Whales are given to companionship. Formerly they were seen sailing along not only in pairs, but occasionally in large families of ten or twelve in the solitary seas. Nothing exceeded the grandeur of those vast and living fleets, sometimes lighted up by their own phosphorescence, and throwing to the height of thirty or forty feet in the Polar seas columns of water which smoked as it rose. They would approach a vessel, peaceably and in evident curiosity; looking upon her as some specimen of a new and strange species of fish; and they sported around and welcomed the visitor. In their joy they raised themselves half upright and then fell down again with a huge noise, making a boiling gulf as they sank. Their innocent familiarity went so far that they sometimes touched the ship or her boats. An imprudent confidence which was most cruelly deceived! In less than a century, the great species of the Whale have almost disappeared.
Their manners and their organization are those of our herbivora. Like our ruminating animals they have a succession of stomachs where their nourishment is elaborated; they need no teeth and have none. They easily graze the living prairies of the sea, I mean the gigantic, soft, and gelatinous, fucus, the beds of infusoriæ, the banks of the imperceptible atoms. For such aliments the chase is not necessary. Having no occasion for war, they have no necessity for the sawlike teeth or the frightful jaws of the Shark and other destructive creatures. Boitard tells us that they never pursue. Their food is borne to them on every wave. Innocent and peaceable, they engulf a world of scarcely organized creatures which die ere they lived, and pass unconsciously into the crucible of universal change.
Not the slightest connection between this gentle race of mammiferæ, which, like our own, have milk and red blood, and the monsters of an earlier age,—horrible abortions of the primitive mud! The Whale, of far more recent origin, found a purified water, a free Sea, and a peaceful globe.
He had finished, the Globe had, his old discordant dream of lizard-fishes, and flying dragons, the frightful reign of the reptile; he had got out of the sinister fogs and mists into the lovely dawn of harmonious conceptions. Our carnivorous creatures were not yet in existence. There was a brief time (a hundred thousand years, perhaps,) of great gentleness and innocence, when the Opossum and other pouched animals were on the earth; excellent creatures, that tenderly loved their families, that carried their young, and, in case of the fatigue or danger of those little creatures, sheltered them in their pouches. In the Sea appeared vast and gentle giants.
The milk of the sea, its superabundant oil, its warm animalized mucus, saturated with a marvellous power tending to life, swelling at length into those gigantic creatures, those spoilt children of nature which she endowed with an incomparable strength, and with the yet greater gift of the beautiful and warm red blood, which now for the first time appeared.
That is the true flower of the world. All the pale and cold blooded creation is languid and seemingly heartless, when compared with the generous and exulting life which boils with anger or love in the rich purple.
The strength of the superior creation, its charm, its beauty, reside in that blood. With it commenced a new youth in nature, a flame of desire, of love, and the love of family and race; to be completed and crowned in man by divine Pity.
But with this magnificent gift of red blood, the nervous sensibility was enormously increased; the being became more vulnerable, more sensitive alike to pleasure and to pain. The Whale having scarcely any sense of scent or hearing, every thing in his organization is favorable to the sense of touch. The thick blubber which so well protects him from the cold, does not at all guard him against hurts. His finely organized skin of six tissues shudders and vibrates in them all at every blow, and their papillæ are most delicate instruments of touch. And all this is animated and made vivid by rich, red blood, which, even allowing for difference of bulk, is infinitely more abundant than that of the terrestrial mammiferæ. The Whale, when wounded, ensanguines the ocean to a great distance; the blood that we have in drops, is lavished upon him in torrents.
The female is pregnant nine months. Her milk is sweetish and warm, like that of the human female. But as she has always to breast the wave, her front mammæ, if placed on the chest, would be exposed to all shocks; they are, therefore, placed a little lower on the belly. Here the young one is sheltered and safe from the shock of the wave, which is already broken, ere it reaches him. The form, inherent to such a life, contracts the mother, at the waist and deprives her of that adorable grace of woman, that beauty of settled and harmonious life, where all is tenderness. But the Whale, the great woman of the sea, however tender she may be, is forced to conform, in every thing, to her continual battle with the waves. For the rest, beneath that strange uncouth disguise, the organization, and the sensitiveness, are the same; fish above, the Whale is woman beneath. She is infinitely timid, too; the mere flight of a bird will sometimes terrify her so much that she dives so violently as to hurt herself by striking the bottom.