Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?

At this point, Chapter 105 extends the preceding chapter’s fossil discussion into two questions about the whale’s historical stature and continued survival. The reference to the Alabama skeleton provides a concrete starting point, but the inquiry expands from comparative measurements to the possible extinction of an entire species. This movement makes the whale more than an object to be measured or hunted: it becomes a means of imagining humanity’s place within geological time. The opening image, “the head-waters of the Eternities,” gives that enlargement a flowing, almost riverine form. By ending with a future flood, the chapter frames human hunting within a history that begins before humanity and is imagined continuing beyond its dominion.

The narrator builds his case through questions, objections, comparisons, and emphatic rebuttals, making exposition resemble a spirited debate. Numerical measurements and named authorities supply the appearance of scholarly precision, while comic exaggeration repeatedly interrupts it. Ancient reports become “Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!”; Egyptian mummies are measured against “a modern Kentuckian in his socks”. Such juxtapositions deflate inherited prestige and privilege practical knowledge, most explicitly in the narrator’s self-identification as “I, a whaleman”. Yet his authority remains rhetorically constructed rather than uniformly demonstrated: reported captures, historical anecdotes, and a fact that “could be statistically stated” mingle with measurements. The style invites confidence in his energy while exposing the variety of evidence sustaining his conclusions.

The extinction argument contains a tension between acknowledged violence and insistence on the whale’s security. Hunting reaches the world’s “remotest secret drawers and lockers”, an image that makes the ocean seem searchable and vulnerable to human intrusion. The disappearance of regional buffalo populations offers an especially forceful warning, linking slaughter with commercial settlement through the broker selling land. Against this, the narrator argues that whales are harder to kill, gather into protective groups, and retreat to inaccessible waters. Military language turns them into organized defenders with “Polar citadels”. Nevertheless, the admission that at least 13,000 whales are killed annually remains unsettling: the chapter’s confidence must repeatedly overcome evidence of the destructive power it explicitly recognizes.

The conclusion transforms a qualified discussion into a declaration of species immortality. Earlier phrases such as “presumed great longevity” and “probably attaining the age of a century” mark uncertainty, but the final paragraph speaks with prophetic assurance. Its crucial distinction is “immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality”: individual deaths become compatible with an imagined collective permanence. Royal buildings are reduced to temporary landmarks on ground the whale once traversed, and Noah’s Ark becomes unnecessary to its survival. The closing image of the whale’s “frothed defiance” elevates the animal from hunted creature to cosmic antagonist. Rather than merely settling a zoological question, this ending imagines a natural power that refuses humanity’s claim to mastery.