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These admeasurements I now propose to set before you . But first , be it recorded , that , in this matter , I am not free to utter any fancied measurement I please . Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to , to test my accuracy . There is a Leviathanic Museum , they tell me , in Hull , England , one of the whaling ports of that country , where they have some fine specimens of fin - backs and other whales . Likewise , I have heard that in the museum of Manchester , in New Hampshire , they have what the proprietors call “ the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States . ” Moreover , at a place in Yorkshire , England , Burton Constable by name , a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale , but of moderate size , by no means of the full - grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s . In both cases , the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged , were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds . King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it ; and Sir Clifford , because he was lord of the seignories of those parts . Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout ; so that , like a great chest of drawers , you can open and shut him , in all his bony cavities — spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan — and swing all day upon his lower jaw . Locks are to be put upon some of his trap - doors and shutters ; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side . Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column ; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum ; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead . The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm , where I had them tattooed ; as in my wild wanderings at that period , there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics . But as I was crowded for space , and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing — at least , what untattooed parts might remain — I did not trouble myself with the odd inches ; nor , indeed , should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale . CHAPTER 103 . Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton . In the first place , I wish to lay before you a particular , plain statement , touching the living bulk of this leviathan , whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit . Such a statement may prove useful here . According to a careful calculation I have made , and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate , of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length ; according to my careful calculation , I say , a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude , between eighty - five and ninety feet in length , and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference , such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons ; so that , reckoning thirteen men to a ton , he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants . Think you not then that brains , like yoked cattle , should be put to this leviathan , to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination ?
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