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.
Two great whale heads hang from the Pequod’s side—the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale—offering an unparalleled chance for comparative study. The Sperm Whale commands immediate respect: its head possesses a mathematical symmetry the Right Whale lacks, while its pepper-and-salt coloring marks it as a grey-headed veteran of deep waters. One yields instinctively to its pervading dignity.
The eyes, set far back near the jaw’s angle, prove strangely small for such magnitude. Their position prevents the whale from seeing directly ahead or astern; each eye commands its own field, separated by the massive bulk of head between them like two lakes divided by a mountain. The whale must perceive two distinct pictures with a blind void between. Whether its brain can simultaneously attend to both prospects remains a tantalizing question—and perhaps explains the creature’s bewildered movements when boats surround it, its divided vision trapping it in helpless perplexity.
The ear is stranger still: no external leaf, an opening barely large enough for a quill. The Sperm Whale possesses a visible orifice; the Right Whale’s is entirely covered by membrane. Yet what matters physical aperture? Were the whale’s eyes vast as telescopes, its ears capacious as cathedral porches, it would see and hear no better. Subtlety of mind outstrips enlargement.
The crew canters the head bottom-up. The mouth’s interior gleams like bridal satin, beautifully chaste—until one considers the lower jaw. This narrow lid, when raised, reveals a portcullis of teeth. In living but dispirited whales, the jaw hangs slack at right angles, a reproach to their tribe.
Now the jaw is hoisted aboard like an anchor. Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego mount as dentists, lancing gums and rigging tackles to wrench free the forty-two teeth—Michigan oxen dragging oak stumps. The bone is sawn into slabs and stacked like joists, the leviathan’s architecture reduced to building material.
Crossing the deck, the narrator turns to examine the Right Whale’s head—a form utterly unlike the Sperm Whale’s noble symmetry. Where that head suggests a Roman war-chariot, this one resembles a shoemaker’s last or a gigantic shoe, clumsy and inelegant. A barnacled crown sits upon the mass, while the lower lip hangs in a massive sullen pout, yielding hundreds of gallons of oil.
Through a natural fissure in the lip, the narrator enters a mouth like an Indian wigwam. Hundreds of baleen plates line the interior—curved blades of bone forming Venetian blinds that strain food from seawater. These fringed slats once furnished ladies’ busks and umbrella ribs, though such fashions have faded. The arrangement suggests a great organ’s pipes, while the tongue spreads beneath like a soft Turkish rug, fat and fragile, promising six barrels of oil.
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