Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I havechiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separatelyand in detail upon some few interior structural features.But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him,it behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untaggingthe points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loosethe hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones,set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say,in his unconditional skeleton.

  But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman inthe fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean partsof the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan,deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by helpof the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition?Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on yourdeck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not.A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael;but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams;the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, makingup the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.

  I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very farbeneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have beenblessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature.In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was oncebodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheathsfor the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchetand jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contentsof that young cub?

  And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathanin their gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledgeI am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque,one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque, years ago,when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invitedto spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque,at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very fardistant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.

  Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo,being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu,had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingeniousof his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders,the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.

  Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after anunusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with hishead against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopingsseemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been strippedof its fathomdeep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen,where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.

  The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carvedwith Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull,the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystichead again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended froma bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees,like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.

  It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen;the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap;the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom,with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrilsformed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures.All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs,and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all theseunceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves,the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? whereforeall these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--but one single word with thee! Nay--the shuttle flies--the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushingcarpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves;and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice;and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices thatspeak through it. For even so it is in all material factories.The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles;those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting fromthe opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected.Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the greatworld's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

  Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood,the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler!Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummedaround him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all wovenover with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure;but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life;the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

  Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale,and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascendingfrom where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the kingshould regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed.But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jetof his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton--brushed the vines aside--broke through the ribs--and with a ballof Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding,shaded colonnades and arbors. But soon my line was out;and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.

  Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived withinthe skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priestsperceived me taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!"they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us.""Aye, priests--well, how long do ye make him, then?" But hereupona fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches;they cracked each other's sconces with their yard-sticks--the great skull echoed--and seizing that lucky chance,I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.

  These admeasurements I now propose to set before you.But first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not freeto utter any fancied measurements I please. Because there areskeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy.There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England,one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have somefine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I haveheard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire,they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimenof a Greenland or River Whale in the United States." Moreover, at aplace in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certainSir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of aSperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grownmagnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.

  In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged,were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds.King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford,because he was lord of the seignories of those parts.Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that,like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him,in all his bony cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan--and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be putupon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman willshow round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side.Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whisperinggallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echoin the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalledview from his forehead.

  The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down arecopied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed;as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was noother secure way of preserving such valuable statistics.But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of mybody to remain a blank p
age for a poem I was then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not troublemyself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at allenter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.