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 whaleship 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 Elephants, 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
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 titlepages 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 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 Lacepede,
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 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 suckling 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.
