Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead,fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones.But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton;as it is by far the most complicated part;and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter,you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed,otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to view.
In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet;so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long;for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body.Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet,leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone,for something less than a third of its length,was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals.
To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,extending far away from it in a straight line,not a little resembled the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks,when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.
The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet long;the second, third, and fourth were each successively longer,till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs,which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs diminished,till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness,they all bore a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched.In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over small streams.
In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with 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 vertebræ 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 behooves 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 archæological, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 and Indian hunters and trappers of the West,when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin,the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months,mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty,but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated.
Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale,for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans,in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence,the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. Because,as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety,now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes,and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated,unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit,that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them,hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape;and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure,some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which,in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable.And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so,hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas,the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels,and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes;and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot,some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000,have been annually slain on the nor’ west coast by the Americans alone;yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.
Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of the more enormous creatures of the globe,yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa,when he tells us that at one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants;that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes.And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants,which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal,and by all the successive monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in great numbers,much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in,which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined.
Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales,their probably attaining the age of a century and more, therefore at any one period of time,several distinct adult generations must be contemporary. And what that is,we may soon gain some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries,and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women,and children who were alive seventy-five years ago;and adding this countless host to the present human population of the globe.
Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species,however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water;he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin.In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded,like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive,and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood,spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London,had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person.He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock.And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there,he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever,something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then,the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench,that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty,yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness,Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood.For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket,that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown,and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty,his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten,and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.
Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind,that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe;and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove;so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea,more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings,that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world,but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas,some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave;not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing.For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them,but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur;so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction.To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries,carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that,in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons,we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable,sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly, in set way,have been disclosed before. With many other particulars concerning Ahab,always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain period,both before and after the sailing of the Pequod,he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval,sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead.Captain Peleg’s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed,as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light.But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least.That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this,but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason,possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him;to that timid circle the above hinted casualty—remaining, as it did,moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested itself with terrors,not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him,they had all conspired, so far as in them lay,to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it was,that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet,in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay set about making a new leg,and directed the mates to see him supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage,in order that a careful selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured.This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night;and to provide all the fittings for it,independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover,the ship’s forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and,to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone;and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass,and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction;the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was,to a certain off-handed, practical extent,alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own;the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold, was his vice-bench;a long rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of different sizes,and both of iron and of wood. At all times except when whales were alongside,this bench was securely lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.