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It does seem to me , that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality , and the rare virtue of thick walls , and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness . Oh , man ! admire and model thyself after the whale ! Do thou , too , remain warm among ice . Do thou , too , live in this world without being of it . Be cool at the equator ; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole . Like the great dome of St . Peter’s , and like the great whale , retain , O man ! in all seasons a temperature of thine own . But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things ! Of erections , how few are domed like St . Peter’s ! of creatures , how few vast as the whale ! CHAPTER 69 . The Funeral . “ Haul in the chains ! Let the carcase go astern ! ” The vast tackles have now done their duty . The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre ; though changed in hue , it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk . It is still colossal . Slowly it floats more and more away , the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks , and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls , whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale . The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship , and every rod that it so floats , what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls , augment the murderous din . For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen . Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky , upon the fair face of the pleasant sea , wafted by the joyous breezes , that great mass of death floats on and on , till lost in infinite perspectives . There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral ! The sea - vultures all in pious mourning , the air - sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled . In life but few of them would have helped the whale , I ween , if peradventure he had needed it ; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce . Oh , horrible vultureism of earth ! from which not the mightiest whale is free . Nor is this the end . Desecrated as the body is , a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare . Espied by some timid man - of - war or blundering discovery - vessel from afar , when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls , nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun , and the white spray heaving high against it ; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse , with trembling fingers is set down in the log — shoals , rocks , and breakers hereabouts : beware ! And for years afterwards , perhaps , ships shun the place ; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum , because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held . There’s your law of precedents ; there’s your utility of traditions ; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth , and now not even hovering in the air ! There’s orthodoxy ! Thus , while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes , in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world . Are you a believer in ghosts , my friend ? There are other ghosts than the Cock - Lane one , and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them .
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