But the calm was shattered. A whale wounded by a cutting-spade, entangled in the harpoon-line he towed, now dashed among the revolving circles like a lone mounted desperado, tossing the keen spade about him, wounding his own comrades. This terrific object recalled the herd from their stationary fright. The lake began to heave; the submarine nurseries vanished; whales swam in contracting orbits. The entire host came tumbling upon their inner centre.
Starbuck seized the helm, intensely whispering oars, stand by! The boat was all but jammed between two vast black bulks. By desperate endeavor they shot into a temporary opening. After many hair-breadth escapes, they glided into what had been an outer circle. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, taken clean from his head by the air-eddy of broad flukes.
Riotous and disordered as the commotion was, it resolved into systematic movement. Having clumped together in one dense body, the whales renewed their flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats lingered to pick up drugged whales and secure one Flask had killed. The result illustrated that sagacious saying in the Fishery—the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales only one was captured. The rest escaped, only to be taken by some other craft than the Pequod.
Beyond the vast armadas, smaller bands of whales occasionally appear—schools divided strictly by sex. The female school travels under a single full-grown male, a luxurious Ottoman swimming among his delicate concubines. Vastly larger than his ladies, he plays the cavalier: at any alarm, he falls to the rear to cover their flight. Like fashionables, the harem migrates from northern summers to Equatorial feeding grounds, then to Oriental waters, forever seeking comfort.
This lord is a jealous bashaw. When young males approach, he attacks with prodigious fury. Whales fence with their jaws like elks locking antlers; many bear the scars of these battles. Yet he has no taste for the nursery—his anonymous babies are left to maternal care, every child an exotic.
In time, the sated Turk transforms. Lassitude overtakes him; he forswears the harem and becomes an exemplary solitary, cruising alone among the meridians, warning young whales from amorous errors. This “schoolmaster” seems named from the harem he once kept, though some suspect satire aimed at a Frenchman whose early lessons were folly.
Almost universally, a solitary whale proves ancient—like moss-bearded Daniel Boone, wedded to Nature herself in the wilderness of waters.
The all-male schools offer sharp contrast: young, vigorous forty-barrel bulls, tumbling round the world at a reckless, rollicking rate. No prudent underwriter would insure them. When three-fourths grown, they break up to seek harems. Yet a final difference reveals the sexes’ character: strike a bull, and his comrades flee; strike a female, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern—sometimes lingering until they too are taken.
When several ships cruise together, a whale may be struck by one vessel, escape, and fall to another. Without universal law, violent disputes would erupt among fishermen. The American whalemen have fashioned their own code, surpassing Justinian’s Pandects in terse comprehensiveness. Two laws only: a Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it; a Loose-Fish is fair game for whoever can soonest catch it.
But this masterly brevity demands commentary. A fish is fast when connected to an occupied ship by any controllable medium—mast, oar, cable, even a strand of cobweb. Or when it bears a waif, provided the waifing party can take it alongside.
Fifty years past, an English whale-trover case tested these principles. Plaintiffs harpooned a whale but abandoned boat and lines to save their lives; defendants captured the whale before their eyes and kept everything. Erskine, counsel for the defendants, illustrated his position with a recent crim. con. case: a gentleman who abandoned his vicious wife, then sued to recover her. The lady, once abandoned, became a Loose-Fish—fair game for the next harpooner. Lord Ellenborough ruled: the boat returns to plaintiffs, but whale, harpoons, and line belong to defendants. The whale was loose when captured; whoever takes the fish takes all.
These twin laws, on reflection, prove the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence. Possession is often the whole of the law. What are Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish? The widow’s last mite to the rapacious landlord? The undetected villain’s marble mansion? The Archbishop’s £100,000? John Bull’s Ireland, Brother Jonathan’s Texas? All Fast-Fish.
But the doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely applicable. What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, when Columbus struck the Spanish standard? What Poland to the Czar, Greece to the Turk, India to England, Mexico to the United States? What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
An old English statute grants the King every whale’s head and the Queen its tail—a split clean as an apple cleft, leaving nothing between. The law stands yet.
Recently, Dover mariners dragged ashore a whale after brutal labor, counting on £150 for oil and bone. A gentleman arrived with a law book, declared the creature a Fast-Fish, and claimed it for the Lord Warden. The sailors protested their toil and danger, begged quarter or half, pleaded bedridden kin. Each time: the same flat answer. The whale went to auction. His Grace pocketed the proceeds. When a parson wrote begging mercy, the Duke replied he had already taken the money and suggested the reverend mind his own affairs.
The Duke’s claim descends from the Crown. On what grounds? Plowdon explains: the whale belongs to royal couple by virtue of its “surpassing worth.” Commentators call this reasoning sound.
But why heads to kings and tails to queens? William Prynne argued the tail supplies royal wardrobes with whalebone. Yet whalebone dwells in the head—a blunder for so wise a counselor. Perhaps allegory lurks.
Whale and sturgeon both rank as royal fish. The sturgeon presumably suffers similar partition, its dense skull going to the King on some theory of congenial fit. Thus does law find its logic—power draped in the solemn nonsense of learned men.
Having examined the legalistic claims of royalty to portions of the whale, Ishmael now turns to the more practical matter
A week after the Grand Armada, the Pequod sailed over a sleepy, vapory mid-day sea. The noses on deck proved more vigilant than the eyes aloft—a peculiar and unpleasant smell drifted across the water. Stubb guessed these were the drugged whales from their recent chase.
Through the vapors appeared a French ship with furled sails and two whales alongside. Vulture sea-fowl circled and swooped. One was a blasted whale, dead and unmolested, an unappropriated corpse exhaling unsavory odor. Drawing nearer, Stubb recognized his own cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines knotted round the other whale’s tail. The Frenchmen had been scraping the drugged leavings of the Pequod’s hunt—poor devils, content with dry bones.
Stubb reflected that the dried-up whale might contain something worth more than oil: ambergris. He resolved to try for it.
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