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- admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be
regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to
speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of
the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a
new-born child. But no more of this.
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,
as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity,
or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three
fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence
be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose
mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten
barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three
quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.
In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over
obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in
thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line
engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the
isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as
if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some
instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a
veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations.
These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers
on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to
use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the
hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck
with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the
famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.
Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains
undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another
thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm
Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially
his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by
reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random
aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast,
which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact
with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a
little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me
that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact
with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large,
full-grown bulls of the species.
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the
whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very
happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber
as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho
slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of
this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep
himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides.
What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy
seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other
fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but
these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very
bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the
lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn
fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his
blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after
explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as
indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at
home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when
seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards,
perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is
found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been
proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than
that of a Borneo negro in summer.
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself
after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too,
live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep
thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and
like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of
thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the
whale!
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with
rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many
insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats
further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats,
what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the
murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that
hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon
the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that
great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite
perspectives.
There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all
in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or
speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween,
if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral
they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from
which not the mightiest whale is free.
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war
or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring
the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the
whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the
log—_shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!_ And for years
afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly
sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your
utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of
old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
the air! There’s orthodoxy!
Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror
to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a
world.
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe
in them.
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded.