CHAPTER 55
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.
