.. < chapter lvi 6  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

.. <p 267 >

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.

.. <p 268 >

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 in 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

.. <p 269 >

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.

.. <p 269 >