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.. < chapter lvii 23  OF WHALES IN PAINT; IN TEETH; IN WOOD; IN >


SHEET-IRON; IN STONE; IN MOUNTAINS; IN STARS On Tower-hill, as you go down
to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the
sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic
scene in which he lost his leg.  There are three whales and three boats; and
one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original
integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale.  Any time
these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and
exhibited
.. <p 270 >
that stump to an incredulous world.  But the time of his justification has now
come.  His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping,
at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in
the western clearings.  But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a
stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands
ruefully contemplating his own amputation.  Throughout the Pacific, and also
in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively
sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on
Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and
other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in
their hours of ocean leisure.  Some of them have little boxes of
dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering
business.  But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with
that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything
you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.  Long exile from Christendom and
civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed
him, i.  e.  what is called savagery.  Your true whale-hunter is as much a
savage as an Iroquois.  I myself am a savage; owning no allegiance but to the
King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.  Now,
one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is
his wonderful patience of industry.  An ancient Hawaiian war-club or
spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as
great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.  For, with but a bit
of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden
net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady
application.  As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage.
With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth,
of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
quite as workmanlike, but as close
.. <p 271 >
packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield;
and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine
old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.  Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out
of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met
with in the forecastles of American whalers.  Some of them are done with much
accuracy.  At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales
hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door.  When the porter is
sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best.  But these knocking whales are
seldom remarkable as faithful essays.  On the spires of some old-fashioned
churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but
they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so
labelled with Hands off!  you cannot examine them closely enough to decide
upon their merit.  In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of
high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the
plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in
a surf of green surges.  Then, again, in mountainous countries where the
traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there
from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles
of whales defined along the undulating ridges.  But you must be a thorough
whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return
to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting
latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are
such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would
require a laborious re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still
remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera
chronicled them.  Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to

     trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them;
as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked
in battle among the clouds.  Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round
and round
.. <p 272 >
the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to
me.  And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis,
and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of
Hydrus and the Flying Fish.  With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and
fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the
topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless
tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!
.. <p 272 >