CHAPTER 104
The Fossil Whale
From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial themewhereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you,you could not compress him. By good rights he should only betreated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongsfrom 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 awayin the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behovesme 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 habitatoryand anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him inan archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.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 staggerto this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary.And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consultone in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a hugequarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose;because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fittedhim 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 chirographyexpands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill!Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan,they weary me, and make me faint with their outreachingcomprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circleof the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men,and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolvingpanoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe,not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is thevirtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk.To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.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 mycredentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneoustime I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches,canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader,that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossilsof monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relicsdiscovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting,or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures,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 thoughnone of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time,they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justifytheir taking ranks as Cetacean fossils.
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bonesand 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 Tuileries;and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp,in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belongedto some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.
But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almostcomplete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842,on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulousslaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon itthe name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being takenacross the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that thisalleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significantillustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book,that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shapeof 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 mutationsof the globe have blotted out of existence.
When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons,skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterizedby partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters;but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities tothe annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors;I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere timeitself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim,shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedgedbastions 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 andthe Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoonhad shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy.I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struckat this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakableterrors 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 thestereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed hisancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claimfor them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable printof his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fiftyyears ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculpturedand 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 swimmingin that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquityof the whale, in his own osseous postdiluvian reality, as set downby the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Raftersand Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of amonstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore.The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by Godupon the Temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death.But the truth of the Matter is, that on either sideof the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles intothe 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 reachedby 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 Baseof the Temple."
In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if yoube a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.