THE WHITE WHALE 
417 
These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, 
be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied 
measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you 
can refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, 
they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that coun- 
try, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. 
Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in Hew 
Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call “the only perfect speci- 
men of a Greenland or Right Whale in the United States.” Moreover, 
at a place in Yorkshire, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir 
Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, 
but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my 
friend King Tranquo’s. 
In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons be- 
longed, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar 
grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir 
Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir 
Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great 
chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities — 
spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan — and swing all day upon his 
lower jaw. Locks are to he put upon some of his trap-doors and shut- 
ters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of 
keys at his side. 
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied 
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my 
wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of pre- 
serving spch valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, 
and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a 
poem I was then composing — at least, what untattooed parts might re- 
main — I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, 
should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. 
