Ch. 3
CETOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
I give the popular fishermen’s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
Ishmael, “Cetology”
Ishmael begins “Cetology” apologizing for a break in the action since the Pequod is finally at sea and rolling along under sail. He has established how dangerous and honorable it is to be a whaleman, but before he continues to the high drama of revealing Ahab and his true mission of lusty revenge against the White Whale, he pauses here on the North Atlantic for what he deems “a matter almost indispensable”: to define whether a whale is a mammal or a fish and to classify how sperm whales fit into the broader taxonomy of cetaceans. “Cetology” is his longest direct exposition on science in the novel.
IS THE WHALE A FISH OR A MAMMAL?
Twenty-first-century American lobstermen will often among themselves refer to a catch of the American lobster (Homarus americanus) as a crate of “bugs.” These fishermen are well aware that lobster are not insects. Most of them could tell you that lobsters are related to crabs, that they are decapods, and that they had some connection to the Crustacea (a subphylum within the phylum Arthropoda, which includes insects). Yet my guess is that most Americans, fishermen or not, would be hard-pressed to explain the difference between a lobster and an insect, other than insects can’t live underwater and perhaps have a different number of legs.
In “Cetology,” Ishmael sides with the fishermen, the Nantucket whalemen, who use the colloquial name of “fish” to describe whales. He is joking—mostly. It’s a debate with some history.
On January 1, 1819, the year of Melville’s birth and the year the ill-fated whaleship Essex sailed away from Nantucket, the newspapers in New York City reported the final verdict of an entire court case that hinged around this very question of whether a whale should be considered a fish or a mammal. The case was about money: a merchant refused to pay a penalty for not having his “fish oil” inspected. The merchant had purchased three barrels of whale oil. The leading ichthyologist in New York City, Samuel Mitchell, was a lead witness, as was a whaleship captain named (true story) Preserved Fish. Although Captain Fish believed, like Professor Mitchell, that the whale was a mammal, he had a difficult time defending the idea under a lawyer’s quick-witted cross examination. Another working whaleman, James Reeves, the only other person brought to the stand who had seen whales at sea, spoke as a witness with a different opinion than Captain Fish, deciding from his three voyages that the whale was a fish. Seaman Reeves was not confident of the nature of the spout, for example. Perhaps whales did breathe water? In the end, the jury was not convinced either. Thus, in 1819 in New York City, by the court of law and in the dockside realm of oil inspection, the whale was still a fish.1
Melville read of this case decades later, yet he somehow resisted including this in Moby-Dick. The case was mentioned in his numerous fish documents. For example, Dr. Frederick Bennett wrote directly of the debate in 1841, disappointed that the American jury did not listen to “the learned distinctions of science.”2
By the time Melville went to sea in the 1840s, most whalemen and the general public knew that whales breathe air, are warm-blooded, nurse live young, and so on—as Ishmael delineates in “Cetology,” quoting Linnaeus (likely from his encyclopedia), who had written of these traits nearly a century earlier. Later in “The Blanket,” Ishmael writes that “like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood.” But in the America in which Melville grew up, fish was a broader term than we use it today. Fish were simply animals that live in the water all the time, derived straight from the Bible’s grouping of the birds, beasts, and fishes. Consider the names, for example, crayfish, or starfish. Out at sea the whalemen referred to female whales as “cows,” the males as “bulls,” and infant whales as “cubs.” Yet collectively the whalemen still called the whales fish: because the animals lived in water all the time, never hauling out on the beach as did “amphibious” seals.3
Today, for lobstermen, the word bug rolls off the tongue better, their catch does look like giant insects, and the nickname diminishes the creatures they capture, rendering their endeavor an easier, if a seemingly lowlier task. Perhaps the word fish did the same for the American whalemen, too. Whether a whale was a mammal or a fish was simply a different term with little practical value. If anything, calling it a mammal at the time was a bit haughty. The name mammal in Melville’s day even carried a somewhat salacious connotation as it brought up the image of a woman breastfeeding.4
Beginning with “Cetology” and then throughout the novel, Ishmael positions the practical hunter’s knowledge of the whalemen above that of the “learned naturalists ashore,” those pale closet naturalists of the world who sat in preservative-choked laboratories receiving specimens to analyze, men who never had any direct experience with the animals alive. Although genuinely interested in their findings and endeavors, Melville seems to have had a career-long desire to deride, or at least cynically question, what he saw as at times a soulless mainstream scientific community. So when in doubt, Ishmael sides with the whalemen.5
Ishmael reflects accurately that even in the 1840s the terminology question remained an active one in the forecastles of the American whaling fleet. In Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, for example, it was such common knowledge that a whale was a mammal that Browne used this to make fun of the ignorance of a fellow greenhand. Browne’s sailor says, when looking over the rail at the first sperm whale caught of the voyage: “Why, some folks says whales isn’t fish at all. I rayther calculate they are, myself. Whales has fins, so has fish; whales has slick skins, so has fish; whales has tails, so has fish; whales ain’t got scales on ’em, neither has catfish, nor eels, nor tadpoles, nor frogs, nor horse-leeches. I conclude, then, whales is fish. Every body had oughter call ’em so. Nine out of ten doos call ’em fish.”6
Within the scientific community by the 1850s, when Melville sat with his fish documents in his study in his Pittsfield farmhouse, the matter was firmly settled. Surgeon Beale wrote of whales as mammals without deigning to address the issue. Dr. Bennett began his general comments on whales explaining there was no reason they could not be mammals. In his Book of Nature, Good explained that whales were in the seventh order of the mammals, as put forth by Linnaeus. He also wrote that Baron Cuvier had a newer system of three mammalian orders, divided by types of feet: hooves, clawed, or fin-like. Melville’s Penny Cyclopædia also mentions this system by Cuvier, the “great zoologist.”7
No dictionary, encyclopedia, or any book of natural history at the time left out Baron Georges Cuvier. Ishmael calls him, sarcastically, “the great Cuvier,” probably because of that encyclopedia entry, but also because Beale points out so many of Cuvier’s errors when it came to whales. (Georges’ younger brother Frederic was also responsible for that “squash” of a whale illustration that Ishmael mocks later in the novel.) Baron Georges Cuvier, a French paleontologist, was the Western world’s most influential naturalist in the early 1800s. He largely invented the concept of comparative anatomy, a focus on skeletal systems, and the proof that certain species on Earth had actually lived and then gone extinct—which required some new explanations to account for Noah’s flood and the Biblical age of the planet. In addition to leaning on Cuvier, the authors of books of natural history for the general public in the midcentury all wrote of whales as mammals, but they still all seemed to feel the need to discuss the decision. Good, for example, wrote: “there is some force in introducing these sea-monsters into the same class with quadrupeds,” due to the heart, lungs, backbone, and teats. On the other hand, Good did agree, whales do not have feet, hair, or proper nostrils, and they live in water and mostly act and look like fish.8
In January 1851, one of Melville’s brothers gave him a translated edition of Baron Cuvier’s book on fish, one of the fifteen volumes of The Animal Kingdom. We still have Melville’s annotated copy, which includes his underlines and checks in the section in which Cuvier explains—on the same page with a lengthy, opinionated footnote about the New York City court case—that confusion still existed regarding the terminology of whales as fish. Cuvier chastised: “The definition of fish, such as we find it in the writings of modern naturalists, is perfectly clear and precise. They are vertebrated animals with red blood, breathing through the medium of water by means of branchiæ.” In “Extracts,” Ishmael cites Cuvier stating that “the whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” Ishmael’s definition of a whale in “Cetology” seems a direct parry, a fingers-flick under the chin, sent back across the Atlantic to the grave of Baron Cuvier in Paris: a whale, Ishmael states, also in italics, is “a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.”9
“Cetology” is Ishmael’s first of many scenes in Moby-Dick in which he deliberately defies the scientists of his day. The distrust of the scientific community, or at least the sense that scientists are too sequestered in their ivory towers or computer-lined labs, remains prevalent among large portions of American fishing communities today, including the American lobster fleet. Many fishermen still feel that marine biologists do not have enough direct experience with animals and ecosystems, and, just like in that court case in New York City, this distrust can have economic implications, since fisheries biologists, beginning in the late nineteenth century, have had significant influence and authority over the regulatory framework and the laws that govern the fishermen and the food that arrives in our kitchens and restaurants. It would be nearly a century after Moby-Dick that scientists began to have a significant voice in regulating international whaling.
WHALE TAXONOMY BEFORE ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Rob Nawojchik stands on the balcony of Great Mammal Hall at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History. He is looking at whale skeletons. Nawojchik teaches the subject of marine mammal classification better than anybody I’ve ever met. I once saw him squeeze through the door of a lecture hall an enormous branch of a tree to illustrate the idea of evolution. “We’re looking at just the leaves up top here,” he told the students, facing the foliage in their direction. “Each leaf is a species. Evolutionary systematics is trying to figure out the pattern of branches connecting the leaves, without being able to see the branches directly. It’s a detective story.”10
Great Mammal Hall was built in the 1870s as an addition to the original building that opened its doors in 1859, thanks to the star-power and fund-raising of Louis Agassiz, whom America had quickly adopted as its most famous naturalist. Agassiz had arrived on a lecture tour only a decade earlier from Switzerland, after which he was convinced to stay at Harvard during the same years that Melville had begun his writing career and met and married into the prominent Boston family of Elizabeth Shaw.
Ishmael actually drops Agassiz’s name in Moby-Dick when referring to how the scratches on a sperm whale’s skin look like the “violent scraping” on coastal rocks from ice, referring to Agassiz’s most lasting scientific contribution: the expansion and popularization of the theory of how ice ages crafted geological features. Agassiz, a direct mentee of Cuvier, was a passionate scientist and man of God. He was all over the newspapers and just the type of naturalist Melville would seem to have applauded. Agassiz was an intrepid, ambitious man who scaled mountains and was quick to propose far-reaching theories about God’s design. Agassiz advocated for putting down your books and relying on observations out in the field. He passionately believed in teaching natural philosophy to the general public.11
Construction on Great Mammal Hall, where Nawojchik now stands, finished just before Agassiz died. The space has been restored to its original Victorian character. Curators have squeezed into glass cases along the walls the taxidermy and skeletal specimens of a vast range of animals, such as penguins, koalas, and foxes. Hanging from the tall ceiling at various levels, above glass cases of taxidermy buffalo, zebras, and white-maned mountain goats, are skeletons of a range of marine mammals, including three full-sized whale specimens: a sperm whale, a North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), and a fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus). Rigged below them are the other hanging marine mammal skeletons, including a narwhal (Monodon monoceros), a harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena), a pygmy sperm whale (Kogia breviceps), and the extinct Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), which curators knew had been hunted to eradication as early as 1768.12
On the upper balcony, Nawojchik stands between the right whale and sperm whale. He can reach out and touch them. The right whale’s long black plates of baleen extend down from the upper jaw. Known often as “whalebone” in Melville’s time, baleen is indeed hard, but it’s made instead of the protein keratin, the stuff of mammalian fingernails, horns, hair, and hooves. (Keratin is easily confused with chitin, which constitutes, for example, the exoskeleton of lobsters and the beaks of squid.) As Ishmael describes later in “The Right Whale’s Head,” the inner edges of baleen separate into hairy fibers within the mouth in order to sieve small organisms. The vertical plates are indeed like the slats of window blinds. The sperm whale’s skull, by contrast, has no baleen on the upper jaw. The sperm whale’s skull has instead two long narrow rows of thick, white, conical teeth on its lower jaw—the better to grab Ahab’s leg with.
Standing here on the balcony beside these skeletons, Nawojchik says: “I reread Moby-Dick and the ‘Cetology’ chapter, and I can see how Melville, through Ishmael, is being satirical, making fun of the scientists. But I think Ishmael gets a little too dismissive—almost like a guy on a barstool who just throws up his hands. You have these same kinds of conversations today: Nah, it doesn’t matter. Who cares? It’s this, or it’s that. What’s the big deal? How could you possibly classify them? Yeah, he’s got teeth, but he’s big. Or he’s got this or he’s got that. Ishmael in that way is not representing the scientific thinking of his time, for sure.”13
In other words, just because Beale, Bennett, and Scoresby were all vexed by how to classify whales, does not mean they did not want to be able to or did not approach the questions with a plan. Ishmael, it seems, is more annoyed with the likes of Cuvier and an English naturalist named John E. Gray for their condescending confidence on the matter. In a section that Melville marked and underlined and scribbled beside, Surgeon Beale ridiculed French naturalist Bernard Germaine de Lacépède for claiming there to be no less than eight separate species of sperm whales.14
Nawojchik appreciates Melville’s frustration in 1851 regarding what might seem the arbitrary divisions of Linnaean classification, or really any historical classification of the natural world going back to Aristotle. Taxonomy was continually in flux. It was hard, as it is today, for a layman to understand how the systems were and are derived. Cuvier, and then Agassiz, saw no branches underneath the leaves. Agassiz taught that after various catastrophes, such as Noah’s flood or a few creeping Ice Ages, God had created whole new worlds of life, ever improving until He settled on humans as the highest in the great chain of being. Agassiz did not believe in this burbling new idea about the transmutation of species. Cuvier and Agassiz both knew, for example, what Stubb, the second mate of the Pequod, jokes about in Moby-Dick: the bones inside a whale’s fin correspond to the fingers of the human hand—but the naturalists spoke of these as “affinities” in God’s design, his tool box. Agassiz, with Harvard naturalist Augustus Gould, wrote in their 1851 college textbook that the tail and fin of the whale corresponded to the limbs of mammals and that their muscles work to run and swim in a similar way. What Agassiz would not fathom at the time, and would never accept even decades after On the Origin of Species, is that the forepaws on one species could over millions of years slowly, incrementally, alter into a fin on an eventually new swimming animal.15
Without a clear reason for any classification that convincingly rationalized the choice of skeletal features, visible similarities, behaviors, and/or habitats, Ishmael from his barstool, or more appropriately his capstan above the forecastle, admits befuddlement. He argues, why not simply use size?
With a hand on the rail of the balcony Nawojchik says, “If we threw a bunch of objects in a room—tennis balls, automobile mufflers, plastic pens, and so on—or a bunch of different leaves to remain with that analogy—different people would classify them in many different ways, by size, shape, color, and so forth.”
Nawojchik volunteers that Charles Darwin is his personal hero. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, ironically the same year as the opening of Agassiz’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (which is now one of the research arms of the Harvard Museum of Natural History). In Origin of Species Darwin explained the mechanism of this transmutation—evolution by natural selection—by which animals over millions of years had changed. As most scientists began to quickly accept and understand Darwin’s explanation of the process, taxonomy changed forever: physical and behavioral traits were now understood to connect species together by common ancestry, by shared branches. Victorian taxonomists began to organize the animal kingdom on paper and in their museums with a methodology that focused on this ancestry, drawing these lineages of descent, not just organized by atemporal choices of shared characteristics or habitats. Nawojchik likes to point out that the only illustration in Origin of Species is a simple tree diagram that models speciation over time, in the same way that you could show the descent of the Galápagos finches that evolved different traits over time due to the isolation of different islands and different ecological and environmental conditions. Post-Origin taxonomists searched for meaningful characteristics that unified groups from shared progenitors. Today Great Mammal Hall has a large sign “The Evolution of Hoofed Mammals” with a treelike diagram about the ungulates, in which cows, pigs, whales, camels, and rhinos are all evolved from an ancient common ancestor. Even as early as the late 1600s, English anatomists had noticed the similarities between the stomach, reproductive organs, and other parts in whales and in hoofed mammals, but they did not imagine any shared ancestry.16
In the first edition of Origin of Species, Darwin wrote of the potential of a land mammal evolving into a marine one: “In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.” Although the veracity of this initial account from a Canadian fur-trapper was later questioned, which is why Darwin removed it from subsequent editions, scientists now believe that whales evolved from a long-line of transitional forms which can be traced back to a sort of amphibious, wolflike pakicetids that began foraging in streams some fifty million years ago, adjusting its form to more plentiful food found in the water. There’s strong evidence, too, to suggest that pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses) also evolved from land, likely a bearlike ancestor, and bears are their closest living relatives. Nawojchik explains that it would take another full century—the discovery of various fossils, isotope dating of these fossils, continued research with embryology, the development of phylogenetic systematics, and then DNA analysis techniques—to really narrow down the traits that revealed that this supposition about whales evolving from land mammals was actually true. The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) is now considered the closest living relative to current whales.17
In light of evolution then, Ishmael’s use of size as a way to classify the whales is simplistic, but in Melville’s time it wasn’t really that much more arbitrary than other organizational schemes. In his discussion of the fin whale in “Cetology,” Ishmael recognizes, but deems nonsense, that many naturalists had divided the toothed whales and the “whalebone” whales. The toothed vs. baleen whales split has proven to be accurate. Baleen is a meaningful trait, and it’s one of the most significant in whale evolution. We know today that some thirty-five to forty million years ago, in the Eocene, environmental conditions began to favor some of the archaic toothed whales that began to evolve baleen plates in their mouths (separate from their teeth, which would atrophy to nothing over time). By about thirty to thirty-four million years ago, archaic whales had diverged into the two clear lineages, two branches, that we recognize today as the mysticetes, the baleen whales, and the odontocetes, the toothed whales.18 (See fig. 6.)
FIG. 6. A modern cetology by Emese Kazár (2013) from McGowen, Spaulding, and Gatesy (2009). No one drew trees of descent for any groups of animals before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Ishmael names 14 whale species, with an opening for more; modern taxonomies name more than 80 cetaceans.
After Ishmael rejects any classification based on visible traits such as teeth, baleen, humps, or fins, he then rejects Cuvier’s methodology of comparing skeletal structures. Ishmael says:
But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale’s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way.19
Nineteenth-century scientists on both sides of the Atlantic had been learning that there were clear and numerous distinctions between skeletal systems of baleen and toothed whales. In Melville’s Penny Cyclopædia, there were illustrations of the baleen whale’s skeleton and skull a few pages away from that of the sperm whale’s skull. The most obvious difference is the concave bowl of the sperm whale’s skull in comparison to the convex arched-pole skull of the baleen whale. So in this case, Ishmael does not represent the scientific thought of his time. Toothed whale skeletons were noticeably different for the “systematizer” or the lay person. (See fig. 7.)
FIG. 7. The images of baleen whale skulls (left) and sperm whale skulls (right) that Melville saw, separated by a few pages, in the “Whale” entry in his copy of his Penny Cyclopædia (1843).
Nawojchik shows me three other characteristics of the sperm whale’s skull that show it to be a sperm whale, as distinct from other toothed whales, and even from the dwarf and pygmy sperm whales (Kogia spp.). But to tell you the truth, I can’t follow everything that he says, despite his lively ability to teach and even with the entire skeletons right there in front of us. I appreciate Melville’s frustration with the taxonomy business, especially in an age before Origin of Species, when species were considered static and designed perfectly by God. My point here is that you have to cut an educated Christian sailor like Ishmael some slack here for his skepticism of the classification systems for whales.
Today scientists continue to refine and alter our systems based on new information. Species are always evolving in blurry lines—from bacteria to belugas—which was one of Darwin’s major points. A debate over subspecies or species is not simply pompous scientists bickering or turf-defending—although that can be part of it, certainly—but it’s more deciding how far and fast change and evolution is happening. Delineating species is crucial today for management purposes—so we can decide about regulations regarding hunting or fishing, and to decide when and how to act on endangered species or invasive ones. Yet nearly any sort of regulatory framework and the necessity of these lines for management purposes were practically unknown in Melville’s time.
Fundamentally for Melville, Cuvier, Linnaeus, and Aristotle, naming and organizing animals was foremost for learning about the diversity of life, which remains true today if you ask a biologist like Nawojchik. The scientific nomenclature is useful so that we can be sure that we’re all talking about the same organism, since common names vary so greatly even within countries and across regions. That’s why I include scientific names parenthetically throughout this natural history after I mention an animal for the first time. I also insert the binomial nomenclature in the hopes it makes me appear a little smarter and more earnest. In “Cetology,” Ishmael pokes fun of this tendency, suggesting the Linnaean scientific name of the sperm whale is “Macrocephalus of the Long Words.” Macrocephalus means big head in Greek. The description is useful since the sperm whale’s head can be up to a full third the length of its body, especially in males, but scientific names in zoology still remain almost exclusively the language of specialists.20
ISHMAEL’S “BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SYSTEM” OF WHALES
Just as Rob Nawojchik recognizes classification isn’t the sexiest of topics, albeit a necessary one, Ishmael knows he needs to add flair and humor to his own lecture. After choosing magnitude as the simplest, “practicable” system of whales, Ishmael then organizes within a “Bibliographical system” of the paper sizes used in book publishing, a joke more recognizable to the nineteenth-century reader who saw far more range in sizes of books at libraries and book stalls. Folio whales are the largest. (Think of the oversized section in your library.) Ishmael explains in a footnote, that quarto are the next largest—but this is a more square-shaped book, so that doesn’t work. Ishmael then has octavos and duodecimos for the medium-sized and smaller rectangular books of whales.
Reading the whale, the wild animal in a variety of forms, as a text, adds all sorts of layers, too: about perception, about interpretation, and about theological exploration, which was often referred to as seeking to read God’s “Book of Nature.” Thus Dr. John M. Good, the author, surgeon, and devout son of a minister, named his popular scientific work The Book of Nature. Louis Agassiz, too, had his own way of conflating classification with Christian and literary endeavor. Agassiz and Gould taught that all animals were an expression of “divine thought, as carried out in one department of that grand whole which we call Nature.” They wrote that the student of natural history, given only to the highest form of man, should approach the study in the same way the student would look at a work of literature, by first endeavoring “to make ourselves acquainted with the genius of the author.” This meant understanding God’s previous works and paths, the now fossilized worlds between floods, ice ages, and volcanic eruptions, in order to understand the final, current, highest form of humanity.21
Despite all the forecastle, populist cynicism about classification and laboratory naturalists, Ishmael actually provides in “Cetology” a reasonably accurate and representative synopsis of the whales as known to mid-nineteenth-century mariners, with names and descriptions that align truthfully to those written in mariner’s logbooks and narratives published by both author-sailors and professional naturalists. In fact, Ishmael’s architecture is indeed more complete, earnest, and organized in the study of the varieties of whales than anything included, quite genuinely, in most of the sources published at the time. Ishmael’s taxonomy is not useful in terms of understanding the branches of evolution, of course, but it is a reasonably accurate record of common names and how working mariners knew these animals.22
See Figure 8 at the end of this chapter for a quick study about which whales Ishmael is likely referring to in “Cetology,” in comparison to how we know them today. Below are more of the subtleties and further explanation, recognizing that Melville wanted to get it correct, but he didn’t mind Ishmael injecting some anthropomorphic humor, a little flourish, and some poetry along the way, especially in order to keep the reader interested and to make some loftier points.
FOLIO I. SPERM WHALE
Ishmael makes it clear that no one thought that the spermaceti oil in the head of sperm whales was sperm of the sexual emission variety: that was “absurd.”23
Ishmael explains that the sperm whale is “without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe.” Moby Dick as the Earth’s apex giant serves his story, but Surgeon Beale wrote the exact same. This suggests that not everyone under sail ever got close enough to get a sense of the full size of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). Dr. Bennett, however, knew of baleen whales that grew to over one hundred feet, which is true.24
FOLIO II. RIGHT WHALE
As Melville was composing Moby-Dick, he knew of rumblings about a difference between the right whales of the Northern Hemisphere and those of the Southern Hemisphere, and that the right whales of the Arctic, often called the Greenland whale, were also their own species. Whalemen and naturalists had been settling the latter, that the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) was in fact separate from right whales. Bowheads have, true to their name, a steeper bump and slope to their foreheads. Their baleen is longer. In contrast to the heads of right whales, bowhead skin is also smooth and free of any callosity or invertebrate hitchhikers. Bowheads live only in the Arctic and down to the far northern Canadian Maritimes. After dividing the bowheads from the right whales, the splitting of the right whales into three different species would take over a century after Moby-Dick, although the idea was emerging in the 1850s. Today, thanks in large part to DNA analysis, biologists nearly all agree that three species of right whales swim in the global ocean: the North Atlantic right whale, the North Pacific right whale (Eubalaena japonica), and the southern right whale (Eubalaena australis), none of which currently mix geographically or genetically.25 (See fig. 9.)
FIG. 9. Known ranges of right whales and bowheads, which likely were historically much larger.
While Melville worked on a whaleship in the 1840s, whaleman called the bowheads and the right whales collectively, as Ishmael says, the right whale, the black whale, the true whale, or even simply the whale. Indeed, this whale was the first hunted commercially, offshore, by the Basques on both sides of the North Atlantic by the 1500s, if not earlier. Coastal, localized hunting of these whales had been conducted for centuries before in Europe, and perhaps North America, likely by a variety of other peoples, along with the Basques. Since it was slow, coastal, and plump with oil and baleen, hunters seem to have called it the “right whale,” as it was the best one to chase.26
Ishmael summarily dismisses all of the proposals of splitting the right whales into multiple species: “Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all of their grand features.” Here Ishmael jabs his contemporary scientists, perhaps in particular the English naturalist John E. Gray, the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, who was a notorious splitter, especially of the baleen whales. Ishmael says: “It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.”27
FOLIO III-VI. FIN-BACK, HUMP BACK, RAZORBACK, AND SULPHUR BOTTOM
Ishmael’s classification and the naming in “Cetology” show the challenges of observing and naming baleen whales. Even today it’s hard for people standing on the deck of a ship to identify a particular species of whale at a distance. Ishmael’s Fin-Back, Hump Back, Razorback, and Sulphur Bottom are collectively referred to today as the rorquals, which comes from the Norwegian word for furrow, since they all have pleated skin under the jaws to expand, pelican-like, for feeding. Rorquals make up the baleen whale family Balaenopteridae. Ishmael referred to them as the “uncapturable whales.” Their spouts can all look similar, tall and columnar. They generally swam too quickly and were too elusive, and even if the whalemen were able to harpoon these animals, they could almost never haul them in. To chase these whales was a waste of time. Ishmael uses this as a metaphor later in the novel when a luckless captain named Derick chased after a whale that he would never catch: “Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.”28
Authors and mariners in the mid-nineteenth century used the same common names for Ishmael’s folio whales: finbacks, humpbacks, sulphur bottoms, and less often razorbacks. Most of what Ishmael describes in “Cetology” about these rorquals is accurate to how we describe and name them today, even if he lumped them into only four species, compared to the eight different rorquals now delineated. Fin whales do have notably sharp, dorsal fins—but these do not grow nearly as tall as Ishmael claims—and fin whales do indeed have a tall, straight spout. Humpbacks do have more of a hump, and they do more actively breach and flop their enormous fins or show their full flukes when diving. (Humpbacks are also easier to identify and hunt because they tend to be less evasive than the other rorquals; their spouts tend to be shorter and bushier, and they have exceptionally large and long flippers.) Ishmael’s “Sulphur Bottoms,” which we know today as blue whales, do indeed often have a yellow “brimstone belly,” which scientists learned in the 1920s is actually a coating of diatoms, a type of microscopic algae.29
Ishmael’s “Razor Backs” are harder to pin down. Ishmael says that they only show their back, rising “in a long sharp ridge.” Sei whales, diagnostically, do not arch their back as much as other whale species, and they seem to show their flukes less often when going down.30
Different whalemen in Melville’s time, however, surely used, perhaps interchangeably based on what they could see in a brief moment, all of these names, including when they saw Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera edeni), the much smaller minkes (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), or maybe even gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus), which have more of a dorsal ridge. All of these species of baleen whales have various close similarities when spotted in the wild, particularly at a distance. Other than the humpbacks, the whalemen rarely if ever had the rorquals alongside. Ishmael concedes to “several varieties” of these “whalebone whales.”31
THE OCTAVOES: MEDIUM-SIZED TOOTHED WHALES
Ishmael’s “Black Fish” is fairly straightforward. These are pilot whales (Globicephala spp.), which are still called blackfish—although to keep things confusing, blackfish today is sometimes used to mean killer whales, false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens), melon-headed whales, (Peponocephala electra), and others. The common name of blackfish for pilot whales was well known on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the mariners’ voyages at sea. As Ishmael explains accurately, whalemen often caught these whales for harpooning practice and for smaller amounts of oil. James Osborn, for example, described them often during his voyage aboard the Charles W. Morgan. He drew one in his journal. Dean C. Wright drew one prominently on his page of sea animals (see earlier fig. 3).32
Ishmael describes the upturned mouth of the pilot whale as devilish, a “Mephistophelean grin.” He seems to have made up the name “Hyena Whale” to match. The grin is emphasized in an illustration Melville saw in Dr. Bennett’s narrative. (See fig. 10.) Today, we usually anthropomorphize this facial feature of the medium and smaller toothed whales as a friendly smile.
FIG. 10. Illustrations in Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe (1840), left and right, and William Scoresby Jr.’s An Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), middle.
Ishmael’s nineteenth-century octavo common names for grampus, killer, and thrasher seem to be as fluid and regional as the international variants for lobster, crawfish, and scampi. The name grampus seems at the time to have been a fairly fluid term for a medium-sized toothed whale that was not easily identified as a pilot whale. Grampus was also used for killer whales (Orcinus orca), which was also synonymous with thrashers for some. A grampus was also used for Risso’s dolphins, which are smaller and a lighter gray, named Grampus griseus by Cuvier in 1812. Historian Michael Dyer has found only one period logbook illustration labeled as a grampus, and this looks much more like a beaked whale (Mesoplodon spp. or Ziphius cavirostris). When lecturing on the natural history of whales in New Bedford in the 1830s, the merchant Charles W. Morgan, who’d later have the ship named after him, explained that the killer whale was merely a type of grampus, a “small whale.” That said, some mariners and authors, such as Reverend Cheever, did indeed differentiate between all three names at the time, but any period universal agreement did not exist.33
THE DUODECIMOS: DOLPHINS AND PORPOISES
Although used occasionally for the mammal in the scientific literature of Melville’s time in the same way we do today, the term dolphin was more commonly used until recently to mean more often the species of fish that’s also known today as the dorado or mahi-mahi (Coryphaena hippurus). (See fig. 11.)
FIG. 11. Plate in Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1807). Note how the mahi-mahi is labeled “dolphin.” In this plate is also the whale and narwhal illustration that Ishmael makes fun of directly in “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”
When American whalemen said “porpoise,” they were referring to a species in either of the groups we differentiate colloquially today: the smaller, coastal, blunt-nosed porpoises and the larger, pelagic, long-snouted dolphins. Ishmael uses them interchangeably. It can be confusing. (If only he had used scientific names!) When he is talking about the old bookbinding design of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor in “Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” he’s describing the marine mammal. When Ishmael writes of the prolific waters of the Indian Ocean in “Stubb kills a Whale,” teeming with “porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens,” he means the dolphin fish, known to feed on flying fish and featured regularly in maritime literature because of their brilliant rainbow scales.34
Some of the most common large pelagic dolphins that are found globally and that swim under the bows of ships are the bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops spp.). Several other species bow-ride, too. These would all likely fit under Ishmael’s “Huzza Porpoises.”35
Ishmael recognizes that the sailors found the bow-riding of the dolphins irresistible, needing to shout “huzza!” (i.e., hurray! whoopee!) at what seemed to be raucous play behavior. Certainly today, it never gets old: leaning over the rail and watching dolphins effortlessly glide and swerve and leap around the bow of your sailing ship is magical out at sea. Yet Ishmael shifts quickly from this frivolity to explain that dolphins provide good oil and good eating. We’ll pick this up again in regard to “The Whale as a Dish,” but it’s telling how, within a little over a century, the idea of eating dolphin will for most of American culture be akin to murdering and eating a pet dog or cat.
The name of the “Algerine Porpoise” appears in a couple whalemen’s journals. Perhaps these were just a larger dolphin species? Melville likely remembered this name from his sailing days, because none of his published fish documents mention it. Fierce pirates from Algeria were often the subject of stories at the time, so Ishmael has fun at least with this aspect.36
Ishmael’s remaining octavos, the “Narwhale” and the “Mealy-mouthed” or “Right Whale Porpoise,” were well-known and distinct enough that they can be easily identified then and today. Despite the notorious Nar Whale in Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, Melville saw accurate illustrations and read of these two smaller toothed whales (see figs. 10, 11 above). The narwhal provided plenty of opportunity, too, for both pit humor and his metaphor of reading the book of whales.
FORECASTLE APPELLATIONS
Ishmael recognizes a further thicket of common names, some of which the modern reader recognizes. Some are found in Melville’s fish documents. A couple I think Melville made up for kicks. I’ll leave them up to future builders to nail down, but to get you started, some environmental historians theorize that the “Scragg Whale,” a name used at least in New England in the 1720s, might have been the Atlantic gray whale, which seems to have gone extinct sometime around then, perhaps due to human hunting.37
WHY DID MELVILLE INCLUDE THE CHAPTER “CETOLOGY”?
Why did Melville want to make any of these points at all in a novel about an obsessive, dictatorial captain hunting an enormous, mythical whale? What happens to the story if Melville had an editor who convinced him to just cut “Cetology”?
“Cetology” is Ishmael’s first natural history essay in Moby-Dick, the first chapter with footnotes, and the first chapter in which Ishmael as the traditional narrator seems to fade and alter. This taxonomic treatise shifts the narrator’s authority. Ishmael is no longer the goofy greenhand, but the scholar and survivor who has lived this world of whaling, studied whales, and now has something of his own to say about it. In “Cetology” Ishmael starts to build the factual material to craft an epic story about the human-whale relationship that is only more extraordinary in its believability. He declares that only one who has been out there killing whales himself is equipped to tell this story properly. Not only that, but the teller must be an American, since the British and French whaling is bumbling gentlemen’s play. Their scientists sit at home in dusty, dark Europe to argue intricacies of bones and baleen, while not properly listening to their surgeons who have returned from the Pacific. In “Cetology,” Ishmael declaims that the true epic story of the sperm whale is to be told only by the American whaleman.
Ishmael’s admittedly failed effort to create a draft of a whale taxonomy in “Cetology” also emphasizes the fundamental obscurity of the creatures of the ocean. This unknowability builds the significance and drama of his story. Yet he still confidently establishes in this chapter that the sperm whale was the largest and highest on his chain of all animals on earth, continuing to elevate Moby Dick, the king of kings.
Perhaps the greatest significance of “Cetology” to the twenty-first-century reader is this: what if this sets up Ishmael as a character and a natural philosopher whose entire exploration and survival prefigures, anticipates, the theories of Charles Darwin, the person who entirely changed the way we perceive the world? In “Cetology,” Ishmael favors the ideas of Agassiz and the static chain of being, with sperm whales above all whales, and man above all. But by the end of the story, humans no longer reign. Does Ishmael shift over the course of the telling of his story to be a proto-Darwinian narrator?
A few scenes after “Cetology,” in his lower layer to Starbuck in “The Quarter-Deck,” Ahab rages against the reality that God might not have chosen humankind above all, after all. The sperm whale, the animal, might be equal in the eyes of God, maybe even favored. Or what if there was no God at all? Not fate, but gradual, predictable, occasionally random and rapid, environmental conditions shaping species who amorally struggle to live and reproduce: none of Agassiz’s progressivism or hierarchy, but Darwin’s tree of life. Darwin ended Origin of Species by decentering the human:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.38
If Ahab cannot triumph, cannot avenge himself over a single sperm whale—be that whale agent or be that whale principal—what does that mean for humankind?
In 2000, at the turn of the new millennium, three decades into modern American environmentalism, but before much of a public discussion about anthropogenic climate change, the author and scholar Eric Wilson published a short, largely forgotten essay that declared: “Melville was not merely an amateur cetologist but a powerful, innovative philosopher of biology, intuitively (if not empirically) aware of Darwin’s most iconoclastic ideas almost ten years before they found print—a harbinger of the scientist’s momentous dissolution of the great chain of being.”39
FIG. 8. Whale species in Ishmael’s “Cetology.” (For the modern scientific names, this follows the convention in which parentheses indicate that the species has been shifted to within another genus since first named. See Figure Credits and Notes on page 415 for more details on this figure.)
