Chapter 58.00: CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.

**
CHAPTER 56. 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, etc. 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 incomputable flash of time, you
behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the
whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of
the whole thing is wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub
floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons
obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about
the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black
stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault
might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that
pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one.

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the
barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy
bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His
jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a
smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking
in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs,
shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale
sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the
thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in
the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer.
Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable
artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping
unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead
whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from
the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.

Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was
either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting
action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you
find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in
that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way,
pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France; where every
sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings
and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly
unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of
Garnery.

The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s
experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale
hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen seem
entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as
the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of
effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a
pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving
us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical
engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the
microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a
shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals.
I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a
veteran), but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not
to have procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a
Greenland Justice of the Peace.

In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself “H.
Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present purpose,
nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene
among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a
calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship,
and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both drooping together
in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered with
reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few
aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a different
affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the
Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of
cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat,
hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase
to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use;
three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden
roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, like
a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling
whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to
windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains,
seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.