الفصل الفصل 24 · The Advocate.

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 honoring 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 honor. 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 £1,000,000? 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 honor 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

æsthetically 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 honorable 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 honor and the glory

to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.