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- taking the altitude of the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st
thou measure this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long
do ye make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them,
concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces with
their yard-sticks—the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance,
I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it
recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can
refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell
me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where
they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise,
I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they
have what the proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a
Greenland or River Whale in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in
Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford
Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of
moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend
King Tranquo’s.
In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons
belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir
Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir
Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great
chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
cavities—spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon
his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and
shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of
keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep
at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the
echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled
view from his forehead.
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished
the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then
composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not
trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton
we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized
Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least
ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
thousand one hundred inhabitants.
Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to
this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
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