308 
MOBY DICK; OR 
what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s 
measurements, about twenty feet long and five feet deep, a sulk and 
pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. 
A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. 
The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an 
important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earth- 
quakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery 
threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word, were I at 
Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. 
Good Lord ! is this the road that Jonah went ? The roof is about twelve 
feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular 
ridgepole there ; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides present us with 
those wondrous, half-vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say 
three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the 
head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere 
been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with 
hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in 
whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when open-mouthed he goes 
through the seas of brit in feeding-time. In the central blinds of bone, 
as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, 
curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the crea- 
ture’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the cer- 
tainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savour 
of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant 
a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem 
reasonable. 
In old times, there seems to have prevailed the most curious fancies 
concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the won- 
drous “whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth ; 1 another, “hogs’ 
bristles”; a third old gentleman in Hakluyt uses the following ele- 
gant language: “There are about two hundred and fifty fins grow- 
ing on each side of his upper chop, which reach over his tongue on 
each side of his mouth.” 
1 This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or 
rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper 
part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes those tufts impart a 
rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance. 
