Before the Pequod rolls side by side with barnacled leviathans Ishmael pauses to put some systematized exhibition of the whale before us, yet opens by confessing he essays nothing less than the classification of the constituents of a chaos: Scoresby, Beale, Cuvier, and Hunter speak of veils, thorns, and torture for naturalists, and of the long shelf of whale authors almost none of whom ever saw a living sperm whale while poetry still crowned the Greenland usurper monarch of the seas, though Beale and Bennett alone partly succeed in putting the living sperm whale before you in small excellent scraps.
Having swum through libraries and sailed through oceans he offers only the draught of a system, architect not builder, promising nothing complete because completeness would be faulty, waiving Linnaeus to keep the whale a fish with Jonah for counsel while Charley Coffin calls the mammal reasons humbug, then pinning the beast as spouting fish with horizontal tail before sorting the host into Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo books; he walks sperm and right whales, fin-back Cain with gnomon fin, narwhale horn presented to Queen Bess, killer and thrasher outlaws, huzza porpoises tossing like caps, denies dugongs their passports, sketches razor-back and sulphur bottom as gentlemen he barely knows, and lists half-fabulous forecastle names for hands who may one day catch and mark them, all while admitting baleen, hump, and teeth fail every neat naturalist split, duodecimo porpoises though tiny still count as whales by the horizontal tail rule, and no post-office letter-sorter could grope these pelvis foundations without fear.
At Charing Cross he proclaims the great sperm whale now reigneth over commerce and danger, unwritten life far above other hunted whales in any book, then leaves the system standing unfinished as Cologne cathedral wears its crane upon the uncompleted tower, praying God keep him from ever completing anything, for this whole book is but a draught, nay but the draught of a draught: when the plot dives again into leviathanic allusions, will you trust only the filled chapters or also the honest empty slots he refused to pave with pretend knowledge?
Coming Up in Chapter 33
After the whale books comes a Dutch peculiarity: harpooneers who dine aft as professional superiors yet remain social equals with the forecastle. Ishmael traces the Specksnyder, who once shared command with the captain while whale hunting belonged to the harpooneer line.
