Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

The Challenge of Sperm Whale Beheading

The beheading of the Sperm Whale represents a remarkable scientific anatomical achievement that experienced whale surgeons justifiably take great pride in. The procedure presents extraordinary challenges: the whale possesses no proper neck, as its head and body join at the thickest part of the creature. The surgeon must operate from above, with eight to ten feet separating himself from his subject, which remains largely hidden within a discolored, rolling, and often tumultuous sea. Under these difficult circumstances, he must cut many feet deep into the flesh, navigating by feel alone without any visual confirmation of the ever-contracting wound. He must skillfully avoid adjacent, forbidden anatomical areas and precisely divide the spine at a critical point near its insertion into the skull. The reader is invited to marvel at Stubb’s boast that he could behead a sperm whale in merely ten minutes.

Hoisting the Decapitated Whale Head

Once severed, the whale’s head is dropped astern and held in place by a cable while the body is stripped. If the whale is small, the head can subsequently be hoisted onto the deck for deliberate disposal. However, with a fully grown leviathan, this proves impossible, as the sperm whale’s head constitutes nearly one-third of its entire bulk. Suspending such an enormous burden, even using the immense tackles of a whaler, would be as futile as attempting to weigh a Dutch barn on jewellers’ scales. In the case of the Pequod, after decapitation and stripping the body, the head was hoisted against the ship’s side at approximately mid-level, remaining partly submerged and buoyed by its native element. The strained vessel leaned steeply from the enormous downward pull of the lower mast-head, with every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves. That blood-dripping head hung at the Pequod’s waist like the giant Holofernes from the girdle of Judith.