having used mostly metal harpoons since the 1870s.

The implements do not provide a precise age for each whale, but they support the inference that some animals survived for as long as the weapons embedded in them had been present. Because Iñupiat hunters preferred young bowheads, the evidence also leaves open the possibility that older animals remain in the Arctic. The discovery Scoresby recorded therefore acquires a second life: first as a clue to a whale’s long-distance passage, then as a challenge to assumptions about the duration of its life. The stone lance marks the reach of human history into the whale’s body, while the whale’s survival makes that history seem brief by comparison.