Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case
is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest
words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been
convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have
invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased
for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal
bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author
like me.
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing
of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an
inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas
of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding
its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and
liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you
must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be
written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my
credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I
have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals
and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise,
by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in
the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters
now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in
what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any
rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those
whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil
Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the
last preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet
sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking
rank as Cetacean fossils.
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,
been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England,
in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the
year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphiné in Paris, a short street
opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s
time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some
utterly unknown Leviathanic species.
But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842,
on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken
credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the
fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and
bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones
of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist,
it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a
departed species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and
again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes
but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen
rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the
London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most
extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted
out of existence.
When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
jaws, ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances
to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing
on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back
to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;
for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and
I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when
wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics;
and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an
inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world
was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the
present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree
like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s.
Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem.
I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,
must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a
sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins,
and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe
of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore;
was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was
cradled.
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by
the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine,
that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can
pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that
on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into
the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon ’em. They keep a
Whale’s Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the
Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which
cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John
Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their
Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from
this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas
was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.”
In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
CHAPTER CV.
DOES THE WHALE’S MAGNITUDE DIMINISH?—WILL HE PERISH?
Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the
original bulk of his sires.
But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier
ones.
Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,
that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a
large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority,
that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the
time of capture.
But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may
it not be, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated?
Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of
such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For
Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and
Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope
Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and
Solander, Cooke’s naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy
of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or
Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three
hundred and sixty feet. And Lacépède, the French naturalist, in his
elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page
3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and
twenty-eight feet. And this work was published so late as A. D. 1825.
But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is
as big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny
is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so.
Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies
that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do
not measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his
socks; and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest
Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they
are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize
cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the
fattest of Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not
admit that of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.
But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient
look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even
through Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and
lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along
all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long
endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not
at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the
last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final
puff.
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the
prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and
scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous
river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar
an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy
extinction.
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a
period ago—not a good life-time—the census of the buffalo in Illinois
exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day
not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far