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CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails. CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud. FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.

“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.” Bracton, l 3. c. 3.1

Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two years.

It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the Cinque Ports,2 had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.3 Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of them.

Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds from the precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone4 under his arm; and laying it upon the whale’s head, he says—“Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden’s”. Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation—so truly English—knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak.

“Please, Sir, who is the Lord Warden?”

“The Duke.”

“But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”

“It is his.”

“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters?”

“It is his.”

“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a livelihood?”

“It is his.”

“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this whale.”

“It is his.”

“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”

“It is his.”

In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington5 received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published) that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?6

It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowden7 gives us the reason for it. Says Plowden, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters.

But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on “Queen-Gold”, or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench author, one William Prynne,8 thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone”. Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the whale and the sturgeon;9 both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.

CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud.

“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying that inquiry.” Sir T. Browne, V. E.10

It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.

“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up before long.”

Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale,11 that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.

Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales.

“There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship’s bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes12 of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let’s make him a present of a little oil for dear charity’s sake. For what oil he’ll get from that drugged whale there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he’ll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It’s worth trying. Yes, I’m for it”; and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.

By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red color. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read “Bouton de Rose,“—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.

Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole to him.

“A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will do very well; but how like all creation it smells!”

Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over it.

Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled—“Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?”

“Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man13 from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the chief-mate.

“Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”

“What whale?”

“The White Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?”

“Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.”

“Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”

Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a trumpet and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.

He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.

“What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke it?”

“I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!” answered the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. “But what are you holding yours for?”

“Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, aint it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?”

“What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the Guernsey-man, flying into a sudden passion.

“Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word; why don’t you pack those whales in ice while you’re working at ‘em? But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn’t a gill in his whole carcase.”

“I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t believe it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer14 before. But come aboard, and mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me; and so I’ll get out of this dirty scrape.”

“Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.

Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain’s round-house (cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.

Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter’s office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview.

By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them.

“What shall I say to him first?” said he.

“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me, though I don’t pretend to be a judge.”

“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought alongside.”

Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.

“What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.

“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey.15 In fact, tell him from me he’s a baboon.”

“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”

Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.

“What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the captain had returned to them.

“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact, tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else.”

“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service to us.”

Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.

“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.

“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink with the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”

“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it’s so calm they won’t drift.”

By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.

Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.

And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at all blending with it for a time.

“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”

Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris,16 worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them good bye.

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Footnotes

  1. Bracton, l. 3, c. 3 / “De balena vero sufficit
”: Henry de Bracton (d. 1268), the foremost English legal scholar of the 13th century, whose compilation De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (“On the Laws and Customs of England”) was not printed until 1569 but remained a foundational authority for centuries. MEL confirms that Melville’s source for the Bracton quotation was not Bracton directly but William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, where it is cited. The Latin means precisely what Ishmael says: “Concerning the whale, it truly suffices if the king have the head and the queen the tail.” The law is real. It remained technically in force in England through Melville’s era. ↩

  2. Cinque Ports: The Cinque Ports (from the French cinq, “five”) — originally Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, and Hastings — were a confederation of English Channel ports established in medieval times to provide ships and men to the crown in exchange for special privileges and a degree of self-governance. MEL confirms Melville’s source for the whale-seizure anecdote was the Literary World magazine. By the 19th century the Cinque Ports were largely a ceremonial institution, but their legal jurisdictions, including the Lord Warden’s whale rights, remained technically intact. ↩

  3. Lord Warden: The Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a largely ceremonial royal appointment held by prominent figures. In Melville’s era the office was held by the Duke of Wellington (appointed 1829). The Lord Warden’s entitlement to royal fish — whales and sturgeons stranded or caught within the Cinque Port jurisdiction — was a genuine, if rarely invoked, legal perquisite. Melville is not making this up. ↩

  4. Blackstone: Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), English jurist and author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) — the most comprehensive and widely read account of English common law ever written, authoritative on both sides of the Atlantic well into the 19th century. Carrying a copy of Blackstone was the legal equivalent of carrying a loaded weapon: it transformed possession into law. MEL notes this is also Melville’s source for the Bracton quotation — he found it in Blackstone’s Commentaries, not in Bracton directly. ↩

  5. The Duke of Wellington: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) — the conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo, twice Prime Minister, and by the 1840s a revered national institution in Britain. He served as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports from 1829 until his death. The anecdote of Wellington seizing the Cinque Ports fishermen’s whale and brushing off the clergyman’s protest is presented by Melville as fact, drawn from a published account. MEL confirms the sentence “Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?” — Melville’s parting shot at Wellington — was cut from the British Bentley edition. Apparently calling the Duke of Wellington a beggar-coercing extortionist did not play well with the London publisher. ↩

  6. British edition censorship: This is one of the most pointed of MEL’s documented editorial interventions. The sentence attacking Wellington by name was removed from the British edition — presumably because insulting the most celebrated living Englishman in a book being sold in England was commercially inadvisable. The American edition retains the full sting. Worth mentioning on air: the book your listeners are hearing is almost certainly the American text. ↩

  7. Plowden: Edmund Plowden (1518–1585), eminent Elizabethan lawyer and legal commentator, whose Commentaries or Reports (1571) were standard references in English common law. His reasoning that whales belong to the Crown “because of its superior excellence” is the kind of circular legal logic Melville delights in exposing — the whale is royal because it is excellent, and we know it is excellent because it is royal. ↩

  8. William Prynne: William Prynne (1600–1669), a prolific Puritan pamphleteer and lawyer, best remembered for his 1633 work Histriomastix — an attack on theatre so sweeping that it was interpreted as an attack on the Queen herself, for which he was imprisoned and had his ears cropped. He later became a significant legal antiquarian. His treatise on “Queen-Gold” (the Queen’s traditional share of royal revenues) contains the passage Melville quotes. Melville’s deadpan observation that Prynne got the whale anatomy wrong — the whalebone is in the head, not the tail — is delivered with the relish of a man catching a Puritan lawyer in a blunder about a whale. ↩

  9. The whale and the sturgeon as royal fish: Under English law, both the great whale and the sturgeon are “royal fish” — when found within the territorial waters or stranded on the shore, they belong to the Crown. The law dates to at least the 14th century and is technically still in force today. In practice, the British Royal Family is routinely offered any sturgeon caught in UK waters; whether they accept is another matter. ↩

  10. Sir T. Browne, V. E.: Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), Norwich physician, religious philosopher, and prose stylist — one of Melville’s most important literary influences. The “V. E.” stands for Vulgar Errors (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646), Browne’s encyclopedic survey of popular misconceptions and false beliefs in natural history, science, and folklore. MEL confirms Melville purchased a 1686 folio edition of Browne’s Works in London in 1849 and kept it in his personal library. The quoted passage is from Browne’s entry on spermaceti — he was attempting to investigate ambergris but was defeated by the smell before he could complete his inquiry. The epigraph is perfectly chosen: Ch. 91 is about the value hidden inside the stench. ↩

  11. Blasted whale: A whale that has died at sea of natural causes and floated, decomposing, rather than being freshly killed. The oil from a blasted whale is of markedly inferior quality — rancid, foul-smelling, and not well-suited for the better grades of lamp oil or industrial use. The fishery avoided them whenever possible, but as Stubb suspects, a blasted whale that died of indigestion might contain ambergris — making its revolting exterior the wrapping around something worth more per ounce than gold. ↩

  12. Crappoes: A derogatory English slang term for the French, derived from crapaud (frog) — French people were sometimes called “frogs” or “crapauds” in English vernacular. Stubb’s contempt for the French whaling operation is partly jingoism and partly genuine professional scorn: the Rose-Bud’s captain is an amateur who doesn’t know what he has or doesn’t have. ↩

  13. Guernsey-man: A native of Guernsey, the British Crown dependency in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. Guernsey is officially French-speaking (Norman French is one of its official languages) as well as English-speaking — making the mate perfectly suited as a bilingual interpreter between Stubb and the French captain. MEL notes this detail is characteristically precise: Melville knew his Channel Island geography. ↩

  14. Cologne manufacturer: MEL’s annotation is the gem here: the captain was not from the German city of Cologne, but was a manufacturer of eau de Cologne — the famous aromatic fragrance water made from citrus and floral oils, invented in Cologne in the early 18th century and enormously popular across Europe. The joke Melville is making is exquisitely layered: a perfume manufacturer, surrounded by the worst smell imaginable, is sitting on top of ambergris — the most prized fixative in perfumery, worth a guinea an ounce — and has absolutely no idea. Stubb, who knows exactly what it is, cheerfully cons him out of it. ↩

  15. St. Jago monkey: St. Jago (SĂŁo Tiago) is the largest island of the Cape Verde archipelago off the West African coast, a Portuguese colonial territory and a common stop on Atlantic whaling voyages. Small monkeys from the region were sometimes kept as ship’s pets or curiosities. “No more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey” is a standard-issue Stubb insult — the Guernsey-man’s translation of it as a warning about plague deaths is one of the chapter’s great comic moments. ↩

  16. Ambergris: Ambergris (from the French ambre gris, “grey amber”) is a waxy substance produced in the intestines of sperm whales — formed around indigestible squid beaks and cuttlefish pens that the whale cannot pass. Only an estimated 1–5% of sperm whales produce it. Fresh ambergris is dark, soft, and smells of feces; after years floating in the ocean, oxidized and bleached by salt water and sun, it becomes pale grey, hard, and develops a complex, warm, musky scent with notes of earth and the sea. It was the most valued fixative in perfumery from the medieval Arab world through the 19th century — a fixative being a substance that locks and extends other scents. The pale grey and white varieties were considered finest; black ambergris, containing less of the active compound ambreine, was less valuable. In Melville’s era it was worth roughly a guinea (one pound and one shilling) per ounce — comparable to gold. It is famously an ingredient in Chanel No. 5. In the United States its trade is now prohibited under the Endangered Species Act; it remains legal in some other countries when obtained as beach-found material rather than from hunted whales. Melville notes its color and texture precisely — “between yellow and ash color,” dentable with the thumb, looking like “Windsor soap or rich mottled old cheese” — and he is accurate. ↩

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