Salon.com: An idea’s been floating around for some time that whales more than chewed people — that they swallowed them, and people might have survived in the stomach. Jonah’s story came first, and then there were rumors from the 19th century Yankee Whale Fishery — whaling ships leaving New York and New England ports for years on the open ocean. I’d like to believe in swallowings, but it’s tough. There is no air in the stomach, for one. There are acids. And if we are talking about sperm whales, which we are most of the time, there is the deadly passage through the 30-foot jaws lined with 8-inch teeth.
Still, you’d like to think it’s possible. You want to believe in an animal that can fit you inside them — that you might be consumed not piece-by-piece, mouthful-by-mouthful as sharks and bears would eat you, but wholly; to be encased as your full self, womb-like. You want to believe in big animals like you did when you were a kid. You want to be powerless as you are leaning into hurricane winds or with your eyes closed or looking into the ocean.
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In 1947, Natural History magazine published a newly discovered letter from 1891 penned by a man aboard the ship Star of the East that told of a fellow crew member surviving 24 hours in a whale’s stomach. Here is the story in brief:
The Star of the East was sailing around the Falkland Islands. The crew spotted a bull sperm whale and lowered the boats to give chase. As they approached, the whale turned on the boats and attacked. It stove the boat, scattering the crew in the water. All were accounted for except for one, a young whaleman by the name of James Bartley. All assumed Bartley drowned.
The next day the crew spotted the same whale, gave chase again, and this time killed it. They dragged it back to the ship and began flensing it of its blubber. As they peeled the blubber away, someone noticed something moving under the stomach lining. They cut the stomach open, and out rolled Bartley, unconscious but breathing, his face and arms bleached entirely white by the stomach acids. After waking days later, he said he remembered nothing but sliding through the whale’s throat, and that the throat quivered when he touched it on his way down.
It didn’t take much research – follow-up articles appeared in the years following 1947 – to find that Bartley’s story was fiction, a letter written by mischievous sailors to excite landlubbers. But the letter was enough to pique my interest. Was there ever an actual swallowing, some evidence embedded deep in an antiquated logbook or diary that I might uncover?
Categories: Americas