الفصل الفصل 82 · The Honor and Glory of Whaling.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the

true method.

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up

to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its

great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many

great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other

have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection

that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a

fraternity.

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to

the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale

attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent.

Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms

to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one

knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely

Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast,

and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the

prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and

delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit,

rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as

this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt

this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian

coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast

skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants

asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.

When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in

triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this

story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed

to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St. George and

the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many

old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and

often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a

dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in

truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it

would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but

encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle

with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only

a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march

boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the

creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely

represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted

on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance

of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;

and considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might have

crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal

ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;

bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible

with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to

hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.

In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story

will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines,

Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s

head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the

stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble

stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by

good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most

noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that

honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do

with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer

with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we

are much better entitled to St. George’s decoration than they.

Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long

remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that

antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good

deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that

strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere

appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from

the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary

whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I

claim him for one of our clan.

But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of

Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more

ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versâ; certainly

they are very similar. If I claim the demi-god then, why not the

prophet?

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole

roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like

royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in

nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental

story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread

Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives

us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first

of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified

the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved

to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave

birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical

books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo

before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained

something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these

Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became

incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths,

rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even

as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a

member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like

that?