“For therein be strange and wondrous works, variety of all kinds of beasts, and whales created.”[30]
[30] Ecclesiasticus xliii. vers. 24, 25. [Back]
De Thaun describes something very kraken-like, but he bestows upon it the title of Cetus. Cetus, we need scarcely remind our readers, is a Latin word applied in a general sense to all kinds of large sea-fish, and though the whale is strictly speaking a mammal and not a fish at all, we find the word reappearing in modern use in the term cetaceous, as applied to all creatures of the whale kind. The author of the “Bestiary” tells us that “Cetus is a very great beast; it lives always in the sea. It takes the sand of the sea, spreads it on its back, raises itself up in the sea, and will be at tranquillity. The seafarer sees it, and thinks that it is an island, and goes to arrive there to prepare his meal. The Cetus feels the fire and the ship and the people; then he will plunge if he can, and drown them. When he wants to eat he begins to gape, and the gaping of his mouth sends forth a smell so sweet, that the little fish will enter into his mouth, and then he will kill them, thus will he swallow them.” In a Jewish work entitled “Bara Bathra” we read of a whale so large that a ship was three days in sailing from its head to its tail. Of course this would not be at Cunard liner pace; still it certainly does give one the idea of a very considerable fish. But this monster of the deep sinks into insignificance in its length of but a hundred miles or so when we compare it with the fish Pheg (mentioned in an ancient Chinese book, the Tsi-hiai), that churns up five hundred miles of blue ocean into silvery foam when it starts its stupendous paddles in motion for a cruise. This is indeed, to quote Polonius, “very like a whale.” When any one’s credulity finds no difficulty in digesting such a tale as that, their powers of absorption must be well nigh as striking as the narration itself.
“The imperious seas breed monsters; for the dish
Poor tributary rivers as sweet fish.”[31]
[31] “Cymbeline,” Act iv. sc. 2. [Back]
According to Jewish tradition the Leviathan was a great fish; so great, they taught, that one day it swallowed another fish nearly a thousand miles long. Many of the Jewish legends in the Talmud and elsewhere possess little or nothing of graceful fancy, but simply endeavour to excite wonder by gross exaggeration. There were originally two of these leviathans, a male and a female; but if their numbers had increased beyond this, the world would have been soon destroyed; so the female was killed, and laid up in salt for the great feast to be held at the coming of the Messiah. Such is the Jewish tradition. Leviathan is mentioned in the Bible in several places, notably in the magnificent description that comprises the whole of the forty-first chapter of the book of Job. It is curious that a very similar legend to that we have just referred to was believed by the Jews in connection with the Behemoth mentioned in the preceding chapter of Job. Any one reading the fine description of the creature there given will have little difficulty in agreeing with most commentators that the hippopotamus is intended; but the Jews held that behemoth is a huge animal which has subsisted alone since the creation, and that it is reserved to be fattened for the great rejoicings that are to be held in the days of the advent of the promised Messiah. Every day they believe that he eats up the grass of a thousand hills, and that at each draught, when he is thirsty, he swallows up as much water as the Jordan yields in the course of six months.
It would probably be found that nine out of ten people would at once declare that their idea of the leviathan was that it was a large fish, and the tenth person would have very little doubt either. We do not mean that these typical folk would really believe in its existence as a special monster, but they would be quite prepared to say in an offhand way that the whale was intended under this name. Burton in his “Miracles of Art and of Nature” (A.D. 1678) has a passage that clearly shows this interchange of words, and the evident idea that the two terms, whale and leviathan, are synonymous. He writes, under the description of Norway—“The whales do so terrifie the shores, the Seas being there so deep, and therefore a fit habitation for those great leviathans.” He, however, goes on to tell us that “the People of the Sea-coast have found a remedy, which is by casting some water intermixt with Oyle of Castor, the smell whereof forces them immediately to retire, and without this help there were no Fishing on the Coasts.” The remedy for the boisterous presence of these great monsters seems at first a feeble one, until we bear in mind how gladly we too in our child-days would have immediately retired, if we could, at the awful odour of the coming castor-oil. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
The beautiful description of the wonders of creation in the 104th Psalm, the stretching firmament and the chariots of cloud, the fowls of heaven, and the trees so full of sap and vigour, concludes with a reference to the leviathan that has no doubt done much to associate the name with the whale,[32] and which, in fact, could only apply to some such great creature of the waters; so that we can only conclude that the term was used somewhat vaguely by the different Old Testament writers, as it is now tolerably unanimously held that the leviathan of the book of Job is the crocodile.
[32] “This great and wide sea wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom Thou hast made to play therein” (Ps. civ. 25, 26). [Back]
No creature of the whale tribe inhabits the Mediterranean; neither is the whale clothed in coat-of-mail, nor is it fierce in disposition; but if any one will carefully read the description given of the crocodile in the book of Job they will find point after point of appropriate detail, allowance being made partly for the wealth of Oriental and poetic imagery, and partly for the wonderful difference between assailing the crocodile in these later days with a rifle-ball as against the old sling, spear, or arrow. What a modern sportsman might lightly esteem would be a very different creature indeed to attack when the world was in its youth.