No good blood in their veins? They have something better
than royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin
was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of
the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line
of Folgers and harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--
this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world
to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English
statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."
Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured
in any grand imposing way.
The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital,
the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast,
were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
Grant it, since you cite it; but say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.
No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very
heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more!
Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off
to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime
has taken three hundred and fifty whales.
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