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_ As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of
whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be
regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable
pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of
the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions.
If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan
society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his
merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if
in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials
S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure
would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us
whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to
a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged
therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we
are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest
badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably
delights to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged
uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into
certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the
whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among
the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the
charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a
whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all
ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the
popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that
many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly
recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into
eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible
terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of
God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn
round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.
Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling
fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense,
fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town
some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why
did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in
bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we
whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen
in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned
by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the
ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year
importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How
comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?
But this is not the half; look again.
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his
life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last
sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world,
taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling.
One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in
themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues,
that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless,
endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice.
For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting
out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has
explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or
Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and European men-of-war
now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to
the honour and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them
the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They
may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your
Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous
Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and
greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their
succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,
and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with
virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and
muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a
flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the
life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often,
adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men
accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's common log. Ah,
the world! Oh, the world!
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe
and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific
coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous
policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space
permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at
last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the
yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in
those parts.
That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was
given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first
blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned
those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched
there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony.
Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the
emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent
biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.
The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do
commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the
missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted
land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone
to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.
But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has
no aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I
ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a
split helmet every time.
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
will say.
THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who
wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And
who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no
less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen,
took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those
times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who,
but Edmund Burke!
True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have
no good blood in their veins.
NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than royal
blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of
Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the
barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
respectable.
WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English
statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*
Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any
grand imposing way.
THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the
mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the
world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the
Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed
procession.*
*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.
NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens
attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive
down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg!
No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred
and fifty whales. I account that man more honourable than that great
captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real
repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be
unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon
the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if,
at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any
precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the
honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College
and my Harvard. _
Read next: CHAPTER 25 Postscript.
Read previous: CHAPTER 23 The Lee Shore.
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