Moby Dick

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But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some
plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the
Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." In one of those plates the
whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles,
with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the
prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular
flukes.

Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett,
a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape Horn
into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale
Fisheries." In this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of
a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the
coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck." I doubt not the