97 
THE WHITE WHALE 
Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre- 
eminently presuming and ridiculous. 
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us 
whalemen, is this : they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a 
butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, 
we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, 
that is true. But butchers also, and butchers of the bloodiest, badge, 
have been all martial commanders whom the world invariably delights 
to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our 
business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty 
generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant 
the sperm whaleship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy 
earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true, what 
disordered slippery decks of a whale ship are comparable to the un- 
speakable carrion of those battlefields from which so many soldiers 
return to drink in. all ladies’ plaudits ? And if the idea of peril so much 
enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure 
ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would 
quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning 
into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible 
terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of 
God! 
But, though the world scouts at us whale-hunters, yet does it un- 
wittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adora- 
tion! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that bum round 
the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory ! 
But' look at this matter in other lights ; weigh it in all sorts of scales ; 
see what we whalemen are, and have been. 
Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling 
fleets? Why did Louis xvi. of France, at his own personal expense, 
fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town 
some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? 
Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whale- 
men in bounties upwards of £1,000,000? And lastly, how comes 
it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the 
banded- whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven 
hundred vessels ; manned by eighteen thousand men ; yearly consuming 
