As Queequeg and Ishmael are now fairly embarked in whaling, and landsmen treat the hunt as unpoetical and disreputable, Ishmael turns advocate with all anxiety to convince ye of the injustice: introduce a harpooneer at metropolitan society or append S.W.F. to a visiting card and the world will laugh, call the trade butchery on disorderly decks, yet delight in martial commanders whose battlefields are unspeakable carrion and shrink from the sperm whale's vast tail when veterans would march to a battery. Though the world scouts whale hunters, almost every taper, lamp, and candle round the globe burns, as before so many shrines, to their glory.
Weigh whaling in other scales, he says: Dutch admirals of whaling fleets, Louis XVI fitting ships from Dunkirk, Britain paying upwards of a million pounds in bounties, America now sailing upwards of seven hundred vessels with eighteen thousand men, four million dollars yearly consumed, twenty million in ships at sailing, seven million harvested home; for sixty years no peaceful influence operated more potentially upon the broad world than whaling, the whale-ship pioneer in remotest seas where no Cook or Vancouver sailed, breaking Spanish colonial lines toward Peru and Bolivia, giving Australia after others shunned its shores, dropping benevolent biscuit to starving settlers, clearing Polynesia for missionary and merchant, standing on Japan's threshold while anonymous Nantucket captains battled virgin terrors celebrated explorers would not willingly dare.
If ye still declare whaling has no aesthetically noble associations, Ishmael is ready to shiver fifty lances; an italic objector keeps sneering, and he answers with Job on Leviathan, Alfred the Great's whaling narrative, Burke in Parliament, Benjamin Franklin's Folger harpooner blood, the whale as royal fish by old English law, whale bones in Roman triumph, Cetus in the southern sky, then drives down his hat before the Czar and takes it off to Queequeg, accounting a man who took three hundred and fifty whales more honorable than the captain who boasted as many walled towns.
If at his death executors find precious MSS., Ishmael prospectively ascribes all honor and glory to whaling alone, for a whale-ship was his Yale College and his Harvard: when respectability still calls the hunt small, what dependence will landsmen finally admit while the lamps they mock keep burning like shrines?
Coming Up in Chapter 25
Ishmael adds a postscript to his whaling defense: an advocate who hides a reasonable surmise is blameworthy. He asks what oil anoints kings at coronation, rules out every common type, and lands the joke: loyal Britons, whalemen supply your coronation stuff.
