Greg Bales

Swallowed by a whale—a true tale?

Sperm whales would rather eat squid, which require little chewing, and not the hairy, bony things we are. That’s not to say sperm whales haven’t swallowed more than squid. In the 1960s, biologist Malcolm Clarke and his colleagues examined the remains from 2,403 stomachs of sperm whales caught by whalers off the South American coast. Aside from the hundreds of squid remains, he found seabirds, lobsters, seals, driftwood, coconuts, stones, rays, swordfish and sharks. While finding a tiny coconut in a whale’s stomach is enchanting, there’s nothing so striking as the image of a sperm whale eating a shark. It disturbs me the way turducken does, like as a close cousin to cannibalism. More terrifying, with sharks in the diet, Americans who might have been swallowed by sperm whales would have had another thing to worry about: sharing the stomach of your predator with yet another predator. To be eaten after being eaten. To be the –en of the turducken.

Shattuck investigates the likelihood that anyone in the whale fisheries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could have been swallowed whole, much less have survived the experience. Answer: Probably not, so Shattuck instead describes the process of archival research of whaling logs at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library. Not surprisingly, it’s dusty, painstaking work, paradoxically not unlike being swallowed by a whale.

“Swallowed by a whale—a true tale?” by Ben Shattuck for Salon