163 
THE WHITE WHALE 
wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with 
many a mighty birth. 
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit 
over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumours of the White 
Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of mor- 
bid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, 
which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed 
from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a 
panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumours, at least, 
had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to 
encounter the perils of his jaw. 
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. 
Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm 
Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the levia- 
than, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are 
those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous 
enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right Whale, would per- 
haps — either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timid- 
ity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale. At any rate, there are 
plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sail- 
ing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered 
the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is re- 
stricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North. 
Seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fire- 
side interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. 
Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale 
anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows 
which stem them. 
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary 
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists — 
Olassen and Povelson — declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a 
consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so in- 
credibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor 
even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost similar 
impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself 
affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) 
