CHAPTER 82
The Honor and Glory of Whaling
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
method.
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great
honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great
demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have
shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself
belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the
eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our
brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly
days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed,
and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of
Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a
king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very
act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly
advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It
was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of
the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart.
And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa,
on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages
the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants
asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When
the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph.
What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this: it
was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some
supposed to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St.
George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for
in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together,
and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a
dragon of the sea,” said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth,
some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much
subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a
crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster
of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a
Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.
Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the
creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented
of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the
saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when
the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as
in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might have crawled up out of the sea on
the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have
been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not
appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest
draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great
Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this
whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines,
Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s head
and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or
fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a
whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we
harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St.
George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none
of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great
patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our
woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St.
George’s decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good
deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that
strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere
appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the
inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at
any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one
of our clan.
But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules
and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient
Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are
very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings
of old times, we find the head-waters of our fraternity in nothing short of
the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be
rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the
three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo
himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly
incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma,
or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after
one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over
the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to
have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and
which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical
hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the
waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him
to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a
whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll
for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?
