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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 1, 2004
Cetacean moments
The case of the exploding whale caught my attention while browsing through news from Taiwan last week. It happened at Tainan the 17th-century Dutch capital in the south-west of the island -- taken from them soon after by Koxinga the great anti-Manchu pirate-warrior in the later moments of the Ming Dynasty -- and famous today for its coffin cakes eel noodles and milkfish congee. The whale was the largest ever to wash up in Taiwan by rather a wide margin -- an old bull sperm 17 metres in length and about 50 tons in weight. (The previous record was 11 metres.) It beached itself and expired before a large crowd near the old city. The industriousness of the Taiwanese must never be underestimated: it was resolved to load the carcass onto a flatbed trailer and truck it to Chung Keng University so that marine biologists there could conduct an assiduous post-mortem. Three construction cranes were required along with 50 men but within 13 hours the thing was loaded. The route to the university led through the middle of town unfortunately. In the retrospective judgement of Prof. Wang Chien-ping a large quantity of gas must have accumulated in the whale's belly through natural processes of decomposition under increasing pressure. The smell attributable to the same processes had already become an issue. I speculate that the jostling of the whale both by the cranes and in traffic might have contributed to the later catastrophic event. As luck would have it the truck was passing through a busy market street when the blast occurred. The quantity of blood and entrails to be found within a 50-ton whale is apparently quite considerable. These were suddenly distributed up and down the street covering cars pedestrians and shopfronts. I am pleased to report that no one was killed. A vigorous clean-up was immediately begun by residents of the neighbourhood wearing face masks. Reporters arriving on the scene quoted them as being Disgusted. In a quick change of plan the administrators at Chung Keng decided they didn't want to receive the remains after all and after repositioning the remains of those remains the truck proceeded instead to the Shi-Tsao Nature Preserve. (A fine bird sanctuary incidentally on a migration route. And notwithstanding the problem of cetacean volatility I recommend Tainan to any traveller. It remained the chief city of Taiwan until the late 19th century has dozens of temples several ancient city gates and a lively night market.) Exploding whales have been a problem over time. It would seem to be an inevitable design glitch in large mammals. But spontaneous combustion is something to which Taiwan seems especially prone lately -- we read the other day of a lady's cellphone blowing up in Taipei. Now thanks to the universal fame of Dave Barry who wrote about it memorably 20 years later another exploding whale story may be impinging upon my reader's memory even as I write. That whale however did not explode from natural causes but owing to being stuffed with dynamite by the Oregon State Highway Division on Nov. 12th 1970. It was a mere 8-ton whale that had been found beached and was unambiguously deceased. Since the detonation was pre-announced it was captured on local television. The plan was to distribute the whale carcass along the beach near Florence Oregon in smaller pieces that could then be removed "naturally" -- by hungry seagulls. The best-laid plans often go amiss and after a very satisfying initial explosion which drew cheers from onlookers their tone suddenly changed. In Mr. Barry's words describing the archived news footage You hear a new sound like 'splud'. You hear a woman's voice shouting, 'Here come pieces of ... MY GOD!' Something smears the camera lens. The crowd began to run for its lives. The roof of a car belonging to someone named Umenhofer was caved by descending whale debris a quarter mile away. In the excited phrase of Paul Linnman the contemporary TV reporter The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds. Yet in the end whale sectors the size of condominium units remained at the original site. Nor did seagulls appear soon after (Mr. Barry guessed they relocated to Brazil). A diligent Internet search yielded several other humanly-contrived whale explosions; but reporting of these lacked the je-ne-sais-quoi of American media treatment. Apparently dead floating whales are occasionally torpedoed by South African authorities in order to remove a hazard to shipping in the busy sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope. Back in Taiwan or more generally in the north-east of Asia the art of dealing with beached whales is usually both more sophisticated and more likely to involve market forces. On at least one occasion Greenpeace fanatics racing to the site of a beached pod of whales in Japan discovered that local people had got there first. They had already removed the edible portions with the use of buzzsaws. While I have not myself had the pleasure a Japanese friend strongly recommends hari-hari-nabe a potherb stew with sweet sake and soy sauce (red whale meat absorbs a broth wonderfully) and then there's "seashepherd's pie" with mushrooms and mashed parsnips. The advantage of a newly-beached whale is that the meat is still fresh. Owing to frequent abduction by space aliens journalists are usually unable to mention whales without making some fuss about "endangered species". (Well I suppose I have just done that too; please forgive.) But the major endangered species in Taiwan just now is the Taiwanese. The Communist Chinese across the strait now have 650 surface-to-surface missiles pointed at the little island where democracy is flourishing (an election and referendum are coming on March 20th). This last week Jacques Chirac the unspeakable president of France entertained Hu Jintao the unspeakable president of China. Mr. Chirac declared that it was time for the world to lift the arms embargo on China that was imposed after the Communist Party's massacre of the students in Tiananmen Square on June 4th 1989. He reiterated the French government's view that Taiwan is "a part of China" -- a view not shared by the great majority of the Taiwanese. (The U.S. State Department promptly expressed its usual displeasure with Chirac.) Mr. Chirac's behaviour is not as gratuitous as might appear. France has recently lost a major weapons client in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and is in need of new customers. I do hope that exploding whale in Tainan was not a portent. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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