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 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 fore-ground 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 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 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.
