Still in behalf of the dignity of whaling, Ishmael adds a postscript to The Advocate: he would fain advance naught but substantiated facts, yet after embattling his facts an advocate who wholly suppresses a not unreasonable surmise that might tell eloquently upon his cause would be blameworthy, so he risks one inference for landsmen who still scout the fishery after lamps and bounties failed to shame them.
It is well known, he says, that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through; there is a saltcellar of state and there may be a castor of state, and a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation even as a head of salad, perhaps like machinery anointed to run well, while in common life we esteem but meanly a fellow who anoints his hair and palpably smells of it, for a mature man who uses hair-oil unless medicinally probably has a quoggy spot somewhere and cannot amount to much in his totality.
But the only thing to be considered is what kind of oil is used at coronations: certainly not olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil; what then can it possibly be but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils, a surmise not a royal receipt yet an elimination game Ishmael marks honestly before he crowns whaling's product by default.
Think of that, ye loyal Britons, we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff, he cries, and this six-inch chapter sticks the Advocate's landing where straight history left off: when the punchline names dependence, will landsmen keep calling the hunter disreputable while the crown runs on his oil?
Coming Up in Chapter 26
The argument pauses and Ishmael turns to rank aboard ship, introducing the Pequod's officers and harpooneers as knights and squires of the fishery. Starbuck leads: a lean Nantucket Quaker built like twice-baked biscuit, with chronometer steadiness and a thousand perils quiet in his eyes.
