Yesterday’s report of a Arctic beluga whale in the Thames has an almost Shakespearean quality of something both rich and strange, sensational and fatal at the same time. She’s tragically in the wrong place; comparisons with the Thames whale of 2006 are all too obvious. Despite a million-pound rescue attempt, that northern bottlenose died of dehydration, unable to feed on her deep-water diet of squid and thus slake her thirst.

Londoners may be becoming blase about marine mammals, with an upsurge in sightings of seals; I saw one recently, sunning itself on the riverbank in front of the National Theatre as if auditioning for a role.

Beluga whale sighted in Thames estuary off Gravesend Read more

But none of this is new. In 1456, William Caxton reported: “This yere were taken iiij [4] grete fishes bitwene Eerethe [Erith, just upriver from where the beluga appeared] and London, that one was called mors marine, [a walrus] the second a swerd fisshe, [swordfish] and the othir twenyne were w[h]ales”.

In 1788, 17 sperm whales stranded on the river’s lower reaches; in 1791, sailors from Greenwich chased an orca to Deptford, and killed it; in 1849, a 58-foot fin whale was dragged ashore at Gravesend, despite “desperate attempts to obtain its freedom”; and in 1949 a narwhal stranded at Rainham, although being female, she lacked the extraordinary tusk that earns the species its legend as a sea unicorn.

The eerie quality of the beluga evokes up the most famous whale in culture, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “It was the whiteness of the whale that appalled me.” Like the mass stranding of sperm whales around the North Sea in 2016 – whose natural GPS may have been deceived by the same solar surges that spark the northern lights – the lonely beluga is both an anomaly and an omen, very like a whale.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A stranded beluga from William Scoresby’s 1820 book, An Account of the Arctic Regions Photograph: Philip Hoare

Belugas cannot live on their own; they are social animals, defined by their communal reality. This whale, perhaps set off course by recent storms, is an emblem of a changing climate and disrupted food sources. Melville, ever prophetic, wrote in Moby Dick of ‘“the breaking up of the ice-bound stream of time”.

With Arctic temperatures 20C warmer than usual this summer, can we expect more whalish refugees, even as global warming forces their human counterparts to migrate?

Belugas are one of only three species other than humans – all of them whales – whose females experience menopause; their evolution is determined by a long-standing matriarchal culture. It’s tempting to wonder what they make of us and what we have done to them. Beluga leather was once used for shoelaces and horse harnesses; the aviator Amy Johnson was said to have had a pair of boots made from the same material. Belugas were the first whales to be held captive, both in London and in New York where, in an ultimate warming, PT Barnum’s belugas were boiled alive when his aquarium caught fire in 1865.

Shrinking Arctic sea ice threatens the majestic Beluga whale Read more

Now Russia maintains a trade in whales stolen from the sea and sold into captivity in the US, Europe and Asia (despite the Whale and Dolphin Conservation charity’s brave attempts to set up a sanctuary in Iceland) while belugas in Canada’s Saint Lawrence River are so contaminated by hydrocarbons from smelting plants that they suffer the highest cancer rate of any wild animal and their bodies must be disposed of as toxic waste.

Their beauty, like so many things about our natural world, has been besmirched and enslaved; it seems all too apt that this whale should appear in the turbid waters of the ominously named Gravesend, site of the opening of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Belugas sing so sweetly that they were called the canaries of the sea. Perhaps this whale is singing out her warning.

• Philip Hoare is the author of Leviathan or, The Whale