Chapter 92.00: CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.

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CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
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“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.” _Bracton,
l. 3, c. 3. _

Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which,
in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate
remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force
in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in
a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the
English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious
proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I
proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two
years.

It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of
the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching
a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore.
Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a
sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office
directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to
the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this
office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily
employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by
virtue of that same fobbing of them.

Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
fish high and dry, promising themselves a good £150 from the precious oil
and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale
with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps
a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of
Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale’s head, he says—“Hands
off! This fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord
Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation—so
truly English—knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching
their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the
stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the
hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length
one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to
speak,

“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”

“The Duke.”

“But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”

“It is his.”

“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all
that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains
but our blisters?”

“It is his.”

“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
getting a livelihood?”

“It is his.”

“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this
whale.”

“It is his.”

“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”

“It is his.”

In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of
the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take
the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To which
my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published) that he
had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the
reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would
decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this the still militant
old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands
coercing alms of beggars?

It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to
the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire
then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that
right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the
reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and
Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” And by the soundest
commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters.

But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
for that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench
author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that
ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this was
written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right
whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in
the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer
like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An
allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the
whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I
know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference
it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the
whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to
that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously
grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in
all things, even in law.