D. Graham Burnett

From the Bible’s “Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?” to Captain Ahab’s “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!,” from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery. In the twentieth century, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even Nature was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that continues to this day. The book closes with a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation. A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, The Sounding of the Whale tells a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see these behemoths from below.

Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century

The Sounding of the Whale

Justin E. H. Smith

Catherine L. Hansen

The real history of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds." A great deal of uncertainty--and even some genuine confusion--surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or "Order of the Third Bird." Sensational accounts of this "attentional cult" emphasize histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes--both to its ranks, and to its scholarship. In recent years, however, the revisionist work of the research collective ESTAR(SER) has done much to clear the air, bringing archival precision to the history of this covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds." Gathering the best articles of the last twenty years of The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), this volume represents a landmark in the history of aesthetic practices, and will be a point of departure for future work wading the muddy marshes at the limits of historicism.

Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001-2021

In Search Of The Third Bird

Recounts the 1818 trial Maurice v. Judd in which the new science of taxonomy was pitted against a dispute over the regulation of whale oil and the then-popular view that the whale was a fish.

The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature

Trying Leviathan

Explores how humans' view of whales changed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, looking at how the sea mammals were once viewed as monsters but evolved into something much gentler and more beautiful.

A 'Wunderkammer', or 'cabinet of curiosities', was an encyclopaedic collection of controversial, yet-to-be-defined objects, including Cyclopes, Siamese twins and other infants with fatal genetic disorders. Herzog visited these Renaissance collections, photographing the mysteries they contain. Although for years they have been preserved as scientific specimens, they are profoundly transformed through Herzog's lens into a mirror reflecting human fears. Also included are images of skeletons and bones of various creatures and other unusual objects on display.

Lost Souls

Chronicling the British pursuit of the legendary El Dorado, Masters of All They Surveyed tells the fascinating story of geography, cartography, and scientific exploration in Britain's unique South American colony, Guyana. How did nineteenth-century Europeans turn areas they called terra incognita into bounded colonial territories? How did a tender-footed gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), make his way up churning rivers into thick jungle, arid savanna, and forbidding mountain ranges, survive for the better part of a decade, and emerge with a map? What did that map mean? In answering these questions, D. Graham Burnett brings to light the work of several such explorers, particularly Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, the man who claimed to be the first to reach the site of Ralegh's El Dorado. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society and later by the British Crown, Schomburgk explored and mapped regions in modern Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, always in close contact with Amerindian communities. Drawing heavily on the maps, reports, and letters that Schomburgk sent back to England, and especially on the luxuriant images of survey landmarks in his Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana (reproduced in color in this book), Burnett shows how a vast network of traverse surveys, illustrations, and travel narratives not only laid out the official boundaries of British Guiana but also marked out a symbolic landscape that fired the British imperial imagination. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, Masters of All They Surveyed will interest anyone who wants to understand the histories of colonialism and science.

D. Graham Burnett

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