KAPITEL 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
This chapter provides an extended examination of the Right Whale’s head, drawing detailed anatomical comparisons and observations from multiple viewing angles. The chapter also contrasts the Right Whale’s head with the Sperm Whale’s, highlighting fundamental differences in their physical structures and concluding with a philosophical meditation on how each whale faces death differently.
Right Whale Head Examination
The narrator crosses the deck to conduct a thorough examination of the Right Whale’s head. Rather than beginning with technical description, the text invites readers to “have a good long look” at the massive anatomical feature, framing the observation as an experiential journey rather than a clinical dissection.
Right Whale Head Shoe Analogy
The Right Whale’s head is compared to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe in broad outline. A Dutch voyager from two centuries ago likened its shape to a shoemaker’s last, and this comparison proves apt enough that the narrator muses the old woman from nursery tales could be lodged comfortably inside “she and all her progeny” within this shoe-like head.
Right Whale Head Viewpoint Variances
The head’s appearance shifts dramatically depending on the observer’s vantage point. From the summit, the two F-shaped spoutholes resemble the apertures in a bass-viol’s sounding-board, transforming the whole head into a musical instrument. From other angles, different impressions emerge, demonstrating how the whale’s anatomy presents multiple visual possibilities depending on perspective.
Right Whale Crown Bonnet Feature
The top of the head features a strange, crested, comb-like incrustation that Greenlanders call the “crown” and Southern fishers call the “bonnet.” This barnacled, green growth hosts live crabs in its crevices, suggesting both a bird’s nest in an oak tree’s crotch and a diadem befitting a king of the sea—though the narrator notes the whale’s sulky expression seems unfitting for such royal adornment.
Right Whale Lower Lip and Hare-Lip
The lower lip hangs down in an enormous pout measuring approximately twenty feet long and five feet deep—a sulk that yields some 500 gallons of oil. The whale is notably hare-lipped, with a fissure about a foot across, potentially caused when the mother sailed past the Peruvian coast during an earthquake that made the beach gape open.
Right Whale Mouth Interior and Blinds
Inside the mouth, the roof rises about twelve feet high to a sharp angle resembling a ridge-pole. The walls present those wondrous, half-vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone—about three hundred on each side—forming Venetian blinds that depend from the crown bone. These fringed bones serve as the whale’s filtering mechanism for straining water and retaining small fish during feeding.
Whalebone Blind Function and Age Estimation
The edges of the baleen bones are fringed with hairy fibers through which the Right Whale strains seawater, catching small fish in the intricate fibers when it feeds. Natural marks, curves, hollows, and ridges appear in the central blinds, and some whalemen calculate the whale’s age from these patterns, comparing the method to determining an oak’s age by its rings—though this criterion’s certainty remains undemonstrated yet analogically probable.
Historical Descriptions of Right Whale Mouth Blinds
Voyagers have described these baleen structures in remarkably varied terms. One writer in Purchas called them “whiskers,” another named them “hogs’ bristles,” while a third in Hackluyt described them as “fins” growing on each side of the upper chop, arching over the tongue. The text notes the whale does possess actual whiskers—a moustache of scattered white hairs on the outer lower jaw that gives the creature a somewhat brigandish expression.
Historical Uses of Right Whale Baleen
The same baleen that forms these blinds in the whale’s mouth has traditionally furnished ladies with busks and other stiffening contrivances. The bone reached its peak fashion during Queen Anne’s time when farthingales were all the rage. The narrator wittily notes that modern umbrella users still shelter under these same jaws, as the umbrella functions as a tent spread over bone that once adorned aristocratic corsets.
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