Whether mesmeric clairvoyants testified to the fluctuations of electricity,
imagination, disease, or moral character, they were generally bringing news of something hidden from the ordinary senses: a subtle fluid, or the pulsations of temperament left in an autograph manuscript. The difficulty of sense in these domains made their success as observers prestigious, and it made themselves valued subjects. But outside the charmed circle of this extreme skepticism, sensation might barely count as a skill at all. Especially when the object was obvious—as big, for example, as a whale—mere accurate perception could seem to be a lowly labor, a mere preliminary to reason. So it certainly seemed to the British anatomist John Hunter, one of Ishmael's whipping-boys in "Cetology." "[G]ain being the primary view" of those who pursue whales as "articles of traffic," Hunter had once complained before the Royal Society of London, the "researches of the Naturalist are only considered as secondary points, if considered at all" (1). The
anatomist saw lamp-oil manufacture and natural history as locked in a zero-sum game in which the investigator could barely pry a whale-cub specimen out of the harpooner's unctuous clutches. Whalemen were merely recalcitrant servants, remiss deliverers of goods.
But this was a misleading complaint. Hunter needed hunters, as his auditors at the Royal Society knew perfectly well. From its seventeenth-century beginnings the Society had urged mercantile travelers, however humble, to collect data and specimens from the
empire's far corners and to return their spoils to the metropole for analysis. The first volume of its Transactions had even offered this body of men a few sets of highly detailed instructions for data-gathering, thereby constituting them as a global armada of laborers prepared to take meteorological readings, preserve specimens, describe native peoples, and make maps ("Directions"). These instructions did not so much let the mariner-collector into the community of knowledge-producers as keep him out, making observation an invisible preliminary to the real epistemological work of reason. In other words, while the measurement of electricity or of a soul might require an observer gifted to the point of clairvoyance, whale-watching merely required a docile one.
Captain William Scoresby was one such compliant observer. In Ishmael's pecking-order of cetologists in Moby-Dick (1851), Scoresby could have been better, and he could have been worse. Unlike the armchair natural-philosophers of the Royal Society, Ishmael admitted, he was at least a "real professional harpooneer and whaleman"—but one unfortunately hampered by his inferior object, the Greenland whale.cxix In the 1820s Scoresby had been one of the better-known members of the class the anatomist Hunter loved to hate: the mariner-collectors. A century and a half after the publication of the Royal Society's directives for travelers bound on far voyages, Scoresby might have been following the same instructions. He collected specimens and meteorological readings while on his northern voyages and brought them back to the professorates of Glasgow and Edinburgh for analysis. In his northern journeys, Scoresby amassed data on a stultifying array of scientific questions whenever he was not busy hunting. He recorded the color, specific gravity, and "saltness" of the Greenland Sea; he compiled
meteorological tables showing the "appearance, colour, transparency, density, degree of Dryness, and state as to Electricity, of the atmosphere;" he studied snowflake
morphology with his polar-chilled microscope; and he collected and described birds, whale cubs, and marine "Animalecules, &c."cxx In all this Scoresby was an homme
couvert, as were mariner-collectors in general: his intellectual property was of uncertain
value without the imprimatur of his metropolitan correspondents. In his whaling years, the 1820s and 1830s, Scoresby seldom published a section on a scientific topic without explanatory notes and a certificate of approval from some Edinburgh professor (Journal 399, 410, 467). It was his to report, and not to wonder why. In the division of natural- historical labor as Scoresby knew it, the lowly work of observation belonged to the unskilled and the far-flung, while propertied and centralized reason gathered both the raw data and the prestige to itself.
Moby-Dick's first salvo in the revaluation of the whaleman's knowledge is roundly
to reject this system to which the earnest Scoresby acquiesced. Ishmael refuses to have the whale expropriated from sea to metropole. His definition of the whale—"a spouting
fish with a horizontal tail"—receives its unanswerable mandate from Nantucket lore. "By
the above definition," the reader is assured, "I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers" (137). A natural-historical definition stands only so long as it meets this test, and no longer. Nantucket whalemen are the ultimate in cetological expertise as far as Ishmael is concerned, followed not particularly closely by hunters of inferior species. Scoresby, though a whaleman, is limited by his inferior prey like an
artist by substandard materials. Poor Linnæus, with his misguided notion that the whale is an aquatic mammal and not a fish, can barely cling to the lintel of this pantheon. Told Linnæus's theories, Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, "profanely hinted they were humbug" (137). Linnæus, the Cuviers, Lacépède, and our old acquaintance, the Royal Society anatomist John Hunter, all fall before the Coffins' marling spikes.
Ishmael scoffs at a series of quotes from the likes of these, in which he seems to catch the naturalists in admissions of their inadequacy, of their "'[u]nfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters'" and of an "'[i]mpenetrable veil covering our
knowledge of the cetacea'" (134). The only book that could describe the whale would be the one that contained the entire sea: Ishmael's "Bibliographical System" of cetological taxonomy does not so much take whales to books, as books to whales. The sperm whale and right whale are "Folio Whales," accommodated by the publication format that suits their proportions (137-38). Only in his element, the chapter punningly declares, is the whale legible. Even a whale skeleton on a South Sea island—let alone in a European museum—is insufficient; "timid untravelled man" ought not to expect to learn anything about the whale "by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton" (453). The text of Leviathan is difficult, and part of the non-circulating collection of only one library: the sea. This rebellion against the hierarchies of natural history is not a rejection of scientific knowledge per se.cxxi Instead, the point is to valorize one part of scientific labor: the work of sense, which, in the case of cetology, undervalued mariner-collectors perform—and which occurs at sea.
Scoresby himself rebelled in a different way: he decided to get out of the game. Perhaps his middling position in the cetological ranks had began to chafe; perhaps, after taking all these pains to buoy others' flights of reason, Scoresby began to feel—as his contemporary Melville did when turning from his early travel narratives to the writing of
Moby-Dick—"a longing to plume [his] pinions for a flight" of his own.cxxii
What avowed fiction did for Melville—giving him license to interpret, try out, appropriate, plagiarize and opine—experimental magnetism was to do for Scoresby. By the time the Arctic explorer appeared in Melville's novel as a not entirely useless observer, the real Scoresby had put in for a promotion in the system of scientific knowledge-producers. He had begun experimenting with iron magnets, and with the magnet of his own soul. He had become, in other words, a mesmerist. Scoresby hypothesized that a single unknown fluid—a "hitherto undefined agency…the servant of the Great Creator"—might explain animal and mineral magnetism (Magnetical Investigations; Zoistic Magnetism 118).cxxiii Now, instead of observing the obvious, he would keep careful records of the tantalizingly invisible. If he had craved prestige, he would find it here.