The Town-Ho limped to a desolate island, where Steelkilt led a mass desertion. Most of the foremastmen vanished into the palms, later seizing native war-canoes to escape. The captain, stranded with a skeleton crew, sailed his whale-boat to Tahiti for reinforcements. On the fourth day, he encountered Steelkilt’s canoe. The Lakeman stood astride the twin prows, laughing at the captain’s pistol, and forced him to swear an oath: he would beach his boat on a nearby island and remain there six days. Bound by the vow, the captain watched Steelkilt sail on to Tahiti, where the Lakeman secured passage on French ships and vanished forever. Radney’s widow remained on Nantucket, her gaze fixed on an ocean that would never return her husband’s body.
In the Golden Inn, the Spanish gentlemen stirred with wonder and doubt. Don Sebastian pressed Ishmael: was this extraordinary tale true? The company leaned forward, demanding assurance. Ishmael called for a priest and a copy of the Gospels. When the holy book arrived, he placed his hand upon it and swore by Heaven that the story was true in substance and in its essential facts. He had walked the Town-Ho’s deck, he had known her crew, and he had spoken with Steelkilt himself after Radney’s death.
Ishmael promises to reveal the whale’s true form as it appears moored alongside a whaleship, but first he must demolish the gallery of errors that passes for knowledge. Every picture of the whale, from temple carvings to scientific plates, distorts the creature beyond recognition.
The errors begin in antiquity. In Elephanta’s cavern-pagoda, the Hindoo Matse Avatar—Vishnu incarnated as leviathan—shows a tail tapering like an anaconda’s rather than the broad palms of true flukes. Christian painters fare no better. Guido’s Perseus rescuing Andromeda features a sea-monster drawn from pure imagination, and Hogarth’s attempt at the same scene produces a floating mountain with a howdah on its back and a tusked mouth like a fortress gate. Old Bibles depict Jonah’s whale; book-bindings stamp ornamental dolphins curling around anchors—picturesque inventions with no claim to truth.
Scientific authorities prove equally blind. Dutch voyage books show whales with perpendicular flukes or bears running across their living backs. Captain Colnett’s careful scale drawing gives the sperm whale an eye five feet wide—a bow-window rather than an organ. Goldsmith’s popular Natural History presents something resembling an amputated sow. Even Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, publishes plates that experienced whalers declare have no counterpart in nature. Frederick Cuvier’s sperm whale resembles nothing so much as a squash, perhaps copied from a Chinese tea-cup decorator’s fantasy.
The fundamental problem is physical. No living leviathan has ever been hoisted entire from the sea to pose for his portrait. At sea, his bulk swims submerged; stranded on shore, he collapses like a wrecked vessel, broken and formless. Artists work from stranded specimens—corpses already distorted.
Perhaps the skeleton offers truth? Not at all. The articulated bones suggest nothing of the flesh that rounds and pads the living animal. A human skeleton conveys the person’s frame; a whale’s bones give no hint of his majestic contours. The creature remains essentially unpaintable. The only way to know his true shape is to go whaling—and risk being stove and sunk by the subject itself.
Ishmael reviews the few existing outlines of whales, dismissing most scientific attempts as inadequate. He finds Beale’s drawings of the Sperm Whale superior to others, though still imperfect, and critiques Scoresby’s Right Whale for being too small and lacking the vitality of the hunt. True accuracy, he argues, is found not in outlines but in the dramatic French engravings by Garnery. The first engraving depicts the catastrophic moment a Sperm Whale rises beneath a boat, shattering it and tossing an oarsman into the air. Ishmael praises the living commotion of the scene despite anatomical faults. The second engraving shows a Right Whale hunt, contrasting the raging, curded wake of the fleeing monster with the becalmed background and the inert mass of a conquered whale. Ishmael lauds the French genius for action, contrasting Garnery’s work with the mechanical sketches of English and American draughtsmen. He also examines two engravings by H. Durand: one of “oriental repose” showing a calm anchorage, and another of intense activity depicting the cutting-in process and a boat rearing like a horse amidst the smoke of the boiling whale. These works capture the perilous spirit of the hunt better than any profile.
On Tower-hill, a crippled beggar displays a painted board depicting the whale attack that cost him his leg, a tangible testament to the fishery’s dangers. Ishmael then turns to the intricate carvings on whale teeth and bone created by sailors, attributing this artistic patience to the “savage” nature restored in men by long exile from civilization. He catalogs the whale’s image in wooden forecastles, brass knockers on country doors, and sheet-iron weather-cocks on church spires. Moving to nature, he identifies petrified shapes in rocky cliffs and living profiles in the undulating ridges of mountains, visible only to the thorough whaleman. The chapter culminates in a cosmic vision, tracing constellations like Argo-Navis and Cetus in the night sky. Ishmael expresses a final, soaring desire to ride a whale beyond the mortal sight, using anchors for bridle-bits and harpoons for spurs to see if the fabled heavens truly lie encamped beyond his gaze.
Steering northeast from the Crozetts, the Pequod sails through vast meadows of brit, a yellow substance resembling ripe wheat, upon which Right Whales feed. Secure from the Pequod, these immense leviathans swim sluggishly through the fields, filtering the brit through their baleen like mowers scything grass. From the mast-head, their vast black forms appear less like living creatures than lifeless masses of rock, their instinct so alien compared to land animals. Ishmael reflects on the ocean’s unsocial, repelling nature, noting the lack of sagacious kindness found in terrestrial beasts. The sea is an everlasting terror that insults and murders man, pulverizing the stateliest frigates, yet familiarity has dulled humanity’s sense of its full awfulness. It is a fiend to its own offspring, dashing whales against rocks and engaging in universal cannibalism, hiding its horrors beneath beautiful azure surfaces. The chapter concludes with a philosophical analogy: just as the terrifying ocean surrounds the verdant land, the horrors of the half-known life encompass the peaceful, joyous island within the human soul, warning the traveler not to push off from that isle, for he can never return.
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