Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton — Moby-Dick

Ishmael begins with the living whale before he walks through the bones. A full-grown sperm whale between eighty-five and ninety feet long weighs at least ninety tons. That is heavier than a whole village of eleven hundred people. Ishmael says you need strong imagination, like yoked cattle pulling brains, just to picture such a beast.

The skeleton at Tranque measures seventy-two feet. In life the whale was about ninety feet, because bones shrink about one fifth after death. The skull and jaw take twenty feet. The spine runs fifty feet. Ten ribs sit on each side, growing longer toward the middle until the fifth rib arches about eight feet. Ishmael says the skeleton is not the mould of the living body. The biggest rib shows only half the true depth of the whale when it was alive. Where flesh, muscle, and blood once wrapped the frame, he now sees bare spine. The fins and tail flukes leave almost no trace on the dry bones.

Studying a dead skeleton in a peaceful wood cannot teach you the real whale. Ishmael says you must meet him in danger, within the swirl of his angry tail, on the open sea. He stacks the spine bones upright until they look like Pompey's Pillar. The vertebrae taper down to tiny pieces like white billiard balls. Priests' children stole the smallest ones to use as marbles. Even the hugest creature ends in something small enough for child's play.