








CHAPTER CIV. THE FOSSIL WHALE


From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and
the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables
and hausers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a
line-of-battle-ship.

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to
approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him
in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now
remains to magnify him in an archological, fossiliferous, and
antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the
Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed
unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case
is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest
words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been
convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have
invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased
for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal
bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author
like me.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of
this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an
inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas
of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding
its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and
liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you
must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be
written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my
credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I
have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals,
and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise,
by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the
earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now
almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are
called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate
intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose
remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil
Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the
last preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet
sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking
ranks as Cetacean fossils.

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,
been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England,
in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the
year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphin in Paris, a short street
opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's
time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some
utterly unknown Leviathanic species.

But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842,
on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken
credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the
fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and
bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of
it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned
out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed
species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again
repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but
little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen
rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the
London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most
extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted
out of existence.

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
jaws, ribs, and vertebr, all characterized by partial resemblances to
the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on
the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to
that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for
time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I
obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when
wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and
in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an
inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world
was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the
present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree
like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's.
Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I
am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,
must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some
fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a
sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins,
and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe
of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was
there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was
cradled.

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by
the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.

"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine,
that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can
pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that
on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into
the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a
Whale's Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the
Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which
cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John
Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their
Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from
this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas
was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple."

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.





