Chapter 60 55．unrecognizable

I have had a desire for a long time, especially since I began to tell you the story of the Pequod. This wish is: to paint a portrait of a great whale, to draw a real portrait of a great whale. However, this wish cannot be realized at this moment, because there is no canvas on board, and I have no painter's handwriting. Then I can only draw with my mouth for everyone to hear. I would draw it so carefully and realistically that all the whalers would be convinced that it was the same whale they had hunted to death and just dragged back to their boats. What I have drawn with my mouth can only be called a whale if it wins the approval of the whalers.

The reason why I have such a strong urge to draw whales is because: Among the existing portraits of whales, there is no one that can be considered plausible by people who really know what a whale looks like. Especially bad: Even though the predecessors painted whales in a nondescript way, which made whalers laugh and cry, it still convinced many people who had never seen whales. I have a strong desire to tell you what a whale looks like, and I want to correct the distorted image of a whale. First, let us see how the predecessors painted the whale. From the farthest. The world's earliest pictures of whales are found in Indian, Egyptian and Greek engravings, which are the most primitive sources of whale pictures.

It should be said that whales are widely represented in ancient art works, from temples, coins and weapons, to tombs, medals and daily necessities, the shadow of whales can be found. Of course, the whale mentioned here is the kind of thing that the creators at that time thought was a whale. It's just that, apart from the creator's subjective thoughts and religious spirit, there is almost nothing real in the original whale portrait that can be affirmed. In other words, no whale can make us think it's a whale and not something else. The whale in the painting is too far away from the actual whale.

This is also the case with the earliest surviving Indian whale carvings. So besides the ancient performance? Christian painters can be said to be brilliant in the field of painting, but unfortunately, their achievements are not much better than those of ancient times. In their drawings the whale is represented as a monster only an inch above the water, with a sort of chair-back on its back, and a large mouth. Before and after the Renaissance, people generally believed that dolphins were a kind of whale, so the appearance of dolphins became the embryonic form of whales, which was imitated.

Anyway, a step forward. In addition to formal paintings, whales can also be found in some book inserts and decorations, but most of them are drawn in eccentric ways. The authors of the above-mentioned whale pictures are mostly painters or other types of artists, rather than academicians who specialize in the study of cetaceans. So let's take a look at how cetologists describe whales. A geographer in England wrote a collection of voyages that contained several illustrations of whales. Although this work is very serious, it is regrettable that these illustrations are without exception full of errors.

In one, the whale is drawn as a raft lying on a frozen island, with many white bears running around on its back. In another picture, the author drew the tail of the whale vertically. There is also a captain of the British Navy who also wrote a book about sperm whales, and the main content is the capture of a sperm whale off the coast of Mexico. It's a pity that his illustration is also wrong. He even drew the whale's eye as a five-foot long window. Even the works on the history of science that should be the most scientific and accurate can't get rid of mistakes and ridiculousness.

In a well-known English natural history there are interspersed pictures of whales and what are interpreted as "narwhals," but, to us who have seen whales in person, they are simply unbearable to witness. The whale there is like a sow whose legs have been cut off. As for the narwhal, it was painted as something that looked like a horse and an eagle, which had nothing to do with a real whale. But this is actually believed. Compared with the above mistakes and what I will say below, they are nothing. This is a "scientist" called Tiffel who has done the best job of misrepresenting whales.

In his Natural History of Whales he drew a schematic diagram of the so-called Sperm Whale. But God knew it wasn't a sperm whale at all, but a big pumpkin. It seems that no one can accurately represent and describe the whale, the most wonderful marine animal. In fact, this is not surprising, and the reason is very simple.That is: none of them had actually seen a live whale. Like most scientists, it was not easy to be able to express emotion in the face of dead whales and then describe them, because many of the people who described whales had seen dead whales. Woolen cloth. But how many whale-like features do dead whales have?

This is only known to those who have compared it. For example, a living whale is like a big house, and a dead whale is like the big house after it collapsed. How much similarity do you think there are between the two? It's a pity, for these people who don't go out to sea to hunt whales, the big whales will not float upright and let them draw strokes for hours. It seems that it is really not an easy task to draw a big whale well, whether it is for those who have made mistakes before or for those who are going to start drawing again now. So, for those who want to know what a great whale is like, the best way to do it is:

Go whaling yourself.