241 
THE WHITE WHALE 
the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it. 
“So help me, HeaVen, and on my honour, the story I have told ye, 
gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be 
true ; it happened on this ball ; I trod the ship ; I knew the crew ; 
I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.” 
CHAPTER LIV 
OF THE MONSTROUS PICTURES OF WHALES 
I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, some- 
thing like the true form of a whale as he actually appears to the eye 
of the whalemen when in his own absolute body the whale is moored 
alongside the whale ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. 
It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those cu- 
rious imaginary portraits of him. which even down to the present day 
confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the 
world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all 
wrong. 
It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will 
be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. 
Eor ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the 
marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, 
medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain- 
armour like Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St. George’s; ever 
since then has something of the same sort of licence prevailed, not 
only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific 
presentations of him. 
How, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways pur- 
porting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of 
Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost end- 
less sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, 
every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any 
of them actually came into being. Ho wonder then, that in some sort 
our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. 
The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the 
