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 backbone. 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 pouring 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 vertebrae 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.
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Chapter 26 - Knights and Squires
Chapter 27 - Knights and Squires
Chapter 29 - Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb
Chapter 39 - First Night-Watch
Chapter 40 - Midnight, Forecastle
Chapter 42 - The Whiteness of The Whale
Chapter 48 - The First Lowering
Chapter 50 - Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah
Chapter 54 - The Town-Ho's Story
Chapter 55 - Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales
Chapter 56 - Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes
Chapter 57 - Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars
Chapter 61 - Stubb Kills a Whale
Chapter 65 - The Whale as a Dish
Chapter 66 - The Shark Massacre
Chapter 71 - The Jeroboam's Story
Chapter 73 - Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale and Then Have a Talk Over Him
Chapter 74 - The Sperm Whale's Head - Contrasted View
Chapter 75 - The Right Whale's Head - Contrasted View
Chapter 76 - The Battering-Ram
Chapter 77 - The Great Heidelburgh Tun
Chapter 78 - Cistern and Buckets
Chapter 81 - The Pequod Meets The Virgin
Chapter 82 - The Honor and Glory of Whaling
Chapter 83 - Jonah Historically Regarded
Chapter 88 - Schools and Schoolmasters
Chapter 89 - Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish
Chapter 91 - The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud
Chapter 94 - A Squeeze of the Hand
Chapter 98 - Stowing Down and Clearing Up
Chapter 100 - Leg and Arm. The Pequod of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London
Chapter 102 - A Bower in the Arsacides
Chapter 103 - Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton
Chapter 104 - The Fossil Whale
Chapter 105 - Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? - Will He Perish?
Chapter 108 - Ahab and the Carpenter
Chapter 109 - Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin
Chapter 110 - Queequeg in His Coffin
Chapter 115 - The Pequod Meets The Bachelor
Chapter 120 - The Deck Toward the End of the First Night Watch
Chapter 121 - Midnight - The Forecastle Bulwarks
Chapter 122 - Midnight Aloft.- Thunder and Lightning
Chapter 125 - The Log and Line
Chapter 128 - The Pequod Meets The Rachel
Chapter 131 - The Pequod Meets The Delight
Chapter 133 - The Chase - First Day
Chapter 134 - The Chase - Second Day