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🎤059 Moby Full Text Chs104-105

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CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.

From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio1. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship2.

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous3, and antediluvian point of view4. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under5 the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson6, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals.7 Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!8 Friends, hold my arms!9 For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.10 Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.11 No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.12 Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations13 seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures14, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils.

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales15, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries16; and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments17 to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.

But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama18. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.19 The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me20, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs21. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a school-boy.22 I look round to shake hands with Shem.23 I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence24 of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature25, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah26, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.27

“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon ‘em. They keep a Whale’s Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.28”

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.29

CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?

Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.

But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found in the Tertiary system30 (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier ones.

Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale31. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.

But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it not be, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated?

Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally32. For Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!33 And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke’s naturalists34, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.35

But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks36; and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets37, by the relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield38, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh’s fat kine39; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.

But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc40; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe41, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo42, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.

But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man43; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish.44 Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise)45 was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated.

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans46, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds47 in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.

Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable48. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.

But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions. But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been annually slain on the nor’-west coast by the Americans alone49; yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.

Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa50, when he tells us that at one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal51, and by all the successive monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in52, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea53 combined.

Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more54, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to the present human population of the globe.

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin55. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.

FOOTNOTES

Footnotes

  1. “imperial folio” — MEL: in bookmaking, the largest size, “made of single sheets folded only once.” A book about the whale ought to be printed in the biggest book format there is. (This picks up the book-size joke from Ch. 32, “Cetology,” where Ishmael sorts whales into Folio, Octavo and Duodecimo sizes.) ↩

  2. Orlop-deck — the lowest deck of a ship, just above the hold, where cables and ropes were coiled and stored. A line-of-battle-ship was the largest class of warship. Melville uses the anatomy of the biggest ship to describe the anatomy of the biggest animal: the whale’s intestines are coiled like a warship’s cables. ↩

  3. “fossiliferous” — a real scientific term still in use, meaning “containing fossils.” It comes from Latin fossilis (dug up, from fodere, to dig) + ferre (to bear). Melville is using genuine scientific vocabulary, not inventing impressive-sounding words. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil ↩

  4. “antediluvian” — MEL: “before the biblical flood.” It’s literally “before the Flood” (Latin ante, before + diluvium, flood). In the early 19th century some naturalists still used the Flood as a rough dividing line in the fossil record, and the word was already broadening into its everyday sense of “impossibly old.” Melville uses both meanings. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antediluvian ↩

  5. “Fain am I to stagger to this emprise” — MEL: “eager to undertake the enterprise.” Emprise is an old, chivalric word for a bold undertaking, which adds mock-heroic swagger. Melville announces his method openly: he’ll use the biggest words in the dictionary because the subject demands them. The paragraph has just shown you what he means: archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian. As he says himself, such “portly terms” would be “unwarrantably grandiloquent” applied to an ant or a flea, but “when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered.” ↩

  6. Johnson’s Dictionary — Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the great English dictionary before the Oxford English Dictionary. The joke is about bodies: Johnson was famously large, so his “uncommon personal bulk” made him the right lexicographer for “a whale author like me.” 🅱️ British edition: MEL notes that the British text reads “a huge quarto of Johnson,” deleting “edition,” which sharpens the joke: now it’s Johnson himself who’s the huge quarto. ↩

  7. “chirography … placard capitals” — chirography is handwriting (Greek cheir, hand + graphein, to write), and placard capitals are the huge letters on a poster. Writing about the whale makes his handwriting swell until it’s the size of a poster. ↩

  8. “a condor’s quill … Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand” — the tools grow to match the subject: a pen made from the feather of one of the largest flying birds, and an active volcano (near Naples) for an inkwell. ↩

  9. “Friends, hold my arms!” — MEL: “Evoking the help needed by Moses as his brother Aaron and companion Hur held up his hands in continuous prayer so the Israelites might prevail in battle (Exodus 17: 11-12).” In Exodus 17:11–12, whenever Moses lowered his tired arms the Israelites began to lose, so Aaron and Hur held them up until sunset. Ishmael is exhausted by the size of his subject and needs his arms held up too. It also works as comic self-restraint, a 19th-century “hold me back!” or “hold my beer,” as if he needs to be physically stopped from going further. ↩

  10. “not excluding its suburbs” — beautiful bathos. The sentence sweeps across all the sciences, all generations of whales, men and mastodons, all the empires on earth and the whole universe, and then lands on suburbs. The joke deflates the grandiosity just as it peaks: even the universe has outskirts. 🅱️ British edition: MEL: “In the British edition, ‘not excluding its suburbs’ is deleted, probably at Melville’s request.” So the British sentence ends on “the whole universe.” If Melville really asked for the cut, it’s one of the rare times the American text keeps a joke that its own author removed. ↩

  11. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme” — one of the most direct statements in the novel about the novel itself. The whale justifies the size and ambition of Moby-Dick. The next sentence is the punchline: “No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” ↩

  12. Ishmael’s “credentials as a geologist” — a comic setup: he’s dug holes, so he’s qualified to talk about rocks and fossils. MEL notes that “Ishmael’s list of occupations during his ‘miscellaneous time’ … does not correspond to what we know of Melville’s random odd jobs during his adolescence and young manhood” (he worked as a bank clerk, a store clerk, a schoolteacher, and a sailor). So this is Ishmael’s résumé, not Melville’s. There’s a real point under the joke, though: in the 1840s geology was young enough that canal-diggers, quarrymen and well-diggers were turning up real fossils. ↩

  13. “Tertiary formations” — a real geological term, used correctly for 1851. The Tertiary period was the age of mammals that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs, roughly 66 to 2.6 million years ago. The name goes back to the Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino in the 1700s, and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) made it standard. Geologists have since replaced “Tertiary” with “Paleogene” and “Neogene,” but the older word is still used informally. Melville is right that the fossil whales known in his day came from Tertiary rocks. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary ↩

  14. “antichronical” — MEL: “before recorded time.” Melville is stacking up “before” words in these two chapters: antediluvian (before the Flood), antichronical (before time), pre-adamite (before Adam), and, a few paragraphs later, antemosaic (before Moses). ↩

  15. “pre-adamite” — MEL: “before Adam.” The word was theologically loaded in 1851, because “pre-Adamite” theories held that people or creatures existed before the biblical Adam, which challenged a literal reading of Genesis. Putting whales before Adam takes them entirely outside the Genesis timeline. Ishmael will soon say that “time began with man,” and the whale was already here. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Adamite ↩

  16. Rue Dauphine and the Tuileries — MEL catches a geography error: “The royal palace called the Tuilleries (destroyed in 1871) was far from the Rue Dauphine (no accent mark), across the Seine.” MEL also notes that, apart from the references to Napoleon and the Tuileries, “all the details in this paragraph are mentioned in the Penny Cyclopaedia article on ‘Whales,’” so we can see Melville working from a popular reference book and adding his own flourishes. Antwerp docks: Napoleon ordered new naval docks built at Antwerp in the early 1800s, and the digging turned up fossil bones. ↩

  17. Baron Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) — the founding figure of comparative anatomy and paleontology. Cuvier showed that species could go extinct, which was a revolutionary and unsettling idea at the time, and he studied fossil marine mammals. His authority here is real science. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier ↩

  18. Basilosaurus / Zeuglodon — MEL: “Melville’s generally correct description in this paragraph on fossil discoveries in the US is laced with minor inaccuracies.” The historical record: bones from Judge John Creagh’s land in Clarke County, Alabama, reached the naturalist Richard Harlan, a Philadelphia physician, who thought the animal was a giant reptile and named it Basilosaurus (“king lizard,” from Greek basileus, king + sauros, lizard) in 1834. So Melville’s date of 1842 doesn’t match, and it wasn’t really “the Alabama doctors” who named it. Harlan took bones to London, where Richard Owen showed in 1839 that the creature was a whale and proposed the name Zeuglodon (“yoke-tooth”). Today Basilosaurus, the first name, is the official one, so the “lizard” mistake is permanent. Melville’s larger point is correct: the skeleton alone misled the experts, which proves his repeated claim that “the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body.” The basilisk of legend (and of Harry Potter) shares the same Greek root, basileus, king. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilosaurus ↩

  19. ⚠️ ON-AIR FLAG — enslaved people as a punchline. The Alabama fossil was dug up on a plantation, and the people working that land were enslaved. Melville mentions them only to call them “awe-stricken” and “credulous” (gullible) for thinking the bones belonged to a fallen angel, while the white “Alabama doctors” get to name the creature. It’s worth naming this condescension on air. It’s also worth pointing out the irony Melville sets up in the very next sentences: the “doctors” were wrong too. They called a whale a reptile. Open question for listeners: is the whole paragraph a joke about everyone misreading the bones, or does the contempt land only on the enslaved? ↩

  20. “Saturn’s grey chaos” — MEL: Saturn stands for the primordial era before order. In Roman myth Saturn (the Greek Kronos) ruled in the earliest age, before Jupiter and the Olympian gods. The phrase may echo Keats’s Hyperion (“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale … Sat gray-hair’d Saturn”). On-air hedge: the Keats echo is possible, not documented. ↩

  21. “Himmalehs” — the Himalayas, in a common 19th-century spelling. The image is of the whale swimming over where the world’s highest mountains now stand, back when “the whole world was the whale’s.” ↩

  22. Methuselah — the oldest man in the Bible, who lived 969 years (Genesis 5:27). Next to the whale’s pedigree, he’s a child. “Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s” means the whale’s bloodline is older than any royal dynasty in Egypt. ↩

  23. Shem — the eldest of Noah’s three sons (Shem, Ham and Japheth), and so one of the first generation after the Flood (Genesis 10:21). The word “Semitic” comes from his name. Ishmael feels so far back in time that he looks around for Noah’s son to shake hands with, and the whale is older still. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shem ↩

  24. “antemosaic, unsourced” — antemosaic means “before Moses,” that is, older than the five books traditionally attributed to Moses, including Genesis, the book of Creation. Unsourced means having no known origin. Note the shift in tone: the comic grandiloquence turns into real awe and fear, “the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.” 🅱️ British edition: MEL: “In the British edition, ‘humane’ has been altered to ‘human,’ which in context seems to be the more likely word.” ↩

  25. “stereotype plates of nature” — MEL: geological strata compared to a printing process. A stereotype plate was a solid metal cast of a page of set type, kept so a book could be reprinted. The fossil is nature’s printing plate, and the rock is the page. It’s also a publishing in-joke: the American first edition of Moby-Dick was printed from stereotype plates that Melville arranged, and paid for, himself in 1851. ↩

  26. Temple of Denderah (Dendera) — the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Upper Egypt (MEL: a “First-century BCE Egyptian temple”). The planisphere is the Dendera Zodiac, a carved star map from a ceiling in the temple. French scholars with Napoleon’s expedition recorded it in 1799 (so “some fifty years ago” is about right), it was cut out of the ceiling in 1821, and it is now in the Louvre. Melville sees a whale among the dolphins and sea creatures on it, “centuries before Solomon was cradled.” Note for the show: the Temple of Denderah is not the Temple of Dendur now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They’re two different temples. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendera_zodiac ↩

  27. John Leo (Leo Africanus) — MEL: “Sixteenth-century Arab commercial and diplomatic traveller al-Hasan al-Zayati (c. 1485-c. 1554), renamed Giovanni Leone and Leo Africanus by his Christian captors.” He was captured by pirates, presented to Pope Leo X, and wrote his Description of Africa (published 1550), the standard European source on North Africa for centuries. The quoted passage describes a whale-bone temple on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The “Barbary” coast was the European name for the North African coast. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Africanus ↩

  28. Jonas = Jonah — MEL glosses “Jonas” as Jonah, and the “Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet” (Muhammad) as unidentified. This is the Jonah thread again: a local tradition claims the very spot where the great fish spat Jonah out onto dry land (Jonah 1:17; Jonah 2:10). Jonah is honored in Islam as well as in Judaism and Christianity, so a Muslim temple claiming his landing place fits. Father Mapple’s sermon in Ch. 9 is where this thread began. ↩

  29. “you will silently worship there” — the chapter ends in a temple built of whale bones, and Ishmael invites the whaleman-reader to worship in it. This is the sacred/profane axis again: the whale is killed and boiled for oil, and also revered as something older than every god on record. ↩

  30. “Tertiary system” — see the note on “Tertiary formations” in Ch. 104. Melville’s argument is that modern whales are bigger than their fossil ancestors, and that within the Tertiary the later whales were bigger than the earlier ones. Whales haven’t shrunk. ↩

  31. “seventy-two feet” — a callback to Ch. 103, where Ishmael measured the Sperm Whale skeleton in the Arsacides and found it seventy-two feet long. The Alabama fossil (the Basilosaurus of Ch. 104) was “less than seventy feet.” Modern measurements agree with the direction of his argument: the largest reliably measured sperm whales are around 67–68 feet, and Basilosaurus was roughly 50–60 feet. The “near a hundred feet” sperm whales that Ishmael has “heard, on whalemen’s authority” are whalemen’s tales. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale ↩

  32. Pliny and Aldrovandus — MEL: “Pliny, the Elder is the Roman naturalist mentioned in Chs. 32 and 56,” and Aldrovandus is the “Sixteenth-century Italian naturalist and physician Ulise Aldrovandi … also mentioned in Ch. 32.” Pliny’s Natural History (Book 9) does describe whales in the Indian Ocean covering four jugera, about 2½ acres. These ancient and Renaissance “measurements” are what Ishmael is mocking. ↩

  33. “Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!” — Ishmael’s mocking exclamation at the absurd 800-foot whales of the old naturalists. A ropewalk was a very long, narrow building (some over 1,000 feet) where rope was twisted, a fixture of every seaport. The Thames Tunnel in London (opened 1843, engineered by Marc Isambard Brunel with his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel) was the first tunnel under a navigable river and a famous tourist sight; Melville visited London in 1849. So: whales as long as a ropewalk and as big around as a tunnel. The images are chosen for their ridiculousness, not as real measurements. (Ahab reuses the Thames Tunnel in Ch. 108.) ↩

  34. Banks and Solander … the “Danish member” — MEL: “On his first voyage around the world (1768–1771), Captain James Cook … brought along naturalists Joseph Banks (later Sir Joseph, and president of the Royal Society) and Daniel Charles Solander.” MEL identifies the “Danish member” as Uno von Troil, a Swede, not a Dane, who wrote Letters on Iceland (1780). The 360-foot “Wrinkled Bellies” come from that book. ↩

  35. Lacépède’s date — MEL: “Melville repeats his error of Ch. 55, confusing the death date of Bernard Germain Étienne de Lacépède” with the publication date of his book. Lacépède’s Histoire naturelle des cétacés came out in 1804. He died in 1825. ↩

  36. “a modern Kentuckian in his socks” — Kentuckians had a popular reputation as exceptionally tall frontiersmen. Egyptian mummies are shorter than modern people, so humans haven’t shrunk since ancient times, and neither have whales. ↩

  37. Nineveh tablets — hot news in 1851. Austen Henry Layard had been excavating the Assyrian palaces at Nimrud and Nineveh since 1845, and his Nineveh and Its Remains (1849) was a bestseller. The huge Assyrian stone reliefs, full of carved animals, were arriving at the British Museum just as Melville visited London in 1849. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austen_Henry_Layard ↩

  38. Smithfield prize cattle — Smithfield was London’s great livestock market, and the Smithfield Club (founded 1798) held a famous annual show for fattened prize cattle. Modern selectively bred cattle are far bigger than the cattle carved on ancient tablets. ↩

  39. “Pharaoh’s fat kine” — MEL: “For Pharaoh’s ‘kine’ (cattle), see Genesis 41.” Kine is the old plural of “cow,” in the language of the King James Bible. In Pharaoh’s dream, seven fat kine come up out of the Nile and are eaten by seven lean ones, which Joseph interprets as seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine (Genesis 41:2–4). Melville’s joke is that today’s prize bullocks are fatter than even the fat cows of Pharaoh’s dream. ↩

  40. “moot point” — MEL: “issue for debate.” In 1851 moot meant “open to argument.” The modern sense of “irrelevant” came later. This is the chapter’s real question, and a startling one for 1851: can hunting wipe out the whale entirely? ↩

  41. “the last whale, like the last man” — “The Last Man” was a favorite Romantic subject, from Thomas Campbell’s poem “The Last Man” (1823) to Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826). Ishmael pictures the last whale going out like an old man with a pipe, spouting his “final puff.” On-air hedge: a general echo of the theme, not a specific source. ↩

  42. The buffalo comparison — the bison really had vanished from Illinois within living memory; the last were gone from the state by the early 1800s. Melville had seen the prairie himself: in 1840 he traveled west to Galena, Illinois, to visit his uncle. “Where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch” describes the land booms of the new river cities, such as Chicago in the 1830s. MEL’s gloss on “this wondrous extermination” discusses Melville’s thinking about species extinction here. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting ↩

  43. “the spear of man” — figurative: “spear” stands for all human hunting weapons, with a deliberately ancient ring. By the early 1800s the buffalo east of the Mississippi were being killed mostly with guns, and the great mechanized slaughter of the Plains herds with long-range rifles came in the 1870s, twenty years after Melville wrote. ↩

  44. The whale-hunting math — Melville’s arithmetic: 40 men, 48 months (a four-year voyage), about 40 whales, against the same number of hunters on horseback killing “forty thousand and more buffaloes” in the same time. For hand-thrown harpoons and open boats, his reasoning is sound. What he couldn’t foresee was the explosive harpoon gun developed by the Norwegian Svend Foyn in the 1860s–70s, steam-powered catcher boats, and 20th-century factory ships, which changed the math catastrophically. ↩

  45. “the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise)” — a paradox about the American West. The West is where the sun sets, yet it is also where new days, new settlements and new lives are just beginning. For Melville’s readers the far West was the country’s sunrise. Here the phrase describes the buffalo country, “a wilderness and a virgin,” before settlement. ↩

  46. Whales changing behavior under hunting pressure — Ishmael argues that sperm whales haven’t become fewer, only harder to find, because they now travel in huge, widely separated herds “influenced by some views to safety.” He’s referring back to Ch. 87, “The Grand Armada.” It’s a remarkable claim for 1851: whales learning from being hunted. Modern research does show whale populations shifting their ranges and behavior in response to hunting and harassment, though historical whaling is now known to have wiped out huge numbers. See: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-firm-fortress-no-retreat-reading-and-mourning-moby-dick-on-the-cusp-of-climate-catastrophe/ ↩

  47. “whale-bone whales” / “cachalot” — “whale-bone whales” are what we now call baleen whales, such as the right whale, bowhead and humpback. They strain their food through plates of baleen (“whalebone”). The sperm whale, by contrast, has teeth. MEL: cachalot is “sperm whale (French).” See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baleen_whale ↩

  48. “two firm fortresses” — the Arctic and Antarctic ice, where the baleen whales can retreat “in a charmed circle of everlasting December,” as the Swiss retreated to their mountains when invaded. This was painfully wrong: the Antarctic became the site of the largest whale slaughter in history in the 20th century. Today’s reading is sadder still, since those ice “fortresses” are themselves melting. The essay cited in the previous note takes its title from this passage. ↩

  49. “13,000 … annually” — this figure comes from Melville’s sources and hasn’t been checked here; treat it as his number rather than a verified statistic. The American Northwest Coast right-whale fishery boomed in the 1840s and rapidly depleted the North Pacific right whales, which are still among the most endangered whales in the world. ↩

  50. “Harto, the historian of Goa” — MEL’s text reads “Horto” and explains: “Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica cites this report by Garcias ab Horto.” That is Garcia de Orta, a 16th-century Portuguese physician and naturalist who lived in Goa, the Portuguese colony in India. So this is another item that reached Melville through Browne, one of his favorite writers. The printed “Harto” in the American first edition appears to be a misreading of the name. ↩

  51. Semiramis, Porus, Hannibal — MEL: “In Assyrian legend, Queen Semiramis founded Babylon and Nineveh; the powerful Indian ruler Porus is mentioned in Ch. 87; and Carthaginian general Hannibal” famously took war elephants over the Alps against Rome (218 B.C.). Porus fought Alexander the Great with elephants in 326 B.C. If elephants survive thousands of years of such hunting, Ishmael argues, so will whales. ↩

  52. “a pasture to expatiate in” — expatiate in its original, physical sense: from Latin ex (out) + spatiari (to walk about, to roam). The whale has pasture to wander in. The later meaning, “to speak or write at length,” comes from the same root, and Melville used it that way in the first sentence of Ch. 104 (“to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate”), so the two chapters are framed by a pun. His arithmetic is about right: the ocean covers about 71% of the earth, roughly two and a half times the land area. ↩

  53. “New Holland” — MEL: “Early name for Australia, discovered by Dutch seamen.” ↩

  54. Whale longevity — Melville’s guess was good. Sperm whales can live 70 years or more, and bowhead whales, a baleen species, are now known to live over 200 years. Bowheads killed in Alaska in the 1990s and 2000s had fragments of 19th-century harpoon points embedded in them. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale ↩

  55. Tuileries, Windsor Castle, the Kremlin — MEL: “famous palaces in Paris, Windsor (England), and Moscow.” Seats of royal power in France, England and Russia, and the whale swam over all of them before there was any land. The chapter’s final image, of a world flooded “like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats” with the whale spouting defiance on top, answers the chapter’s title. What Melville got right and what he couldn’t foresee: his reasoning from the tools of his era is careful, but industrial whaling in the century after him brought several species to the edge of extinction. Most readers today treat Ch. 105 not as a foolish error but as a man reasoning well from the tools and scale of 1851. See: https://beigemoth.blog/2023/07/09/chapter-105-does-the-whales-magnitude-diminish-will-he-perish/ ↩

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