25 August: a date James Bartley wouldn’t want to remember, even if he hadn’t died in 1909, because it’s the 132nd anniversary of the day he was swallowed whole by a whale. Mind you, he was cut out of it later — alive.
Allegedly.
We know it’s true, because the event is described, in Bartley’s own words, in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. It was 25 August 1891, and Bartley was 35, on a ship called Star of the East, off the Falklands.
Intriguingly, that’s also the date given in Jeremy Beadle’s Today’s The Day!, published 10 years earlier, which doesn’t strike me as a likely source for Julian Barnes. Anyway, back to Bartley’s FULLY AUTHENTIC account:
Suddenly I found myself in a sack much larger than my body, but completely dark. I felt about me; and my hands came in contact with several fishes, some of which seemed to be still alive, for they squirmed in my fingers, and slipped back to my feet. Soon I felt a great pain in my head and my breathing became more and more difficult. At the same time I felt a terrible heat; it seemed to consume me, growing hotter and hotter. My eyes became coals of fire in my head, and I believed every moment that I was condemned to perish in the belly of a whale. It tormented me beyond all endurance, while at the same time the awful silence of the terrible prison weighed me down. I tried to rise, to move my arms and legs, to cry out. All action was now impossible, but my brain seemed abnormally clear; and with a full comprehension of my awful fate, I finally lost all consciousness.
Luckily for James, Star of the East was a whaler, and the rest of the crew caught and killed the great beast. They spent some hours ‘flensing’ (cutting off the blubber), and hauled it onto the deck the next morning. When they noticed “movement from within”…
You would expect, naturally, that a story such as this, if it were true, would have contemporary records. And, certainly, it turned up in The Buffalo Commercial on 13 April 1892:
In this version, he apparently had “the appearance of having been parboiled”, but there is a problem. This says it happened in February, not August — as does an account from an Australian newspaper in 1953:
Well, of course it’s balls. The question is: to what extent is it balls, and did anything like it ever happen? Yes, that is two questions, and the most comprehensive answer is to be found in a 13,000-word essay by a Fellow of the American Science Affiliation.
Fuck that, obviously. There’s a shorter analysis in Australian Geographic, which dates the event to 22 August 1891, and its debunking to the Adelaide Evening Journal in 1907
Star of the East may have been near the Falklands at the time, but wasn’t a whaler, and didn’t have a James Bartley on its crew,
while scientists confirm it is not possible to survive for 15 hours in the stomach of a sperm whale.
Also, in the words of the maritime curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library:
Sperm whales’ throats are small. They can’t swallow people
However, that article does two fine things: firstly, it takes us through what it would be like if one could survive in a whale’s innards for several hours, alongside several bioluminescent squid
Our bones, like squids’ beaks, wouldn’t dissolve, and would scrape along the whale’s gut walls, encouraging the production of ambergris, one of the most valuable substances on earth, and giving us an aromatic afterlife. (Well, of sorts.)
The other thing in the Salon article is the story of Edmund Gardner, who was apparently at least partly chewed by a sperm whale. They have eight-inch teeth.
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…and, if you didn’t see it the other day, this account’s vital scientific research into the question of all whales having syphilis:
But what was Barnes’ source? Well, maybe I’ll email his agent, and maybe he just thought 25th sounded better than 22nd. But I quite like the idea that somewhere in his library, nestling among the Flaubert, is an incongruous (and not terribly reliable) stocking filler from 1979.
(alt text, just in case: August 25 entry in Jeremy Beadle’s book: A real-life Jonah was swallowed by a whale off the Falkland Isles. Leaving the whaler in a rowing boat, thirty-five-year-old English steersman James Bartley headed for a large school of sperm whales. In a mêlée of harpooning, one of the wounded animals upskittled the boat and swallowed Bartley as he tried to jump clear. Later that day, the crew collected the bodies of the dead whales that had floated to the surface, and began stripping them. Curled up in the intestines of one, the amazed seamen discovered their lost shipmate, alive but unconscious. Brought round by massage and brandy, he could remember only being in the company of live fish, surrounded by hot slime which gave way ‘like soft india rubber’. The event had left an indelible impression however — the whale’s enzymes had bleached Bartley’s body white.)
