Wilcox County judge, prehistoric whale are mentioned in Herman Melville's classic novel, 'Moby Dick'

Zeuglodon skeleton at the University of Alabama.

I always enjoy hearing from readers of the newspaper, and I recently received a nice e-mail from Nikhil Bilwakesh, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Bilwakesh emailed in response to a column I wrote some time ago about the Catherine community. Bilwakesh said that Catherine “may have been where Judge John Creagh owned a farm, and where he found the fossil of a 35-million-year-old creature, initially thought to be a dinosaur of ‘lizard,’ but later determined to be a whale.”

Bilwakesh went on to say that famous author Herman Melville wrote of Creagh’s discovery in his classic novel, “Moby Dick.” Melville said that slaves found the bones and thought they were from a fallen angel, but Melville may have made that part up, Bilwakesh said.

Like many of you, no doubt, I found this information highly interesting.

John Gates Creagh was born in South Carolina in 1792, and he eventually moved to Alabama, where he helped found Jackson and Old Suggsville, both in Clarke County. During his life, he served as Jackson’s treasurer, as a commissioner and probate judge in Clarke County, and as a state legislator. He died at the age of 51 at Boiling Springs in 1843 and is buried in Wilcox County’s Creagh-Glover Cemetery.

Sources say that Creagh organized a wagon train and transported the only complete zeuglodon fossil skeleton to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. from his Alabama plantation. Creagh’s plantation was known as “The Rocks” because it was strewn with so many fossils. Much of this information is contained within a biography of Creagh written by Robert B. Van Devender, which was compiled from the archives of Mary Margaret Creagh Wood of Athens, Ga.

Zeuglodons were prehistoric meat-eating whales that grew as long as 70 feet. Many fossilized zeuglodon skeletons have been found in Clarke and Washington counties over the years, and today some of those skeletons are on display at the Smithsonian and the Alabama Museum of Natural History at the University of Alabama. In 1984, the state legislature named the Basilosaurus cetoides, aka, the zeuglodon, as the state fossil.

Research also shows that Creagh and his whale were indeed mentioned in Melville’s famous novel, “Moby Dick.” In Chapter 104, Melville wrote that “the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus.

“But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.”

In the end, I think it’s remarkable that someone from Wilcox County is mentioned in a book as famous as “Moby Dick.” If anyone in the reading audience has any additional information to share about Creagh and his whale, please let me hear from you. It would be especially interesting to learn where “The Rocks” was located.