CHAPTER 75
The Right Whale’s Head – Contrasted View
Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the the
Right Whale’s head.
As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a
Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so,
at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant
resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old
Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last. And in this
same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale with the swarming
brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny.
But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and
look at these two f-shaped spout-holes, you would take the whole head for
an enormous bass viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
soundingboard. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested,
comblike incrustation on the top of the mass—this green, barnacled thing,
which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the Southern fishers the
“bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you would
take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird’s nest in its crotch.
At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet,
such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy
has been fixed by the technical term “crown” also bestowed upon it; in
which case you will take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster
is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put
together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is
a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower
lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s
measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout
that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The
fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important
interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the
beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into
the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the
inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went?
The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if
there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy
sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimitar-shaped slats of
whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper
part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have
elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed
with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in
whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes
through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as
they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves,
hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature’s age,
as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this
criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical
probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to
the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.
In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
“whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a third
old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: “There are
about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop,
which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”
*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper
part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather
brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.
As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,”
“blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other
stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has long been on
the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was in its glory, the
farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved
about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a
shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same
jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.
But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing
in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these
colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you
were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand
pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey—the
tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very fat
and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on deck. This particular
tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was a six-barreler;
that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil.
Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with—
that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different
heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of
sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like
the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of
bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the
Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be
very long in following.
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same
he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now
faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born
of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head’s
expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the
vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head
seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This
Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who
might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
