
remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer
than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of
exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale
really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable
idea of his living contour, is by going a-whaling yourself; but by so doing, you
run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems
to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this
leviathan.
 

                                  Chapter LVI

   Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling
                                     Scenes

In connection with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here
to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found
in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas,
Hakluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by.
    I know of only four published outlines of the great sperm whale: Colnett's,
Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous chapter Colnett and
Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far better than theirs; but, by great
odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's drawings of this whale are good,
excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes,
capping his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking sperm whales,
though no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlour men,
is admirably correct and lifelike in its general effect. Some of the sperm whale
drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are
wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault, though.
    Of the right whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are
drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has but one
picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because it is by such
pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive anything like a
truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters.
    But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the
most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found,
are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one
Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the sperm and right whale. In
the first engraving a noble sperm whale is depicted in full
