Chương Chương 56 · Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True

Pictures of Whaling Scenes.

In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly

tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them

which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,

especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass

that matter by.

I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;

Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous

chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far

better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All

Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in

the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second

chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no

doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is

admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the

Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour;

but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.

Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they

are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has

but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency,

because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you

can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by

his living hunters.

But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details

not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be

anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and

taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent

attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble

Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath

the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the

air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of

the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the

monster’s spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single

incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the

incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if

from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and

true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden

poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the

swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions

of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing

down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical

details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I

could not draw so good a one.

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside

the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his

black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the

Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so

that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there

must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are

pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and

maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent

back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through

the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and

causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh

the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all

raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the

glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the

powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered

fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole

inserted into his spout-hole.

Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he

was either practically conversant with his subject, or else

marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the

lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe,

and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing

commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the

beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great

battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern

Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a

charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that

gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.

The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of

things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings

they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s

experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the

Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only

finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the

whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale

draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical

outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so

far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to

sketching the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned

Right whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland

whale, and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and

porpoises, treats us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks,

chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a

Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six

fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement

to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), but in so

important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured

for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of

the Peace.

In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other

French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself

“H. Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present

purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet

noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored,

inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened

sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background,

both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine,

when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen

under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving

is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in

the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside;

the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to

a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity,

is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and

lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in

its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands

half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the

smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke

over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up

with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the

excited seamen.