By Will Thomson from The Palimpsest, Summer 1987

Visitors to the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History in Iowa City look with awe at the forty-five-foot skeleton of a whale suspended above them in Mammal Hall, yet few pause to consider how this enormous marine mammal became an exhibit in a Midwestern museum. The story of its journey in the late 1890's from an ocean home half a continent away from Iowa provides insight into the resourceful energies and interests of our early naturalists. It encompasses the scientific endeavors of those individuals and touches on the history of the lost American subculture of whaling. And it explains how this particular whale got to Iowa.

Now the rarest of Atlantic great whales, the North Atlantic right whale, Eubalaena glacialis, was once abundant along the east coast of the United States. Because it was easily captured and floated when killed, it was called the "right" whale. Rich in oil and baleen (commonly known as "whalebone"), right whales were a preferred catch for nineteenth-century whalers. Yet today, despite this once-active commerce in whaling, few whale skeletons are on display in American museums because of the immense size of the skeletons and the difficulty of preparing them for display. In the waning decades of the nineteenth century, several naturalists and curators actively gathered and prepared specimens for museum collections. One of these men was to make whales his specialty. Herbert H. Brimley, with his brother Clement, had developed a small business of collecting and preparing specimens for other museums to purchase, which led to Brimley's appointment as curator of the North Carolina State Museum in Raleigh. At the University of Iowa, already established as a major center of museum activity, Herbert Brimley's counterpart was Charles Cleveland Nutting, professor of zoology. In 1886 Nutting, at the age of 28, had been named laboratory assistant and curator of the natural history museum when the museum was moved from Old Capitol to Science Hall and when collections were expanding rapidly. That year the naturalist William Temple Hornaday donated his collection of birds and mammals, including Australian marsupials. In 1887 D. H. Talbot of Sioux City gave his collection of several thousand bird skins. Promoted to full professor of systematic zoology by 1888, Nutting continued to actively solicit specimens for the museum. His speeches and narratives of his expeditions, often written in a semipopular style for nonscientific audiences, generated public and private support and financed several expeditions.

The collections in Science Hall continued to grow. Nutting's own expeditions in the early 1890s to the Bay of Fundy and the Bahamas added seabirds, seals, and marine invertebrates to the collection. Graduate student Frank Russell's three-year expedition to the Far North brought back caribou, musk-oxen, and mountain goats. By 1892 the exhibit space was filled. Boxes of specimens were piled high in the basement and attic. Then in March 1898 Nutting heard from his colleague Brimley about a particular specimen, and despite the severe lack of exhibit or storage space, Nutting was keen to acquire this unusual addition.

On the windswept coast of North Carolina, at the eastern tip of a slender twelve-mile-long barrier island called Schackleford Banks, was the town of Diamond City. In the late nineteenth century, Diamond City was a relatively thriving fishing community. The inhabitants were descendants of English stock who had settled on the Outer Banks two centuries earlier. To the east of Diamond City lay the southern tip of Core Banks and Cape Lookout. The town had been named for the black-and-white diamond pattern painted on the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, which warned navigators away from the cape's treacherous shoals. It was in these waters that the people of Diamond City made their living, and in the winter, when fishing was at its ebb, good fortune sometimes sent whales migrating southward past their shores.

On the morning of February 14, 1898, a low plume of mist was sighted on the horizon--the sure sign of a whale. Cries of "Whale!" stirred adults from their chores and sent children clambering over the dunes to catch a look. As the town came to life, the local men of Captain Tyree Moore's Red Oar Crew scrambled for their tackle.

Within a half-hour of the sighting the crew shoved their six twenty-four-foot open boats into the surf. With a man at each bow, four to six men-at-oars, and a steersman, each boat plowed into the breakers and made to the southeast in pursuit of the leviathan.

After over an hour of steady rowing, the Red Oar Crew pulled in close. The whale, a large female North Atlantic right, was making for open water south of the hook of land called Cape Lookout. The crew was tired, but the prospect of adding such a catch to their meager winter incomes spurred them on. Harpooners stationed in each bow prepared for action.

In one boat, John Lewis readied his harpoon and, at the whale's next breach, plunged it into the whale's back. Rowing furiously, the crews kept pace with the animal until it began to tire. Surfacing more and more frequently, it turned from its course as it tried to shake off its pursuers. As the boat pitched beneath him, Lewis hefted the heavy whale gun to his cheek and waited to fire. More like a small cannon with a shoulder stock, the gun was a heavy iron affair capable of driving an exploding harpoon deep into the whale, close to its vital organs. When the huge brow of the whale lifted out of the water directly in front of him, he quickly tugged the gun tight against his shoulder and fired.

The deafening report thundered above the roar of the sea. Lewis was tossed backwards by the recoil of the gun and landed amidships with a thud. The great beast rolled away from them, twisting and thrashing. The water boiled around them and plumes of spray drenched the whalers. After all the other harpoons were thrown, the crew fell back apace and waited until the still body of the animal drifted at the surface. John Lewis sat in the bow of his boat and nursed a gash on his nose. He was lucky the gun's recoil had not broken it. Several hours later, the exhausted men of the Red Oar Crew beached the fifty-ton carcass on a spit of sand beside a brackish pond at the western end of Shackleford Banks. As it was the custom to name each whale they took, they christened this whale "Mullet Pond," from the spot where they came ashore. In the approaching darkness, word was carried back to Diamond City. John Lewis, Tyree Moore, and the rest of the crew sat down around a fire and joined in weary smiles of congratulations; a hard day's work was done.

continued, part 2: Scientists learn about the whale