Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship
of their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan.
That ship—well called the “Syren”—made a noble experimental cruise;
and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became
generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a
Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago
have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast
sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every
soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine
gam I had—long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it’s
squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were
called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing
each other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of
our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts
did not go overboard; and by and bye we scrambled down, so sober, that
we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting
down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to
my taste.
The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was
bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that
you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were
swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their
pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn’t
be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread
contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not
very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner when
you ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering
the dimensions of the cook’s boilers, including his own live parchment
boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of
good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and
capital from boot heels to hat-band.
But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous, hospitable
ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the
joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing?
I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers
is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of
historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still
extant in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English
merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence,
in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and
natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some
special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further
elucidated.
During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon
an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I
knew must be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I
concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I
was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production
of one “Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned
man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa
Claus and St. Pott’s, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving
him a box of sperm candles for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so
soon as he spied the book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean
“The Cooper,” but “The Merchant.” In short, this ancient and learned
Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other
subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery.
And in this chapter it was, headed “Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found a
long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180
sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead,
I transcribe the following:
400,000 lbs. of beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.
Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole
pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by
every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and
Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their
naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by
the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their
game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux
country where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of
train oil.
The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as
those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of
that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not
much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their
fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore,
I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve
weeks’ allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers
of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one
might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up
in a boat’s head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem
somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But
this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with
the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would
be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his
boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers
of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they,
when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of
the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the
decanter.
CHAPTER CII.
A BOWER IN THE ARSACIDES.
Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
sweeping comprehension of him, it behoves me now to unbutton him still
further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,
and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost
bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
unconditional skeleton.
But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the
fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the
whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures
on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a
specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land
a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a
roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;
the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,
ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of
leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and
cheeseries in his bowels.
I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged
to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his
poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my
boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the
contents of that young cub?
And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted
to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.
For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey
of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with
the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side
glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his
capital.
Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being
gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertù, had
brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious
of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful
devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic
canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of
its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,
then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where
a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head
again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the
terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung
sword that so affrighted Damocles.
It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy