Chapter 26.00: CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.

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CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
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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 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 De Witt’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 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of £1,000,000?
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
4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing,
$20,000,000! And every year importing into our harbors a well reaped
harvest of $7,000,000. 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 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
Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have
sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook
and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in
the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin
islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook 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
life-time 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
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
æsthetically 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.” *

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. *

*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.

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.