CHAPTER 24
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.
