CHAPTER 32. Cetology.

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost

in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere

the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of

the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter

almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the

more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which

are to follow.

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,

that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The

classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here

essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.

“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled

Cetology,” says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.

“It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry

as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families.

* * * Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal”

(sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.

“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.”

“Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field

strewn with thorns.” “All these incomplete indications but serve to

torture us naturalists.”

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,

those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real

knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in

some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are

the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at

large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors

of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;

Ray; Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;

Marten; Lacépède; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick

Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne;

the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to

what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above

cited extracts will show.

Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen

ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional

harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate

subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing

authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great

sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy

mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper

upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of

the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the

profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the

then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to

this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats

and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference

to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past

days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was

to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a

new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,—the

Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth!

There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the

living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest

degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s;

both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both

exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to

be found in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes,

it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific

description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic,

lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted

whales, his is an unwritten life.

Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular

comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the

present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent

laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I

hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;

because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very

reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical

description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to much

of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of

a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the

Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea

after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations,

ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I

that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful

tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a

covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam

through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with

whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There

are some preliminaries to settle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology

is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it

still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of

Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from

the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,

sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict,

were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the

Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from

the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular

heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem

intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure

meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley

Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and

they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether

insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned

ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.

This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal

respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given

you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;

whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.

Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as

conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a

whale is _a spouting fish with a horizontal tail_. There you have him.

However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded

meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a

fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is

still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have

noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a

vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail,

though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal

position.

By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude

from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified

with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other

hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as

alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish

must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the

grand divisions of the entire whale host.

*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and

Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are

included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish

are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers,

and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny

their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their

passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.

First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary

BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them

all, both small and large.

I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.

As the type of the FOLIO I present the _Sperm Whale_; of the OCTAVO,

the _Grampus_; of the DUODECIMO, the _Porpoise_.

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The

_Sperm Whale_; II. the _Right Whale_; III. the _Fin-Back Whale_; IV.

the _Hump-backed Whale_; V. the _Razor Back Whale_; VI. the _Sulphur

Bottom Whale_.