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Table of Contents
Chapter 24
THE ADVOCATE
As Queequeg and I are now
fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling
has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and
disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen,
of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it
may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at
large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are
called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any
miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general
opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say;
and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W.
F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be
deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason
why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at
best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when
actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements.
Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the
bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably
delights to honor. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our
business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty
generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the
sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But
even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery
decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies'
plaudits? And if the ..
2 idea of peril so much
enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye
that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly
recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies
the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared
with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! But, though the world scouts
at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage;
yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles
that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory! But
look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what
we whalemen are, and have been. Why did the Dutch in DeWitt's time have
admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own
personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to
that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why
did Britain between the years and pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of
1,000,000 pounds? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now
outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of
upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly
consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing,
20,000,000 dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped
harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars. How comes all this, if there be not
something puissant in whaling? But this is not the half; look again. I freely
assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one
single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more
potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high
and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so
remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential
issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless
task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many ..
3 years past the
whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known
parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no
chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and european
men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes
to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the
way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may celebrate as
they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes, Your Krusensterns;
but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that
were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your Krusenstern. For in their
succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the
beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and
terrors that Cooke with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have
dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those
things were but the lifetime commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often,
adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted
unworthy of being set down in the ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the
world! Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the
long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the
whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown,
touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown
how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and
Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal
democracy in those parts. That great America on the other side of the sphere,
Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first
blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those
shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The
whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the
infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times
saved ..
4 from starvation by the
benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their
waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do
commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary
and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to
their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become
hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for
already she is on the threshold. But if, in the face of all this, you still
declare that whaling has no aesthetically noble associations connected with
it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you
with a split helmet every time. The whale has no famous author, and whaling no
famous chronicler, you will say. The whale no famous author, and whaling no
famous chronicler? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but
mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but
no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down
the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who
pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke! True
enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood
in their veins. No good blood in their veins? They have something better than
royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel"
afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket,
and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers --all kith and
kin to noble Benjamin --this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the
world to the other. Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is
not respectable. Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English
statutory law, the whale is declared a royal fish. ..
5 Oh, that's only
nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way. The
whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs
given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital, the bones of a
whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous
object in the cymballed procession. Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what
you will, there is no real dignity in whaling. No dignity in whaling? The
dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in
the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it
off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three
hundred and fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than that great
captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns. And, as for
me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in
me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed
world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do
anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left
undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any
precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and
the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. ..
6 See subsequent
chapters for something more on this head. ..
7 See subsequent
chapters for something more on this head. ..
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