The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [105]
“Of Gray’s Anatomy?” Kanai said.
“That’s the one.”
A large crowd had gathered but somewhat to Blyth’s surprise they had not set upon the whales. On the contrary, many people had labored through the night to rescue the creatures, towing them through a channel into the river. Apparently these villagers had no taste for whale meat and no knowledge of the oil that could be extracted from the animals’ carcasses. Blyth learned that many whales had been saved and that the twenty remaining ones were the last of a school of several dozen. With the rescues proceeding apace, there was clearly no time to be lost. Blyth chose two of the best specimens and ordered his men to secure them to the bank with poles and stout ropes: his intention was to return the next day with the implements necessary for a proper dissection.
“But when he came back the next morning,” said Piya, “they were all gone.” The chosen animals had been cut loose by the bystanders. But Blyth was not easily thwarted and managed to get hold of two of the last remaining whales. These he quickly reduced to perfect skeletons. After a prolonged examination of the bones, he decided that the animals were an unknown species. He called it the Indian pilot whale, Globicephalus indicus.
“I have a theory,” Piya said with a smile, “that if Blyth hadn’t gone out to Salt Lake that day, he’d have become the man who identified the Irrawaddy dolphin.”
Kanai was licking a grain of rice off his forefinger. “Why?”
“Because six years later he made a terrible mistake when he found the first specimen of Orcaella.”
“And where did he find it?”
“In a Calcutta fish market,” Piya said with a laugh. “Someone told him about it and he went running over. He gave it the once-over and decided it was a juvenile pilot whale like the animals he’d seen out near the Salt Lake. He couldn’t get those creatures out of his head.”
“So he wasn’t the one who identified your beloved dolphin?” Kanai said.
“No,” said Piya. “Old Blyth missed his chance.”
A quarter of a century later, another carcass of a small, roundheaded cetacean was found at Vizagapatnam, four hundred miles down the coast from Calcutta. This time the skeleton found its way to the British Museum, where it occasioned much curiosity. The anatomists of London saw what Blyth had failed to see: this was no juvenile pilot whale! It was a new species, a relative of none other than the killer whale, Orcinus orca. But where the killer whale grew to lengths of over thirty feet, its cousin rarely exceeded eight; while the killer whale liked the icy waters of the subpolar oceans, its cousin preferred the warmth of the tropics and appeared to thrive in both fresh water and salt. Compared to the mighty orca, this creature was so mellow as to need a diminutive: it became Orcaella — Orcaella brevirostris, to be exact.
A puzzled frown appeared on Kanai’s forehead. “So this killer-ella of yours was first netted in Calcutta and then in Vizagapatnam?”
“Yes.”
“Then why is it known as the Irrawaddy dolphin?”
“That’s another story,” said Piya.
The name was the doing of John Anderson, she said, the very one who’d tried to rear a Gangetic dolphin in his bathtub. In the 1870s Anderson accompanied two zoological expeditions that traveled through Burma to southern China. While sailing up the Irrawaddy, Anderson found no Orcaella in the lower part of the river. In the upper reaches, on the other hand, they were present in great numbers. There appeared also to be a few small anatomical differences between the animals that lived in fresh water and those that lived in salt water. From this Anderson drew the conclusion that there were two species of Orcaella: to Orcaella brevirostris he awarded a cousin, Orcaella fluminalis. This, he decided, was the Irrawaddy dolphin, the true inhabitant of Asia’s rivers.
“The name stuck,” Piya said, “but his conclusions didn’t.”
The great Gray of London examined