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- at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out
of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element
it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily
into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.
And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour
between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan;
yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a
ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying
shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not
catch.
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at
all. 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, etc. 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 his pestilent
back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through
the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and
causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh
the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all
raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the
glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the
powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered
fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole
inserted into his spout-hole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
was either practically conversant with his subject, or else
marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the
lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe,
and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing
commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the
beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great
battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern
Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a
charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that
gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.
The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s
experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the
whale hunt.