CHAPTER 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," said 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 trowers 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 versa; certainly

they are very similar. If I claim the demigod 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?