Schools and Schoolmasters

Chapter 88 shifts from the preceding chapter’s immense herd, explicitly recalled in its opening, to the smaller whale communities known as schools. Its immediate work is classificatory: it distinguishes predominantly female groups from bands of young males, then describes their movements, conflicts, and responses to danger. Yet this natural history also develops a miniature social narrative, following males from youthful turbulence through reproductive dominance into solitary age. The technical designation “schoolmaster” connects the chapter’s taxonomy to its governing joke about education and authority. Rather than advancing a shipboard incident, the chapter broadens the account of whale life while showing how fishermen’s categories mingle practical observation with imaginative accounts of character.

The narrator repeatedly translates whale behavior into human social comedy. The dominant male becomes “a luxurious Ottoman,” seasonal migration resembles fashionable travel, and young bulls behave “Like a mob of young collegians.” These comparisons make the account lively while exposing how thoroughly its descriptions depend on human conventions of gender, class, and power. Mock-politeness supplies much of the humor: calling females “comparatively delicate” immediately precedes the estimate of “half a dozen yards round the waist.” The voice also moves between confident generalization and qualified speculation, as when it reports what “some have surmised” about the title’s origin. Such shifts combine the manner of an instructive naturalist with that of a conversational, mischievous storyteller.

The schoolmaster’s career makes masculine authority look less like wisdom than appetite followed by exhaustion. His protective gallantry coexists with possessiveness, combat, and indifference to offspring: “my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery.” When declining energy produces apparent virtue, the narrator calls him an “exemplary, sulky old soul,” puncturing the dignity of his conversion. The joke becomes explicitly educational when the retired schoolmaster teaches not his former practices but “the folly of it.” This suggests that moral instruction may arise from incapacity rather than superior understanding. Yet the account of aged solitude changes register: Nature’s “moody secrets” lend the solitary whale a mystery that the preceding domestic caricatures do not fully contain.

The final comparison gives the chapter’s social comedy a harsher ethical edge. Young males possess collective energy and aggression, but their fellowship disappears when one is struck: “all his comrades quit him.” Female companions, by contrast, remain around an injured whale “with every token of concern,” even when their persistence exposes them to capture. This ending complicates the earlier description of females as “characteristically timid”: vulnerability does not prevent sustained attachment, while masculine pugnacity guarantees no loyalty. The contrast also returns the reader to the hunter’s perspective underlying the classifications. Terms such as “forty-barrel-bulls” measure animals through extractable value, and the closing phrase “fall a prey” shows how social concern itself can become an opportunity for killing.