334 
MOBY DICK; OR 
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches 
up to the very springhead of it, so much the more am I impressed with 
its great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so 
many great demigods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way 
or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the re- 
flection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so em- 
blazoned a fraternity. 
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and 
to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale at- 
tacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those 
were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to 
succour the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one 
knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda ; how the lovely An- 
dromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, 
and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the 
prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and 
delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic ex- 
ploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; in- 
asmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let 
no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, 
on the Syrian coast, in one of the pagan temples, there stood for many 
ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the 
inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Per- 
seus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was 
carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively 
important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail. 
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda — indeed, by some 
supposed to be indirectly derived from it — is that famous story of St. 
George and the Dragon ; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale ; 
for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled 
together, and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the 
waters, and as a dragon of sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly mean- 
ing a whale ; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. 
Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. 
George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of 
doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a 
