.. < chapter ciii 10  MEASUREMENT OF THE WHALE'S SKELETON >


     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

.. <p 450 >

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 back-bone.

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 foot-path 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

.. <p 451 >

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

poring 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.

.. <p 451 >

