After a local Facebook group posted the photo below, and with Naburn village being swallowed up by the ever-expanding River Ouse, I was unexpectedly spurred into revisiting the White Rose Whale story I blogged about many years ago.
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| "A white whale caught in the River Ouse nr York" (image from this York Press article of 2006) |
I hadn't seen the photo before. It is remarkable. It is also a great place from which to disappear down a research wormhole that enables me to flesh out the story much more fully than before.
It now goes a little something like this:
April Fools' Day*, 1905: an individual of Delphinapterus leucas ("the white fin-less dolphin") cruises its way up the Ouse almost as far as Naburn Lock, and into a salmon net. After it has 'made short work of the...net...one of the fishermen loaded a gun and fired at the unfortunate whale.'
*hopefully before noon.
The fisherman in question was Tom Smith of Acaster Malbis, according to a 1934 article in the Yorkshire Evening Post:
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| "When A Whale Came Up The Ouse" (Yorkshire Evening Post, 1934) |
Mr Smith's identity was verified by his grandson in the York Press in 2006. A Press article the previous year states that he was angling for salmon at Moreby Park, half-a-mile or so downstream of Naburn Lock, when a huge Arctic cetacean suddenly appeared. I've been salmon fishing just the once, in Labrador, and the fish we saw (but never caught) were big enough. The thought of accidentally catching a 12-foot-long, 50-stone whale instead is pretty bewildering.
The people of Cawood must have been pretty bewildered when the beluga washed up there the following day, and shortly afterwards expired, but a local coal merchant, W. Green, saw a business opportunity. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see their name on the whale-cart.
The 2005 Press article says the whale's body was kept in the water at Cawood Bridge for the crowds to admire, then taken to be shown in Selby, before being shipped back upstream to York and spending a couple of days on display at a Skeldergate stonemason's. The 2006 Press article doesn't mention Skeldergate, but says the beluga went on display at the Pack Horse pub at the bottom of Micklegate, close to St John's Church. I particularly liked the following excerpt:
"Initially, the whale was quite a draw, but after a week, the deteriorating 12ft-long, 50-stone corpse began to deter custom. So the pub presented it to the Yorkshire Philosophical Museum [sic], which must have been delighted."
I've asked the Yorkshire Museum's Curator of Natural Sciences if the museum still has the beluga's mortal remains in its collections, but they weren't sure.
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| Skull of a beluga on display in the French National Museum of Natural History. (Image from Wikimedia Commons) |
What they were able to confirm is that the 1905 Annual Report of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society contains the following paragraph:
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| "This animal was shot in the river Ouse, near Naburn, on April 1st 1905." |
So the beluga was a she. At well over three metres long, and weighing more than half a ton, she was surely an adult: full-grown female belugas are 3 to 4 metres long, and weigh 400 to 1000 kg.
Bothering salmon in a river on the outskirts of York seems a surprising activity for a white whale to have ended up doing, but belugas make their way from their Arctic habitat into the coastal waters of northern Britain fairly frequently, as illustrated by this map by the Sea Watch Foundation:
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| A map of UK beluga sightings since 1964. (Image copyright: Sea Watch Foundation) |
Perhaps she followed a favoured food source a bit too far up the Humber? Many other marine mammals, including seals and porpoises have done it before.
And whilst we'll never know what brought her here, we certainly do know what happened to her penultimate resting place: The Pack Horse pub. It was demolished in the 1950s, but a spot of old map analysis shows the site is now occupied by the Casa: Brazilian Rodizio. And not only do they serve up enormous steaks, but also a offer a variety of seafood specials.
I suspect none of them feature a deteriorating 12 ft-long, 50-stone whale corpse, but you never know.
Footnote: in the summer of 1954, the City of York Ideal Homes exhibition exhibited a formalin-stuffed, 69-ton Norwegian fin whale on St George's Fields for two days. An ideal home? Well, it was called Jonah.
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