Interlude II: Great Fishes and Monstrous Men (Undertow)

• Main Author: Palmer, Megan E.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: punctum books 2017
• Subjects: Orca
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.21983/p3.0182.1.06; https://punctumbooks.com/titles/things-from-the-sea/

Back, now, to Ipswich in 1568 — and to a disorientingly dual narrative in which the darker side of shared creaturely vulnerability is hidden, though ever-present, beneath a story of human victory over the monstrous. As we have seen, the strong surface current running through Timothy Granger’s broadside account of the capture of twenty-seven orca concentrates its definition of monstrousness on the size of the captured creatures. Unlike other monster broadsides of its day, it is without an explicit moral: the monsters are used neither to warn against behaviors that cross culturally constructed moral boundaries nor to plead with readers to reform their lives. It is a story of human ascendency. But pulling strongly in the other direc-tion — back to sea, back to the enormity of non-human otherness and to the disturbing darkness of unspeakable human cruelty — the broadside also illustrates the extreme brutality of the men of Ipswich upon encountering their “monsters.” The orca, once finally captured, were hauled in to Ipswich wharf; the largest was tied to a tree. “Som of them,” we learn, “laye upon the wharfe .ii. dayes and a nyght before they weare dead, and yet [the men] strooke them wyth Axes & other weapons to kyll them,” even to the point of their axes breaking on the whales’ “bones hard as stones.” While Granger never remarks upon the merciless brutality he describes at length, it saturates the text. It is likely that these actions were legible as cruelty to many contemporaries, especially those who focused on the creatures as fish first and monsters second.