CHAPTER 90

  Heads or Tails

  "De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam."

  BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.

  Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along

with the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the

coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must

have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the

tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple;

there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a

modified form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in

various respects a strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast-

and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the

same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at

the expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the

accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious proof of

the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed

to lay before you a circumstance-that happened within the last two

years.

  It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some

one of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing

and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar

off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow

under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord

Warden. Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the

royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by

assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure.

But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in

fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that

same fobbing of them.

  Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with

their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled

their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good L150 from the

precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their

wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their

respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and

charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and

laying it upon the whale's head, he says- "Hands off! this fish, my

masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden's." Upon this

the poor mariners in their respectful consternation- so truly English-

knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their heads all

round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the stranger. But

that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard heart of

the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of

them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak,

  "Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"

  "The Duke."

  "But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?"

  "It is his."

  "We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and

is all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing at all for

our pains but our blisters?"

  "It is his."

  "Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode

of getting a livelihood?"

  "It is his."

  "I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share

of this whale."

  "It is his."

  "Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"

  "It is his."

  In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke

of Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some

particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some

small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one,

ali honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to

his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate

mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance

replied (both letters were published) that he had already done so, and

received the money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman

if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would decline meddling

with other people's business. Is this the still militant old man,

standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands coercing

alms of beggars?

  It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the

Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must

needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally

invested with that right. The law itself has already been set forth.

But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so

caught belongs to the King and Queen, "because of its superior

excellence." And by the soundest commentators this has ever been

held a cogent argument in such matters.

  But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A

reason for that, ye lawyers!

  In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pin-money, an old King's

Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye

Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye

whalebone." Now this was written at a time when the black limber

bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies'

bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head,

which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is

the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical

meaning may lurk here.

  There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers- the

whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations,

and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's ordinary

revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter;

but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in

the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and

elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded,

may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality.

And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.