A white whale in the Thames! Quick, grab the kids, the phone, roll up for a once-in-a-lifetime chance at Gravesend... But wait — stop. For the whale’s sake, for the good of “Moby Mick” the beluga, who shares only his or her colour with Melville’s ship-fighting sperm whale, boats, helicopters and whale-watchers are implored to stay away.
He or she is more than 1,000 miles off course, in the warm waters of the Thames. Belugas are sociable, migratory fish-followers. They are highly vocal canaries of the sea. This moon-coloured creature should be chatting and hunting in the Arctic Ocean, or at least out in the North Atlantic. And yet here, between the piers, the mudbanks and pylons of an ever-busier river, it is.
It might just end well. Belugas habitually swim up estuaries. River-time is good for their metabolisms. This species has a sophisticated echo-location system: the hump on the forehead, known as a “melon”, is a kind of sonar dome, allowing the beluga to operate in the finickity spaces under sea ice.
If any whale can get out of this, it’s a beluga. The great whale-writer Philip Hoare sees an omen and a tragedy in this wild thing being here now. Starvation, rising polar temperatures, ship-thronged seas ... He is right, of course. But the other stories of the Thames today add something too. For all the boats, buildings and people, the Thames remains, as a lifeboat coxswain from the RNLI put it to me, “a strip of pure wilderness in the middle of the city”.
The reaches around Gravesend on a cold night, when gulls glow ghostly against the deathly black water, make you shiver inside your dry suit. Joseph Conrad chose the same spot for the telling of Heart of Darkness. With the Gravesend RNLI crew I once searched for a boy’s body in these waters. We did not find him. The true wild runs right up here, under the windows of the Port of London Authority building, where fiercely competent people will try to protect our strange visitor.
Beluga Whale in the Thames- In pictures
This riverine wildness is echoed in today’s news: campaigners against a new cruise ship terminal at Greenwich claim the river has become a “wild west” of marine diesel pollution. The Port of London Authority says it is working on air quality, pointing out that river traffic removes about 300,000 lorry movements from London’s roads. Investment bank Morgan Stanley, which wants to build the terminal, is pressing ahead with the plan.
So our friendly beluga swims into a perfect parable of modern London: bankers, campaigners, the port authority, shipowners and a threatened but still threatening wilderness receive an unearthly visitor.
One hesitates over what message it brings us, but savage emission limits for new ships would protect Londoners, and this Arctic whale’s rightful home.
- Horatio Clare’s The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal will be published in hardback by Elliott and Thompson on November 1.
