CHAPTER 90
Heads or Tails
“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.”
BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.
Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that
land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head, and the
Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which, in the
whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder.
Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force in England;
and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly touching the general
law of Fast—and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on
the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at the
expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of
royalty. In the first place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-
mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance-
that happened within the last two years.
It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one
of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and
beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the
shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding
the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments
incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some
writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden
is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly
by virtue of that same fobbing of them.
Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish
high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds from the precious
oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale
with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps a
very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of
Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale’s head, he says
—”Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord
Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation—
so truly English— knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching
their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the
stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard
heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one
of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak,
“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”
“The Duke.”
“But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”
“It is his.”
“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all
that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains but
our blisters?”
“It is his.”
“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
getting a livelihood?”
“It is his.”
“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of
this whale.”
“It is his.”
“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
“It is his.”
In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be deemed,
under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the town
respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take the case of
those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke
in substance replied (both letters were published) that he had already done
so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the reverend
gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would decline
meddling with other people’s business. Is this the still militant old man,
standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of
beggars?
It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the
whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then
on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that right. The
law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for it.
Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen,
“because of its superior excellence.” And by the soundest commentators this
has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters.
But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail?
A reason for that, ye lawyers!
In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pin-money, an old King’s
Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s,
that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this
was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right
whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in the
tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like
Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An
allegorical meaning may lurk here.
There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers— the whale
and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I
know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it
seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the
whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that
fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded
upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all
things, even in law.
