The traveling whale
Up close and personal with the king of the deep
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1955
In the early 1950s, the World Wildlife Fund, in conjunction with the University of Oslo, planned to put on a one-of-kind traveling educational exhibit for the public. In the icy waters off the coast of Norway, hunters harpooned and killed a 60-foot, 58-ton fin whale. After hauling it back to shore, a team of scientists quickly drained it of its 7,000 liters of blood and pumped it full of formalin, a preservative. The entrails and organs were also removed, including the 6-ton liver and 2.5-ton tongue. A refrigeration system was installed in the belly of the leviathan to keep it intact. With its mouth propped open to display its frilly baleen, the whale was loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken around Europe as a traveling exhibit, going by the nickname “Jonas.” Here, children and adults alike gather at Les Invalides in Paris to get a look at the creature, awestruck despite the offensive smell.The killing of a single-fin whale for educational purposes was considered acceptable in the 1950s, when over 30,000 of the species were killed for commercial purposes annually. Today, the fin whale is an endangered species, with only around 100,000 still surviving. There is a global moratorium on hunting fin whales, though Iceland and Japan continue to do so.
