Moby Dick

For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan,
that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape.
Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra
in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea
of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's
other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this
kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones.
In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale
bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal
as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it.
This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part
of this book will be incidentally shown.  It is also very curiously
displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer
to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb.  This fin has
four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger.
But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering,
as the human fingers in an artificial covering.  "However recklessly
the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day,
"he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens."

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it,
you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one
creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.
True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another,
but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.
So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what
the whale really looks like.  And the only mode in which you
can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour,
is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run
no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.
Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious
in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.



CHAPTER 56

Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True Pictures
of Whaling Scenes


In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them
which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c. But I
pass that matter by.

I know of only four published outlines of the great
Sperm Whale; Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In
the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to.
Huggins's is far better than theirs; but, by great odds,
Beale's is the best.  All Beale's drawings of this whale
are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three
whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter.
His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt
calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men,
is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect.
Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty
correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved.
That is not his fault though.

Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby;
but they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression.
He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency,
because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you
can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen
by his living hunters.

But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in
some details not the most correct, presentations of whales
and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large
French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by
one Garnery.  Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm
and Right Whale.  In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale
is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat
from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the.
air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks.
The prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just
balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing in that prow,
for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold
an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of
the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice.
The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and true.
The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea;
the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it;
the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale
in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black
stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon the scene.
Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details
of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me,
I could not draw so good a one.

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls
his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from
the Patagonian cliffs.  His jets are erect, full, and black like soot;
so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think
there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below.
Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea
candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on