A whale on the sands

Text 1: The Whale at Sandsend, by Robert Iveson

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Tom, you will have read in the papers of the whale that came ashore at Sandsend on Tuesday, but the papers do not tell the half of it, and I was there, so you shall have the whole.

Word came up to the village at first light that something enormous lay upon the sands, and by the time I got down there half the parish had arrived before me, in nightcaps and shawls, with dogs and children and a great many opinions. The creature lay in the shallows just beyond the tide-line, like an upturned boat, or a black rock that had not been there the day before. It was sixty feet long if it was an inch. Its skin, where the sun caught it, was not black at all but a deep slate-blue, wet and gleaming and scored all over with old white scars.

What I had not expected was that it would be alive. Every minute or so, with a sound like a great door slowly opening, it breathed, and a fountain of mist went up from the top of its head and drifted over us, smelling of fish and the bottom of the sea. Once it lifted its tail a little way out of the water and let it fall, and the whole beach shook. Nobody laughed after that. The children were taken back.

And then I came round to its head, and saw its eye. I do not know how to tell you of it, Tom. It was no bigger than a man’s fist in all that vastness, dark and wet and wonderfully mild, and it moved, and it looked at me. I am not a fanciful man, as you know. But I swear there was something in that look that I have seen in the eyes of old horses at the end of a long day: not fear, but a great weariness.

It died a little after noon. The men are cutting it up for the oil. I have not gone down to watch.

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