Chapter 105.00: CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.

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CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
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In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized
Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet
in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety
tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably
outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one
hundred inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?

Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw,
teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply
point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed
bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of
the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated
part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you
must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed,
otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we
are about to view.

In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been
ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in
length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull
and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain
back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third of
its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his
vitals.

To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the
hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of
her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time,
but a long, disconnected timber.

The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly
six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively
longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle
ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the
remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet
and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly
correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In
some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath
bridges over small streams.

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the
whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the
Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish
which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen
feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight
feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living
magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked
spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in
flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here
saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic,
but boneless flukes, an utter blank!

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to
comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead
attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the
heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
be truly and livingly found out.

But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane,
to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it’s done,
it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar.

There are forty and odd vertebræ in all, which in the skeleton are not
locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic
spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one,
is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four.
The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two
inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was
told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some
little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, who had stolen them to
play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of
living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.