Used to take on killer, treasured tusk from unicorn of the sea
AS makeshift weapons go, it’s hard to think of one more bizarre than a narwhal tusk. But the Polish-born chef named Luckasz, who so bravely confronted terrorist usman Khan on London Bridge, was quick to find it can make a surprisingly effective armament.
For narwhal tusks are strong, very strong indeed.
A perusal of an old copy of the Journal of the Royal united Service Institution reveals that in the early 19th century a narwhal pierced right through the 2½in oak hull of a ship called the Fame.
Mercifully it did not appear to sink the vessel. Clearly, if a tusk can do that, it does not take much to imagine what it could do to flesh and bone.
It is not surprising therefore that tusks from narwhals – medium-sized whales closely related to the beluga – have been used as weapons before.
In Greenland, whose icy waters the narwhal inhabits, the tusks were attached to wooden handles to form something like a spear.
Called a ‘nuguit’, the weapon appears to have been used not against humans but rather to hunt birds. However, because birds might not be hit by the tip of the weapon, the Greenlanders would attach three or four jagged ribs of bone to the shaft to increase the chance of making contact.
Even so, the nuguit must have required a huge amount of skill to use effectively.
But while ancient Greenlanders would have known the creature from which the tusk came from, for many the source of this extraordinary appendage was a complete mystery.
It was commonly supposed that they came from unicorns and their association with this mythical beast meant that the tusks were somehow magical and had miraculous curative powers.
In his History of the Worthies of England in 1662, historian thomas Fuller observed that the tusk was ‘antidotal to several venoms’ and that it could resist poisons.
It was said that just a few grains of ground-up tusk was a ‘great cure against poison’, although the historian was somewhat doubtful and speculated that very few would ever dare put it to the test.
But whether the tusk was medicinal or not, there is no doubt that there was an extremely lucrative trade in these ‘unicorn horns’, just as there is with rhinoceros horns today. they could be astonishingly expensive and be worth more than ten times their weight in gold.
One lucky owner was no less a figure than Queen Elizabeth I, who was given a tusk by the privateer Martin Frobisher.
She placed what became known as the Horn of Windsor in the Royal Wardrobe and treasury.
In 1598, it was valued at £10,000 – which is the equivalent of some £2million today.
Sadly for the Royal Family, the ‘horn’ no longer survives as it disappeared from the tower of London during the Civil War.
It was reputed to have been destroyed by the Puritans, who did not care for the object’s supposed association with magic.
today, tusks are somewhat cheaper than they were in Elizabethan times. In October 2013, John Jeffries, of tregony, Cornwall, sold a fine example for £36,000, which still, of course, puts hanging a tusk above the mantelpiece out of the reach of most.
Curiously, a plaque on that tusk revealed that it had been presented in 1881 to a sailor called Cornelius Fudge, which happens to be the name of a Harry Potter character. Author JK Rowling herself has insisted this is a complete coincidence.
While the tusk sold by Mr Jeffries was over 8ft long, and a good 3ft longer than that bravely brandished by Luckasz, the tusks can grow to around 18ft.
this raises the question of what exactly the narwhal uses it for.
What first needs to be appreciated is that the tusk is, in fact, a tooth – a very extended canine tooth that projects from the left side of the upper jaw through the lip and forms a left-handed spiral as it grows.
Despite lots of research, it seems that marine boffins are not completely sure of the tusk’s function. What is known is that it is hollow and contains some ten million nerve endings, which makes it likely that it is used to assess the condition of the water.
It was previously thought that when males rub their tusks together, this was part of some masculine dominance ritual.
But scientists now believe that the narwhals – which can live for some 50 years – are actually communicating with each other.
Of course, it seems unthinkable that the narwhal would not use the tusk as a weapon and indeed it appears that they do.
In May 2017, aerial footage of a pod of narwhals showed them using their tusks to knock out some cod, thereby making it easier to eat them. What the narwhals did not do was to use the tusks as spears but rather as clubs.
It does seem satisfying that there is still some mystery attached to the narwhal and its tusk. they are shy creatures and they do not give up their secrets easily.
there is still something magical about them, something vestigial of the old name for them – the sea unicorn. And, of course, even though it seems bizarre in the extreme that a narwhal tusk was used as a weapon last Friday, we should not let our British love of the absurd obscure the deep tragedy of that day.