Moby Dick

and is all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing
at all for our pains but our blisters?"

"It is his."

"Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode
of getting a livelihood?"

"It is his."

"I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share
of this whale."

"It is his."

"Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"

"It is his."

In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money.  Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree
be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman
of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him
to take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration.
To which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)
that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged
to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman)
would decline meddling with other people's business.  Is this the still
militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms,
on all hands coercing alms of beggars?

It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke
to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign.  We must needs
inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested
with that right.  The law itself has already been set forth.
But Plowdon gives us the reason for it.  Says Plowdon, the whale so caught
belongs to the King and Queen, "because of its superior excellence."
And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent
argument in such matters.

But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail?
A reason for that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pin-money, an old
King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth:
"Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied
with ye whalebone."  Now this was written at a time when the black
limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used
in ladies' bodices.  But this same bone is not in the tail;
it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer
like Prynne.  But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail?
An allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers--
the whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations,
and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's ordinary revenue.
I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter;
but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided
in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense
and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded,
may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality.
And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.



CHAPTER 91

The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud


"In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch
of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry."
SIR T. BROWNE, V. E.


It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted,
and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory,
mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod's deck proved
more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft.
A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.

"I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts
are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day.
I thought they would keel up before long."

Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must
be alongside.  As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors
from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled,
and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has
died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.
It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale;
worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent
to bury the departed.  So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some,
that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.
Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact
that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality,
and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.