_ 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 behooves 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 emprise 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 rank 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 school-boy. 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 post-diluvian 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. _