Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderlinessis the true method.

  The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researchesup to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressedwith its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when Ifind so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts,who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transportedwith the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately,to so emblazoned a fraternity.

  The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman;and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the firstwhale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with anysordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession,when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fillmen's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseusand Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king,was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was inthe very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen,intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and deliveredand married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit,rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day;inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart.And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa,now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples,there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,which the city's legends and all the inhabitants assertedto be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italyin triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively importantin this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

  Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by somesupposed to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous storyof St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to havebeen a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragonsare strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other."Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon ofthe sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself.Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploithad St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land,instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep.Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George,a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

  Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us;for though the creature encountered by that valiant whalemanof old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape,and though the battle is depicted on land and the sainton horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times,when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George'swhale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach;and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might havebeen only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind,it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacredlegend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold thisso-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth,this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowlidol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being plantedbefore the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palmsof his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishypart of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp,even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England;and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should beenrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore,let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom,I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like theirgreat patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain,since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are muchbetter entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

  Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I longremained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies,that antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doerof rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown upby a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whalemanof him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he everactually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside.Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman;at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale.I claim him for one of our clan.

  But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian storyof Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the stillmore ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa;certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then,why not the prophet?

  Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprisethe whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named;for like royal kings of old times, we find the head-watersof our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves.That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster,which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three personsin the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoohimself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his tenearthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved torecreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions,he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas,or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensableto Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which thereforemust have contained something in the shape of practical hintsto young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom ofthe waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and soundingdown in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who ridesa horse is called a horseman?

  Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there'sa member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can headoff like that?