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.
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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