distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the
whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be
remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes. A curious and most
puzzling question might be started concerning
..
this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
hint. so long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is
involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever
objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him,
that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance,
it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any
two things —however large or however small —at one and the same instant of
time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you
now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of
profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to
bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your
contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his
eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same
moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of
him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as
marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through
the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly
investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. It may be but an
idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary
vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four
boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales;
I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of
volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision
must involve them. But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If
you are an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two
heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect
to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the sperm
whale and the
..
right. While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the
latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite
imperceptible from without. Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the
whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder
through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as
the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches
of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
hearing? Not at all. — Why then do you try to enlarge your mind? Subtilize
it. Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
over the sperm whale's head, so that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending
by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that
the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend
into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here
by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and
chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a
glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. But come out now, and
look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of an
immense snuff-box, with a hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry
it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a
terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the
fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more
terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky
whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet
long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world
like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out
of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw
have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach
to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. In most
cases this lower jaw —being easily unhinged by a practised artist —is
disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth,
and furnishing a supply of
..
that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of
curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to
riding-whips. With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it
were an anchor; and when the proper time comes —some few days after the other
work —Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set
to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then
the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft,
they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of
wild wood-lands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales,
much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion. The
jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building
houses.
..






.. < chapter lxxv 17 THE RIGHT WHALE'S HEAD—CONTRASTED VIEW >
Crossing the
deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's head. As in
general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a Roman
war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a
broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a
gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager
likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same last or
shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might
very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny. But as you come nearer
to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your
point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two f-shaped
spout-holes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and
these
..
spiracles, the apertures in its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your
eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass
—this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the crown, and
the Southern fishers the bonnet of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely
on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a
bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that
nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you;
unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term crown also
bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in thinking how
this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green
crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this
whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look
at that hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and
pout, by carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep;
a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. A great
pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is
about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was
sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape.
Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth.
Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an
Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is
about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a
regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us
with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whale-bone, say
three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or
crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through
which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains
the small fish, when open-mouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding
time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order,
there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some
whalemen calculate
..
the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the
certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of
analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far
greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable. In
old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning
these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous whiskers
inside of the whale's mouth; another, hogs' bristles; a third old gentleman
in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: There are about two hundred
and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his
tongue on each side of his mouth. As every one knows, these same hogs'
bristles, fins, whiskers, blinds, or whatever you please, furnish to
the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this
particular, the demand has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's
time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the
fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of
the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like
thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the
umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone. But now forget all about
blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale's mouth,
look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically
ranged about, would you not think you were inside the great Haarlem organ,
and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug
of the softest Turkey —the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of
the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
amount of oil. Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I
..
started with —that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
different heads. To sum up, then; in the Right Whale's there is no great
well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower
jaw, like the Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those
blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again,
the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not
be very long in following. Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's
there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the
forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a
prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death.
But mark the other head's expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by
accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does
not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in
facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm
Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
..
This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather
a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of
the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather
brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.
..






.. < chapter lxxvi 24 THE BATTERING-RAM >
Ere quitting, for the nonce, the
Sperm Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply
—particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I
would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself
some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may
be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily
settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of
the most appalling,
..
but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded
history. You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm
Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were
entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no external
nose; and that what nose he has —his spout hole —is on the top of his head;
you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one
third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have
perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall,
without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever.
Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward
sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone;
and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the
full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one
wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise
the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the
substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some
previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the
whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this
difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a
boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The
severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human
arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm
Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks
in it. Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded
Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do
the sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
contact, any merely hard substance,
..
like iron or wood. No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and cork,
enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured
takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron
crowbars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive
at. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable,
at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I
know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise
inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the
surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering
the unobstructed elasticity of its envelop; considering the unique interior
of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical
lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and
unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to
atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the
irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive
of all elements contributes. Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead,
impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there
swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately
estimated as piled wood is —by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as
the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable
braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity,
and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage
through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you
would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale,
you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a
thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the
provincials then? What befel the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's
veil at Sais?
..






.. < chapter lxxvii 2 THE GREAT HEIDELBURGH TUN >
Now comes the Baling of
the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the
curious internal structure of the thing operated upon. Regarding the Sperm
whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways
divide it into two quoins, whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming
the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones;
its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the
whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin,
and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally
divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance. The lower
subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by
the crossing and re-crossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough
elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as
the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale.
And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale's
vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical
adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always
replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so
the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily
vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure,
limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed
in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid,
yet, upon
..
exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth
beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just
forming in water. A large whale's case generally yields about five hundred
gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it
is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the
ticklish business of securing what you can. I know not with what fine and
costly material the heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative
richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken
pearl-colored membrane, like the line of a fine pelisse, forming the inner
surface of the Sperm Whale's case. It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh
Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the
head; and since —as has been elsewhere set forth —the head embraces one third
of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty
feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth
of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's side.
As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close to
the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at
last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the
enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make
quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter. Thus much being said, attend
now, I pray you, to that marvellous and —in this particular instance
—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is
tapped.
..
Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics.
I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs
from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one
side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.
..






.. < chapter lxxviii 2 CISTERN AND BUCKETS >
Nimble as a cat, Tashtego
mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon
the overhanging main-yard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the
hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip,
consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block.
Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one
end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then,
hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till
dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There —still high elevated
above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries —he seems some
Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for
the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds
very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the
walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search
is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been
attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across
the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist
the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up
a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward
guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the
word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like
a dairy-maid's pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the
full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied
into a large tub. Then re-mounting aloft, it again goes through the same
round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego
has to ram his long pole harder and
..
harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the
pole have gone down. Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time
in this way; several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all
at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild
Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed
hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place
where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself
would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons; how it
was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth
or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up —my God! poor Tashtego —like the twin
reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into
this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went
clean out of sight! Man overboard! cried Daggoo, who amid the general
consternation first came to his senses. Swing the bucket this way! and
putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold
on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head,
almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime,
there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if
that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor
Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which
he had sunk. At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was
clearing the whip —which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles —a
sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of
the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast
vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and
shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the
entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of giving
way; an event still more likely from the violent motions of the head. Come
down, come down! yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but
..
with one hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should
drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul
line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out. In heaven's name,
man, cried Stubb, are you ramming home a cartridge there? —Avast! How
will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast,
will ye! Stand clear of the tackle! cried a voice like the bursting of a
rocket. Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass
dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the
suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper;
and all caught their breath, as half swinging —now over the sailors' heads,
and now over the water —Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly
beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive
Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had
the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in
its hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The
next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the
rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted every
ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the
diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed
a little off from the ship. Ha! ha! cried Daggoo, all at once, from his
now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side,
we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as
an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave. both! both! —it is both!
—cried daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen
boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair
of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to
the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very
brisk.
..
Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the
slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges
near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his
sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our
poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a
leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and
might occasion great trouble; — he had thrust back the leg, and by a
dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that
with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way —head foremost. As
for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. And
thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the
deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished,
in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments;
which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in
the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing. I know that this
queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to seem incredible to some
landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or heard of some one's
falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom happens, and
with much less reason too than the Indian's, considering the exceeding
slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale's well. But, peradventure, it may
be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated head
of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet
thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than
itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time
poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents,
leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well —a double welded,
hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than the sea water,
and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid
sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially counteracted
by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank
very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for
performing his agile
..
obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so
it was. Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and
sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled
—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch
of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far
over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye,
have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?
..






.. < chapter lxxix 14 THE PRAIRE >
To scan the lines of his face, or feel
the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a thing which no
Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would
seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the
Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the
Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only
treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of
horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his
disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological
characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill
qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the
whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has
no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the
features; and since it perhaps
..
most modifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would
seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely
affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to
the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping
without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from
Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan
is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the
same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no
blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have
been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast
head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by
the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which
so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal
beadle on his throne. In some particulars, perhaps, the most imposing
physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front
of his head. This aspect is sublime. In thought a fine human brow is like the
east when troubled with the morning. in the repose of the pasture, the
curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon
up mountain defiles, the elephant's brow is majestic. Human or animal, the
mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to
their decrees. It signifies God: done this day by my hand. But in most
creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of
alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like
Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes
themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them
in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending
there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer.
But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent
in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front
view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers
..
more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see
no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes,
ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad
firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom
of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow
diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur does not domineer upon you
so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic
depression in the forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of
genius. But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever
written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his
doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been
known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their
child-magian thoughts. they deified the crocodile of the nile, because the
crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or as least it
is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any
highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the
merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now
egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's
high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. Champollion deciphered the
wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the
Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other
human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who
read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face, in its
profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read
the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you.
Read if it you can.
..






.. < chapter lxxx 2 THE NUT >
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a
Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it
is impossible to square. In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at
least twenty feet in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of
this skull is as the side view of a moderately inclined plane resting
throughout on a level base. But in life —as we have elsewhere seen —this
inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous
superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a
crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this
crater — in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many
in depth —reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at
least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away
behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified
fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him,
that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale
has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the
cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and
convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea
of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his
intelligence. It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this
Leviathan, in the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As
for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any.
The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common
world. If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be
..
struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation,
and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled
down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would
involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one
part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say —This man had no
self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with
the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to
yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the
most exalted potency is. But if from the comparative dimensions of the
whale's proper brain, you deem it incapable of being adequately charted,
then I have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any
quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae
to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance
to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are
absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take
it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the
vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked
prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an
important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum
through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will be
found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your
skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and
noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that
flag which I fling half out to the world. Apply this spinal branch of
phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first
neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will
measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a triangular
figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebrae
the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large
capacity. Now, of course, this
..
canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance — the spinal
cord —as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And what is
still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's cavity, the spinal
cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain.
Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map
out the whale's spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the
wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated
by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord. But leaving this
hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely assume the
spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the sperm whale's hump. This
august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebrae, and
is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From its relative
situation then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or
indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is
indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.
..






.. < chapter lxxxi 21 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE VIRGIN >
The predestinated day
arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of
Bremen. At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals of
latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the
Pacific. For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her
respects. While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and
dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing
in the bows instead of the stern.
..
What has he in his hand there? cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German. Impossible! —a lamp-feeder! Not that, said
Stubb, no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's coming off to make
us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big tin can there alongside
of him? —that's his boiling water. Oh! he's all right, is the Yarman. Go
along with you, cried Flask, it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He's out
of oil, and has come a-begging. However curious it may seem for an oil-ship
to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly
contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes
such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer
did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare. As he mounted the
deck, ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what he had in his
hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his complete
ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to his
lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into
his hammock at night in profound darkness —his last drop of Bremen oil being
gone, and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency;
concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is
technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the
name of Jungfrau or the Virgin. His necessities supplied, Derick departed;
but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously
raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was
Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he
slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders. Now, the
game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that soon
followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's keels. There were
eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all
abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as
closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a
..
great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon
the sea. Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a
huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to
the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such
venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their
wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the
white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell
formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and
laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in
torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which
seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters
behind him to upbubble. Who's got some paregoric? said Stubb, he has the
stomach-ache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache!
Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul
wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so
before? it must be, he's lost his tiller. As an overladen Indiaman bearing
down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens,
buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged
bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose
the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin.
Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were
hard to say. Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that
wounded arm, cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him. Mind
he don't sling thee with it, cried Starbuck. Give way, or the German will
have him. With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going
with such great velocity, moreover,
..
as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture, the Pequod's keel
had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the great start he
had had, Derick's boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by
his foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already
so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they could
completely overtake and pass him. as for derick, he seemed quite confident
that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook
his lamp-feeder at the other boats. The ungracious and ungrateful dog!
cried Starbuck; he mocks and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for
him not five minutes ago! —then in his old intense whisper — give way,
greyhounds! Dog to it! I tell ye what it is, men —cried Stubb to his crew
— It's against my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villanous
Yarman —Pull—won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love
brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don't some of
ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard —we
don't budge an inch —we're becalmed. Halloo, here's grass growing in the
boat's bottom —and by the Lord, the mast there's budding. This won't do,
boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit
fire or not? Oh! see the suds he makes! cried Flask, dancing up and down
— What a hump —Oh, do pile on the beef —lays like a log! Oh! my lads, do
spring —slap-jacks and quohogs for supper, you know, my lads —baked clams and
muffins —oh, do, do spring —he's a hundred barreler —don't lose him now
—don't oh, don't! — see that Yarman —Oh! won't ye pull for your duff, my
lads —such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm? There goes three
thousand dollars, men! —a bank! —a whole bank! The bank of England! —Oh, do,
do, do! —What's that Yarman about now? At this moment Derick was in the act
of pitching his lamp-feeder at the advancing boats, and also his oil-can;
perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same
time economically accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the
backward toss. The unmannerly Dutch dogger! cried Stubb. Pull now,
..
men, like fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What
d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty
pieces for the honor of old Gay-head? What d'ye say? I say, pull like
god-dam, —cried the Indian. Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of
the German, the Pequod's three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and,
so disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude
of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up
proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of,
There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the
Yarman! Sail over him! But so decided an original start had Derick had,
that spite of all their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this
race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught
the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to
free his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to
capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage; —that was a
good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a mortal
start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter. An instant
more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's immediate wake,
while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.
It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now
going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented
jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this
hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every
billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled
towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing,
making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the
piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make
known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained
up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration
through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably
..
pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent
tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied. Seeing now
that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's boats the advantage,
and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to
him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would
for ever escape. But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke,
than all three tigers —Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo — instinctively sprang to
their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three
Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire!
The three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped the
German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer
were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels. Don't be
afraid, my butter-boxes, cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as
he shot by; ye'll be picked up presently —all right —I saw some sharks
astern —St. Bernard's dogs, you know —relieve distressed travellers.
Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sun-beam! Hurrah! —Here
we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in
mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain —makes the
wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there's danger of
being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a
fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones —all a rush down an endless
inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail! But the
monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded.
With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a
force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the
harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using
all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope
to hold on; till at last —owing to the perpendicular strain from the
lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three
..
ropes went straight down into the blue —the gunwales of the bows were almost
even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the
whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude,
fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish.
But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this
holding on, as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live
flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon
rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the
peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the
best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken
whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the
enormous surface of him —in a full grown sperm whale something less than
square feet —the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an
astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,
above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on
his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the
weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of
twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on
board. As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort,
nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what
landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the
utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight
inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible
that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big
weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of
board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said — Canst
thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The
sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the
habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee;
darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear! This
the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments
..
should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his
tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him
from the Pequod's fish-spears! In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the
shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been
long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how
appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over
his head! Stand by, men; he stirs, cried Starbuck, as the three lines
suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman
felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in a great part from the
downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a
small ice-field will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it
into the sea. Haul in! Haul in! cried Starbuck again; he's rising. The
lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth could have
been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the
boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship's lengths of the
hunters. His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land
animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins,
whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off
in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it
is, to have an entire nonvalvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that
when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once
begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by the
extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his
life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the
quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains,
that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even
as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of
far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this
whale, and perilously drew over his swaying
..
flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady
jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the
natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending
its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came,
because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they
significantly call it, was untouched. As the boats now more closely
surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is
ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places
where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in
the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which
the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly
pitiable to see. but pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one
arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to
light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate
the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.
A nice spot, cried Flask; just let me prick him there once. Avast!
cried Starbuck, there's no need of that! But humane Starbuck was too late.
At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and
goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick
blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and
their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and
marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was
he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,
then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white
secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that
last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off
from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the
spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground —so the last long dying spout
of the whale.
..
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed
symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by
Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere
long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few inches
beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew
nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there
by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially
upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom. It so chanced that almost
upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded
harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch
before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the
dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them,
and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must
needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account
for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the
flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when?
It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was
discovered. What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the
sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink. However,
Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung
on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been
capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when the
command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable strain upon
the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it
was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was
aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up the steep
gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory
inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the
unnatural dislocation. In
..
vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable
fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timber-heads; and so low had the
whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached,
while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk,
and the ship seemed on the point of going over. Hold on, hold on, won't
ye? cried Stubb to the body, don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink!
By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there;
avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a
pen-knife, and cut the big chains. Knife? Aye, aye, cried Queequeg, and
seizing the carpenter's heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and
steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes,
full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest.
With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the
carcase sank. Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed
Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy,
with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only
whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their
pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you
might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon
specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of
buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest
health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm
flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these
brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink. Be it said, however, that the Sperm
Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other species. Where one
of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the
species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of
bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more
than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there
are instances where,
..
after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again rises,
more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are
generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of
animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In
the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right
Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of
rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it
when it shall have ascended again. It was not long after the sinking of the
body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the
Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was
that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales,
because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's
spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is
often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made
after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward,
still in bold, hopeful chase. Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the
Dericks, my friend.
..






.. < chapter lxxxii 24 THE HONOR AND GLORY OF WHALING >
There are some
enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. The more I
dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very
spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great
honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great
demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed
distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself
..
belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity. The gallant
Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honor of
our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was
not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our
profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill
men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda;
how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the
sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off,
Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster,
and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit,
rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this
Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite
story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of
the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,
which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical
bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same
skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and
suggestively important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah
set sail. Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda —indeed, by some
supposed to be indirectly derived from it —is that famous story of St. George
and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many
old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often
stand for each other. Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of
the sea, saith ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some
versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract
from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling
reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the
deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin,
have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale. Let not the modern
paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by
that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape,
and though
..
the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering
the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was
unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's
whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that
the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or
sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether
incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene,
to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In
fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will
fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name;
who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the
palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him
remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the
tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket
should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let
not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say,
have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye
a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred
trowsers we are much better entitled to st. george's decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained
dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique
Crockett and Kit Carson —that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was
swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a
whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever
actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless,
he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught
him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan. But, by the
best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale
is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah
and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim
the demigod then, why not the prophet?
..
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of
our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of
old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the
great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed
from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons
in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our
Lord; —Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for
ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods,
saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its
periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work;
but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been
indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore
must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young
architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo
became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost
depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then?
even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman? Perseus, St. George,
Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but
the whaleman's can head off like that?
..






.. < chapter lxxxiii 26 JONAH HISTORICALLY REGARDED >
Reference was made to
the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter. Now
some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the
whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing
out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of
Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin;
..
and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one
whit the less facts, for all that. One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason
for questioning the Hebrew story was this: —He had one of those quaint
old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of
which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head —a peculiarity
only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and
the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying,
A penny roll would choke him; his swallow is so very small. But, to this,
Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the
Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as
temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable
enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would
accommodate a couple of whist tables, and comfortably seat all the players.
Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on
second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless. Another reason which
Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this matter
of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body
and the whale's gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to the
ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge
in the floating body of a dead whale — even as the French soldiers in the
Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.
Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when
Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his
escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head;
and, I would add, possibly called The Whale, as some craft are nowadays
christened the Shark, the Gull, the Eagle. Nor have there been wanting
learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of
Jonah merely meant a life-preserver —an inflated bag of wind —which the
endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor
Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another
reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was
..
swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was
vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the
Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point
of the Mediterranean coast. How is that? But was there no other way for the
whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He
might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to
speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and
another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would
involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to
speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for
any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of
Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that
great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make
modern history a liar. But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only
evinced his foolish pride of reason —a thing still more reprehensible in
him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from
the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via
the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general
miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks
devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries
ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish
Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which mosque was a miraculous lamp that
burnt without any oil.
..






.. < chapter lxxxiv 2 PITCHPOLING >
To make them run easily and swiftly,
the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some
whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the
bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it
may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water
are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his
boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared,
took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom,
where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though
diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel. He
seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did
it remain unwarranted by the event. Towards noon whales were raised; but so
soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift
precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great exertion,
Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale,
without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added
fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or
later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale,
or be content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was
impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained? Of all the
wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless
subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed
that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad
sword, in all its
..
exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable with an inveterate
running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which
the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat,
under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten
or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the
harpoon, and also of a lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a small
rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to
the hand after darting. But before going further, it is important to mention
here, that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the
lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently
successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the
harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks.
As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any
pitchpoling comes into play. Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous,
deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially
qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the
tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is
forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice
along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers
up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his
grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before
his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with
it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the
point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in
the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his
chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the
bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the
whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood. That drove the
spigot out of him! cries Stubb. 'Tis July's immortal Fourth; all fountains
must run wine to-day! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio,
or unspeakable
..
old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet,
and we'd drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch
in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff
the living stuff! Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart
is repeated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in
skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is
slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely
watches the monster die.
..






.. < chapter lxxxv 11 THE FOUNTAIN >
That for six thousand years —and no one
knows how many millions of ages before —the great whales should have been
spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the
deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some
centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain
of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings —that all this should
be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter
minutes past one o'clock P. M. of this sixteenth day of December, A. D.
),
it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all,
really water, or nothing but vapor —this is surely a noteworthy thing. Let
us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent.
Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes
in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in
which they swim, hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never
once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal
structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being's, the whale can
only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore
the necessity
..
for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree
breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's
mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still
more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through
his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head. If I say, that in
any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to vitality, inasmuch
as it withdraws from the air a certain element, which being subsequently
brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying
principle, I do not think I shall err; though I may possibly use some
superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that if all the
blood in a man could be aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his
nostrils and not fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he
would then live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is
precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals,
his full hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single
breath, or so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember,
he has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like
vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are completely distended
with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the
sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel
crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use
in its four supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth
is indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and
true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable
obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as the fishermen
phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface,
the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with
all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets
seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he rises
again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute.
Now, if after he fetches a few
..
breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again
to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths
are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark,
however, that in different individuals these rates are different; but in any
one they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by
hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand
fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the
great necessities that strike the victory to thee! In man, breathing is
incessantly going on —one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so
that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping,
breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one
seventh or Sunday of his time. It has been said that the whale only breathes
through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are
mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his
sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at
all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged
with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling.
But owing to the mystery of the spout —whether it be water or whether it be
vapor —no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it
is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what
does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.
Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal,
and as that long canal —like the grand Erie Canal —is furnished with a sort
of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the
upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you
insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through
his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known
any profound being that had anything to say to this
..
world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.
Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener! Now, the spouting
canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air,
and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper
surface of his head, and a little to one side; this curious canal is very
much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the
question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words,
whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath,
or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth,
and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly
communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is
for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the
greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he
accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath the
surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard
him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when
unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and
the ordinary periods of respiration. But why pester one with all this
reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare
what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this
world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your
plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might
almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely. The
central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and
how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always,
when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is
in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at
such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in
the spout, how do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapor;
or how do you know that they are not those identical drops superficially
lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the
whale's head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day
..
sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the
desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his
head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled
up with rain. Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious
touching the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be
peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher
to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often
happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so
touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the
spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot
say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen,
the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another thing; I have
heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted
into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do
then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Still, we can
hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this:
that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this
conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent
dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow
being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on
soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both
ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all
ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante,
and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the
act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity,
I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected
there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my
head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this
seems an additional argument for the above supposition. And how nobly it
raises our conceit of the mighty, misty
..
monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his
vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his
incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor —as you will sometimes see it
—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his
thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only
irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a
heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all
things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination
makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both
with equal eye.
..






.. < chapter lxxxvi 16 THE TAIL >
Other poets have warbled the praises of
the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never
alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail. Reckoning the largest sized
Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to
about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area
of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands
into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less
than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly
overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide
vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely
defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost
expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty
feet across. The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded
..
sinews; but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:
—upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long
and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise
between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else,
imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman walls, the middle
layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always
alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and
which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry.
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the
whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular
fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down
into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their
might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole
whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this
were the thing to do it. Nor does this —its amazing strength, at all tend to
cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease
undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive
their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or
harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,