Bab Bab 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 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 archæological, 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 vertebræ, 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.