Hope the blue whale: How the largest animal in the world came to the Natural History Museum

Some stories are bigger than others – and there’s nothing bigger than a blue whale!

On the morning of 25 March 1891, a blue whale migrating up the east coast of Ireland was caught out by the low tide and stranded on a sandbar near the harbour town of Wexford.

The locals rushed down to the beach, taking great interest in the 25.2-metre-long leviathan. The whale wasn’t yet fully grown, but unfortunately its youth wasn’t enough to help it escape the shallows.

After two days on the sandbar, a lifeboat pilot named Ned Wickham finally put the poor animal out of its misery. Its body was then auctioned off and processed, until all that was left was a 4.5-tonne skeleton.

We purchased the skeleton, which we’ve since named Hope the whale, and it arrived in South Kensington a year later. For almost 130 years, that was everything we knew about this blue whale’s life.

That was until 2017 when, as part of a project to display Hope in Hintze Hall new research revealed previously unexplored chapters of her life. From the memories of the Wickham family to cutting-edge science, we’re now able to tell Hope’s story in greater detail than ever before.

What was Hope the blue whale’s early life like?

Hope’s story begins out in the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean. As a newborn calf, she would already have weighed about 2.7 tonnes – that’s around the same as a hippo!

Thought to have been around 15 years old at the time of her death, Hope was likely born sometime around 1876. This was the same year that the first telephone call was made, Heinz ketchup was first sold and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was first published.

The years that followed Hope’s birth are still a mystery, and we’re only able to pick up her story again at the age of eight. This is because scientists were able to use her baleen to investigate the last seven years of her life.

Baleen are the long, flexible plates inside the mouths of blue whales that they use to filter feed krill out of seawater. They’re made of keratin, the same material that makes up our own hair and fingernails.

Dr Natalie Cooper, one of our scientists who studied Hope’s hidden history, says that baleen incorporates certain molecules as the whale grows, preserving a biological record of its life.

“The nice thing about keratin is that once it’s laid down, it doesn’t change,” says Natalie.

“Bones and blood will turn over in the body and be replaced, but once keratin has been made it stays like that until it falls off. The same thing applies to baleen.”

The team looked at the ratio of carbon isotopes inside the baleen to find out more about Hope’s life. These isotopes are different forms of the same element. They differ in mass depending on their structure and are referred to as light and heavy isotopes.

“We can look at the ratio between light and heavy carbon isotopes recorded in the baleen over time, and then we can compare that ratio to what’s going on in the oceans and see where they match up,” Natalie adds.

To do this, the researchers took more than 100 samples from Hope’s baleen, working out at around one sample for every four weeks of her final years. These samples were then burnt, and their chemical make-up recorded.

The team then modelled how the isotope ratio varies across the ocean, incorporating the swirling ocean currents, temperature and seasons. Professor Clive Trueman, a University of Southampton researcher who led research into Hope’s movements, says that this allowed them to investigate a range of possibilities.

“We built some computer-generated whales and put them into our isotope model – something that no one has done before,” Clive explains. “We made them migrate along different routes, and, as they swam and ate, they acquired the isotopes found in particular places at a particular time.”

After running hundreds of simulations, the team could then see what computer-generated baleen had a pattern of isotopes that best matched Hope’s. This allowed them to piece together the final years of her life.

Blue whale migration

The results of the team’s study, published in the journal PeerJ, divide the last seven years of Hope’s life into three separate phases. Hope begins this period living in the subtropical waters of the Atlantic, though it’s not certain exactly where. A few different areas fit the bill, including the seas off the Azores, Cape Verde and Mauritania.

The warmth of these waters means that they’re highly productive, providing everything a growing whale needs. After at least a year spent here, Hope then began migrating.

Modern blue whales in the northern Atlantic tend to spend their summers feeding around Iceland, Norway and the Arctic Circle. Ocean upwellings drive plankton blooms across the region during the summer, providing food for the krill that whales feed on.

As winter sets in and ice begins to form, the whales return south. They travel past the western coasts of Ireland and Iberia until they reach the warmer subtropical waters again. The pattern of carbon isotopes in Hope shows that she was following the same routes.

In the final year of her life, however, Hope’s migration suddenly becomes much more unpredictable. There’s one major reason that could cause a blue whale to dramatically shift its movements in this way – she was pregnant.

A new mother

When a blue whale becomes pregnant, it will change its migratory pattern to find an area more suitable to give birth.

“When they’re about to give birth, blue whales head south, as they breed mostly in the warmer waters south of the Azores,” explains Natalie. “They have a calf and then rear it for about eight months until it’s big enough to look after itself. The mother then leaves the calf in the warm waters and moves back north again.”

At the moment, it’s impossible to be certain that this is what Hope did in the year before she died. However, the pattern of isotopes and hormones in her baleen is consistent with what the researchers would expect to see in a pregnant whale.

After spending about a year in the subtropical Atlantic waters raising her calf, Hope once more turned north to resume her annual migrations. But as she swam north along the east coast of Ireland, tragedy struck.

The death of Hope

On the morning of 25 March 1891, Hope became stranded on a sandy ridge called Swantons Bank at the mouth of Wexford Harbour. Despite struggling to escape, she was unable to free herself.

It’s uncertain why Hope ended up trapped on this sandbank. Bad weather might have caused her to lose her bearings or she may still have been weak from the effort of raising a calf. Whatever the cause, she couldn’t free herself – and that was when she was spotted by Ned Wickham.

Ned, who was only in his 20s at the time, led a team of men who rowed out to the beached animal. Initial attempts to put Hope out of her misery failed, and she struggled through the night. The following day, having been weakened by her attempts to escape, Ned eventually killed Hope to save her from further suffering by plunging an improvised harpoon under one of her flippers.

Once she was dead, people came from far and wide to view the body of this monster from the deep. Newspapers spread the word about Wexford’s “strange visitant from strange seas” over even greater distances.

As Ireland was under British rule at the time, Hope’s body became the possession of the state. Whales have been deemed ‘royal fish’ under UK law since 1324, meaning that they automatically belong to the reigning monarch and the government acting on their behalf.

In this case, Hope’s carcass was auctioned off by the Receiver of Wreck – a role normally associated with salvaging shipwrecks. The auction raised £111 in the end, which is equivalent to about £12,500 today. Around half of this sum was given to Ned and the lifeboat crew for securing the blue whale.

Hope’s buyer, meanwhile, was one William Armstrong. He recognised the immense value of the whale’s carcass, which was towed away for processing.

The most valuable part of Hope was her oil. In the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s whale oil was used as a fuel and a lubricant, as well as in the manufacture of textiles, foods and even explosives. William was able to extract almost 3,000 litres of this oil from Hope – the sale of which would have made him a very wealthy man.

His finances would have benefitted further from the sale of Hope’s flesh, which was removed to be sold as pet food. Last but not least, he sold the skeleton to us for £250 – the equivalent of over £28,000 today.

Hope’s skeleton eventually arrived in London in 1892, where she’s remained ever since.

A family reunion

After Hope was remounted in Hintze Hall in 2017, Ned’s descendants were invited to see the whale that played such an important part in their family’s history. His granddaughter Mary Costello, her husband Edward, their six children and numerous grandchildren stood beneath the suspended skeleton to pay their respects on behalf of their ancestor.

The whale’s dramatic death in Wexford had passed into legend by the time Mary was born almost 50 years later. Her son Eddie, Ned’s great grandson, says that seeing the skeleton for the first time was “incredible”.

“My mum used to tell us about this whale, but when we were young, we thought she was making it all up,” Eddie said. “Then we discovered newspaper clippings in an old scrapbook and realised the Museum’s whale was the Wexford whale.”

“I don’t blame Ned for doing what he did. It was a fight for survival at the time. All those people saw was food and an opportunity to make money. Now, times have changed a lot, and we think differently about the ocean. But back then, it was just another resource.”

Mary, meanwhile, said that she was “overwhelmed” to be in the presence of Hope.

“I have goosepimples,” she said. “To come face-to-face with the animal my grandfather had such a close connection to, it’s one of the biggest thrills of my life. I won’t experience this feeling again.”

“Until now I had no appreciation of the enormity of this animal,” added her husband Edward. “Ned Wickham was an ordinary man living an ordinary life, and this was just another job for him.”

“But everyone knows about the whale in Wexford, and as a family, we are so moved to finally see it. It’s been a huge adventure.”

More than a century after her and Ned’s fates intertwined, Hope’s story has finally come full circle. Her scientific and social history still reverberate now, providing information that helps us to understand and protect her relatives swimming the world’s oceans today.