Moby Dick

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the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as
Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince
of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered
and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely
achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this
Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this
Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,
in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton
of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to
be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans
took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What
seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this:
it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed
to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and
the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many