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though day-break was yet some way down the future.



Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent

position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we

found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us,

leaning against the headboard with our four knees drawn up

close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if

our knee-pans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug,

the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out

of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room.

The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth,

some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality

in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.

Nothing exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you

are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time,

then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.  But if,

like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown

of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general

consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.

For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished

with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.

For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing

but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold

of the outer air.  Then there you lie like the one warm spark

in the heart of an arctic crystal.



We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time,

when all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when

between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether

asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut,

in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his

eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element

of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant

and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom

of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced

a disagreeable revulsion.  Nor did I at all object to the hint

from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light,

seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong

desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk.  Be it said,

that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking

in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices

grow when love once comes to bend them.  For now I liked

nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed,

because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then.

I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance.

I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness

of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.

With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed

the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew

over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame

of the new-lit lamp.



Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage

away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke

of his native island; and, eager to hear his history,

I begged him to go on and tell it.  He gladly complied.

Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words,

yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar

with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole

story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.







CHAPTER 12



Biographical





Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West

and South.  It is not down on any map; true places never are.



When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands

in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were

a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul,

lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom

than a specimen whaler or two.  His father was a High Chief,

a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side

he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors.

There was excellent blood in his veins--royal stuff;

though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity

he nourished in his untutored youth.



A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought

a passage to Christian lands.  But the ship, having her full

complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King

his father's influence could prevail.  But Queequeg vowed a vow.

Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he

knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island.

On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land,

covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water.

Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its

prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand;

and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out;

gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized

and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself

at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there,

and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.



In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a

cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King,

and Queequeg budged not.  Struck by his desperate dauntlessness,

and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented,

and told him he might make himself at home.  But this fine young savage--

this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin.

They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.

But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities,

Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might

happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen.

For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound

desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make

his people still happier than they were; and more than that,

still better than they were.  But, alas! the practices of whalemen

soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable

and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens.

Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors

did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent

their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.

Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

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the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous,

fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them

at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.



But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally

lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits,

they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just

before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their

own peculiar quarters.



In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American

whale captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion

that by rights the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by

courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there.

So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might

more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it.

For when they did enter it, it was something as a streetdoor

enters a house; turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned

out the next; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the open air.

Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship;

socially, Ahab was inaccessible.  Though nominally included

in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it.

He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived

in settled Missouri.  And as when Spring and Summer had departed,

that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree,

lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement,

howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body,

there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!







CHAPTER 35



The Mast-Head





It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation

with the other seamen my first mast-head came round.



In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned

almost simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port;

even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more,

to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground.  And if,

after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing nigh

home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial even--

then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last! and not till

her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she

altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.



Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very

ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.

I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the

old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.

For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless,

by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in

all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it)

as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by

the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot

give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians.  And that

the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an

assertion based upon the general belief among archaeologists,

that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes:

a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stairlike formation

of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long

upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount

to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a

modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight.

In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times,

who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole

latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from

the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance

of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from

his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly

facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.

Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set;

mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing

out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent to the business

of singing out upon discovering any strange sight.  There is Napoleon;

who, upon the top of the column of Vendome stands with arms folded,

some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules

the decks below, whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis

the Devil.  Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering

main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his column

marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go.

Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his

mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even when most obscured by that

London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there;

for where there is smoke, must be fire.  But neither great Washington,

nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below,

however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted

decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised,

that their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future,

and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned.



It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers

of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so,

is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian

of Nantucket, stands accountable.  The worthy Obed tells us, that in

the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in

pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along

the seacoast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats,

something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years ago this same

plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying

the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach.

But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper

mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea.  The three mast-heads are kept

manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns

(as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours.

In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant

the mast-head: nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful.

There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along

the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you

and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea,

even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at

old Rhodes.  There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea,

with nothing ruffled but the waves.  The tranced ship indolently rolls;

the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor.

For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness

invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling

accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements;

you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks;

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     "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

      Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."



Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young

philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient

"interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly

lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they

would rather not see whales than otherwise.  But all in vain;

those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect;

they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve?

They have left their opera-glasses at home.



"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads,

"we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast

not raised a whale yet.  Whales are scarce as hen's teeth

whenever thou art up here."  Perhaps they were; or perhaps

there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon;

but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant,

unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending

cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;

takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of

that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature;

and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;

every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form,

seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that

only people the soul by continually flitting through it.

In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came;

becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's

sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every

shore the round globe over.



There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted

by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea;

by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.  But while

this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch;

slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.

Over Descartian vortices you hover.  And perhaps, at midday,

in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through

that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.

Heed it well, ye Pantheists!







CHAPTER 36



The Quarter-Deck





(Enter Ahab:  Then, all)





It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe,

that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont,

ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck.  There most sea-captains

usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal,

take a few turns in the garden.



Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his

old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all

over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk.

Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow;

there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints

of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.



But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper,

even as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark.

And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn

that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle,

you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned,

and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed,

that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.



"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him

pecks the shell.  'Twill soon be out."



The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin;

anon, pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose

in his aspect.



It drew near the close of day.  Suddenly he came to a halt by

the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there,

and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck

to send everybody aft.



"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given

on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.



"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab.  "Mast-heads, there! come down!"



When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious

and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked

not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab,

after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his

eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though

not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck.

With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace,

unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb

cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned

them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.

But this did not last long.  Vehemently pausing, he cried:--



"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"



"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score

of clubbed voices.



"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones;

observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question

had so magnetically thrown them.



"And what do ye next, men?"



"Lower away, and after him!"



"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"



"A dead whale or a stove boat!"



More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving,

grew the countenance of the old man at every shout;

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unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way,

he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,--

all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go.

The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell

whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound

of his pick?  Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?

What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still?  For one,

I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place;

but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see

naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.







CHAPTER 42



The Whiteness of The Whale





What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times,

he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.



Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick,

which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm,

there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror

concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered

all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it,

that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim,

random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters

might be naught.



Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly

enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own,

as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations

have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue;

even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title

"Lord of the White Elephants" above all their other magniloquent

ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling

the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the

Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;

and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,

having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though

this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself,

giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe;

and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made

significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked

a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings,

this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things--

the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among

the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was

the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies

the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes

to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds;

though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions

it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power;

by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being

held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies,

Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull;

and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred

White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,

that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they

could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their

own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white,

all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their

sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock;

and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is

specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord;

though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed,

and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before

the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there

white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations,

with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet

lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue,

which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which

affrights in blood.



This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness,

when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled

with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror

to the furthest bounds.  Witness the white bear of the poles,

and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth,

flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?

That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness,

even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect.

So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can

so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*





*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who

would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness,

separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of

that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said,

only rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness

of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence

and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions

in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast.

But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness,

you would not have that intensified terror.



As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose

in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies

with the same quality in the Polar quadruped.  This peculiarity is most

vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish.

The Romish mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam"

(eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself,

and any other funeral music.  Now, in allusion to the white,

silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness

of his habits, the French call him Requin.





Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual

wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails

in all imaginations?  Not Coleridge first threw that spell;

but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*





*I remember the first albatross I ever saw.  It was during

a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas.

From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck;

and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing

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the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton

of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.

The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones,

occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest

in depth.  Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this

particular whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas,

the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet.

So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion

of the living magnitude of that part.  Besides, for some way,

where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped

round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels.

Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints;

and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes,

an utter blank!



How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man

to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring

over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.

No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within

the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea,

can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.



But the spine.  For that, the best way we can consider it is,

with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end.  No speedy enterprise.

But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.



There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton

are not locked together.  They mostly lie like the great knobbed

blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry.

The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet,

and in depth more than four.  The smallest, where the spine tapers

away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something

like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still

smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins,

the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.

Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things

tapers off at last into simple child's play.







CHAPTER 104



The Fossil Whale





From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme

whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate.  Would you,

you could not compress him.  By good rights he should only be

treated of in imperial folio.  Not to tell over again his furlongs

from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist;

only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines,

where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away

in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.



Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves

me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise;

not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood,

and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.

Having already described him in most of his present habitatory

and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in

an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.

Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--

such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.

But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered.  Fain am I to stagger

to this enterprise 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 outreaching

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 ranks 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 Dauphine 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 vertebrae, 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 schoolboy.

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 postdiluvian 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 105



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 Lacepede,

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 whaleships, 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 lifetime--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 different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily

forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.  Forty men in one

ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they

have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home

the oil of forty fish.  Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian