We talked about the old story of Jonah and the whale in the last chapter.
Now, plenty of Nantucket sailors don’t fully buy that ancient tale.
But doubt about old sea legends is nothing new.
Even back in ancient Greece and Rome, there were skeptical men who refused to blindly follow the common pagan beliefs of their time.
They doubted the stories of Hercules being swallowed by a whale, and of Arion riding a dolphin to safety.
Yet their skepticism never erased those old traditions or proved them false.
One old whaler from Sag Harbor had his own set of stubborn reasons for rejecting the story of Jonah.
He owned an old, quirky Bible filled with rough, unscientific illustrations from a bygone era.
One picture showed Jonah’s whale with two blowholes on its head.
This detail only matches one specific type of whale: the right whale and its close relatives.
Sailors have a famous saying about right whales: “A penny roll would choke him.”
In short, their throats are far too tiny to swallow a man whole.
But Bishop Jebb already answered this objection long ago.
He argued we don’t have to believe Jonah was trapped deep inside the whale’s stomach.
He could have simply been lodged safely inside the whale’s huge mouth for three days.
The bishop’s logic makes perfect sense.
A right whale’s mouth is so massive, it could easily fit two card tables and seat every player comfortably.
Some might guess Jonah could have hidden inside a hollow tooth, but that’s impossible too.
Right whales have no teeth at all.
The old Sag Harbor whaler had another objection to the Jonah story.
He rambled vaguely about how the whale’s stomach acids would have destroyed Jonah’s body if he’d been trapped inside.
This argument falls apart just as easily as the first one.
One German biblical scholar suggested a clever fix: Jonah might have climbed inside the floating corpse of a dead whale to survive.
He compared it to French soldiers marching on Russia’s frozen plains, who crawled inside dead horse bodies for makeshift shelter.
Other European scholars offered even more creative theories.
They believe the moment Jonah was thrown overboard from his Joppa ship, he spotted another nearby vessel and escaped aboard it.
That ship supposedly had a whale carved as its figurehead, and was likely named The Whale—just like modern ships named The Shark or The Eagle.
Some learned scholars even argue the “whale” in Jonah’s story was never a real sea creature.
They claim it was simply an inflatable flotation device, a primitive life preserver, that Jonah swam to and clung to until he was saved.
No matter what angle he took, the old Sag Harbor sailor’s arguments all fall flat.
Still, he had one final, strongest objection to the classic tale.
Jonah was swallowed in the Mediterranean Sea.
Three days later, he was vomited ashore near Nineveh, a city on the Tigris River.
The problem? The closest point on the Mediterranean coast is far more than a three-day journey from Nineveh.
How could the whale have moved him that far in just three days?
Could the whale have taken a longer route to get Jonah close enough?
Some suggest the whale might have sailed all the way around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
But that theory is full of holes too.
It would mean crossing the entire Mediterranean, navigating the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and circumnavigating all of Africa—all in three short days.
On top of that, the river waters near Nineveh are far too shallow for any large whale to swim through.
This idea also messes with recorded history.
If sailors rounded the Cape of Good Hope back in Jonah’s time, it would steal the credit from Bartholomew Diaz, the man officially credited with discovering the landmark.
It would make modern history entirely wrong.
In the end, all the old sailor’s petty arguments only show one thing: his foolish, arrogant pride in his own limited reasoning.
This stubbornness is even more ridiculous considering he had no formal education, only the rough wisdom he picked up from the sun and open ocean.
His doubt was nothing but disrespectful arrogance and ignorant rebellion against learned religious scholars.
Ironically, a Portuguese Catholic priest once used that very Cape of Good Hope theory to praise the miracle of Jonah’s survival.
He argued the whale’s incredible, impossible journey only made the divine miracle more extraordinary.
And he was right to see it that way.
To this day, devout and thoughtful Turkish people still fully believe the true story of Jonah.
Three centuries ago, an English traveler wrote in his travel journals about a Turkish mosque built in Jonah’s honor.
Inside that mosque hung a legendary lamp that burned endlessly, never needing a drop of oil.