Quartz 4

FOOTNOTES

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https://countercraft.substack.com/p/your-novel-should-be-more-like-moby

Contents

CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides. CHAPTER 103. Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton. FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.

Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;1 the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag,2 to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that young cub?

And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.3 For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers,4 I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town,5 his capital.

Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella6 whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.7

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet8 for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened,9 that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.[^10] For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villanies been detected10. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.11

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton—brushed the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding, shaded collonades and arbors. But soon my line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib. “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long do ye make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces with their yard-sticks—the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.12

These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable13 by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s.

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities—spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.

CHAPTER 103. Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton.

In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living bulk of this Leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?

Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to view.

In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals.

To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.

The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay foot-path bridges over small streams.

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.14 The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.15

But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it’s done, it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar.16

There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.

The Manchester Museum of Science and Industry / power loom sound:
https://fromthesoundup.tumblr.com/page/7
(This is the blog post describing the museum demonstration as “thunderous” with audio)

The Lancashire Loom — Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Loom

The Power Loom — Stories from Lancashire Museums (includes Queen Street Mill):
https://lancashiremuseumsstories.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/the-power-loom/

Power Loom — Spartacus Educational (has the 250,000 looms / 177,000 in Lancashire stat):
https://spartacus-educational.com/TEXloom.htm

Weaving Shed — Wikipedia (explains the industrial shed layout):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving_shed

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 102

Footnotes

  1. The privilege of Jonah alone: A wry biblical joke — Jonah is the only human on record to have seen the interior of a whale from the inside, making him the ultimate authority on its “joists and beams.” Melville is gently mocking his own narrative conceit: how can Ishmael claim to describe the whale’s skeleton? By the authority of the only man who ever truly got inside one. See also the Jonah sermon in Ch. 9 (“The Sermon”) and Ch. 83 (“Jonah Historically Regarded”), where Melville circles this same reference. ↩

  2. Poke or bag - genital double entendre, not unlike Ch 95 The Cassock, however, here the whale is younger and thus the sheathes he can contribute to are much smaller (for a harpoon point) ↩

  3. Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides: MEL’s annotation is essential here. “Tranque” is Isla TranquĂ­, a real island near Isla ChiloĂ© off the southern coast of Chile — waters Melville sailed in 1842 and 1844. But “Arsacides” does not refer to islands near TranquĂ­; it is Cape Arsacides on the eastern shore of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, some 7,000 miles away, named by the French navigator Jean François de Surville in 1769 after the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia. Melville has collapsed two widely separated Pacific geographies into one composite fictional location. Whether this is deliberate exoticism, carelessness, or creative compression is debated by scholars — but the geography is knowingly mixed. ↩

  4. Regency of Algiers — Wikipedia and Dey defined—it’s the title of the ruler of Algiers under the Ottoman Empire — the military commander who governed the semi-autonomous Regency of Algiers. It’s a Turkish word (for maternal uncle, used as an honorific for senior officers). There were thirty Deys who ruled Algiers between 1671 and 1830, each elected by fellow Janissary officers, so each held virtually absolute power. ↩

  5. Pupella contrasts with “Bamboo-Town” as the capital’s sailor nickname is doing similar work in the opposite direction — that one’s aggressively casual and vernacular, the way actual sailors would rename a place they couldn’t pronounce or didn’t bother learning. ↩

  6. pupa in Latin and Italian means a doll, a girl, a chrysalis. There’s something small and delicate encoded in the sound of it, which sits in interesting contrast to what’s actually there: a whale skeleton temple in a jungle ↩

  7. The hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles: The Sword of Damocles — the classical story told by Cicero: Damocles, a flattering courtier, expressed envy of the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse’s power and wealth, so Dionysius invited him to sit on the throne for a day. Damocles was enjoying the luxury until he looked up and saw a sword suspended above his head by a single horse hair. He immediately lost all interest in the tyrant’s position. The image of the whale’s lower jaw suspended over the worshippers — hanging by a bough, swinging — is a perfect Melvillian deployment: the object of their worship is also the thing that could kill them. ↩

  8. Freshet: a sudden rush of fresh water — specifically the surge of a river swollen by heavy rain or snowmelt, flooding its banks and rushing forward with unstoppable momentum. So “the freshet-rushing carpet” is the woven fabric of the loom pouring off the frame in a continuous, unstoppable flood ↩

  9. Looms appear early in the book with the chapter “Loomings” then more poetically later in Ch. 47, “The Mat-Maker,” (Ishmael identifies the warp as necessity, the shuttle as free will, and the sword that strikes the weft as chance. The three forces of the universe, modeled on a loom.) Then in Ch. 93, Pip sees “God’s foot upon the treadle” — the same loom, but now glimpsed from below, from the perspective of someone abandoned in the open ocean, and it breaks him. Then here in Ch. 102, the weaver-god who can’t hear. Then later in Ch. 119, “The Candles,” we will see Ahab directly address the fire as the source of his being, which is another version of the same theology. ↩

  10. You can’t see the evil (villaniies) from close-up. Distance is needed. Again, that’s gotta really burn Ahab’s beard. ↩

  11. For a look at how much of a careful ‘weaver’ Melville was, take a look at The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel is a scholarly book by Christopher Sten, published in 1996 by Kent State University Press. ↩

  12. admeasurements: determination and apportionment of shares; determination or comparison of dimensions. ↩

  13. Burton Constable: Burton Constable Hall, a real stately home in Yorkshire, England. MEL confirms that Melville’s primary source here was Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), which describes the Burton Constable skeleton in detail — Beale personally visited and measured it. The skeleton was of a sperm whale that had stranded on the Yorkshire coast in 1825. Sir Clifford Constable’s scheme to charge admission (twopence for the spinal whispering gallery, etc.) is Melville’s comic invention layered over the real skeleton, which did exist and was displayed on the estate grounds; King Tranquo seized the whale skeleton because he wanted it; Sir Clifford seized his because he was lord of the land. Barbaric and civilized doing exactly the same thing. ↩

  14. Just as we can’t know what color a dinosaur was just by looking at its bones, similarly, a whale skeleton can’t tell use much about a REAL whale - how it looks, how it moves, how it sounds. ↩

  15. Only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out: The epistemological argument Melville has been building through four chapters of cetology: the skeleton is not the whale. The skeleton gives you bones; it gives you nothing of the flesh, the movement, the life. The true whale is only knowable in its living context — the open ocean — and even there, not fully. The same argument applies to Moby Dick specifically: no anatomical study will tell you what the White Whale means. ↩

  16. Pompey’s Pillar: Pompey’s Pillar, a 30-meter Roman triumphal column in Alexandria, Egypt — actually erected in honor of the Emperor Diocletian in 297 CE, not Pompey, but misidentified by medieval European travelers who gave it the name. It was one of the most famous ancient monuments in the world, widely reproduced in engravings and known throughout literate Western culture. The sperm whale’s stacked vertebrae, piled end on end, apparently resemble this column in shape: tapering at the top, massive at the base, ancient in implication. ↩

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