Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.

Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated. In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. The contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,—furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins. The harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. The schools composing none but young and vigorous males offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans. They are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.

CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.

The allusion to the waif and waif-poles necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery. It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by another vessel. Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. What plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it. What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant. Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a whale in the Northern seas, and when indeed they had succeeded in harpooning the fish, they were at last, through peril of their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself. Ultimately the defendants came up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge. Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife’s viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life. Erskine was on the other side; and he then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the lady, yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish. The very learned judge in set terms decided, that as for the boat, he awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture. The two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?