her off, Perseus, the prince
of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered
and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely
achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this
Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this
Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,
in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton
of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to
be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans
took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What
seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this:
it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed
to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and
the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many
old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and
often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a
dragon of the sea," saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;
in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it
would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but
encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle
with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a
Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly
up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though
the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance
of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have
crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;
bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible
with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In
fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will
fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol o