26/26 Sturgeon have all but vanished from British waters; a 2024 Zoological Society of London map gathers 2,500 sightings over 400 years. So if a whale or a sturgeon washes up on an English beach, call the Coastguard. The head is the King's. The tail is the Queen's.

25/26 The fish went to market in Plymouth and police stopped the sale: sturgeon are protected, and selling one is a crime. It ended up in the Natural History Museum, whose fish curator called it "hugely important", as sturgeon are now so rare in British waters.

24/26 In June 2004 Robert Davies, a 27-year-old fisherman from Llanelli in Wales, landed a sturgeon in Swansea Bay: about 9 feet long and 120 kg. He knew the law and offered it to the Queen. A fax came back from the Palace: he could dispose of it as he saw fit.

23/26 In 1971 Parliament swept away the Crown's old rights to wild creatures, with two exceptions spelled out in the Act: "royal fish and swans". The monarch still owns them. The Receiver of Wreck still takes possession of royal fish found on the shores of England and Wales.

22/26 Coastguards filled in postcards for every whale, dolphin and porpoise on the beach. The founder of the scheme, zoologist Sidney Harmer, later ran the Natural History Museum. Since 1990 the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme carries on the work.

21/26 In 1912, at the request of the British Museum's trustees, the Board of Trade told its Receivers of Wreck, the officials who deal with wreck and salvage, to report stranded royal fish. From 1913 the reports went to the museum's natural history branch in London.

20/26 Scotland has its own version. There the Crown takes only whales too big to be pulled ashore by a "wain drawn by six oxen", a wain being a farm wagon. Today that is read as anything over 25 feet, about 7.6 metres. Smaller whales, dolphins and sturgeon go to the council.

19/26 Moby-Dick first appeared in London on 18 October 1851, in three volumes titled The Whale, published by Richard Bentley. The New York edition followed weeks later under the name we know. This month the book turns 175, and its royal fish are still royal.

18/26 A local clergyman wrote to the Duke on the men's behalf. In Melville's version, the Duke replied that he had already received the money and would thank the clergyman to mind his own business. Melville calls it recent news; whether it really happened is unclear.

17/26 Up steps "a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm". He lays it on the whale's head and claims the fish for the Lord Warden. To every plea of the sailors he gives one answer: "It is his."

16/26 Twenty years later the Duke turned up in fiction. In Moby-Dick, chapter 90, "Heads or Tails", Melville tells of Cinque Ports mariners who chase and kill a whale, haul it ashore, and dream of the 150 pounds its oil and bone will bring.

15/26 The Warden's court registrar dug out a precedent from 1668: the King's right could be granted to someone else, in this case the Lord Warden. Wellington won. The whale was his, not the King's, and certainly not the fishermen's.

14/26 Wellington's salvage commissioner advised him to let the claim go. Then the Admiralty took the Duke to the High Court, arguing the whale was a royal fish that belonged to King William IV himself. The Lord Warden had no business giving it away.

13/26 From 1829 the Lord Warden was the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo and a former Prime Minister. In autumn 1831 a whale was beached in Whitstable Bay in Kent, and local fishermen claimed salvage on it: a reward for saving property from the sea.

12/26 The most famous holder of the right was the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. The Cinque Ports were a league of Channel ports, Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich, that supplied ships to the Crown in return for privileges. Their Warden held royal rights there.

11/26 That made for quarrels. Around 1440 in Ireland, the Crown and Christopher St Lawrence, Baron Howth, lord of the Howth peninsula north of Dublin, both claimed a huge stranded grampus, an old name for Risso's dolphin. His family claimed every grampus and porpoise found there

10/26 Note the escape clause: "except in places privileged by the King". The Crown often granted its rights away. Lords of coastal manors, bishops and abbeys held "wreck of the sea", the right to what the tide brought ashore, and with it often the royal fish.

9/26 Later lawyers widened the catch. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of England in the 1670s, wrote a treatise on who owns the sea and the shore and added the porpoise. Today the royal fish are all whales, dolphins and porpoises, plus sturgeon.

8/26 There was a catch, and Herman Melville spotted it. "Whalebone" is not bone at all but baleen: the flexible plates that hang from the upper jaw of some whales and sieve food from the water. It sits in the head. The King, not the Queen, got the corset material.