Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in
some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are
the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at
large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors
of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;
Ray; Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
Marten; Lacépède; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick
Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne;
the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to
what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above
cited extracts will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen
ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate
subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great
sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy
mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper
upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest
of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the
profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the
then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to
this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past
days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was
to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a
new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,—the
Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth!
There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the
living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest
degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s;
both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both
exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale
to be found in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it
goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific
description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic,
lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted
whales, his is an unwritten life.
Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the
present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I
hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;
because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical
description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to much
of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of
a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the
Post-office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea
after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations,
ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am
I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful
tauntings in Job might well appal me. “Will he (the leviathan) make a
covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!” But I have swam
through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with
whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There
are some preliminaries to settle.
First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters
it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System
of Nature, A. D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales
from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year
1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express
edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with
the Leviathan.
The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from
the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular
heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure
meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and
they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether
insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given
you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;
whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then,
a whale is _a spouting fish with a horizontal tail_. There you have
him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded
meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a
fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is
still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have
noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a
vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail,
though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal
position.
By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as
alien.[2] Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish
must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the
grand divisions of the entire whale host.
[2] I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled
Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of
Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales.
But as these pig-fish are a nosy, contemptible set, mostly
lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and
especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as
whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit
the Kingdom of Cetology.
First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary
BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them
all, both small and large.
I. The FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
As the type of the FOLIO I present the _Sperm Whale_; of the OCTAVO,
the _Grampus;_ of the DUODECIMO, the _Porpoise_.
FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. _The
Sperm Whale_; II. the _Right Whale_; III. the _Fin Back Whale_; IV. the
_Hump-backed Whale_; V. the _Razor Back Whale_; VI. the _Sulphur Bottom
Whale_.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER I. (_Sperm Whale_).—This whale, among the
English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter
whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the
French, and the Pottfisch of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe;
the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being
the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically
considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland
or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was
that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable
of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment
and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you
nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of
time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name
was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a
notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation
must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this
spermaceti was really derived.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER II. (_Right Whale_).—In one respect this is
the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly
hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or
baleen; and the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article
in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated
by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the
Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There
is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus
multitudinously baptized. What then is the whale, which I include in
the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the
English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the
Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the
Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been
hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale
which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on
the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other parts of
the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree
in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.
The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with
reference to elucidating the sperm whale.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER III. (_Fin-Back_).—Under this head I reckon
a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains,
and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of
a less portly girth, and a lighter color, approaching to olive. His
great lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting,
slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the
fin, from which he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object.