CHAPTER 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 measured 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 archaeological,

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

enterprise 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 vertebrae, 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

schoolboy. 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, 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 postdiluvian 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.