Harris’s Voyage Collection
The narrator examines old Harris’s collection of voyages, specifically plates from a Dutch book of 1671 entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale.” These illustrations show whales lying among ice-islands like “great rafts of logs” with white bears running over their backs. The narrator identifies the “prodigious blunder” of depicting whale flukes as perpendicular rather than horizontal, a fundamental anatomical error that persists even in seemingly authoritative sources.
Captain Colnett’s Sperm Whale
The narrator critiques Captain Colnett’s “Voyage round Cape Horn” (1793), which purports to show a scientifically drawn “Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico.” He doubts the captain’s veracity and mockingly suggests the illustration’s eye, when scaled to a real sperm whale, would be a “bow-window some five feet long.” He quips that the captain should have included Jonah looking out of that enormous eye, highlighting the absurdity of the proportional errors.
Goldsmith’s Animated Nature
The narrator turns to popular natural history works, examining the 1807 abridged London edition of “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” He finds the plates depicting an alleged “whale” and “narwhale” deplorable. The whale “looks much like an amputated sow,” while the narwhale resembles a “hippogriff”—a mythical creature utterly unlike the actual animal. He expresses amazement that such gross inaccuracies could be accepted by the intelligent public of schoolboys in the nineteenth century.
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