In chapter 104, we go deeper into history; past the start of time and reign of man, and discuss the aged pedigree of the whale through fossils found on land all over the world. Ishmael, is a student of the world, and his knowledge learned through experiences and observation. Not only is he a student of the ocean, but of the earth and its history. He is a geologist, or has enough experience discovering fossils in his time digging cisterns, to give credit to the discoveries of whale fossils, in the Alabama, England, France, etc.

After numerous chapters spent on ripping apart and harvesting the whale, we are engulfed in this affirmation of the whale as having once been the dominant creature, found all over the world on land, which has only recently existed above water, and allowed humans to crawl upon the shore and reign supreme over nature. As Ishmael stands on the bones of processed whales, he imagines a time in which the Whale ruled:

“I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.”

The presence of the whale supersedes that of the history of mans great figures, kings, and empires, and is positioned as a godly figure; later Ishmael mentions that there are temples of whale bone where men go to worship God. The Fossil, is the ‘antemosaic’ or the unknowable history of the earth imprinted upon the land as a reminder that time did not being with the creation of man, whereas humans have used mosaicas to portray history, nature, and the activities of man. The leviathans reign however, is not over, as this lineage of adaptation has kept them in the water for a reason, which means that despite the effort of humans to hunt them for sport or industry, these godly-monsters will survive them when the earth is again submerged into a watery realm. The only question, is if humans will be able to adapt, where the whale’s genetic lineage has perfected him for this future and past.