Whale Art in Human Civilization
Chapter 57 of Moby-Dick is an essayistic meditation on the many ways human beings have attempted to represent whales—in art, craft, architecture, landscape, and even the cosmos. Ishmael begins by describing a crippled beggar on Tower-hill in London who holds up a painted board depicting the whale attack that cost him his leg. The beggar's three whales and three boats, Ishmael notes, are "as good whales as were ever published in Wapping," and his stump is as genuine as any in the western clearings. Despite his permanent disfigurement, the man never makes a "stump-speech" but stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
Scrimshaw and the Sailor-Savage
Ishmael then turns to the whaling art of scrimshaw—lively sketches of whales and whaling scenes carved by fishermen on sperm whale teeth, ladies' busks wrought from right whale bone, and other "skrimshander articles." Some whalemen carry small boxes of specialized carving tools, though most work with nothing more than a jack-knife. connects this craft to a larger philosophical point: long exile from civilization "inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery." The white sailor-savage, like the ancient Hawaiian carver, demonstrates a "wonderful patience of industry," producing carvings as intricate as Achilles's shield and as suggestive as the prints of Albrecht Dürer.
Whales in Architecture and Landscape
Moving beyond handcraft, Ishmael catalogs whales in the built and natural environment. Wooden whales carved from South Sea war-wood appear in the forecastles of American whalers. Brass whales hang as door knockers on old country houses. Sheet-iron whale weathercocks sit atop church spires, too elevated for close inspection. In the natural landscape, masses of rock at the base of broken cliffs resemble "petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass," while mountain ridges occasionally reveal the passing profile of a whale to a trained whaleman's eye.
Whales in the Stars
The chapter concludes with Ishmael's most expansive vision: whales traced in the constellations themselves. He describes chasing Leviathan "round and round the Pole" in the northern sky and boarding the constellation Argo-Navis beneath the Antarctic stars to join the chase against Cetus. In a soaring final passage, Ishmael imagines mounting a whale with "a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs" to leap beyond mortal sight and discover whether the "fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond." This progression—from a beggar's painted board to the cosmos itself—captures 's central theme that the whale permeates every level of human experience and imagination.