 Moby Dick, Chapter 97-100. CHAPTER 97 THE LAMP Had you descended from the Pequod's triworks to the Pequod's folksal, where the off-duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counselors. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiseled muteness, a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. In merchant men, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, to eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his birth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down to it, so that in the pitchous night the ship's black hull still houses an illumination. See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps. Often but old bottles and vials, though, to the copper cooler at the triworks, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oils, in its unmanufactured and therefore unvisiated state. A fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore, it is as sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game. Chapter 98 Stowing down and clearing up Already it has been related how the great Leviathan is a far-off described from the masthead, how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep, how he is then towed alongside and beheaded, and how, on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed, his great padded ser-toe becomes the property of his executioner, how in due time he is condemned to the pots, and like Shadrach, Mishach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire. But now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing, singing, if I may, the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again Leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as before, but alas never more to rise and blow. While still warm the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks, and while perhaps the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many landslides, till at last manhandled and stayed in their course, and all round the hoops wrap-wrap go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now ex officio every sailor is a cooper. At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up. In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil, on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled, great rusty casks lie about as in a brewery yard, the smoke from the troworks is besuited all the bulwarks, the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness, the entire ship seems great leviathan himself, while on all hands the din is deafening. But a day or two after, you look about you and prick your ears in this self-same ship, and were it not for the tell-tale boats and troworks you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lie is readily made, and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lie quickly exterminates it. Tanks go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging, all the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the troworks, completely hiding the pots. Every cask is out of sight, all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks, and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship's company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions, shift themselves from top to toe, and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegroom new leaped from out of the daintiest Holland. Now with a lateed step they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambricks, propose to mat the deck, think of having hanging to the top, object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the folksal. To hint to such musked mariners of oil and bone and blubber were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Play and bring us napkins! But Mark, aloft there, at the three mast heads stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease spot somewhere. Yes, and many is the time when, after the severest uninterrupted labours which known no night, continuing straight through for ninety-six hours, when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the line, they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial tri-works. Even on the heels of all this they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it. Many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of, there she blows, and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Ah, my friends, but this is man-killing! But this is life, for hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm, and then with weary patience cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul, hardly is this done when, there she blows, the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again. Oh, the Matempsicosis! Oh, Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die so good, so wise, so mild, I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage, and foolish as I am, taught thee, a green, simple boy, how to splice a rope. CHAPTER 99 THE DEBLUNE Air now it has been related how Ahab was want to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the binocle and main-mast, but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration, it has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was want to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the binocle with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose. And when resuming his walk, he again paused before the main-mast, then as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness. But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by these strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now, for the first time beginning to interpret for himself, in some monomaniac way, whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the milky way. Now this doubloon was of purest virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous hills, whence east and west, over golden sands, the headwaters of many a pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts, and the vertigris of copper spikes, yet untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its keto glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew, and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the live-long nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where sunset left at last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end, and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it. Now those noble golden coins of South America are as metals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes, suns, discs, and stars, ecliptics, horns of plenty, and rich banners waving are in luxuriant perfusions stamped, so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness in enhancing glories by passing through those fancy mints so Spanish-ly poetic. It's so chance that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters Republica del Ecuador, keto, so this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator and named after it. And it had been cast midway up the Andes in the unwaining climb that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes summits, from one aflame, a tower on another, on the third a crowing cock, while arching overall was a segment of the partition zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra. Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing. There's something ever egotistical in mountain tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things. Look here, three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab. The volcano, that is Ahab. The courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl. That, too, is Ahab. All are Ahab. And this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like the magician's glass, to each and every man in turn, but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains, for those who ask the world to solve them. It cannot solve itself. Me thinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face. But see, aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox. And but six months before, he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries. From storm to storm. So be it then. Born in throes, it is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs. So be it then. Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it then. No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold. But the devil's claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday. murmured Starbuck to himself leaning against the bulwarks. The old man seems to read Belchazar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below. Let me read. A dark valley between three mighty heaven abiding peaks that almost seem the trinity in some faint earthly symbol. So in this veil of death God girds us round. And overall our gloom, the sun of righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark veil shows her moldy soil. But if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance halfway to cheer. Yet oh, the great sun is no fixture. And if at midnight we would feign snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain. This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it. Less truth shake me falsely. There now's the old mogul, soliloquy's stub by the triwarks. He's been twigging it. And there goes Starbuck from the same. And both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold. Which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corleers' hook? I'd not look at it very long ere spending it. In my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings, your doubloons of Old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chile, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Papillon, with plenty of gold moateray's and pistolay's, and joes and half-joes and quarter-joes. What should there then be in this doubloon of the equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda. Let me read it once. Hello! Here's signs and wonders truly. That now is what old Bowditch and his epitome calls the Zodiac. And what my almanac below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac. And as I have heard devils can be raised with da bowls arithmetic, I'll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see now. Signs and wonders, and the sun. He's always among them. Hem, hem, hem. Here they are. Here they go. All alive. Ares, or the ram. Taurus, or the bull. And Jiminy. Here's Geminy himself, or the twins. Well, the sun he wheels among them. I, here on the coin, he's just crossing the threshold between two of the twelve sitting rooms all in a ring. Book, you lie there. The fact is, you books must know your places. You do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That's my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar and Bowditch's navigator and da bowls arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs and significant in wonders. There is a clue somewhere. Wait a bit. Hist, Hark. By Jove, I have it. Look you doubloon. Your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter. And now I'll read it off straight out of the book. Come, almanac. To begin, there's Ares, or the ram. Letcherous dog, he begets us. Then Taurus, or the bull. He bumps us the first thing. Then Gemini, or the twins. That is virtue and vice. We try to reach virtue. When Lo comes cancer the crab and drags us back. And here, going from virtue, Leo, a roaring lion, lies in the path. He gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw. We escape and hail Virgo, the virgin. That's our first love. We marry and think to be happy for I. When pup comes Libra, or the scales, happiness weighed and found wanting. And while we are very sad about that, Lord, how we suddenly jump. As Scorpio, or the Scorpions, stings us in the rear. We are curing the wound when, wing, come the arrows all around. Sagittarius, or the archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside. Here's the battering ram, capricornus, or the goat. Full tilt he comes rushing. And headlong we are tossed. When Aquarius, or the water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us. And to wind up with Pisces, or the fishes, we sleep. There's a sermon now, rid in high heaven. And the sun goes through it every year. And yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he aloft their wheels through toil and trouble. And so, a low here, does Jollily stub. Ah, Jollily's the word for eye. Adieu, de blune. But stop. Here comes little King Post. Dodge round the tri-works. Now, and let's hear what he'll have to say. There, he's before it. He'll out with something presently. So, so, he's beginning. I see nothing here but a round thing made of gold. And whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true. And at two cents, the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke dirty pipes like stub, but I like cigars. And here's nine hundred and sixty of them. So here goes flask aloft to spy him out. Shall I call that wise or foolish now? If it be really wise, it has a foolish look to it. Yet if it be really foolish, then it has a sort of wisish look to it. But a vast, here comes our old Manxman. The old hearst driver he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He laughs up before the de blune. Hello, and goes round the other side of the mast. Why, there's a horseshoe nailed on that side. And now he's back again. What does that mean? Hark, he's muttering. Voice like an old worn-out coffee mill. Prick ears and listen! If the white whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I've studied signs, and know their marks. They were taught me to score years ago by an old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horseshoe sign. Or there it is right opposite the gold. And what's the horseshoe sign? The lion is the horseshoe sign. The roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship. My old head shakes to think of thee. There's another rendering now. But still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again. Here comes Quikwague. All tattooing. Looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes. Looking at his thigh bone thinks the sun is in the thigh or in the calf or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk surgeon's astronomy in the back country. And by Jove he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh. I guess it's Sagittarius or the Archer. No, he don't know what to make of the doubloon. He takes it for an old button off some king's trousers. But aside again. Here comes that ghost devil Fadala. Tail coiled out of sight as usual. Oakham in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say with that look of his? Only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself. There is a sun on the coin. Fire worshipper. Depend upon it. More and more. This way comes Pip. Poor boy. Would he had died or I? He's half horrible to me. He too has been watching all these interpreters, myself included. And look now. He comes to read with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark! I look. You look. He looks. We look. You look. They look. Upon my soul. He's been studying Murray's grammar. Improving his mind poor fellow. But what's that he says now? Hissed. I look. You look. He looks. We look. You look. They look. Why he's getting it by heart. Hissed. Again. I look. You look. He looks. We look. You look. They look. Well that's funny. And I, you and he, and we, ye, and they, are all bats. And I'm a crow. Especially when I stand atop this pine tree here. Ca, ca, ca, ca, ca, ca. Ain't I a crow? And where's the scarecrow? There he stands. Two bones stuck into a pair of old trousers and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket. Wonder if he means me? Complementary. Poor lad. I could go and hang myself. Anyway, for the present I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits. But he's too crazy witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering. Here's the ship's naval. This is a balloon here. And they are all on fire to unscrew it. But unscrew your naval. And what's the consequence? Then again, if it stays here. That is ugly, too. For when ought's nailed to the mast, it's a sign that things grow desperate. Ha! Ha! Old Ahab. The white whale. He'll nail you. This is a pine tree. My father, in Old Tallinn County, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in it. Some old Darkie's wedding ring. How did it get there? And so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Ah, the gold. The precious, precious gold. The green miser'll hoard you soon. Hish, hish! God goes among the world's black-bearing. Cook, ho, cook, and cook us. Jenny, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny, and get your ho-cake done. Chapter one hundred. Leg and arm. The Pequod of Nantucket meets the Samuel Enderby of London. Shepahoy has seen the white whale. So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship's showing English colors, bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarterboat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darkly tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot cloth, and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a Hazar's surcoat. Has seen the white whale! See you this! and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm-whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet. Man, my boat! cried Ahab impetuously and tossing about the oars near him. Stand by to lower! In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew were dropped to the water and were soon alongside of the stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning. Now it is no very easy matter for anybody, except those who are almost hourly used to it like whalemen, to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea, for the great swells now lift the boat high up toward the bulwarks, then instantaneously drop it halfway down to the kelson. So deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again, hopelessly eyeing the uncertain, changeful height he could hardly hope to attain. It is before been hinted perhaps that every little untoward circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange ship leaning over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of nailed cleats there, and swinging towards him a pair of tastefully ornamented man ropes. For at first they did not seem to be think them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea banisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing at a glance how a fare stood, cried out, I see, I see, a vast heaving there. Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting tackle. As good luck would have it, they had had a wail alongside a day or two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved blubberhook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook, it was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor or the crotch of an apple tree, and then giving the word held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own weight by pulling hand over hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth and welcomed, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg and crossing the ivory arm, like two swordfish blades, cried out in his walrus way, I, I, hearty, let us shake bones together, an arm and a leg, an arm that never can shrink, do you see, and a leg that never can run. Where did thou see the white wail? How long ago? The white wail, said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the east, and taking a rueful sight along it as if it had been a telescope. There I saw him, on the line, last season. And he took that arm off, did he, asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan and resting on the Englishman's shoulder as he did so. I, he was the cause of it at least, and that leg too? Spin me the yarn, said Ahab, how was it? It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the line, began the Englishman. I was ignorant of the white wail at that time. Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five wails, and my boat fastened to one of them. A regular circus horse he was too, had went milling and milling round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish by setting all their sterns on the outer gunnel. Presently up breeches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great wail, with a milky white head and hump, all crow's feet and wrinkles. It was he, it was he, cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath, and harpoon sticking in near his starboard fin. I, I, they were mine, my irons, cried Ahab exultingly, but on. Give me a chance then, said the Englishman, good humoredly. Well, this old great-grandfather, with a white head and hump, runs all a foam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast line. I, I see, wanted to part it, free the fast fish. An old trick, I know him. How it was exactly, continued the one-armed commander. I do not know, but in biting the line it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow. But we didn't know it then, so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounced we came plump onto his hump, instead of the other wails that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood in what a noble great wail it was, the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life, my resolve to capture him, in spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in, and thinking the haphazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw, for I have a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a wail line. Seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first mate's boat. Now, Mr. Mounttop's here, and by the way, Captain, Mounttop, Mounttop, the Captain, as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's boat, which do you see was gunnel and gunnel with mine, then snatching the first harpoon, let this old great grandfather have it. But Lord, look you, sir, hearts and souls alive, man. The next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat, both eyes out, all be fogged and be deadened with black foam, the wail's tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air like a marble steeple. No use sterning all then, but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding sun all crowned jewels, as I was groping, I say, after the second iron to toss it overboard, down comes the tail like a lemur tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters, and flukes first the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But the combing seed dashed me off, and at the same instant the fish taking one good dart forward went down in a flash, and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here, clapping his hand just below his shoulder. Yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to hell's flames I was thinking, when, when all of a sudden, thanked the good God, the barb ripped its way along the flesh, clear along the whole length of my arm, came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated. And that gentleman there will tell you the rest. By the way, Captain, Dr. Bunger, ship surgeon, Bunger, my lad, the Captain. Now, Bunger Boy, spin your part of the yarn. The professional gentleman, thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible to denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober one. He was dressed in a faded blue woolen frock or shirt, and patched trousers, and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marling spike he held in one hand, and a pillbox held in the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled Captains. But at his superior's introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his Captain's bidding. It was a shocking, bad wound, began the whale surgeon, and taking my advice, Captain Bunger here stood our old Sammy. Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship, interrupted the one-armed Captain addressing Ahab. Go on, my boy. Stood our old Sammy off to the Northward to get out of the blazing hot weather there on the line. But it was no use. I did all I could, sat up with him nights, was very severe with him in the matter of diet. Very severe, chimed in the patient himself, and suddenly altering his voice, drinking hot rum toddies with me every night till he couldn't see to put on the bandages, and sending me to bed half seas over, about three o'clock in the morning. Ye stars, he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. A great watcher, and very dietetically severe as Dr. Bunger. Bunger, you dog laugh out, why don't you? You know you're a precious jolly rascal. But eve ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man. My Captain, you must have ere this perceived respected sir, said the imperturbable, godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab, is apt to be facetious at times. He spins us many clever things of that sort. But I may as well say, en peissant as the French remark, that I myself, that is to say Jack Bunger, late of the Reverend clergy, am a strict total abstinence man. I never drink water, cried the Captain. He never drinks it. It's a sort of fits to him. Fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia. But go on, go on with the arm story. Yes, I may as well, said the surgeon coolly. I was about observing, sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that, spite of my best and severest endeavours, the wound kept getting worse and worse. The truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping a wound as surgeon ever saw, more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black. I knew what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there. That thing is against all rule. Pointing at it with the marling spike. That is the Captain's work, not mine. He ordered the carpenter to make it. He had that clubhammer there put to the end to knock someone's brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do you see this dent, sir? Removing his hat and brushing aside his hair and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scurry trace nor any token of ever having been a wound. Well, the Captain there will tell you how that came here. He knows. No, I don't, said the Captain. But his mother did. He was born with it. How, you solemn rogue you, you bunger! Was there ever such another bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die and pickle, you dog. You should be preserved to future ages, you rascal. What became of the white whale? Now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen. Oh! cried the one-armed Captain. Oh, yes. Well, after he sounded, we didn't see him again for some time. In fact, as I before hinted, I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick. Till some time afterwards, when coming back to the line, we heard about Moby Dick, as some call him, and then I knew it was he. Didst thou cross his wake again? Twice. But could not fasten? Didn't want to try to. Ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows. Well then, interrupted bonger, give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen, very gravely and mathematically bowing to each captain in succession, do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by divine providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man's arm. And he knows it too. So that what you take for the white whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb. He only thinks to terrify by faints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe to swallow jackknives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelve-month or more. When I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, do you see? No possible way for him to digest that jackknife and fully incorporated into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving a decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours. Only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that's all. No thank you, Bunger, said the English Captain. He is welcome to the arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then, but not to the other one. No more white whales for me. I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that. And there is a shipload of precious sperm in him. But Hark ye, he's best let alone. Don't you think so, Captain? glancing at the ivory leg. He is. But he will still be hunted for all that. What's best let alone? That accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a magnet. How long since thou saw him last? Which way heading? Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiends! cried Bunger, stupingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog strangely snuffing. This man's blood. Bring the thermometer. It's at the boiling point. His pulse makes these planks beat. Sir, taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm. Avast! roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks. Man the boat! Which way heading? Good God! cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put. What's the matter? He was heading east, I think. Is your Captain crazy? Whispering Fadala. But Fadala, putting a finger on his lips, slid over the bulwark to take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting tackle towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower. In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manila men were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him, with back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till the long side of the Pequod. End of chapters 97 to 100. Moby Dick, chapters 101 to 104. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading, by Stuart Wills. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, chapters 101 to 104. Chapter 101. The Decanter. ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here that she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of Enderby and Sons. A house which, in my poor Whaleman's opinion, comes not far behind the united Royal Houses of the Tudors and Bourbons in point of real historical interest. How long prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish documents do not make plain. But in that year, 1775, it fitted out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the sperm whale. Though for some score of years previous, ever since 1726, our valiant coffins and Macy's of Nantucket in the vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic, not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great sperm whale, and that for a half century they were the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him. In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose and at the sole charge of the vigorous enderbees boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whaleboat of any sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skillful and lucky one, and returning to her birth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast sperm whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed the indefatigable house again bestirred itself. Samuel and all his sons, how many their mother only knows, and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send the sloop of war rattler on a wailing voyage of discovery into the South Seas. Commanded by a naval post captain, the rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service, how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819 the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship, well called the Siren, made a noble experimental cruise, and it was thus that the great Japanese wailing ground first became generally known. The Siren, in this famous voyage, was commanded by a captain Kauffin, a nantucketer. All honor to the enderbees, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day, though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world. The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailor and a noble craft in every way. I boarded her once at midnight, somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the folk-soul. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps, every soul on board, a short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam I had, long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his ivory heel. It reminds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship. And may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if ever I lose sight of it. Flip, did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the hour. And when the squall came, for its squally off there by Patagonia, and all hands, visitors and all, were called to reef top sails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in bolans, and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the mast did not go overboard, and by and by we scrambled down, so sober that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the folk-soul scuttle rather too much diluted and pickled it to my taste. The beef was fine, tough but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef, others that it was dromedary beef, but I do not know for certain how that was. They had dumplings, too, small but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you like billiard balls. The bread, but that couldn't be helped. Besides, it was an anti-square butic. In short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had. But the folk-soul was not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers, for an aft I say the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship, of good fare and plenty, fine flippin' strong, crack-fellows all, and capital from bootheels to hat-band. But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English whalers I know of, not all, though, were such famous hospitable ships that passed round the beef and the bread and the can and the joke, and were not soon weary of eating and drinking and laughing? I will tell you, the abounding good cheer of these English whalers is a matter for historical research, nor have I been at all sparing of historical whale research when it has seemed needed. The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollenders, Zeelanders, and Danes, from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery, and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English merchant ship scrimps her crew, but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental in particular, and therefore must have some special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated. During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was Dan Koepman, wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one Fitzswakhammer. But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of low Dutch and high German in the College of Santa Claus and St. Potts, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble, this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that Dan Koepman did not mean the cooper, but the merchant. In short, this ancient and learned low Dutch book, treated of the commerce of Holland, and among other subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed smear, or fat, that I found a long, detailed list of the outfits for the larders and sellers of 180 sale of Dutch whalemen, from which list translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribed the following. 400,000 pounds of beef, 60,000 pounds Friesland pork, 150,000 pounds of stockfish, 550,000 pounds of biscuit, 72,000 pounds of soft bread, 2800 ferkins of butter, 20,000 pounds Texell and Leiden cheese, 144,000 pounds cheese, probably an inferior article, 550 anchors of Geneva, 10,800 barrels of beer. Most statistical tables are parcingly dry in the reading, not so in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer. At the time I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and platonic application. And furthermore I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stockfish, etc., consumed by every low Dutch harpoonier in that ancient Greenland and Spitzburg and whale fishery. In the first place the amount of butter and Texell and Leiden cheese consumed seems amazing. I imputed though to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid polar seas, on the very coasts of that Eskimo country where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil. The quantity of beer, too, is very large. Ten thousand eight hundred barrels. Now as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole crews of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzburg and sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning thirty men to each of their fleet of one hundred and eighty sail, we have five thousand four hundred low Dutch semen in all. Therefore I say we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that five hundred and fifty anchors of gin. Now whether these gin and beer harpooners, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's head and take good aim at flying whales, this would seem somewhat improbable, yet they did aim at them and hit them, too. But this was very far north, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution. Upon the equator in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooners sleepy at the masthead and boozy in his boat, and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford. But no more. Enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of two or three centuries ago were high livers, and that the English whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it at least. And this empties the decanter. Chapter 102 A Bower in the Arsacides Hither, too, in descriptively treating of the sperm whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect, or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum, that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton. But how now, Ishmael, how is it that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know ought about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite stub mounted upon your capstan deliver lectures on the anatomy of the cetacea, and by help of the windlass hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael, but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone, the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams, the rafters, ridge poles, sleepers, and underpinnings, making up the framework of the leviathan, and be like of the talovats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels. I confess that since Jonah few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale, nevertheless I have been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub sperm whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke, or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go without using my boat hatchet and jackknife and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that young cub. And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic full-grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque years ago, when attached to the trading ship Day of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque at his retired palm villa at Pupella, a seaside glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo Town, his capital. Among many other fine qualities my royal friend Tranque being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric virtue, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could invent. Chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiseled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes, and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders the wonder-frated tribute rendering waves had cast upon his shores. Chief among the latter was a great sperm whale, which, after an unusually long, raging gale, had been found dead and stranded with his head against a coconut tree, whose plumage-like tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathom deep in foldings, and the bones became dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella Glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it. The ribs were hung with trophies, the vertebrae were carved with Arsace Sidi and Annals in strange hieroglyphics, in the skull the priest kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapor-y spout, while suspended from a bow the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles. It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the icy glen. The trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap. The industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches, all the shrubs and ferns and grasses, the message-carrying air, all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwirried verdure. Oh, busy weaver, unseen weaver, pause, one word. Wither flows the fabric. What palace may it deck? Wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver, stay thy hand, but one single word with thee. Nay, the shuttle flies, the figures float from forth the loom, the fresh it-rushing carpet, forever slides away. The weaver god, he weaves, and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice. And by that humming we, too, who look on the loom are deafened, and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories, the spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles, those same words are plainly heard without the walls bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal, then be heedful, for so, in all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar. Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsace-sedean wood, the great white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging, a gigantic idler. Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp-and-woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver, himself all woven over with the vines, every month assuming greener, fresher verger, but himself a skeleton. Life-folded death, death-trellest life, the grim God wived with youthful life and begat him curly-headed glories. Now, when with the royal tranquil I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull and altar and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marveled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of virtue. He laughed. But more I marveled that the priest should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton, brushed the vines aside, broke through the ribs, and with a ball of Arsace-sedean twine wandered, eddyed long amid its many winding shaded colonnades and arbors. But soon my line was out, and following it back I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within, not was there but bones. Cutting me a green measuring rod I once more dived within the skeleton. From their arrow slit in the skull the priest perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib. How now, they shouted, darest thou measure this our God? That's for us. I, priest, well how long do you make him then? But here upon a fierce contest rose among them concerning feet and inches. They cracked each other's sconces with their yardsticks, the great skull echoed, and seizing that lucky chance I quickly concluded my own ad-measurements. These ad-measurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it recorded that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied measurement I please, because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of finbacks and other whales. Likewise I have heard that in the Museum of Manchester in New Hampshire they have what the proprietors call, quote, the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or river whale in the United States, end quote. Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a sperm whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquoes. In both cases the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquoes seizing his because he wanted it, and Sir Clifford because he was Lord of the Seniors in those parts. Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout, so that like a great chest of drawers you can open and shut him in all of his bony cavities, spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan, and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap doors and shutters, and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging tuppence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column, three pence to hear the echo of the hollow of his cerebellum, and six pence for the unrivaled view from his forehead. The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm where I had them tattooed, as in my wild wanderings at that period there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics, but as I was crowded for space and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing, at least what untattled parts might remain, I did not trouble myself with the odd inches, nor indeed should inches at all enter into a congenial ad measurement of the whale. Chapter 103 Measurement of the Whales Skeleton In the first place I wish to lay before you a particular plain statement touching the living bulk of this leviathan whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here. According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scorsby's estimate of seventy tons for the largest size Greenland whale of sixty feet in length, according to my careful calculation I say, a sperm whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons, so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants. Think you not, then, that brains like yoked cattle should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination. Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and diverse other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones, but as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton, as it is by far the most complicated part, and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to view. In length the sperm whale's skeleton at tranq measured seventy-two feet, so that when fully invested and extended in life he must have been ninety feet long, for in the whale the skeleton loses about one-fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain backbone. Attached to this backbone for something less than a third of its length was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals. To me this vast ivory ribbed chest with the long unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great ship, new laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise for the time, but a long disconnected timber. The ribs were ten on a side. The first to begin from the neck was nearly six feet long. The second, third, and fourth were each successively longer till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness they all bore a seemingly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams, whereon to lay footpath bridges over small streams. In considering these ribs I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the mold of his invested form. The largest of the trunk ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale must have been at least 16 feet, whereas the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels, still more for the ample fins I here saw but a few disordered joints, and, in place of the weighty and majestic but boneless flukes, an utter blank. How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid, untraveled man to try to comprehend or write this wondrous whale by merely pouring over his dead attenuated skeleton stretched in this peaceful wood. No, only in the heart of quickest perils, only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes, only on the profound, unbounded sea can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. But the spine, for that the best way we can consider it, is with a crane to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise, but now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's pillar. There are forty an odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a gothic spire forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but that they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play. 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 spherical 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 hausers coiled away in the subterranean orlop deck of a line of battleship. 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 anti-diluvian 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. Thane am I to stagger to this imprise 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 addition of Johnson expressly purchased for that purpose, because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more than 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's crater for an ink stand. 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. Air 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, and 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 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 anti-chronical 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 30 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 Dauphin in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the tulliaries, 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 Cree 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 Basilisaurus. 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 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 Zugladon, 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 anti-chronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors, I am, by a flood, born back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun, for time began with man. Here Saturn's gray 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 twenty-five thousand miles of this world's circumference not an inhabitable handsbreath of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whales, and king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himalayas. 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 anti-Mosaic 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-atomite 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 Dendera, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planosphere 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 traveler. Quote, Not far from the seaside 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 them. 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 lain there a hundred years before I saw it. Their historians affirm that a prophet who prophesied of Muhammad 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. End quote. 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. End of chapters 101 to 104.