Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum appears as a place where whales are made visible in sharply different forms: architectural spectacle, plaster model, preserved specimen, and entry in a record of death and stranding. Its displays and collections preserve knowledge that might otherwise disappear, but the book also shows the costs and limits of that knowledge. The museum’s history is entwined with the whaling industry that supplied specimens, while its later records document the mounting losses that industry helped bring about.

Public Display and the Whale Made Visible

The museum’s setting makes natural history feel at once monumental and unsettling. Visitors emerge from a tiled underground passage into a building whose terracotta exterior resembles geological strata and carries an industrial bestiary of griffins, fish, and pterodactyls. Inside, children gather around a darkened dinosaur skeleton. A century earlier, the building’s spectacle included a sperm-whale skeleton, watched over as though it were a captive exhibit. The changing display registers a shift in what the museum puts before its public, without removing the older sense of the whale as a creature to be observed and classified.

The museum’s models extend that public encounter beyond a single skeleton. Percy Stammwitz made moulds of stranded whale carcasses and created plaster replicas, among them a blue whale that became his most celebrated achievement. His work also included a range of cetaceans, from killer whales and belugas to pilot whales, dolphins, porpoises, sei whales, and a young sperm whale. These replicas gave visitors access to animals rarely encountered at sea, translating the size and variety of cetaceans into objects that could be arranged and studied in a gallery. In that sense, the museum’s public image of the whale was not simply found in nature: it was fashioned through the labour of collecting, mould-making, and display.

Collections, Preservation, and Classification

Behind the exhibition spaces, the museum keeps a much less accessible archive. Its climate-controlled rooms contain cetacean sections preserved in alcohol and identified by scientific names, alongside shelves of other preserved animals and metal vats holding entire dolphins and infant whales. The collections turn bodies into specimens that can be stored, labelled, compared, and revisited. Their order makes scientific study possible, while the physical separation between this working collection and the public galleries establishes different kinds of access to animal life.

The collection also includes a giant squid, preserved in a large tank of formalin and seawater. Its importance in the book comes partly from its place in the imagined struggle between the sperm whale and its formidable prey: an animal once treated as mythical becomes an object of museum science. Across these displays and stores, the institution holds together different ways of knowing whales and other sea animals. A model invites public attention; a labelled specimen supports classification; a preserved body records an encounter that may have ended in stranding or capture.

Stranding Records and the Work of Documentation

In 1913, the Crown gave the museum the first right to refuse the carcasses of royal fish, formally recognizing their scientific as well as commercial value. The Board of Trade asked Receivers of Wreck stationed around the country to send the museum telegraphic reports of stranded whales. Sidney Harmer, the museum’s director, collated the earliest records during the First World War. The reports included a fin whale in the Firth of Forth that was initially mistaken for an aeroplane, and a rare Sowerby’s beaked whale found at Skegness. Other whales died after entering minefields laid against submarines. The records thus gathered natural-history observations within the conditions of wartime: the coast was being watched for military threats even as stranded animals became evidence for the museum.

The scale of the archive is striking. The museum has recorded thirteen thousand beached whales across the twentieth century, though only a small number were claimed for scientific research. The rest form a record of loss and a practical problem for those responsible for dealing with huge carcasses. The museum’s documentation does not resolve that problem; it makes its extent legible. In the book, the record is at once a resource for natural history and an accumulation of individual strandings, each plotted along the British coast.

Field Research and the Making of Knowledge

The museum’s work extended beyond its galleries and records. As whaling expanded into the Southern Ocean, the institution sent scientists south to study whales and assess their populations. In 1913, after the governor of the Falkland Islands recognized the speed at which new hunting methods threatened those populations, the Colonial Office accepted a proposal to introduce licences. G. E. Barrett-Hamilton of the museum was sent to investigate sustainability, accompanied by Percy Stammwitz. Barrett-Hamilton died shortly after arriving in South Georgia, leaving Stammwitz to report the loss.

Stammwitz’s correspondence also preserves a description of the abundance that preceded intensive exploitation. He relayed whalers’ reports of whales spouting in their thousands around South Georgia, some said to reach one hundred feet. A museum curator marked the reported size and proposed obtaining a specimen. The exchange makes the institution’s scientific ambition visible, but it also reveals how easily the desire to document an animal could overlap with the desire to possess one. Stammwitz continued to collect information and body parts, and his work supplied material for the museum’s models. His annual appraisals record arduous recovery work, including the retrieval of a sixty-foot sperm whale in Yorkshire, after which he was allowed special leave.

Scientific Value and Ecological Warning

The book places the museum’s collecting and research history against the commercial forces that altered whale populations. Oil discoveries, including Edwin L. Drake’s 1859 well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, changed the energy economy, while new whaling technologies opened further targets. In 1904, Norwegian and British steamships began exploiting Antarctic waters for whale products used in manufacturing explosives. Whales were killed on a massive scale during the two world wars, and the South Atlantic humpback population was driven to extinction by 1918. The museum’s reports and field investigations preserve evidence of abundance and decline, but they could not by themselves halt the industries causing the losses.

Scientific investigation could also involve harm to the animals it sought to understand. In 1956, a project led by Boston heart specialist Paul D. White attempted to record a grey whale’s heartbeat by firing a harpoon carrying an electrocardiogram contact into it. The episode is not presented as a Natural History Museum project; rather, it shows the wider context in which cetacean research could treat an animal as an instrument of measurement. Against that history, the museum’s accumulated records and specimens acquire an ambivalent significance: they are tools for knowledge, yet reminders that observation has often been entangled with capture and exploitation.

That ambivalence sharpens as the book turns toward the future. Research into sperm-whale societies suggests that hunting may have damaged communities by removing matriarchs and the knowledge they pass on. During the writing of the book, the Yangtze River dolphin was declared extinct, and the author warns that other species could follow. The Natural History Museum’s record therefore looks both backward and forward: it preserves traces of animals and populations, while making clear that a complete archive cannot substitute for living species. Its collections can show what has been found, gathered, and lost; they cannot guarantee that the subjects of natural history will remain present.