Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales — Moby-Dick

Ishmael says he will soon describe what a real whale looks like when it is tied next to a ship and a whaleman can walk on it. First he wants to fix all the wrong pictures that landsmen still trust.

Wrong whale art goes back a long way. Ancient temple carvings show dolphins in armor. At Elephanta in India, Vishnu as a whale has a tail that looks like a snake, not real flukes. Christian painters Guido and Hogarth draw Perseus sea monsters that barely float in water. Old Bible prints, book covers, and even Bacon's Advancement of Learning show silly spouting whales.

Scientists get it wrong too. Dutch voyage plates from 1671 draw vertical flukes. Captain Colnett shows a sperm whale with an eye as big as a bow window. Goldsmith's nature book makes whales look like clipped sows. Count de Lacepede's species sheets miss the mark. Frederick Cuvier's 1836 sperm whale is not a sperm whale at all. Ishmael says it is a squash. Oil-shop sign painters hang violent Richard III whales eating whole boats.

These mistakes are not surprising. Most artists copy stranded dead whales. A dead whale on a beach is like a wrecked ship with a broken back. It does not show the proud animal at sea.

The living whale stays mostly underwater, like a battleship afloat. Young whales hoisted on deck look eel-like and change shape. Even bones mislead. A whale skeleton is to the living whale what an insect is to its padded chrysalis, unlike Jeremy Bentham's honest skeleton in a library. Stubb jokes that a whale never handles us bare-handed because its fin bones sit inside fleshy mittens.

In the end Ishmael says no picture can capture the whale exactly. The only way to learn its real shape is to go whaling yourself. That means risking your life beside the living leviathan.