246 
MOBY DICK; OR 
CHAPTER LV 
OF THE LESS ERRONEOUS PICTURES OF WHALES, AND THE 
TRUE PICTURES OF WHALING SCENES 
In connection with the monstrous pictures of whales,, I am strongly 
tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them 
which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern, espe- 
cially in Pliny, Purchas, Hakluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass 
that matter by. 
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale: 
Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the pre- 
vious chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is 
far better than theirs ; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All 
Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure 
in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second 
chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no 
doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlour men, 
is admirably correct and lifelike in its general effect. Some of the 
Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in 
contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault 
though. 
Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but 
they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. 
He has but one picture of' whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, 
because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can 
derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his 
living hunters. 
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details 
not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be 
anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and 
taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent 
attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble 
Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath 
the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the 
air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of 
the boat is* partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the 
