.. < chapter lvii 23  OF WHALES IN PAINT; IN TEETH; IN WOOD; IN >


    

SHEET-IRON; IN STONE; IN MOUNTAINS; IN STARS On Tower-hill, as you go down

to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the

sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic

scene in which he lost his leg.  There are three whales and three boats; and

one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original

integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale.  Any time

these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and

exhibited

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that stump to an incredulous world.  But the time of his justification has now

come.  His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping,

at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in

the western clearings.  But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a

stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands

ruefully contemplating his own amputation.  Throughout the Pacific, and also

in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively

sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on

Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and

other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little

ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in

their hours of ocean leisure.  Some of them have little boxes of

dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering

business.  But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with

that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything

you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.  Long exile from Christendom and

civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed

him, i.  e.  what is called savagery.  Your true whale-hunter is as much a

savage as an Iroquois.  I myself am a savage; owning no allegiance but to the

King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.  Now,

one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is

his wonderful patience of industry.  An ancient Hawaiian war-club or

spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as

great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.  For, with but a bit

of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden

net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady

application.  As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage.

With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth,

of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not

quite as workmanlike, but as close

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packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield;

and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine

old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.  Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out

of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met

with in the forecastles of American whalers.  Some of them are done with much

accuracy.  At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales

hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door.  When the porter is

sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best.  But these knocking whales are

seldom remarkable as faithful essays.  On the spires of some old-fashioned

churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but

they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so

labelled with Hands off!  you cannot examine them closely enough to decide

upon their merit.  In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of

high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the

plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the

Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in

a surf of green surges.  Then, again, in mountainous countries where the

traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there

from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles

of whales defined along the undulating ridges.  But you must be a thorough

whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return

to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting

latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are

such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would

require a laborious re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still

remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera

chronicled them.  Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to


     trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them;

as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked

in battle among the clouds.  Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round

and round

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the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to

me.  And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis,

and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of

Hydrus and the Flying Fish.  With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and

fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the

topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless

tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

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