The Advocate
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;
and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among
landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am
all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done
to us hunters of whales.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions.
If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,
it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he
presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the
naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery)
to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed preeminently
presuming and ridiculous.
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring
us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation
amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively
engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements.
Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers
of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom
the world invariably delights to honor. And as for the matter
of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be
initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown,
and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm
whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth.
But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered
slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable
carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return
to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril
so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession;
let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up
to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm
whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head.
For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with
the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles
that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines,
to our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales;
see what we whalemen are, and have been.
Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their
whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own
personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely
invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island
of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788
pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000 pounds?
And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber
all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of
upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men;
yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
at the time of sailing, 20,000,000 dollars; and every year importing
into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars.
How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?
But this is not the half; look again.
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot,
for his life, point out one single peaceful influence,
which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially
upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate,
than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way
and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves,
and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues,
that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother,
who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb.
It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things.
Let a handful suffice. For many years past the whale-ship has
been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known
parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cooke or Vancouver had ever sailed.
If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride
in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor
and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them
the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.
They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions,
your Cookes, Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous
Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great,
and greater, than your Cooke and your Krusenstern. For in
their succorless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish
sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands,
battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his
marines and muskets would not willingly have willingly dared.
All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages,
those things were but the life-time commonplaces of our
heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver
dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy
of being set down in the ship's common log. Ah, the world!
Oh, the world!
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe
and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.
It was the whalemen who first broke through the jealous policy of
the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted,
it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated
the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain,
and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia,
was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman.
After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships,
long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous;
but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true
mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy
of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several
times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of
the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.
The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth,
and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way
for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried
the primitive missionaries to their first destinations.
If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable,
it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due;
for already she is on the threshold.
But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling
has no aesthetically noble associations connected with it,
then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there,
and unhorse you with a split helmet every time.
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler,
you will say.
The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler?
Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job?
And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who,
but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own
royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian
whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing
eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils;
they have no good blood in their veins.
No good blood in their veins? They have something better
than royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin
was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of
the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line
of Folgers and harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--
this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world
to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English
statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."
Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured
in any grand imposing way.
The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital,
the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast,
were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
Grant it, since you cite it; but say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.
No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very
heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more!
Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off
to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime
has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man
more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted
of taking as many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of;
if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather
have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors,
or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk,
then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling;
for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
