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 green wood, the living sap, the earth a weaver’s loom—through the leaves, the sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving verdure. The weaver-god weaves, deafened by his own humming. Amid this life-restless loom, the white skeleton lay lounging—Life folded Death; Death trellised Life.
Visiting with Tranquo, Ishmael paced the skeleton with a ball of twine, then cut a green measuring-rod and dived within. The priests shouted outrage, then fell to fighting over feet and inches, cracking sconces with yard-sticks. Seizing that chance, Ishmael concluded his admeasurements.
These dimensions are verifiable against skeleton authorities in Hull, Manchester, and Yorkshire, where Sir Clifford Constable displays an articulated whale like a chest of drawers. But the measurements themselves are copied from Ishmael’s right arm, where he had them tattooed—the only secure way to preserve such statistics. He left the rest of his body a blank page for a poem he was composing.
Ishmael opens with the whale’s living bulk: a Sperm Whale of largest magnitude weighs ninety tons, outweighing a village of eleven hundred. The landsman’s imagination strains against such mass.
The Tranque skeleton measured seventy-two feet; in life, the whale stretched ninety. Skull and jaw claimed twenty feet, leaving fifty of backbone. Ten ribs per side, the longest exceeding eight feet, formed an ivory chest like a ship’s hull under construction. In the Arsacides, such bones bridge streams.
Yet the skeleton is not the mould. The largest rib spans eight feet, but the living body reached sixteen in depth. Where naked spine lies, flesh and blood once wrapped the bone. The fins are mere joints; the flukes, an utter blank.
Foolish to think one knows the whale from dead bones in peaceful woods. Only amid quickest perils, within the eddyings of angry flukes, can the living whale be truly found out.
The spine stacked upright resembles Pompey’s Pillar. Forty-odd vertebrae taper to a white knob like a billiard ball. Smaller bones vanished, stolen by the priest’s children for marbles. Thus even the hugest living thing diminishes into child’s play.
The whale’s colossal bulk demands a writer expand rather than compress—he belongs in imperial folio, his coiled entrails vast as cables in a warship’s hold. Ishmael now turns from anatomy to archaeology, to fossils and antediluvian remains. Such grand terms would overwhelm any lesser creature, but Leviathan justifies the dictionary’s weightiest words. He consults Johnson’s quarto, fitting that the portly lexicographer should serve a whale author.
Writers rise with their subjects; Ishmael swells with his. His handwriting sprawls into billboard letters. He craves a condor’s quill, a volcanic crater for ink. The theme’s magnitude forces him to encompass all sciences, all generations of whales and men. A great book requires a great subject—no enduring volume was ever written about a flea.
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