THE WHALE.
"The fisherman belated at night in the North Sea," says Milton, "saw
an isle, a shoal, which, like the back of an enormous mountain, lay
upon the water, and in that isle or shoal he fastened his anchor. The
isle fled and carried him away. That isle was Leviathan."
An error only too natural. D'Urmont Durville was similarly though not
so fatally deceived. He saw at a distance what seemed a bank with
breakers and eddies all around it, and certain patches upon it looked
like rocks. Above and around this seeming bank the swallow and the
stormy petrel raced and sported. The bank looked venerably grey,
covered as it was with shells and madrepores. But the mighty mass
suddenly moved, and two enormous columns of water which it threw high
into the air, revealed the awakened Whale.
The inhabitant of another planet who should descend towards ours in a
balloon and survey it from a vast height would say to himself, "The
only creatures that I can discover there are from one hundred to two
hundred feet long, their arms are only twenty feet long, but their
superb tail, thirty feet, magnificently beats the Sea, and enables
them to advance with a speed and a majestic ease which make it very
evident that they are the sovereigns of that planet."
And by and bye he would add: "It is a great pity that the solid part
of that globe should be deserted, or at best peopled only by creatures
so small that they are invisible. The sea alone is inhabited and by a
kind and gentle race. Here the family is held in honor, the mother
nurses and suckles her young ones with tenderness, and although her
arms are very short she contrives during the raging of the tempest to
protect her little one by pressing it to her vast body."
Whales are given to companionship. Formerly they were seen sailing
along not only in pairs, but occasionally in large families of ten or
twelve in the solitary seas. Nothing exceeded the grandeur of those
vast and living fleets, sometimes lighted up by their own
phosphorescence, and throwing to the height of thirty or forty feet in
the Polar seas columns of water which smoked as it rose. They would
approach a vessel, peaceably and in evident curiosity; looking upon
her as some specimen of a new and strange species of fish; and they
sported around and welcomed the visitor. In their joy they raised
themselves half upright and then fell down again with a huge noise,
making a boiling gulf as they sank. Their innocent familiarity went so
far that they sometimes touched the ship or her boats. An imprudent
confidence which was most cruelly deceived! In less than a century,
the great species of the Whale have almost disappeared.
Their manners and their organization are those of our herbivora. Like
our ruminating animals they have a succession of stomachs where their
nourishment is elaborated; they need no teeth and have none. They
easily graze the living prairies of the sea, I mean the gigantic,
soft, and gelatinous, fucus, the beds of infusoriæ, the banks of the
imperceptible atoms. For such aliments the chase is not necessary.
Having no occasion for war, they have no necessity for the sawlike
teeth or the frightful jaws of the Shark and other destructive
creatures. Boitard tells us that they never pursue. Their food is
borne to them on every wave. Innocent and peaceable, they engulf a
world of scarcely organized creatures which die ere they lived, and
pass unconsciously into the crucible of universal change.
Not the slightest connection between this gentle race of mammiferæ,
which, like our own, have milk and red blood, and the monsters of an
earlier age,--horrible abortions of the primitive mud! The Whale, of
far more recent origin, found a purified water, a free Sea, and a
peaceful globe.
He had finished, the Globe had, his old discordant dream of
lizard-fishes, and flying dragons, the frightful reign of the reptile;
he had got out of the sinister fogs and mists into the lovely dawn of
harmonious conceptions. Our carnivorous creatures were not yet in
existence. There was a brief time (a hundred thousand years, perhaps,)
of great gentleness and innocence, when the Opossum and other pouched
animals were on the earth; excellent creatures, that tenderly loved
their families, that carried their young, and, in case of the fatigue
or danger of those little creatures, sheltered them in their pouches.
In the Sea appeared vast and gentle giants.
The milk of the sea, its superabundant oil, its warm animalized mucus,
saturated with a marvellous power tending to life, swelling at length
into those gigantic creatures, those spoilt children of nature which
she endowed with an incomparable strength, and with the yet greater
gift of the beautiful and warm red blood, which now for the first time
appeared.
That is the true flower of the world. All the pale and cold blooded
creation is languid and seemingly heartless, when compared with the
generous and exulting life which boils with anger or love in the rich
purple.
The strength of the superior creation, its charm, its beauty, reside
in that blood. With it commenced a new youth in nature, a flame of
desire, of love, and the love of family and race; to be completed and
crowned in man by divine Pity.
But with this magnificent gift of red blood, the nervous sensibility
was enormously increased; the being became more vulnerable, more
sensitive alike to pleasure and to pain. The Whale having scarcely any
sense of scent or hearing, every thing in his organization is
favorable to the sense of touch. The thick blubber which so well
protects him from the cold, does not at all guard him against hurts.
His finely organized skin of six tissues shudders and vibrates in them
all at every blow, and their papillæ are most delicate instruments of
touch. And all this is animated and made vivid by rich, red blood,
which, even allowing for difference of bulk, is infinitely more
abundant than that of the terrestrial mammiferæ. The Whale, when
wounded, ensanguines the ocean to a great distance; the blood that we
have in drops, is lavished upon him in torrents.
The female is pregnant nine months. Her milk is sweetish and warm,
like that of the human female. But as she has always to breast the
wave, her front mammæ, if placed on the chest, would be exposed to all
shocks; they are, therefore, placed a little lower on the belly. Here
the young one is sheltered and safe from the shock of the wave, which
is already broken, ere it reaches him. The form, inherent to such a
life, contracts the mother, at the waist and deprives her of that
adorable grace of woman, that beauty of settled and harmonious life,
where all is tenderness. But the Whale, the great woman of the sea,
however tender she may be, is forced to conform, in every thing, to
her continual battle with the waves. For the rest, beneath that
strange uncouth disguise, the organization, and the sensitiveness, are
the same; fish above, the Whale is woman beneath. She is infinitely
timid, too; the mere flight of a bird will sometimes terrify her so
much that she dives so violently as to hurt herself by striking the
bottom.
Love with the Whale being subject to difficult condition requires a
profoundly peaceful place. Like a noble elephant, who fears profane
eyes, the Whales love only the desert. Their meeting place for pairing
is towards the poles, in the solitary bays of Greenland, among the
fogs of Behring, and, also, no doubt, in the warm sea which is known
to exist close to the pole itself. A solitude they must have to mate
in, be it arctic or antarctic.
Will that warm sea be found again? It is only to be reached by
traversing the horrid defiles which open, close, and change, with
every succeeding year, as though to prevent the return. The Whale, it
is believed, pass under the ice from one sea to the other; a bold and
perilous journey by that dark road. Compelled to rise to breathe every
quarter of an hour, though they have reserves of air which will last
them a little longer, they are much endangered as they pass through
that enormous crust with only here and there a breathing hole. If one
of these cannot be reached in due time, the ice is so thick and solid
every where else, that no strength of the Whale could break through
it; and he would be as helplessly drowned as Leander in the
Hellespont. But the Whales know nothing about the fate of Leander; so
they boldly venture, and for the most part pass safely.
The solitude is great, it is a strange scene of death and silence for
this festival of ardent and passionate life. A white Bear, a Seal, or,
perhaps, a blue Fox, respectful and prudent, looks on from a distance.
Fantastically brilliant chandeliers and mirrors are not wanting.
Bluish crystals, huge and dazzling peaks of ice, and masses of virgin
snow, are all around.
What renders this Elephantine Hymen the more interesting, is, that it
is one of express consent. They have not the tyrannous weapons of the
Shark by which he subdues his female, for on the contrary their
slippery skins separate them. In their struggle to overcome this
desperate obstacle to their happiness, one might suppose them to be
fighting. The whale-men assert that they have seen this strange
spectacle. The couples in their burning transports rear themselves
upright like two vast towers, and endeavor to embrace with their short
arms. They fall down again with an immense crash; and Bear and Man
alike retreat, astounded by the deafening sobs of the vast creatures.
The solution is unknown; those explanations, which have been given,
are simply absurd. What is certain is, that, whether in the act of
love or of suckling, or of defence, the unfortunate Whale suffers
under the double oppression of its weight and its difficulty of
breathing. She can only breathe with her head above water; if she
remain below she will be choked. Is the Whale, therefore, a
terrestrial animal? Not so. If by chance she be stranded on the coast,
the enormous weight of her flesh and blubber overwhelms her respiring
organs and she is strangled.
Placed wholly in the only element in which she can respire, she is
asphyxiated just as surely as if kept beyond a certain space of time
wholly beneath the water.
Let us speak plainly. This vast mammiferous giant is an incomplete
creature, the first poetic offspring of creative power, which first
contemplates the sublime and then reverts to the possible and the
durable. The admirable animal was well provided as to size, strength,
warm blood, sweet milk, and good disposition. It needed nothing but
the means of living. It was made without respect to the general
proportions of this globe, without respect to the imperative law of
weight. In spite of his enormous bones, beneath, his gigantic sides
were not strong enough to keep his chest sufficiently expanded and
free. Escaping from his enemy, the water, he found another enemy in
the land, and his mighty lungs were overwhelmed, and collapsed. His
magnificent blowing apertures throwing up columns of water thirty feet
into the air, are, in themselves, proofs of an organization infantine
and rude. In throwing up that column towards the sky the _panting
blower_ seems to say, "Oh, nature, why hast thou made me a serf?"
The life of this creature was a problem, and it seemed that this
splendid but imperfect first draft of the vast and the warm-blooded
could not endure. Their furtive and difficult love, their suckling
amidst the roar and the rush of the tempest, in the hard choice
between shipwreck and strangling; the two great acts of their life
rendered almost impossible, and performed only by mightiest effort and
most heroic will;--what conditions of existence are these!
The mother has never more than one little one, and that is much for
her to achieve. Both she and it have three great annoyances, the
difficulty of breasting the waves, the suckling, and the fatal
necessity of rising to the surface to breathe. The education of the
young one is a real combat. Tempest-tossed and sorely beaten by the
waves, the young one sucks, as it were, by stealth, when the mother
can throw herself on her side. Here the mother is admirable. She knows
that the young one in endeavoring to draw the teat will be forced to
leave its hold; and, therefore, seizing the favorable moment, she, as
from a piston, discharges a tun of milk into the gaping and craving
mouth.
The male seldom quits the female. Their embarrassment is great when
the eager and cruel fishers attack them in the person of their young
one. The whale-men harpoon the young one, well knowing that the
parents will follow it. And, in fact, they do make almost incredible
efforts to save it and carry it off; they rise to the surface and
expose themselves to the utmost danger. Even when it is dead, they
still defend it; though so well able to dive and save themselves, they
remain upon the water in full peril to follow the floating body of
their little one.
Shipwrecks are common among them, for two reasons. In the first place
they cannot, like the fishes, remain during tempestuous weather in the
lower and peaceable depths; and in the next place, whatever the
danger, they will not separate; the strong nobly share the fate of the
weak; the whole family drowns together.
In December, 1723, at the mouth of the Elbe, eight females perished,
and near their carcasses were their eight males; and a similar scene
was witnessed in 1784, at Andierne in Brittany. In the latter
instance, fish and frightened porpoises were driven on shore by the
tempest, and strange and terrible bellowings were heard from a great
family of Whales, tempest-driven, and struggling for life. There,
again, the males perished with the females. Many of the latter were
with young and defenceless against the pitiless waves; they were cast
upon the shore to die. Two of them, in this situation, brought forth
their young with piercing shrieks, and groans most harrowingly human.