Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bustling Dr. Edith Summerskill is neither an epicure nor a literary giant, but she too has had her say about the British diet. It was Dr. Summerskill who, as Parliamentary Under Secretary to the Ministry of Food, helped introduce whale meat and snoek to British markets as substitutes for juicy roast beef and mutton saddles. "I thought," she had the grace to admit then, "that I would be politically finished," but her British constituents managed to forgive...
Properly timed, thinks Dr. Kreutzer, the singing current would even catch whales, forcing them to swim right up to the maw of a whale ship. When the whales arrived, he suggests, the current could be intensified, stunning them temporarily. Then the whalers or whale inspectors could measure each leviathan, noting its sex and its depth of blubber. Large, fat males could be hauled aboard. The young, the thin and the female could be set free with the crew's apologies...
British officialdom was ready with instructions to cope with any emergency that might arise from the conflict. In the case of seaborne invasion, the British Museum had issued a neat booklet telling Britons what to do if they should find a whale on their beach. The prescribed procedure was simple: fill out a form (N.H.M. Form 136 tidily enclosed in the booklet), and mail it to the Keeper of Zoology. Question No. 1 on the form read: "Is the tail horizontal?" Since all whales have horizontal tails, the questionnaire continued sensibly: "If the answer to this question...
...sleek sister moved in through the icy, spume-laced seas to her side. It was a deadly task. Both vessels were rolling wildly and constantly awash, and their hulls were as bare of hand holds as two whale's backs. A rubber boat set out from the Cochino, lost a man in the enormous waves...
Seldom has a novelist made his borrowings more his own. Beale's dry notation that somebody had once tasted whale's milk and found it rich, Melville turned into "The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries." From Beale's remark that "we cannot fail to be impressed with a truly magnificent idea of the profusion of animal life which must necessarily exist in the ocean's depths," Melville constructed a passage for those who like philosophical meat on their narrative bones...