Labrador enters the book through the routes taken by captive beluga whales: its coastal waters supply animals that are transported far from their habitat and displayed to urban audiences. The accounts of two nineteenth-century exhibitions connect Labrador to a wider tension between curiosity and care, as elaborate efforts to keep the whales alive unfold alongside the physical costs of confinement and travel.

A source of captive belugas

In 1861, Phineas T. Barnum imported a pair of beluga whales from waters off Labrador to his American Museum on Broadway. The animals were twenty-three and eighteen feet long. They were carried south in hermetically sealed boxes lined with seaweed, then placed in a basement tank measuring fifty-eight by twenty-five feet but barely seven feet deep. Filled with fresh water, the tank was an inadequate setting for whales taken from the sea. They swam together in a manner described as resembling lovers, yet even Barnum expected their careers to be brief.

The book presents this exhibition as part of a Victorian fashion that joined ingenuity in science with public curiosity. The New York Tribune imagined that Barnum’s enterprise might expand beyond white whales to include sperm whales, mermaids, and other strange creatures, turning the museum into a miniature world of animal life. Labrador is thus not simply a distant place named as a point of capture: it is the beginning of a journey that converts living animals into exhibits and makes their removal part of metropolitan entertainment.

The journey to London

In September 1877, a beluga caught off Labrador arrived at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster. It was one of eleven animals netted by Zack Coup and his men after they stranded at high tide. The nine-foot, six-inch whale’s journey south proceeded in stages: it travelled in a narrow box by sloop to Montreal, then by train to New York City, a trip lasting two weeks. It remained for seven months at Coney Island’s Summer Aquarium, where it acquired the habit of swimming in a circle.

The transfer across the Atlantic demanded repeated intervention. Removed from its tank, the whale was placed aboard the North German Lloyd steamship Oder, bound for Southampton. On deck, it travelled in a rough wooden box lined with seaweed and was wetted with salt water every three minutes. Despite this careful routine, it had begun to live off its own blubber before reaching England. The measures taken to sustain it could not undo the strain of the passage.

Exhibition, confinement, and cost

From Southampton, the beluga was carried on an open truck by the South-Western Railway to Waterloo Station and then to its new home: an iron tank at the Royal Aquarium, forty-four feet long, twenty feet wide, and six feet deep. The animal waited while the tank took two hours to fill. Still in its box, it had been breathing once every twenty-three seconds; when the box was moved, it feebly flapped its tail. It then fell sideways into the water and sank to the bottom. After three hours without the public, visitors were admitted in great numbers to view it from a specially built grandstand.

The spectacle did not conceal the animal’s condition. The Times questioned whether it could live long in fresh water and noted that noise or vibration from workmen sometimes kept it submerged for as long as two minutes. It was fed live eels, but its high dorsal ridge, which should have been rounded with fat, stood out sharply along its back. In the two exhibition histories, the movement from Labrador’s waters to a display tank is measured not only in miles and transfers, but in the whale’s shrinking body and altered behaviour.

Labrador and the limits of human mastery

The book places these captures against a broader understanding of the sea as a wilderness that human beings often mistake for a distance to be crossed or a domain already subdued. Its account of the London beluga gives that idea a concrete route: capture off Labrador, transport through Montreal and New York City, an Atlantic crossing, and confinement in Westminster. Each link depends on human planning, yet the whale’s need for salt water, its weakening condition, and its circling habit expose the limits of that control.

Labrador’s significance in these episodes is therefore both geographical and ethical. The region’s waters are the point of departure for animals whose presence in aquaria was treated as a public marvel. Their journeys reveal the imbalance within that marvel: the city receives the spectacle, while the captured whale bears the costs of the spectacle in confinement, exhaustion, and dependence on human care.