Tertiary period

The Tertiary period is presented as the last geological age preceding the superficial formations and as the principal horizon of known fossil whales. In Ishmael’s account, its remains do not merely supply a date for vanished animals: they interrupt any simple boundary between prehistoric monsters and living cetaceans, revealing a deep continuity within the history of the whale.

Geological Position and Fossil Record

The Tertiary period follows the earlier geological strata in which monsters that are now almost completely extinct are found. Its fossil remains appear as connecting, or at least interrupted, links between those ancient creatures and the animals whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark. All fossil whales then known to have been discovered belong to the Tertiary period, although none corresponds exactly to any species living in the present. Their general resemblance to modern whales nevertheless justifies classifying them as cetacean fossils.

The evidence is fragmentary rather than complete. Broken fossils of pre-Adamic whales, including portions of bones and skeletons, had been found during the preceding thirty years at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, France, England, Scotland, and the American states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A particularly curious skull fragment was excavated in 1779 in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, near the Tuileries, while other bones were uncovered during the construction of the great docks at Antwerp in the time of Napoleon. Cuvier judged these remains to belong to an entirely unknown leviathanic species, emphasizing both the scale of the creatures and the incompleteness of human knowledge about them.

A Bridge Between Extinction and Survival

The Tertiary period gives the whale a history deeper than the immediate record of hunting and navigation. Fossils from this interval preserve forms that are neither simply identical with living whales nor wholly separated from them. They therefore make geological time visible as a chain of partial likenesses, missing links, and interrupted evidence rather than as a perfectly continuous catalogue. The whale appears as an organism whose present shape carries the pressure of remote transformations, while its past remains accessible only through scattered material remnants.

This geological perspective also complicates claims that modern whales are necessarily approaching extinction. Ishmael argues that the apparent disappearance of whales from familiar grounds may reflect altered distribution rather than a terminal decline. Sperm Whales, once encountered in small pods, are described as having gathered into immense, widely separated caravans, so that sailors may pass weeks or months without seeing a spout and then suddenly meet what seem to be thousands. Whalebone whales likewise may have been driven from formerly populated coasts toward remote polar strongholds, where icy fields and floes make pursuit nearly impossible.

Scale, Time, and Human Limits

The Tertiary period expands the narrative beyond the scale of a single voyage or industry. Whaling reaches across oceans and routes that connect the American and European worlds with the Pacific, Australia, Polynesia, Japan, and the waters around Java; the fossil record reaches backward through geological ages. Together, these scales make the whale both a living participant in global commerce and a survivor of a time preceding human history.

The period also exposes the limits of statistics and observation. Even annual slaughter on a large scale cannot by itself prove that the species is vanishing when the animals’ distribution, migrations, and inaccessible refuges remain imperfectly known. The same narrative that measures whale herds and hunting grounds must therefore acknowledge what it cannot see. Tertiary fossils are material evidence of vanished forms, but they are also reminders that the surviving animal exceeds the records made by hunters, naturalists, and sailors.

Narrative and Ecological Significance

Within the larger account of Cetology, the Tertiary period places living whales inside a multispecies and planetary history. The sea is shown as an active ecological field: Right Whales feed by filtering brit, sharks gather around a captured Sperm Whale, squid and other creatures inhabit the same oceanic world, and immense Sperm Whale herds form social aggregations that alter the conditions of pursuit. Against this living complexity, fossil whales represent earlier configurations of the same broad order of life.

The period consequently resists reducing the whale to a commodity or a symbol. Whaling is defended as a global force that explored unknown seas, opened routes, aided colonies, and carried missionaries and commerce, but the geological record places that human enterprise inside a much older history that it does not control. The Tertiary whale survives in the narrative as bone, fragment, resemblance, and uncertainty: a deep-time presence that enlarges the meaning of the living Leviathan while warning against confidence that any human account has captured its whole existence.