Postscript

Chapter 25 presents itself as a supplementary defense of whaling rather than an episode of action. Its title, "Postscript", suits the narrator’s opening desire to uphold "the dignity of whaling" by adding one more argument. At this point, the chapter makes the occupation’s prestige its explicit subject, connecting whalemen’s labor to the ceremonial elevation of monarchs. Yet the opening immediately complicates its promise of "substantiated facts": the narrator permits himself "a not unreasonable surmise" if it strengthens his case. The chapter thus stages advocacy as much as demonstration. Its culminating claim makes whalemen suppliers to royalty, but the route toward that claim invites readers to notice the advocate’s ingenuity rather than accept his reasoning without reservation.

The style combines mock solemnity with comic deflation. Legal and military language in "embattling his facts" gives the narrator’s defense an imposing posture, while rhetorical questions allow him to advance possibilities without establishing them. Coronation becomes a "process of seasoning", and a king’s head is oiled "even as a head of salad". These culinary comparisons reduce royal ceremony to familiar material operations; the suggestion that anointing might make the head’s "interior run well" adds a mechanical joke. The narrative voice then wanders into an opinionated digression about hair-oil before returning to its announced question. This movement makes the argument feel conversational and improvisatory, even as its final direct address, "ye loyal Britons!", supplies a theatrical conclusion.

The chapter’s central irony is that it elevates whaling by diminishing the royal dignity from which that elevation supposedly derives. If anointing a monarch resembles dressing salad or lubricating machinery, coronation appears less inherently majestic than ceremonially distinguished. The contrast with the ordinary man who "palpably smells of that anointing" exposes how the same material practice receives different judgments according to social position. Meanwhile, the list excluding other oils offers no evidence for those exclusions: "What then can it possibly be" turns assertion into apparent necessity. Describing sperm oil as "unmanufactured, unpolluted" lends the favored substance an exceptional purity. The closing boast, "we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!", both claims occupational honor and makes royal grandeur dependent on material supplied by workers.