Trying Leviathan by Burnett D. Graham

Author:Burnett, D. Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

1 Biographical material on Fish (who eventually became a director at the Bank of America) can be found in several places. See, for instance, the records of the firm of Fish and Grinnell, MSS 50, “Inventory of the Grinnell Family Papers,” Old Dartmouth Historical Society, New Bedford Whaling Museum. He also features in: Henry Beetle Hough, Wamsutta of New Bedford (New Bedford, MA: Wamsutta Mills, circa 1946).

2 IWF, p. 18.

3 Unfortunately there is no hint in the record concerning the provenance of this image, and there were far too many such engravings in circulation at this time to hazard a confident guess. Limiting ourselves only to the published texts Sampson referenced during the trial (though it is entirely possible that the engraved image came from another source), there were images of whales in Goldsmith (they varied by edition), Bigland (copied from Goldsmith), Shaw, and in Rees’s Encyclopedia. The image that appeared in various forms in most early editions of Goldsmith gained some notoriety later in the century when it was singled out for abuse by Melville’s Ishmael in chapter 55 of Moby-Dick, “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” a chapter that expresses much the same disgust Captain Fish voiced concerning the poor quality of most whale imagery. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988 [1851]). For a superb discussion of the iconography at Melville’s command, see Stuart M. Frank, Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery: Sources and Types of the “Pictorial” Chapters of Moby-Dick (Fairhaven, MA: Edward J. Lefkowicz, 1986). The most complete published source for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century printed images of whales (with an emphasis on American imprints) is Elizabeth Ingalls, Whaling Prints in the Francis B. Lothrop Collection. The three-volume German catalogue by Klaus Barthelmess and Joachim Münzig contains a more eclectic array of continental sources (paintings, bas-relief, ceramic) and focuses on the early modern period: Monstrum Horrendum (Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, 1991).

4 IWF, p. 19; first question mark in this cite is my insert (the sentence is printed with a period in the original).

5 Ibid., p. 39.

6 Ibid., p. 40.

7 Andrew John Lewis suggests that this period saw “possibility” become the “dominant metaphor for American natural history,” and it seems to me that there is something to this. See Lewis, “The Curious and the Learned,” pp. 7, 60–63.

8 This locution presages a point I make in greater detail later in this chapter, namely that the term “whale” was itself ambiguous, and not uniformly used in the period to refer to all the large cetaceans. Reeves here distinguishes between “humpback” oil and “whale” oil, despite the fact that the 50-foot humpback (what we now know as Megaptera novaeangliae [Borowski, 1781], but which the German naturalist Georg Heinrich Borowski himself knew as Balaena novaeangliae) certainly counts, by our lights, as a “whale.”

9 IWF, p. 39.

10 Ibid., p. 40.

11“The Whaleman’s Natural History” is part 1 of chapter 8 of Elmo Paul Hohman, The American Whaleman (New York: Longmans, 1928). Despite its age, this book

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