There is a serious shortage of whales

“There is a serious shortage of whales” is a refrain that exposes the gulf between the whale as a travelling public spectacle and the whale as a living animal vanishing from the sea. Set against accounts of enormous preserved whales hauled across land, the sentence sounds at once like a plain report and a bitter paradox: whales can be made to appear everywhere as dead exhibits even as their surviving populations become harder to find. The phrase gathers the book’s reflections on commercial killing, public fascination, and the precarious work of conservation into one stark declaration.

The phrase in its immediate setting

The line appears after the account of a seventy-foot Fin whale caught off Trondheim in 1952. Helicopters had been sent to locate it; after it was preserved, a hundred-foot lorry carried it across Europe, Africa, and Japan. Its route took it through Barnsley in Yorkshire before it ended in Belgium. The whale was no longer moving through its own element: it had become a transported object, displayed in places far from the sea and made to serve as a travelling spectacle.

The sentence is followed by a poetic image of whaling flotillas driving through streets, their scale exceeding the water available to them. That reversal gives the phrase its particular edge. The whale is both too large to be contained by a town’s streets and increasingly scarce in the ocean that should be its natural setting. The image does not suggest that whales have literally returned in abundance. It makes their absence legible through an impossible, landbound excess: what remains visible is the human machinery of capture and display.

A spectacle made from dead whales

The 1952 journey belongs to a longer history of exhibiting whale bodies. In 1931, an embalmed, sixty-five-ton whale arrived at London Docks, owned by the Pacific Whaling Company and bound for a Christmas circus. A specially built case and the floating crane London Mammoth were needed to transfer it onto road bogies for a night-time journey. The recollection of a boy who saw it emphasizes the practical contrivance of the display: a stick held open its mouth, and tar covered its preserved body.

These details sharpen the contrast behind the phrase. The dead whale can be measured, packaged, moved, and advertised; the living animal is not so readily available to human view or possession. The 1952 Fin whale’s passage from a Norwegian capture site through towns and across continents makes that contrast almost geographically visible. A travelling carcass can be brought to audiences, while living whales become rare enough for their whereabouts to be uncertain. The line’s apparent simplicity refuses to let public visibility stand in for biological security.

Scarcity as the consequence of human pressure

The shortage is not presented as a natural mystery. The North Atlantic right whale offers a specific measure of what historical exploitation has left behind: fewer than four hundred remain. Its surface-dwelling habits, buoyancy after death, and tendency to follow shorelines once made it especially convenient to hunt. Its long baleen also supplied material for products such as umbrella ribs, corset stays, blinds, and brushes. The traits that made the animal commercially useful helped make it vulnerable to sustained killing.

Protection did not end the danger. Although the Right whale became the first cetacean protected from hunting in 1935, the North Atlantic population remained static in the account, despite legislation moving a shipping lane farther north and instructions requiring vessels to keep five hundred yards from whales. Ship strikes continue to kill whales, including females of calf-bearing age; fishing-line entanglement is another major threat. Stormy Mayo, who helped found the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown in 1976, collected data on right whales and became the first person licensed by the government to rescue entangled whales. His work turns the contrast between hunting and rescue into a practical reversal: techniques once associated with pursuing whales can be adapted to free them from fishing line.

What the shortage puts at risk

The phrase also extends beyond one species. Sperm whales, though less severely reduced than right whales in the account, reproduce slowly, with the population growing at only one per cent a year. Their societies and inherited knowledge may also have been damaged by hunting that removed animals and disrupted the transmission of ways to exploit particular habitats. A decline, in this view, is not only a reduction in numbers; it can diminish the accumulated social knowledge on which a population depends.

The wider warning is still more severe. The book notes that the Yangtze River dolphin had been declared extinct while the book was being written, and that half of all animal species, including the right whales of Cape Cod Bay, might follow by the end of the century. Against that scale, the phrase is more than a lament for missing animals. Its placement after the pageant of transported whale bodies exposes a disturbing imbalance: human culture can preserve, circulate, and repeatedly display the image of the whale while the living populations themselves remain vulnerable. The whale is made spectacular in death, but scarcity is the condition that gives the spectacle its cost.