![]() ![]() It wasn’t until that Adelaide’s Evening Journal declared “Champion Fish Story, A Hoax Exposed”.īut the tale refused to die and was rerun in many papers over the next two decades. ![]() Dozens more papers ran the story virtually word for sourceless word over two years. The Great Yarmouth Mercury in the UK started this scoop rolling on 22 August 1891 and the Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton, Queensland, snapped up the bait on 11 September. Bartley was the subject of a cetacean-sized early example of churnalism (the pinching and recycling of one journalist’s story). But if the museum swallowed the story, so did the media – for the next 100 years. Newspaper clipping repeating the fascinating tale. The museum adds a note: “Before diving, sperm whales inhale deeply and rapidly, storing oxygen in muscle fibres, tissues and blood…Could it be that James Bartley survived through the storing up of such oxygen?” “This modern Jonah lived 18 more years, dying at 39,” continues an account at the Eden Killer Whale Museum on the south coast of NSW, which sources the story to “Records of British Admiralty”. For two weeks he was delirious, and it was a month before he could tell how he’d fallen into the whale’s mouth, felt the huge teeth grate over him as he slid down into its throat, then stomach. Its digestive juices had permanently bleached his skin a deathly white, he lost his hair and was nearly blind. “Out came a boot on a trousered leg and there was James Bartley…still living after 15 hours in the belly of a whale. ![]()
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