Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/BOOKS/Novels/H.Melville/moby.90

Text File | 1994-05-27 | 5.8 KB | 87 lines

.. < chapter xc 2  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
.. <p 398 >
with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled
their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds 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, an
honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace,
begging him to take the case of those unfortunate
.. <p 399 >
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-pinmoney, 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.
.. <p 400 >