New Orleans Narwhal.
Dolphins frolic in the Gulf of Mexico off Grand Isle and around the churning mouth of the mighty Mississippi River, but whales are rare off the Lousiana Coast, especially narwhals. While some have been sighted in the bayous off Barataria Bay, this hasn’t happened in historical memory. Their presence is more myth than fact. One time, however, when gaslights still lit Bourbon Street, a narwhal swam across Lake Pontchartrain to frolic down the New Basin Canal. The newspapers made a big deal of it. There was even a song written about it, of course.
Lafcadio Hearn nicknamed Nicky in the pages of the Times Democrat.
Nicky was named for the cut he had over his right eye. He may be less than a footnote today, but during the week of December 17th through December 21st, 1883, Nicky the Narwhal was all anyone could talk about. He had a winning smile. People wrote about him in their diaries.
When you think of all the Irishmen who died for being cheaper than slaves, it makes you wonder when you look out from Landry’s Seafood, past the Lighthouse Museum. You wonder how many anonymous bones are buried in the neutral ground between West End Avenue and Pontchartrain Boulevard. On December 17, a narwhal breached in the New Basin Canal. On December 21st, the narwhal’s body was found washed up three miles away at Milneburg. Smoky Mary delivered the body down Elysian Fields Avenue to a cold storage terminal on the Esplanade Wharf.
When Nicky first swam into the New Basin Canal, he was trailing a banana boat headed to one of United Fruit’s warehouses. During a quaterdeck fight aboard the tug, its captain dropped a broken bottle into the drink. On it’s way to the bottom, the jagged edge of the bottle hit Nicky on the noggin. The wound got infected. The canal was filthy with raw sewage and dead Irishmen at the time. It was a stewpot of botulism, Irish flu, and yellow fever.
The guy who found Nicky’s corpse broke off a rib and kept it as a souvenir. A pack of dogs had already been there so it was impossible to tell if Nicky was, indeed, male. The rib sat in a safe deposit box in the old Federal Reserve Vault on the corner of Gravier and Carondolet Streets for at least a hundred years, give or take.
Nobody knows what happened to the rest of Nicky’s body. There are plenty of people who would like to get their hands on that souvenir rib. It’s held in trust by a coproporation managed by an old Baronne Street law firm. They’re the kind of attorneys who wear seersucker suits. You can see them buying rounds of sazaracs at Mandina’s bar most weekday afternoons. To someone who isn’t from New Orleans, they are fat white leviathans supping up soft shell crabs and fried oyster plates. To Orleanians, they are judges in the making.
Lafcadio Hearn’s house is still around. It is preserved as a national historic landmark in a sea of parking lots on Cleveland Street. Lafcadio Hearn had to move to Japan to be heralded a national treasure. It’s been decades since anybody’s seen Nicky the Narwhal’s rib. Some wags speculate that maybe God made a lady narwhal out of it. That isn’t the case.
I know where it is. I won it in a poker game.