"We account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. "In Noah's flood he despised Noah's ark; and if ever the world is to be flooded again, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies."More
Melville and the whale
The BBC has a meditative article around whales, and a literary great to whose work the whale was central.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Herman Melville pondered the future of the whale in a chapter titled Does The Whale's Magnitude Diminish? Will He Perish? Melville, a seafarer, wrote his epochal Moby Dick about a great white whale.
Melville, the article says, "seemed to envision our threatened world of rising temperatures and rising seas. But he also thought that the whale would survive the punitive cull of his age."
Excerpts: