第 七十五 章 · The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.

Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right

Whale’s head.

As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a

Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly

rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather

inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred

years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a

shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the

nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be

lodged, she and all her progeny.

But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different

aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit

and look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole

head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in

its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,

crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass—this green,

barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the

Southern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes

solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,

with a bird’s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those

live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost

sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the

technical term “crown” also bestowed upon it; in which case you will

take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a

diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for

him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a

very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower

lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by

carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a

sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.

The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an

important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when

earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery

threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at

Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good

Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet

high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular

ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us

with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone,

say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the

head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere

been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with

hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in

whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes

through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of

bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious

marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the

creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the

certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the

savor of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we

must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance

will seem reasonable.

In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies

concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous

“whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a

third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:

“There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his

upper _chop_, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”

*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or

rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the

upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts

impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn

countenance.

As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,”

“blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and

other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has

long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was

in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those

ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as

you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we

nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a

tent spread over the same bone.

But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and,

standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all

these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not

think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its

thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest

Turkey—the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the

mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting

it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I

should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that

amount of oil.

Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started

with—that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely

different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no

great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible

of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are

there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely

anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external

spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.

Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet

lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other

will not be very long in following.

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same

he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now

faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like

placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the

other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by

accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw.

Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical

resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a

Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in

his latter years.