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1As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come
2to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince
3ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it may be deemed almost
4superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with
5what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it
6would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and
7if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card,
8such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason why the world
9declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business;
10and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true.
11But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably
12delights to honor. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into
13certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship
14at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what
15disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so
16many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of
17the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly
18recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the
19comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! But, though the world scouts at
20us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all
21the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory! But look at
22this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been. Why did the Dutch
23in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit
24out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of
25Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of £1,000,000? And
26lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a
27navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the
28ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of
29$7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling? But this is not the half; look again. I
30freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which
31within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the
32high and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
33continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
34offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a
35handful suffice. For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known
36parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever
37sailed. If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the
38honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the
39savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say
40that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your
41Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of
42unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would
43not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the
44life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these
45men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! Until the whale fishery
46rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and
47the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the
48jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how
49from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the
50establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts. That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia,
51was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other
52ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true
53mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were
54several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their
55waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that
56cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first
57destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the
58credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold. But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling
59has no æsthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and
60unhorse you with a split helmet every time. The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will
61say. The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but
62mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great,
63who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who
64pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke! True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor
65devils; they have no good blood in their veins. No good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal
66blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old
67settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble
68Benjamin--this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other. Good again; but then all confess
69that somehow whaling is not respectable. Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the
70whale is declared "a royal fish." Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing
71way. The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his
72entering the world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous
73object in the cymballed procession. *See subsequent chapters for something more on this head. Grant it, since you cite
74it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in whaling. No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the
75very heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and
76take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I
77account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns. And, as
78for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real
79repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do
80anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or
81more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the
82glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
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