in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come
to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable
pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the
injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it may be
deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large,
the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the
liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous
metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of
his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in
emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. (Sperm
Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason why the
world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our
vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively
engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we
are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge
have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor.
And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall
soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and
which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least
among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge
in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are
comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so
many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the
.. <p 107 >
idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's
profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to
a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast
tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the
comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and
wonders of God! But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration!
for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe,
burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory! But look at this matter in
other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and
have been. Why did the Dutch in DeWitt's time have admirals of their whaling
fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out
whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two
of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the
years
and
pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000
pounds? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber
all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of
seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 20,000,000
dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in
whaling? But this is not the half; look again. I freely assert, that the
cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful
influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially
upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty
business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so
remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential
issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless
task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many
.. <p 108 >
years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest
and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American
and european men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them
fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed
them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may
celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes,
Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed
out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your
Krusenstern. For in their succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the
heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands,
battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and
muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of
in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the lifetime commonplaces
of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three
chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's
common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! Until the whale fishery rounded
Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial,
was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish
provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through
the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if
space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last
eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old
Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts. That
great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the
enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by
a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously
barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true
mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first
Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved
.. <p 109 >
from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping
an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the
same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way
for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan,
is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit
will be due; for already she is on the threshold. But if, in the face of all
this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically noble associations
connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there,
and unhorse you with a split helmet every time. The whale has no famous
author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say. The whale no
famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first
account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first
narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the
Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the
Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy
in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke! True enough, but then whalemen
themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins. No good
blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there.
The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel" afterwards, by marriage,
Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a
long line of Folgers and harpooneers --all kith and kin to noble Benjamin
--this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
law, the whale is declared a royal fish.
.. <p 110 >
Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand
imposing way. The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In
one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the
world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian
coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession. Grant
it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in
whaling. No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very
heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down
your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I
account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who
boasted of taking as many walled towns. And, as for me, if, by any
possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall
ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might
not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that,
upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at
my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS.
in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to
whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
.. <p 109n. >
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
.. <p 110n. >
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
