Can we have Moby Dick’s bones back?
SOUVENIR hunters have been urged to return bones taken from a 48ft whale skeleton – described in the classic novel Moby Dick – so that it can be restored.
The sperm whale was displayed on an iron frame in the grounds of Burton Constable Hall in East Yorkshire after it washed ashore at nearby Tunstall in 1825.
Local residents remember playing on it in the mid-20th century, the curator at the stately home Philippa Wood said, and she believes people took bones as souvenirs during that time – including 11 of the whale’s 44 vertebrae and much of its left flipper.
‘One of the bones is a really big one – the fourth vertebrae back down from the head – a bit larger than a dinner plate, so I’m sure whoever has taken it knows where it is,’ she said.
‘We’d like to try to rejoin the missing bones with the rest of the skeleton.’ The skeleton, which was claimed by Sir Thomas Aston Clifford Constable after the animal washed up, is being restored to mark the 200th birthday of American writer Herman Melville, who described the display in his novel Moby Dick, published in 1851.
He wrote: ‘Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities – spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan – and swing all day upon his lower jaw.’
The whale was recovered from the grounds in 1995, but Miss Wood said: ‘It was in a dreadful state. It was covered in moss and the surface was very weak.’ The skeleton is set to be redisplayed as it would have been when Melville wrote about it by 2025, she added.