The man who was a whale’s breakfast (nearly)

Could the Bible story of Jonah be true? Today, lobster fisherman Michael Packard is counting his blessings after a humpback whale off the coast of America nearly swallowed him whole. By 8am on Friday morning, the two Cape Cod fishermen had already been at work for two and a half hours and caught 100lbs of lobster. But Michael Packard thought they could do better still, so he took another dive. He was 13m below the surface and nearing the ocean floor when he suddenly felt as if he had been hit by a lorry. Everything went dark. “I could feel just … hard stuff all around me,” the diver said afterwards. “And I just thought, ‘Did I just get eaten by a white shark?’ And then I said, ‘No, I don’t feel any teeth.’ And I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m in the mouth of a whale. With his mouth shut.’” Feeling an agonising pressure on his legs, he twisted and turned while the whale shook its head from side to side. “I just was struggling, but I knew this was this massive creature. There was no way I was going to bust myself out of there.” To make things worse, the breathing regulator attached to his oxygen supply had come out of his mouth. There was no time to lose in grabbing it and pushing it back in. Fearing that he would die either by drowning or being swallowed, Packard thought of his wife and two sons. Meanwhile, on the surface, his fishing partner Josiah Mayo noticed the bubbles from Packard’s SCUBA diving gear suddenly stop. Then came an explosion of white water. A vast humpback whale burst up out of the sea in front of him. Moments later, Packard was thrown high into the air before falling back into the water. “I was just laying on the surface floating and saw [the whale’s] tail and he went back down,” Packard said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I got out of that. I survived.’” With the help of another fisherman, Mayo pulled his colleague from the water and sped towards the harbour, where they were met by an ambulance. At the hospital, doctors found that Packard’s only injuries were a dislocated knee and bad bruising to his legs. One nurse decided he was so lucky that she asked him to suggest some lottery numbers. He was allowed to go home later the same day. The incident has drawn comparisons with the biblical story of the prophet Jonah. In it, God commands Jonah to go and preach in the deeply hostile city of Nineveh. Instead, Jonah boards a ship heading in a completely different direction. But when a great storm hits, the sailors decide to throw him overboard to avoid God’s anger. Jonah is then swallowed by a whale and remains in its stomach for three days and nights. There, he prays for forgiveness until God commands the whale to vomit him out onto dry land. The story is common to Jews, Christians and Muslims. But those who do not share their beliefs tend to dismiss it as a myth – and those who do share them sometimes see it as symbolic rather than literal. It is undisputed that sperm whales are capable of swallowing people because their mouths measure on average 20 feet long, 15 feet high and 9 feet wide. They are known to swallow squid larger than grown men. Could the Bible story of Jonah be true? Hard to swallow Some say, of course not. Even if one accepted that Jonah was swallowed by a sperm whale, he could not have survived in its stomach, which is similar to a cow’s. Its four chambers contain methane rather than air, so the prophet would have suffocated in them. And in any case, the gastric juices that break down the creature’s food would be fatal to a human being. Others argue that, given the right circumstances, Jonah could have survived. A whale’s first stomach chamber, known as the forestomach or rumen, contains bacteria rather than gastric juices. There, he would have been safe from the acid as long as he remained where he was. And he could have had air to breathe if the whale was bloated or if it surfaced frequently. KeywordsHumpback whale - Humpbacks are particularly known for their singing. The males have a song which lasts for up to 20 minutes; they repeat it for hours at a time.