CHAPTER 104
The Fossil Whale
From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio.
Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he
measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his
intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away
in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to
approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking
the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the
uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his
present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify
him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.
Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea— such
portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But
when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this
enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said,
that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these
dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson,
expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s
uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used
by a whale author like me.
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it
may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this
Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals.
Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends,
hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this
Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching
comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the
sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past,
present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth,
and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so
magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its
bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great
and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be
who have tried it.
Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials
as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-
mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults,
cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to
remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found
the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics
discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting,
or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and
those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil
Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last
preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them precisely
answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently
akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking ranks as Cetacean
fossils.
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found
at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland,
and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more
curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was
disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost
directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in
excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time. Cuvier
pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown
Leviathanic species.
But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the
plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves
in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama
doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of
Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to
Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a
whale, though of a departed species. A significant illustration of the fact,
again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale
furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen
rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the
London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most
extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of
existence.
When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the
existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other
hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their
incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period,
ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here
Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses
into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon
what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s
circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then
the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake
along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a
pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the
Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with
Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must
needs exist after all humane ages are over.
But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for
them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his
fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago,
there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted
planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the
grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among
them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that
planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of
the whale, in his own osseous postdiluvian reality, as set down by the
venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of
which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that
by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can pass it
without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side
of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and
wound the Whales when they light upon ’em. They keep a Whale’s Rib of
an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its
convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be
reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to
have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that
a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some
do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at
the Base of the Temple.”
In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
