And then there is James Bartley. On November 22, 1896, the New York Times picked up the story of a sailor on the whaling ship Star of the East who disappeared in the waters off the Falkland Islands after a harpooned sperm whale, “apparently in its death agonies,” capsized his whaleboat. Assuming Bartley had drowned, the rest of the crew set to work flensing the whale, which had by then finished up its agonies. “The workmen were startled . . . to discover something doubled up in [the stomach] that gave spasmodic signs of life. The vast pouch was hoisted to the deck and cut open and inside was found the missing sailor, . . . unconscious” but alive—after thirty-six hours inside the whale.*
Bible literalists seized upon the Bartley story. For decades, it turned up in religious tracts and fundamentalist sermons. In 1990, professor and historian Edward B. Davis, then at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, did some fact-checking. His paper runs to nineteen pages and encompasses research that took him from the newspaper archives of the British Library to the history room of the Great Yarmouth public library. Short version: The Star of the East was not a whaler, and there was no whaling going on in the Falklands at that time. No one named James Bartley had been on the ship, and the captain’s wife was certain no crew had ever been lost overboard.
Placing history aside, let’s look at the digestive realities of the Bartley situation. If survival in the stomach were a simple matter of the size of the accommodations, any one of us could manage just fine. The forestomach of a killer whale, a far smaller creature, has been measured, unstretched, at five feet by seven feet—about as big as a room in a Tokyo capsule hotel, with a similar dearth of amenities. Figure 154 of Whales, by esteemed whale biologist E. J. Slijper, is a scale drawing of a twenty-four-foot killer whale and the fourteen seals and thirteen porpoises recovered from its stomach. The prey are drawn in a vertical lineup beneath the whale’s belly, like whimsically shaped bombs dropping from a plane.
While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale’s stomach would seem to present a new set of problems.* “Bartley’s skin, where it was exposed to the action of the gastric juices, underwent a striking change. His face and hands were bleached to a deadly whiteness and the skin was wrinkled, giving the man the appearance of having been parboiled.” Hideous. And, it turns out, bogus. The whale’s forestomach secretes no digestive fluids. Hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes are secreted only in the second, or main, stomach, and the passage between first and second is too small to admit a human.
While the absence of acid in the sperm whale forestomach shoots another hole in the Bartley tale, it lends some credence to the Jonah parable. Let’s say the whale swallowed some air as it surfaced in pursuit of Jonah. Or let’s fast-forward a few centuries and give him a scuba tank of oxygen. Might the whale stomach under these circumstances be a survivable environment?
It might, if not for this: “Whales ‘chew’ their food with their stomachs,” writes Slijper. Since sperm whales swallow prey whole, they need some other way to reduce it to smaller, more easily digestible pieces. The muscular wall of the forestomach measures up to three inches thick in some species. Slijper compares the cetacean forestomach to the gizzard in birds—an anatomical meat grinder that stands in for molars.
Would a man in a whale forestomach be crushed or merely tumbled? Is the force lethal or just uncomfortable? No one to my knowledge has measured the contraction strength of the sperm whale forestomach, but someone has measured gizzard squeeze. The work was done in the 1600s, to settle an argument between a pair of Italian experimenters, Giovanni Borelli and Antonio Vallisneri, over the main mechanism of digestion. Borelli claimed it was purely mechanical: that birds’ gizzards exerted a thousand pounds of force, and with that kind of grinding going on there was no call for chemical dissolution. “Vallisneri, on the contrary,” wrote author Stephen Paget in a 1906 chronicle of early animal experimentation, “having had occasion to open the stomach of an ostrich, had found there a fluid* which seemed to act on bodies immersed in it.”