Hope, the name given to the Natural History Museum’s newly articulated blue whale, diving over visitors in a sublime spectacle, is already starting to look like a forlorn gesture. Last week, shortly after the exquisitely beautiful specimen was unveiled with determined optimism by Sir David Attenborough and the Duchess of Cambridge, news came in of the death of yet another North Atlantic right whale off the coast of Canada – the eighth carcass to be found since June.

This species is perhaps one of the most endangered animals in the world, with fewer than 530 individuals left alive. Such a toll may be unsustainable for the future of the right whale – especially if any of those eight individuals were breeding females. Many appear to have been hit by ships or become entangled in fishing gear: casualties of human activity. As one Canadian whale rescue team member, Jerry Conway, observed, this is an unprecedented event. “The number of deaths haven’t been seen like this since the days of whaling”.

The deaths of such huge animals – like the 29 sperm whales that died on North Sea coasts last year – are inevitably seen as symbolic of nature perverted. There’s a powerful disconnect between the gesture of magnificent display in a London museum – already being admired by huge crowds and visitors to the museum’s whale exhibition – and the fate awaiting the living animals. It is the spectacle to which we are drawn, almost in spite of ourselves.

Two hundred years before Hope was reassembled as a new emblem, another blue whale went on show in London. In 1828, the 95ft skeleton of a female blue whale, found off the coast of Ostend, was brought to Charing Cross and ceremoniously installed in a “wondrous lengthy booth” – a kind of gigantic garage or shed – where Londoners paid a shilling each to view it. Like today’s visitors to Hope, they entered “a tomb / A sort of bed-crib, sleeping room / For what they call – a Whale” – as if they were latter-day Jonahs. Inside its rib cage they found a library of relevant texts, and could quaff wine while being entertained by a 24-piece orchestra. (The skeleton still survives, on display in St Petersburg’s zoological institute.)

The Charing Cross whale: the 95ft skeleton of a female blue whale, found off the coast of Ostend in 1828, that was exhibited in the centre of London. Photograph: Richard Sabin/Natural History Museum Photograph: Richard Sabin/Natural History Museum

For an era yet to be enlightened by Darwin, this “wonder of the deep” incited sensation and superstition. Nearly 20 years before, in 1809, an only slightly smaller fin whale had been speared to death off Gravesend and dragged on shore, where its rotting carcass was displayed until the Times raised objections to the stink. The sense of human domination was echoed by another display, a few miles upriver in the Soho shop of William Blake’s brother, of Blake’s mystical painting that he titled “The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the Nations of the Earth” – as if the recently deceased national hero’s feats might include the posthumous summoning and conquering of the whale.

And 20 years after the Charing Cross whale came another fin whale, in 1849 – killed off Grays, in Essex, and promptly celebrated as the “Prince of Whales”. It was an additionally interesting spectacle to a young American author who arrived in London that month: Herman Melville, who was even mulling over the monstrous white whale, Moby Dick, which he was about to commemorate.

Even further back, other stranded whales that had the misfortune to visit London acquired a parabolic power. In 1658 a North Atlantic right whale – ancestor of that currently endangered species, and far from home – was harpooned off Deptford, and its bloody death (the diarist John Evelyn recorded its death throes, and afterwards examined the carcass with a scientific eye) was seen as an augury of the death, a day later, of the lord protector, Oliver Cromwell – a tyrant to many.

What will the skeleton of Hope represent 100, or even 500 years, hence? Certainly an emptiness. More than a million great whales died in the culls of the 20th century, when factory ships efficiently deprived the Southern Ocean of blue and fin whales that the whaling ships of Melville’s day had been too slow to hunt.

Our descendants, living with the effects of the sixth great extinction, may peer up at those bones and see a mirror of our legacy, in the absence of its living counterparts. “The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary,” John Berger wrote. “Man becomes aware of returning the look. The animal scrutinises him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension.” But will there be an animal left to return the gaze?

• Philip Hoare’s RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is published by 4th Estate