Here's What Happens When A Whale Swallows You

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ExtinctZoo 25 min 8 chapters transcribed 15 days ago

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What would actually happen if a whale swallowed a person whole?

Unknown 0:00

It's a nice enough morning, the water's flat, and you're swimming a couple hundred meters off the coast. Don't ask me why. When all of a sudden the ocean does something the ocean isn't supposed to do. Bolt. And before your brain has finished flooding your body with stress hormones and probably a scream, the surface opens up and something bigger than a bus comes straight up to the exact patch of water you're floating in and takes you. And whatever else is nearby you. In other words, congratulations. You have been swallowed by a whale. And that's fine and dandy and all, but the real question is what happens now? What happens when a whale swallows a person whole? And here's the thing. We're supposed to have an answer to that already, because it happened over a century ago.

Unknown 0:39

There's this guy named James Bartley, and in 1891 he was working aboard a whaler, called the Star of the East, somewhere off the Falkland Islands, when the crew harpooned a sperm whale, and in the chaos that followed, the whale The whale flipped over one of the boats, and there went Bartley into the water, with the understandably pissed-off whale, and he simply never came back up. Now, the crew managed to rescue other survivors, but they found nothing of our young Bartley, and thus concluded that the man was spending an extended stay in Davy Jones' locker, i.e., he was gonzo. But later, once the injured whale succumbed to its injuries, the sailors started butchering it, and they noticed something odd: the stomach.

Unknown 1:14

It was Moving. And so they did, as any self-respecting curious sailor would do, they cut it open. And suddenly, there goes James Bartley, just falling out. Unconscious, but alive. Supposedly, after this, he spent a few weeks out of his mind, apparently raving and thrashing, so essentially a modern politician reenactment. But when he finally stopped the politician act, he was able to tell them everything. That he remembered the mouth coming to grab him, the teeth that stabbed him. And then that he was sliding down something slick and warm into its stomach. Where upon arrival he could in fact breathe, but the air was so nasty and disgusting that it made him pass out. And so there he was for hours, and by the time he came out of it, he was permanently scarred, seeing that his hair was gone, his skin bleached, and was made blind, all by what was surely the immensely powerful whale stomach acid.

Unknown 2:00

So a great story, no doubt. It ran in the newspapers, got picked up and reprinted. Printed, published around the world, etc. etc. I mean, there's even a decent chance that you've heard some version of it. And yet, my friends, it's also all completely, absolutely, undeniably made up. A historian named Edward B. Davis went and did a bit of some good old school fact-checking. And what he found was that while there was a real ship called the Star of the East, it wasn't a whaler, and in fact, had never Been a whaler, and there was no James Bartley anywhere on its crew list. And then to really put the whole thing in the ground, or should I say the ocean, the wife of the captain, who had sailed with her husband for the entire time he had commanded the vessel, literally wrote, and I quote, There is not one word of truth in the whale story.

Unknown 2:47

So yeah, just a bunch of tomfoolery. But then Davis went further with an actual theory about where this all came from in the first place.

How did the 19th‑century James Bartley story shape the whale‑swallow myth?

Unknown 2:53

Now, in the same year, Here, an actual whale genuinely was killed near Great Dearmouth in England and got carted around the country as an attraction, meaning people paid money to go and look at a dead whale. Truly elevated entertainment. And the whale itself was about 30 feet long. And it was also a roar qual, meaning a type of baleen whale, which therefore also has a belonging to perhaps the one group of whales on this planet that is the most physically incapable of swallowing a human relative to the. To their size that has ever existed. And for reasons which we're gonna get into some detail. Yet, even disregarding all of that, there's even signs of this BS, or should I say WS, that was built into the story itself, such as, for example, that Bartley is said to have been able to breathe, and that his hair was literally dissolved and skin bleached due to the acid.