Whale Oil

WHALE OIL VERSUS spermaceti. Now, see, I actually read the entirety of the infamous “list of whales” chapter of Moby-Dick and thought it was hilarious. But I admit that I was (at one point in a highly checkered career) a marine biologist, so I may have been slightly more aligned with Melville’s frame of reference than is the casual modern reader, who might be inclined to think of whale oil as being the same thing as spermaceti (assuming the CMR to be sufficiently widely read as to have encountered “spermaceti” in print at all).

In fact, though, these are two completely different (though equally combustible) substances. Whale oil is rendered from the flensed blubber of slaughtered whales. In other words, it’s the liquefied body fat of something that feeds mostly on small crustaceans. Body chemistry being what it is, an organism that stores energy in body fat also tends to store iffy chemicals it encounters in the same depository.

Your own body, for instance, stores excess hormones in your body fat, as well as various toxic or otherwise dubious compounds like PBCs, strontium, and insecticides.

The point here is that dead crustaceans are rather pungent. Think of the last time you left a package of thawed frozen shrimp in your refrigerator for a week. These aromatic compounds are stored in the body fat of things that eat the organism that makes them.

I first encountered this phenomenon when I had a postdoctoral appointment in which my principal job was dissecting gannets. These are big diving seabirds (related to boobies) that feed largely on squid. Their body fat smells like rotting squid, especially when you put it in a drying oven in order to desiccate it. So if you’re burning whale oil in your lamps (it was cheap, as Tom Byrd notes), your establishment is probably going to smell like week-old krill. And, being fat, it makes smoke when you burn it.

Spermaceti, by contrast, is not body fat as such—though it is oily and very burnable. It’s an oil that is secreted and stored in the head case (basically, a storage compartment for this oil) of a sperm whale. The appearance of this liquid—white, thickish, slippery—is why they’re called sperm whales; that’s what the old whalers thought the gunk was, though plainly occurring in the wrong place….However, the point here is that spermaceti was also very popular as lamp fuel and general lubricant—because it didn’t stink. It’s very clean-burning and almost odorless. But it’s much more limited in availability, as only sperm whales make it, and thus much more expensive than whale oil.

So, what’s the sperm whale using this substance for? Nobody knows, though speculation is that it’s part of the whale’s sensory system, perhaps acting as an echolocation device, assisting the whale to locate things like giant squid (a major component of its diet, and I’m profoundly grateful that I will likely never be called upon to dissect and analyze the body tissues of a sperm whale) in the black abyssal depths.

Ambassadors, Consuls, and British Diplomats

An ambassador is an appointed office in the British diplomatic service, and very formal. An ambassador may receive official tenders from the foreign power to which he is appointed—declarations of war, statements of intent, official notices of concern, etc.—and by and large acts as the delegated (nonmilitary) authority of the British government within his own territory (they didn’t have female ambassadors in the eighteenth century; it was always “his”).

A consul is a much less formal office, though also appointed by the government. A consul’s duties are to look after the welfare of British citizens in the country to which he’s appointed. He would assist with things like permits to do business, small trade agreements, the relief of British citizens who have run into trouble in the foreign country, and so on. He does not have full diplomatic powers but is generally regarded as part of the diplomatic service.

Now, Britain didn’t have a real ambassador to Cuba until sometime in the late 1800s. They did have consuls appointed for some time prior to the appointment of a real ambassador, though, and Malcolm Stubbs would have been one of these.

The Siege of Havana

The thing about a siege is that it’s usually rather a long-drawn-out affair. The 1762 siege of Havana (there was more than one, so we need to specify the date) took several weeks, beginning with the arrival of the Duke of Albemarle’s fleet (under the command of Admiral George Pocock—a real person, and, no, I have No Idea whether he might have anything to do with anyone else we’ve met recently…) on June 6 and ending on August 14, when the British entered the conquered city.

It was a fairly traditional siege, in that the British were obliged to throw up breastworks from which to fire. That’s the traditional way of referring to the act of erecting or digging barriers to shelter the besieging forces—and in some instances, it is pretty rapid. Others, not so much.

At Havana, the rock of the promontory on which the fortress of El Morro sat was impervious to digging and prevented a head-on advance. The British (or, rather, the American volunteers from Connecticut and New Hampshire—though, mark me, these men were still Englishmen at the time) had to blast trenches through the hard coral rock to approach from the sides and erect wooden breastworks above the trenches to cover the advance. This was naturally a tedious business, made worse by mosquitoes and yellow fever (which killed an enormous number of both besiegers and inhabitants of the city).

If you want an account of the actual siege, there are plenty of them available online, some with considerable detail. However…this particular story is not really about the siege (let alone how many ships of the line and how many men took part—21 ships of the line, 24 lesser warships, and 168 other vessels, mainly transports, carrying 14,000 seamen and marines, 3,000 hired sailors, and 12,862 regulars, if you do care) but about Lord John and his personal sense of honor and responsibility.

That being so, I’ve chosen to shorten the duration of the siege considerably rather than find a way for Lord John to spend an extra six weeks doing nothing.

Now, I will note that while the slave revolt at the Mendez and Saavedra plantations is a fictional one, there were several slave revolts on Cuba during the second half of the eighteenth century, and such an event would not be improbable in the least.

Likewise, while I found no account of the guns of El Morro being spiked, it is true that the siege was finally ended by a naval bombardment of the fortress—taking advantage of the sudden silence of most of the guns of the castle’s battery.

And there is a historical note that ninety slaves were given their freedom after the battle, in return for their services during the siege.