Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.
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.
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