75 The Right Whale's Head
CHAPTER 75
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-chariotRoman war-chariot: This comparison derives from Frederick Debell Bennett, Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe; see Mansfield and Vincent's edition of Moby-Dick, 769. (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 shoegalliot-toed: Resembling the “bluff-bowed” cargo vessel of that name; see also Melville’s first footnote in Ch. 61.. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s lastshoemaker’s last: A last is the foot-shaped form around which the maker builds the shoe. (The “Dutch voyager” has not been identified.). 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 intervalimportant interval: Pregnancy; Ishmael refers to the superstition that the sight of something horrible or ugly will deform a pregnant woman's child. 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 wigwamIndian wigwam: While certain details in his description of the right whale’s mouth—roof, ridge pole, Venetian blinds, hollows, ridges, whiskers—are drawn from Henry T. Cheever’s The Whale and His Captors and William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions (Mansfield and Vincent 769), the comparison of the mouth to a wigwam is Ishmael’s invention. Melville visited Mackinac (pronounced MAKinaw) Island at the confluence of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan in upper Michigan on his journey west to Galena, Illinois, in the summer of 1840. Melville's use of the wigwam image, appearing first in Mardi, is replayed twice in Moby-Dick, and Bryant suggests that Melville may have entered a wigwam when his steamboat stopped “at Mackinaw”; see Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, vol. 2, 676. See also the "wigwam" made of baleen strips and erected on the deck of the Pequod in Ch. 16, “The Ship.”. 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 whalebone, 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 mentionedcursorily mentioned: see Ch. 58.. 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 PurchasPurchas . . . Hackluyt: See note for "Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c." in Ch. 56 calls them the wondrous “whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* 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.”
As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,” “blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busksbusks: corset stays. 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 farthingalefarthingale: a frame for a hoop skirt. 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 organthe great Haarlem organ: Built in the mid-eighteenth century in Haarlem, Netherlands, the organ has five thousand pipes., and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkeythe softest Turkey: Traditional Turkish rugs have a deep pile of pure wool.—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.
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* [Melville's Note] 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.
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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 yearsa Stoic . . . a Platonian . . . Spinoza: Ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, counseling engagement in civic and military affairs, preached and practiced rationalism, mental tranquility, and a belief in moral worth. By contrast, Plato’s philosophy is metaphysical, building on a search for underlying universal concepts or ideals. The Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) similarly argued that all things are expressions of the eternal, universal order. In Pierre (Bk. 14, Ch. 2), Melville is more critical of Spinoza and other neo-Platonists who explain away God’s silence despite the sordid facts of this world..