For all these reasons, then, any way you may look
at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan
is that one creature in the world which must remain
unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may
hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can
hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.
So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely
what the whale really looks like. And the only
mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea
of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself;
but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally
stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to
me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity
touching this Leviathan.
Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True
Pictures of Whaling Scenes
In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales,
I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still
more monstrous stories of them which are to be found
in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially
in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c.
But I pass that matter by.
I know of only four published outlines of the great
Sperm Whale; Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick
Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous
chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to.
Huggins’s is far better than theirs; but, by
great odds, Beale’s is the best. All Beale’s
drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle
figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes,
capping his second chapter. His frontispiece,
boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated
to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men,
is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect.
Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne
are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly
engraved. That is not his fault though.
Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are
in Scoresby; but they are drawn on too small a scale
to convey a desirable impression. He has but
one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency,
because it is by such pictures only, when at all well
done, that you can derive anything like a truthful
idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters.
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though
in some details not the most correct, presentations
of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found,
are two large French engravings, well executed, and
taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively,
they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale.
In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is depicted
in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat
from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high
in the. air upon his back the terrific wreck of the
stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially
unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster’s
spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single
