JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I was digging a little in Herman Melville and Moby-Dick and fell into eleven pages of his scholarly ruminations on the depictions of whales in art and literature, fictional and otherwise. Its really a very fine little gem, bobbing there in the nearly the exact middle of the book. (It is not the middle of the middle of the middle like Gettysburg in Mr. Foote's The Civil War, a Narrative, where as it happens the battle appears in the middle chapter if the middle volume, but it is close enough.) Here it is, from the full text at the University of Virginia:
OF THE MONSTROUS PICTURES OF WHALES
I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something
like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye
of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored
alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon
there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to
those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the
present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is
time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures
of the whale all wrong.
It may be that the
primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among
the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since
those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings
of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions,
cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like
Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's; ever since then
has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in
most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
presentations of him.
Now, by all odds, the most
ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to
be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The
Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that
immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable
avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually
came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble
profession
-262- of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale
referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall,
depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of Leviathan,
learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is
half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter,
yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the
tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true
whale's majestic flukes.
But go to the old
Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's portrait of
this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo.
It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-
monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange
creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in
his own 'Perseus Descending', make out one whit better. The huge
corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface,
scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its
back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are
rolling, might be taken for the Traitors' Gate leading from the
Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales
of the old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah's whale, as depicted in the
prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be
said of these? As for the book-binder's whale winding like a
vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor -- as stamped
and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and
new -- that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature,
imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases. Though
universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this
book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended
when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old
Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the
Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a
comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a
species of the Leviathan.
In the vignettes and other
embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with
very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets
d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling
up from his
-263- unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition of
the 'Advancement of Learning' you will find some curious whales.
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us
glance at those pictures of Leviathan purporting to be sober,
scientific delineations, by those who know. In old Harris's
collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from
a Dutch book of voyages, A. D. 1671, entitled 'A Whaling Voyage to
Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of
Friesland, master.' In one of those plates the whales, like great
rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white
bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the
prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with
perpendicular flukes.
Then again, there is an imposing
quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the
English navy, entitled 'A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South
Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.'
In this book is an outline purporting to be a 'Picture of a
Physeter or Spermaceti Whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the
coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.
I
doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the
benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me
say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying
scale, to a full grown Sperm Whale, would make the eye of that
whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why
did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
Nor
are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the
benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
mistake. Look at that popular work 'Goldsmith's Animated Nature'. In
the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged
'whale' and a 'narwhale'. I do not wish to seem inelegant, but
this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for
the Narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in
this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for
genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Laceápède,
-264- a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book,
wherein are several pictures of the different species of the
Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the
Mysticetus or Greenland Whale (that is to say, the Right Whale),
even Scoresby, a long experienced man as touching that species,
declares not to have its counterpart in nature.
But
the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous
Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which
he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing
that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your
summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm
Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had
the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence
he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his
scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his
authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort
of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups
and saucers inform us.
As for the sign-painters' whales
seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what
shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales, with
dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three or four
sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities
floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.
But
these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have
been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct
as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly
represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull
and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the
living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his
portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is
only to be seen 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
-265- 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
-266- 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.
-266-
Chapter lvi
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
-267- 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.
-268-
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 in
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. For the
most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen seem entirely
content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as
the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of
effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile
of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right Whaleman,
after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland Whale, and
three or four delicate miniatures of Narwhales and porpoises, treats
us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping
knives, and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a
Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six
fac- similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no
disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran),
but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to
have procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a
Greenland Justice of the Peace.
In addition to those
fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other French engravings
worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself 'H. Durand'. One
of them, though not precisely
-269- adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on
other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the
Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily
taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship, and the long
leaves of the palms in the background, both drooping together in
the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered with
reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their
few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a
different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the
very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside;
the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as
if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of
activity, is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The
harpoons and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just
setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea,
the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing
horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale
is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to
windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and
rains, seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.
-269-
Chapter lvii
OF WHALES IN PAINT; IN TEETH; IN WOOD; IN SHEET-IRON; IN STONE; IN MOUNTAINS; IN STARS
On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger,
as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him,
representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are
three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to
contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being
crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten
years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and
exhibited
-270- that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his
justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as
were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as
unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western
clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a
stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes,
stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
Throughout
the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor,
you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes,
graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies'
busks wrought out of the Right Whale- bone, and other like
skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough
material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little
boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the
sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a
mariner's fancy.
Long exile from Christendom and
civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which
God placed him, i. e. what is called savagery. Your true
whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a
savage; owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and
ready at any moment to rebel against him.
Now, one
of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours,
is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club
or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of
carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin
lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth,
that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and
it has cost steady years of steady application.
As
with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth,
of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone
sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close
-271- packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's
shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the
prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.
Wooden
whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the
noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the
forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much
accuracy.
At some old gable-roofed country houses you
will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the
road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale
would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as
faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you
will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather- cocks; but they
are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes
so labelled with 'Hands off!' you cannot examine them closely enough
to decide upon their merit.
In bony, ribby regions of
the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock
lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often
discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly
merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf
of green surges.
Then, again, in mountainous
countries where the traveller is continually girdled by
amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of
view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales
defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough
whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to
return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact
intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else
so chance- like are such observations of the hills, that your
precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious
re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still remain
incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old
Figuera chronicled them.
Nor when expandingly lifted
by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry
heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with
thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle
among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round
and round
-272- the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first
defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have
boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry
Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
With a frigate's anchors for my bridle- bitts and
fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and
leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all
their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!
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