THE RIGHT WHALE’S HEAD—CONTRASTED VIEW.
Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right
Whale’s head.
As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to
a Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly
rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather
inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred
years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a
shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of
the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be
lodged, she and all her progeny.
But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit
and look at these two _f_-shaped spout-holes, you would take the whole
head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures
in its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this
strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass—this
green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and
the Southern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes
solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,
with a bird’s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those
live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost
sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the
technical term “crown” also bestowed upon it; in which case you will
take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually
a diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together
for him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is
a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging
lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by
carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a
sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.
The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during
an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when
earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a
slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I
at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam.
Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve
feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a
regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides,
present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats
of whale-bone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the
upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which
have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones
are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains
the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when
open-mouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the
central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there
are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some
whalemen calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its
circular rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from
demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. At any
rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right
Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.
In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
“whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;[16] another, “hogs’ bristles;”
a third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
“There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
upper _chop_, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”
[16] This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of
whisker, or rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered
white hairs on the upper part of the outer end of the lower
jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish
expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.
As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,”
“blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has
long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was
in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those
ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as
you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a
tent spread over the same bone.
But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and,
standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all
these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not
think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest
Turkey—the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the
mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
amount of oil.
Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
with—that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no
great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible
of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are
there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely
anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external
spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet
lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other
will not be very long in following.
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same
he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem
now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like
placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark
the other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed
by accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the
jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical
resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a
Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in
his latter years.