243 
THE WHITE WHALE 
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at 
those pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delinea- 
tions, by those who know. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there 
are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, 
a.d. 1671, entitled A Whaling Voyage to Spitzhergen in the ship Jonas 
in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland , master. In one of those 
plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among 
ice-isles, with white bears running over their living hacks. In 
another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale 
with perpendicular flukes. 
Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Col- 
nett, a Post Captain in the English Navy, entitled A Voyage round 
Cape Horn into the South Seas , for the purpose of extending the i 
Spermaceti Whale Fisheries. In this book is an outline purporting 
to be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale 
from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August,- 1793, and hoisted 
on deck.” I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken 
for the benefit of his mariners. To mention hut one thing about it, 
let me say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompany- 
ing scale, to a full-grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale 
a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did 
ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye ! 
Nor are the most conscientious compilations of natural history for 
the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of 
mistake. Look at that popular work Goldsmith’s Animated Nature. 
In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged 
“whale” and a “narwhal.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, hut this 
unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the 
narwhal, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nine- 
teenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon 
any intelligent public of schoolboys. 
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a 
great naturalist, published a scientific systemised whale hook, wherein 
are several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All 
these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus, or 
Greenland whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a 
