| Preliminary Matter. |
| |
| This text of Melville's Moby-Dick is based on the Hendricks House edition. |
| It was prepared by Professor Eugene F. Irey at the University of Colorado. |
| Any subsequent copies of this data must include this notice |
| and any publications resulting from analysis of this data must |
| include reference to Professor Irey's work. |
| |
| Etymology (Supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school.) |
| The pale Ushei{rthreadbare} in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. |
| He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, |
| mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. |
| He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality. |
| Extracts (supplied by a sub-sub-librarian.) |
| It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grubworm of a poor |
| devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and |
| street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales |
| he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. |
| Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy |
| whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel |
| cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well |
| as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, |
| as affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, |
| thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, |
| including our own. |
| |
| So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. |
| Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will |
| ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; |
| but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; |
| and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty |
| glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness i{give} it up, sub-subs! |
| For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, |
| by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! |
| Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But |
| gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for |
| your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, |
| and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against |
| your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together i{there}, ye shall |
| strike unsplinterable |
| .. < chapter I 2 LOOMINGS > |
| |
| Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how |
| long precisely --having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular |
| to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the |
| watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and |
| regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the |
| mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find |
| myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the |
| rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an |
| upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me |
| from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking |
| people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. |
| |
| This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish |
| Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is |
| nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their |
| degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the |
| ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round |
| by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. |
| |
| Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is |
| the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by |
| breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the |
| crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath |
| afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by |
| Whitehall northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all |
| around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean |
| reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; |
| some looking over the bulwarks glasses! |
| .. <p 2 > |
| of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a |
| still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up |
| in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. |
| How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? But look! |
| here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for |
| a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the |
| land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. |
| No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling |
| in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come |
| from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, --north, east, south, and west. |
| Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of |
| the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Once more. Say, you |
| are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you |
| please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there |
| by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded |
| of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his |
| feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in |
| all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, |
| try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical |
| professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. |
| |
| But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, |
| quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the |
| Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with |
| a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps |
| his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a |
| sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to |
| overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though |
| the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs |
| like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the |
| shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the |
| Prairies in June, |
| .. <p 3 > |
| when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what |
| is the one charm wanting? --Water --there is not a drop of water there! Were |
| Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see |
| it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls |
| of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or |
| invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every |
| robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other |
| crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you |
| yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your |
| ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea |
| holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? |
| Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that |
| story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image |
| he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same |
| image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the |
| ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. Now, when I say |
| that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the |
| eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it |
| inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you |
| must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something |
| in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick --grow quarrelsome --don't sleep of |
| nights --do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing; --no, I never go as a |
| passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a |
| Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of |
| such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable |
| respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is |
| quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of |
| ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook, -- |
| though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of |
| officer on ship-board --yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls; --though |
| once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, |
| there is no one who will |
| .. <p 4 > |
| speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I |
| will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled |
| ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in |
| their huge bake-houses the pyramids. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple |
| sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there |
| to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me |
| jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, |
| this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, |
| particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van |
| Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just |
| previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a |
| country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The |
| transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, |
| and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin |
| and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some old hunks |
| of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does |
| that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New |
| Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, |
| because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular |
| instance? Who aint a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old |
| sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I |
| have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else |
| is one way or other served in much the same way -- either in a physical or |
| metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed |
| round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be |
| content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of |
| paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny |
| that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And |
| there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The |
| act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two |
| orchard |
| .. <p 5 > |
| thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, --what will compare with it? The |
| urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, |
| considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly |
| ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how |
| cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, I always go to sea as |
| a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle |
| deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds |
| from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for |
| the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second |
| hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but |
| not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many |
| other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But |
| wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant |
| sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this |
| the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance |
| of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way --he |
| can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling |
| voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a |
| long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more |
| extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run |
| something like this: Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the |
| United States. Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael. Bloody Battle in |
| Affghanistan. Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage |
| managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, |
| when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short |
| and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces --though I |
| cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the |
| circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which |
| being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set |
| about |
| .. <p 6 > |
| performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was |
| a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment. |
| chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale |
| himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. |
| Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the |
| undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending |
| marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my |
| wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; |
| but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I |
| love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what |
| is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with |
| it--would they let me --since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all |
| the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the |
| whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung |
| open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two |
| there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid |
| most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. |
| .. <p 6 > |
| .. < chapter ii 24 THE CARPET-BAG > |
| |
| I stuffed a shirt or two into my old |
| carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the |
| Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New |
| Bedford. It was on a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed |
| upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and |
| that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday. As |
| most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling |
| .. <p 7 > |
| stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as |
| well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was |
| made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, |
| boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, |
| which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been |
| gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor |
| old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original |
| --the Tyre of this Carthage; --the place where the first dead American whale |
| was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, |
| the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And |
| where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put |
| forth, partly laden with imported cobble-stones --so goes the story --to throw |
| at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a |
| harpoon from the bowsprit? Now having a night, a day, and still another night |
| following before me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, |
| it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It |
| was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold |
| and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had |
| sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver, --So, |
| wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a |
| dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north |
| with the darkness towards the south --wherever in your wisdom you may conclude |
| to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and |
| don't be too particular. With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed |
| the sign of The Crossed Harpoons --but it looked too expensive and jolly |
| there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the Sword-Fish Inn, there |
| came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice |
| from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches |
| thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement, --rather weary for me, when I struck my |
| foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless |
| .. <p 8 > |
| service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive |
| and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in |
| the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, |
| Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from before the door; |
| your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct |
| followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the |
| cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns. Such dreary streets! Blocks of |
| blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a |
| candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of |
| the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I |
| came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which |
| stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the |
| uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over |
| an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost |
| choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But The |
| Crossed Harpoons, and The Sword-Fish? --this, then, must needs be the sign |
| of The Trap. However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, |
| pushed on and opened a second, interior door. It seemed the great Black |
| Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their |
| rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a |
| pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the |
| blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing |
| there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the |
| sign of The Trap! Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far |
| from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, |
| saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly |
| representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath |
| -- The Spouter-Inn: --Peter Coffin. Coffin? --Spouter? --Rather ominous in that |
| particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, |
| they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the |
| light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked |
| .. <p 9 > |
| quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it |
| might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the |
| swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here |
| was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. It was a |
| queer sort of place --a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and |
| leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous |
| wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's |
| tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any |
| one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. In judging |
| of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, says an old writer --of whose |
| works I possess the only copy extant -- it maketh a marvellous difference, |
| whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on |
| the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where |
| the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only |
| glazier. True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind --old |
| black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this |
| body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the |
| crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too |
| late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone |
| is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus |
| there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking |
| off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, |
| and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the |
| tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken |
| wrapper --(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty |
| night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their |
| oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege |
| of making my own summer with my own coals. But what thinks Lazarus? Can he |
| warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would |
| not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him |
| down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye |
| .. <p 10 > |
| gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost? Now, |
| that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of |
| Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of |
| the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace |
| made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only |
| drinks the tepid tears of orphans. But no more of this blubbering now, we are |
| going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the |
| ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this Spouter may |
| be. |
| .. <p 10 > |
| .. < chapter iii 14 THE SPOUTER-INN > |
| |
| Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, |
| you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned |
| wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one |
| side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way |
| defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was |
| only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful |
| inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding |
| of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at |
| first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New |
| England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of |
| much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by |
| throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last |
| come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be |
| altogether unwarranted. But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, |
| limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the |
| .. <p 11 > |
| centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a |
| nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a |
| nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, |
| unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you |
| involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous |
| painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart |
| you through. --It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. --It's the unnatural |
| combat of the four primal elements. --It's a blasted heath. --It's a Hyperborean |
| winter scene. --It's the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at |
| last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the |
| picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; |
| does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great |
| leviathan himself? In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory |
| of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons |
| with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner |
| in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three |
| dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring |
| clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the |
| three mast-heads. The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a |
| heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with |
| glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of |
| human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like |
| the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered |
| as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have |
| gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with |
| these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. |
| Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, |
| fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a |
| sunset. And that harpoon--so like a corkscrew now--was flung in Javan seas, |
| and run away with by a whale, years afterward slain off the Cape of Blanco. |
| The original iron entered |
| .. <p 12 > |
| nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, |
| travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump. |
| Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way --cut through |
| what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fire-places all |
| round --you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such |
| low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you |
| would almost fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a |
| howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one |
| side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, |
| filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks. |
| Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den --the |
| bar-- a rude attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there |
| stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might |
| almost drive beneath it. within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old |
| decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like |
| another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a |
| little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors |
| deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his |
| poison. Though true cylinders without --within, the villanous green goggling |
| glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel |
| meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. |
| Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; |
| and so on to the full glass --the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down |
| for a shilling. Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen |
| gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of |
| skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be |
| accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full --not a |
| bed unoccupied. But avast, he added, tapping his forehead, you haint no |
| objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin' |
| a whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing. |
| .. <p 13 > |
| I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do |
| so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the |
| landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not |
| decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town |
| on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man's |
| blanket. I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper? --you want supper? |
| Supper 'll be ready directly. I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all |
| over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still |
| further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working |
| away at the space between his legs. he was trying his hand at a ship under |
| full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought. At last some four or |
| five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as |
| Iceland --no fire at all --the landlord said he couldn't afford it. Nothing |
| but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to |
| button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with |
| our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind --not |
| only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! |
| One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in |
| a most direful manner. My boy, said the landlord, you'll have the |
| nightmare to a dead sartainty. Landlord, I whispered, that aint the |
| harpooneer, is it? Oh, no, said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, |
| the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he |
| don't--he eats nothing but steaks, and likes 'em rare. The devil he does, |
| says I. Where is that harpooneer? Is he here? He'll be here afore long, |
| was the answer. I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this |
| dark complexioned harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it |
| so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed |
| before I did. |
| .. <p 14 > |
| Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what |
| else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a |
| looker on. Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the |
| landlord cried, That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the |
| offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; |
| now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees. A tramping of sea boots was |
| heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of |
| mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their |
| heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their |
| beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. |
| They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they |
| entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale's |
| mouth --the bar --when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon |
| poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, |
| upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which |
| he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never |
| mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or |
| on the weather side of an ice-island. The liquor soon mounted into their |
| heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from |
| sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously. I observed, however, |
| that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to |
| spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole |
| he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me |
| at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my |
| shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is |
| concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood |
| full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a |
| coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply |
| brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in |
| the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to |
| give him much joy. His voice at once announced |
| .. <p 15 > |
| that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be |
| one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleganian Ridge in Virginia. When |
| the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped |
| away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the |
| sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, |
| it seems, for some reason a huge favorite with them, they raised a cry of |
| Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington? and darted out of the house in |
| pursuit of him. It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost |
| supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon |
| a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the |
| seamen. No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal |
| rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but people |
| like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with |
| an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger |
| a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any |
| earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody |
| else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do |
| ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have |
| your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your |
| own skin. The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated |
| the thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a |
| harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the |
| tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, |
| it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going |
| bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight --how could I |
| tell from what vile hole he had been coming? Landlord! I've changed my mind |
| about that harpooneer. -- I shan't sleep with him. I'll try the bench here. |
| just as you please; i'm sorry i cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, |
| and it's a plaguy rough board here --feeling of the knots and notches. But |
| wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've |
| .. <p 16 > |
| got a carpenter's plane there in the bar --wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug |
| enough. So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief |
| first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while |
| grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the |
| plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near |
| spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's sake to quit -- the bed was |
| soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world |
| could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with |
| another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the |
| room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study. I now took |
| the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but that |
| could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other |
| bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one --so there |
| was no yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only |
| clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back |
| to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold |
| air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do |
| at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from |
| the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the |
| immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night. The |
| devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal a march on |
| him --bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the |
| most violent knockings? it seemed no bad idea; but upon second thoughts I |
| dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I |
| popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all |
| ready to knock me down! Still, looking around me again, and seeing no possible |
| chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I |
| began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices |
| against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be |
| dropping in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we |
| may become jolly good bedfellows after all --there's no telling. |
| .. <p 17 > |
| But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and |
| going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer. Landlord! said I, what sort of |
| a chap is he --does he always keep such late hours? It was now hard upon |
| twelve o'clock. The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and |
| seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. No, he |
| answered, generally he's an early bird -- airley to bed and airley to rise |
| --yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. --But to-night he went out a |
| peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, |
| may be, he can't sell his head. Can't sell his head? --What sort of a |
| bamboozingly story is this you are telling me? getting into a towering rage. |
| |
| Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged |
| this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head |
| around this town? That's precisely it, said the landlord, and I told him |
| he couldn't sell it here, the market's overstocked. With what? shouted I. |
| |
| With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world? I tell |
| you what it is, landlord, said I, quite calmly, you'd better stop spinning |
| that yarn to me --I'm not green. May be not, taking out a stick and |
| whittling a toothpick, but I rayther guess you'll be done brown if that ere |
| harpooneer hears you a slanderin' his head. I'll break it for him, said I, |
| now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the |
| landlord's. It's broke a'ready, said he. Broke, said I -- broke, do you |
| mean? Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess. |
| |
| Landlord, said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow storm, |
| -- landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and |
| that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you |
| can only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain |
| harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you |
| persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories, tending |
| to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom |
| .. <p 18 > |
| you design for my bedfellow --a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an |
| intimate and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to |
| speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be |
| in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, |
| you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if |
| true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've |
| no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, |
| sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself |
| liable to a criminal prosecution. Wall, said the landlord, fetching a long |
| breath, that's a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and |
| then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of |
| has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New |
| Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, |
| and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it |
| would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' |
| to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was |
| goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth |
| like a string of inions. This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable |
| mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling |
| me --but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out a |
| Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal |
| business as selling the heads of dead idolators? Depend upon it, landlord, |
| that harpooneer is a dangerous man. He pays reg'lar, was the rejoinder. |
| |
| But come, it's getting dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes --it's |
| a nice bed: Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. |
| There's plenty room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big |
| bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little |
| Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, |
| and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm. |
| After |
| .. <p 19 > |
| that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a glim in a |
| jiffy; and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to |
| lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, |
| he exclaimed I vum it's Sunday --you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's |
| come to anchor somewhere --come along then; do come; won't ye come? I |
| considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was |
| ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a |
| prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep |
| abreast. There, said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea |
| chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; there, make |
| yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye. I turned round from eyeing |
| the bed, but he had disappeared. Folding back the counterpane, I stooped |
| over the bed. Though none of the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny |
| tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and |
| centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a |
| rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man |
| striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a |
| hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large |
| seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a |
| land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the |
| shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the |
| bed. But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the |
| light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at |
| some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a |
| large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something |
| like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole |
| or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American |
| ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into |
| a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of |
| guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being |
| uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this |
| .. <p 20 > |
| mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to |
| a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my |
| life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in |
| the neck. I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about |
| this head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on |
| the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the |
| middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little |
| more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed |
| as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer's not |
| coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, |
| but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light |
| tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven. Whether that |
| mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, |
| but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At |
| last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing |
| towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and |
| saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under the door. Lord save me, |
| thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler. But I lay |
| perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to. Holding a |
| light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other, the |
| stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his |
| candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began |
| working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being |
| in the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for |
| some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This accomplished, |
| however, he turned round --when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It |
| was of a dark purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, |
| blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible |
| bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just |
| from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards |
| the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, |
| .. <p 21 > |
| those black squares on his cheeks. they were stains of some sort or other. At |
| first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth |
| occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man --a whaleman too--who, |
| falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this |
| harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a |
| similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It's only his |
| outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of |
| his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and |
| completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be |
| nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's |
| tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been |
| in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary |
| effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me |
| like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some |
| difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently |
| pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. |
| Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the |
| New Zealand head --a ghastly thing enough --and crammed it down into the bag. |
| He now took off his hat --a new beaver hat --when I came nigh singing out with |
| fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head --none to speak of at least -- |
| nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish |
| head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger |
| stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever |
| I bolted a dinner. Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the |
| window, but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make |
| of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. |
| Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and |
| confounded about the stranger, i confess i was now as much afraid of him as if |
| it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of |
| night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then |
| to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed |
| inexplicable in him. |
| .. <p 22 > |
| Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his |
| chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with |
| the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark |
| squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from |
| it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as |
| if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It |
| was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped |
| aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian |
| country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too --perhaps the heads |
| of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine --heavens! look at that |
| tomahawk! But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about |
| something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he |
| must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or |
| dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the |
| pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch |
| on its back, and exactly the color of a three days' old Congo baby. |
| Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black |
| manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But seeing that it |
| was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, |
| I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it |
| proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fireplace, and removing |
| the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunchbacked image, like a tenpin, |
| between the andirons. the chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very |
| sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine |
| or chapel for his Congo idol. I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half |
| hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime --to see what was next to |
| follow. First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego |
| pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship |
| biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings |
| into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the |
| fire, and still hastier |
| .. <p 23 > |
| withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), |
| he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat |
| and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the |
| little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he never |
| moved his lips. All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger |
| guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or |
| else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched |
| about in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took |
| the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket |
| as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock. All these |
| queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now |
| exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping |
| into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light |
| was put out, to break the spell into which I had so long been bound. But the |
| interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up his |
| tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then |
| holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great |
| clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and |
| this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I |
| sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment |
| he began feeling me. Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away |
| from him against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might |
| be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his |
| guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my |
| meaning. Who-e debel you? --he at last said -- you no speak-e, dam-me, I |
| kill-e. And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the |
| dark. Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin! shouted I. Landlord! |
| Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me! Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, |
| I kill-e! again growled the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the |
| tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought |
| .. <p 24 > |
| my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord |
| came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him. |
| |
| Don't be afraid now, said he, grinning again. Queequeg here wouldn't harm |
| a hair of your head. Stop your grinning, shouted I, and why didn't you |
| tell me that that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal? I thought ye know'd |
| it; --didn't I tell ye, he was peddlin' heads around town? --but turn flukes |
| again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here --you sabbee me, I sabbee you --this |
| man sleepe you --you sabbee? Me sabbee plenty --grunted Queequeg, puffing |
| away at his pipe and sitting up in bed. You gettee in, he added, motioning |
| to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did |
| this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood |
| looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, |
| comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, |
| thought i to myself --the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as |
| much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a |
| sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. Landlord, said I, tell him to |
| stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to |
| stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having |
| a man smoking in bed with me. It's dangerous. Besides, I aint insured. |
| This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned |
| me to get into bed --rolling over to one side as much as to say --I wont touch a |
| leg of ye. Good night, landlord, said I, you may go. I turned in, and |
| never slept better in my life. |
| .. <p 25 > |
| .. < chapter iv 2 THE COUNTERPANE > |
| |
| Upon waking next morning about daylight, |
| I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate |
| manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of |
| patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this |
| arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a |
| figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade --owing I suppose to |
| his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt |
| sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times --this same arm of his, I say, |
| looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, |
| partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it |
| from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the |
| sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. |
| My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, |
| I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it |
| was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was |
| this. I had been cutting up some caper or other --I think it was trying to |
| crawl up the chimney, as i had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; |
| and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or |
| sending me to bed supperless, --my mother dragged me by the legs out of the |
| chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the |
| afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I |
| felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my |
| little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as |
| to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets. I lay there |
| dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope |
| for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in |
| .. <p 26 > |
| bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; |
| the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the |
| streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and |
| worse --at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged |
| feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet, |
| beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my |
| misbehavior; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an |
| unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of |
| stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there |
| broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even |
| from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a |
| troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it --half steeped in |
| dreams --I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer |
| darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was |
| to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed |
| placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, |
| unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed |
| closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay |
| there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; |
| yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid |
| spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away |
| from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and |
| for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts |
| to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with |
| it. Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the |
| supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those |
| which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round |
| me. But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one, |
| in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For |
| though I tried to move his arm --unlock his bridegroom clasp --yet, sleeping |
| as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part |
| us twain. I now strove to rouse him -- |
| .. <p 27 > |
| |
| Queequeg! --but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck |
| feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. |
| Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the |
| savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, |
| thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and |
| a tomahawk! Queequeg! --in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake! At length, |
| by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the |
| unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, |
| |
| I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, |
| shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat |
| up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if |
| he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim |
| consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. |
| Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and |
| bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind |
| seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it |
| were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain |
| signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would |
| dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole |
| apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a |
| very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate |
| sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially |
| polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he |
| treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of |
| great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette |
| motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. |
| Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways |
| were well worth unusual regarding. He commenced dressing at top by donning his |
| beaver hat, a very tall one, by the by, and then --still minus his trowsers |
| -- he hunted up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot |
| tell, but his next movement was to crush himself --boots in hand, and hat on |
| --under the bed; when, from sundry violent |
| .. <p 28 > |
| gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; |
| though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be |
| private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature |
| in the transition state -- neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just |
| enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible |
| manner. his education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he |
| had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have |
| troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a |
| savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. |
| At last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his |
| eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much |
| accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones -- probably not |
| made to order either --rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of |
| a bitter cold morning. Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, |
| and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain |
| view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that |
| Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I |
| begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and |
| particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied, |
| and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any |
| Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, |
| contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and |
| hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on |
| the wash-stand centre-table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his |
| face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he |
| takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock, |
| unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the |
| bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather |
| harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best |
| cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation |
| when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how |
| exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept. |
| .. <p 29 > |
| the rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the |
| room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon |
| like a marshal's baton. |
| .. <p 29 > |
| .. < chapter v 5 BREAKFAST > |
| |
| I quickly followed suit, and descending into |
| the bar-room accosted the grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no |
| malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the |
| matter of my bedfellow. However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and |
| rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in |
| his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not |
| be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in |
| that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be |
| sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. The bar-room was |
| now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and |
| whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen; |
| chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea |
| coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and |
| brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing |
| monkey jackets for morning gowns. You could pretty plainly tell how long each |
| one had been ashore. This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted |
| pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been |
| three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few |
| shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the |
| complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached |
| withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a |
| cheek like |
| .. <p 30 > |
| Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western |
| slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone. |
| |
| Grub, ho! now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to |
| breakfast. They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at |
| ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: |
| Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of |
| all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the |
| mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the |
| taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of |
| Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances -- this kind of travel, |
| I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social polish. |
| Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere. These |
| reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were |
| all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about |
| whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound |
| silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a |
| set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded |
| great whales on the high seas --entire strangers to them --and duelled them dead |
| without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table --all of |
| the same calling, all of kindred tastes --looking round as sheepishly at |
| each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among |
| the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid |
| warrior whalemen! But as for Queequeg --why, Queequeg sat there among them --at |
| the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure |
| I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have |
| cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and |
| using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the |
| imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. |
| But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every |
| .. <p 31 > |
| one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it |
| genteelly. We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he |
| eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to |
| beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like |
| the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting |
| there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I |
| sallied out for a stroll. |
| .. <p 31 > |
| .. < chapter vi 11 THE STREET > |
| |
| If I had been astonished at first catching a |
| glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the |
| polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon |
| taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford. In |
| thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer |
| to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in |
| Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle |
| the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; |
| and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the |
| natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street and Wapping. In these |
| last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual |
| cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom |
| yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare. But, |
| besides the Feegeeans, Tongatabooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and |
| Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which |
| unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more |
| curious, certainly more comical. |
| .. <p 32 > |
| There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire |
| men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, |
| of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop |
| the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains |
| whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. |
| Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and |
| swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes |
| another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak. No town-bred dandy will |
| compare with a country-bred one -- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy --a fellow |
| that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of |
| tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head |
| to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you |
| should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In |
| bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps |
| to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those |
| straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and |
| all, down the throat of the tempest. But think not that this famous town has |
| only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. |
| Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that |
| tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the |
| coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten |
| one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live |
| in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough; but not like |
| Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; |
| nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of |
| this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks |
| and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted |
| upon this once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron |
| emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be |
| answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the |
| .. <p 33 > |
| Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and |
| dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a |
| feat like that? In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to |
| their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. |
| You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they |
| have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their |
| lengths in spermaceti candles. In summer time, the town is sweet to see; |
| full of fine maples --long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in |
| air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer |
| the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So |
| omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced |
| bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at |
| creation's final day. And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own |
| red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of |
| their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match |
| that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young |
| girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, |
| as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the |
| Puritanic sands. |
| .. < chapter vii 26 THE CHAPEL > |
| |
| In this same New Bedford there stands a |
| Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the |
| Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am |
| sure that I did not. Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied |
| out upon this special errand. The sky had changed from clear, |
| .. <p 34 > |
| sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket |
| of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. |
| Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' |
| wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the |
| shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart |
| from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The |
| chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women |
| sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned |
| into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the |
| following, but I do not pretend to quote: -- Sacred To the Memory of John |
| Talbot, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of |
| Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, |
| . This Tablet Is erected to his |
| Memory By his Sister. Sacred To the Memory of Robert Long, Willis Ellery, |
| Nathan Coleman, Walter Canny, Seth Macy, and Samuel Gleig, Forming one of the |
| boats' crews of the Ship Eliza, Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On |
| the Off-shore Ground in the Pacific, December 31st, |
| . This Marble Is |
| here placed by their surviving Shipmates. |
| .. <p 35 > |
| Sacred To the Memory of The late Captain Ezekiel Hardy, Who in the bows of |
| his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, |
| This Tablet Is erected to his Memory by His Widow. Shaking off the sleet |
| from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and |
| turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the |
| solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity |
| in his countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed to |
| notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, |
| therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any |
| of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the |
| congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the |
| fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not |
| the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me |
| were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak |
| tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh. Oh! ye whose |
| dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say |
| --here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms |
| like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no |
| ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and |
| unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and |
| refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a |
| grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here. |
| In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it |
| is that a universal proverb says of them, that |
| .. <p 36 > |
| they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; |
| how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we |
| prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if |
| he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life |
| Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, |
| unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who |
| died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be |
| comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable |
| bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the |
| rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things |
| are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the |
| tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. It |
| needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket |
| voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that |
| darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me, |
| Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. |
| Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems -- aye, |
| a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this |
| business of whaling --a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into |
| Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of |
| Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my |
| true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much |
| like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick |
| water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better |
| being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And |
| therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body |
| when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot. |
| .. <p 37 > |
| .. < chapter viii 2 THE PULPIT > |
| |
| I had not been seated very long ere a man |
| of a certain venerable robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted |
| door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all |
| the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the |
| chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, |
| among whom he was a very great favorite. He had been a sailor and a |
| harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the |
| ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter |
| of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second |
| flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone |
| certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom --the spring verdure peeping |
| forth even beneath February's snow. No one having previously heard his |
| history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost |
| interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about |
| him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered |
| I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his |
| carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great |
| pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of |
| the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by |
| one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, |
| arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit. Like most old |
| fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to |
| such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the |
| already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the |
| hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting |
| a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting |
| .. <p 38 > |
| a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the |
| chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, |
| being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany color, the whole |
| contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in |
| bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both |
| hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a |
| look upwards, and then with a truly sailorlike but still reverential |
| dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of |
| his vessel. the perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the |
| case with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of |
| wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the |
| pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these |
| joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to |
| see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping |
| over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole |
| was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec. I |
| pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father |
| Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I |
| could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. |
| No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, |
| it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of |
| physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from |
| all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat |
| and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a |
| self-containing stronghold --a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well |
| of water within the walls. But the side ladder was not the only strange |
| feature of the place, borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings. |
| Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which |
| formed its back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship |
| beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy |
| breakers. But high above the |
| .. <p 39 > |
| flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, |
| from which beamed forth an angel's face; and this bright face shed a distinct |
| spot of radiance upon the ship's tossed deck, something like that silver |
| plate now inserted into the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. Ah, noble |
| ship, the angel seemed to say, beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and |
| bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are |
| rolling off --serenest azure is at hand. Nor was the pulpit itself without a |
| trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its |
| panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible |
| rested on the projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's |
| fiddle-headed beak. What could be more full of meaning? --for the pulpit is |
| ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit |
| leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first |
| descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the |
| God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the |
| world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit |
| is its prow. |
| .. < chapter ix 23 THE SERMON > |
| |
| Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of |
| unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. Starboard |
| gangway, there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard! |
| Midships! midships! There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the |
| benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet |
| again, and every eye on the preacher. He paused a little; then kneeling in |
| the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his |
| closed eyes, |
| .. <p 40 > |
| and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at |
| the bottom of the sea. This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the |
| continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog --in |
| such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner |
| towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy |
| -- The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While |
| all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom. I saw |
| the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but |
| they that feel can tell-- Oh, I was plunging to despair. In black distress, |
| I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my |
| complaints -- No more the whale did me confine. With speed he flew to my |
| relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone |
| The face of my Deliverer God. My song for ever shall record That terrible, |
| that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the |
| power. Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the |
| howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over |
| the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper |
| page, said: Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of |
| Jonah -- And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. Shipmates, |
| this book, containing only four chapters --four yarns --is one of the smallest |
| strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul |
| does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this |
| prophet! What |
| .. <p 41 > |
| a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and |
| boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to |
| the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is |
| about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? |
| Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, |
| and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a |
| lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, |
| suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and |
| finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, |
| the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command |
| of God --never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed --which he found |
| a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us |
| to do --remember that --and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to |
| persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this |
| disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists. With |
| this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by |
| seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him |
| into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth. |
| |
| He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for |
| Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all |
| accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's |
| the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in |
| Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in |
| those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because |
| Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the |
| Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles |
| to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not |
| then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? Miserable |
| man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and |
| guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile |
| burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his |
| look, that had there been policemen in |
| .. <p 42 > |
| those days, jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested |
| ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a |
| hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag, --no friends accompany him to the wharf with |
| their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship |
| receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its |
| Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in |
| the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he |
| tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. |
| Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In |
| their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other --"Jack, he's |
| robbed a widow;" or,"Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or,"Harry lad, |
| I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of |
| the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck |
| against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five |
| hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a |
| description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; |
| while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay |
| their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his |
| boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not |
| confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes |
| the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is |
| advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin. "Who's |
| there?" cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers |
| for the Customs --"who's there?" Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! |
| |
| For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. "I seek a |
| passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?" Thus far the busy |
| captain had not looked up to jonah, though the man now stands before him; |
| but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing |
| glance. "We sail with the next coming tide," at last he slowly answered, |
| still intently eyeing him. "No sooner, sir?" --"Soon enough for any honest man |
| that goes a passenger." Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls |
| away the Captain from that scent. "I'll sail with ye," --he says, --"the |
| passage |
| .. <p 43 > |
| money, how much is that, --I'll pay now." For it is particularly written, |
| shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history,"that he |
| paid the fare thereof" ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, |
| this is full of meaning. Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose |
| discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the |
| penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, |
| |
| and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all |
| frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, |
| ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's |
| assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the |
| same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when |
| Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. |
| |
| He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; |
| |
| and Jonah is put down for his passage. "Point out my state-room, Sir," says |
| Jonah now. "I'm travel-weary; I need sleep." "Thou look'st like it," says |
| the Captain, "there's thy room." Jonah enters, and would lock the door, |
| but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the |
| Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of |
| convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and |
| dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little |
| state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and |
| jonah gasps. then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's |
| water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when |
| |
| the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowel's wards. Screwed at |
| its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's |
| room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the |
| last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still |
| maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, |
| |
| infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels |
| among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his |
| berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful |
| fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in |
| the lamp more and |
| .. <p 44 > |
| more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. "Oh! so |
| my conscience hangs in me!" he groans, "straight upward, so it burns; but the |
| chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!" Like one who after a night of |
| drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet |
| pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more |
| strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still |
| turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit |
| be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals |
| over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, |
| and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, |
| Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep. And |
| now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the |
| deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. |
| |
| That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband |
| was jonah. but the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A |
| dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the |
| boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are |
| clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, |
| and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all |
| this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and |
| raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he |
| the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving |
| the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of |
| the ship --a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But |
| the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, "What |
| meanest thou, O sleeper! arise!" Startled from his lethargy by that direful |
| cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, |
| to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther |
| billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, |
| and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come |
| nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows |
| .. <p 45 > |
| her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast |
| Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward |
| again towards the tormented deep. Terrors upon terrors run shouting through |
| his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly |
| known. The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of |
| him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to |
| high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great |
| tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how |
| furiously they mob him with their questions. "What is thine occupation? |
| whence comest thou? thy country? what people?" but mark now, my shipmates, |
| the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and |
| where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but |
| likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited |
| answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him. "I am |
| a Hebrew," he cries --and then --"I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath |
| made the sea and the dry land!" Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou |
| fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full |
| confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still |
| are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he |
| but too well knew the darkness of his deserts, --when wretched Jonah cries out |
| to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for |
| |
| his sake this great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, |
| and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant |
| gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the |
| other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah. And now behold Jonah taken up |
| as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats |
| out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with |
| him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such |
| a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething |
| into the yawning jaws |
| .. <p 46 > |
| awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like the Lord out |
| of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon |
| his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he |
| is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his |
| dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting |
| |
| himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still |
| look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful |
| repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how |
| pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual |
| deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place |
| Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a |
| model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like |
| Jonah. While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, |
| slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when |
| describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep |
| chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring |
| elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy |
| brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look |
| on him with a quick fear that was strange to them. There now came a lull in |
| his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more; and, |
| at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed |
| communing with God and himself. But again he leaned over towards the people, |
| and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest |
| humility, he spake these words: Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon |
| you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may |
| be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, |
| and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly |
| would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you |
| sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other |
| and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me as a pilot of |
| .. <p 47 > |
| the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true |
| things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of |
| a wicked nineveh, jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from |
| his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at |
| Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, |
| God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of |
| doom, and with swift slantings tore him along"into the midst of the seas," |
| where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and"the weeds |
| were wrapped about his head," and all the watery world of woe bowled over |
| him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet --"out of the belly of |
| hell" --when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God |
| heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the |
| fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came |
| breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air |
| and earth; and"vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;" when the word of the |
| Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten --his ears, like two |
| sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean --Jonah did the |
| Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the |
| face of Falsehood! That was it! This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; |
| and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this |
| world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the |
| waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please |
| rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! |
| |
| Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not |
| be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the |
| great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway! |
| He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to |
| them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly |
| enthusiasm, -- but oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is |
| a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the |
| woe is |
| .. <p 48 > |
| deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to |
| him --a far, far upward, and inward delight --who against the proud gods and |
| commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight |
| is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base |
| treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives |
| no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he |
| pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight, |
| --top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the |
| Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all |
| the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake |
| from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will |
| be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath --O Father! |
| --chiefly known to me by Thy rod --mortal or immortal, here I die. I have |
| striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is |
| nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out |
| the lifetime of his God? He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, |
| covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the |
| people had departed, and he was left alone in the place. |
| .. <p 48 > |
| .. < chapter X 24 A BOSOM FRIEND > |
| |
| Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the |
| Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone; he having left the Chapel before |
| the benediction some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with |
| his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his |
| face that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a |
| jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in |
| his heathenish way. But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and |
| pretty |
| .. <p 49 > |
| soon, going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his |
| lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth |
| page --as I fancied --stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and |
| giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would |
| then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each |
| time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by such |
| a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the |
| multitude of pages was excited. With much interest I sat watching him. Savage |
| though he was, and hideously marred about the face --at least to my taste -- |
| his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. |
| You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I |
| saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery |
| black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand |
| devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the |
| Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like |
| a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, |
| too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and |
| brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I |
| will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically |
| an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General |
| Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long |
| regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise |
| very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg |
| was George Washington cannibalistically developed. Whilst I was thus closely |
| scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking out at the storm from |
| the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so |
| much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the |
| pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping |
| together the night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm |
| I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this |
| indifference of his |
| .. <p 50 > |
| very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know |
| exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm |
| self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also |
| that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other |
| seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire |
| to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty |
| singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in |
| it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape |
| Horn, that is --which was the only way he could get there --thrown among people |
| as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed |
| entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own |
| companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine |
| philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as |
| that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be |
| conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a |
| man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic |
| old woman, he must have broken his digester. As I sat there in that now |
| lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first |
| intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the |
| evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in |
| upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; |
| I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No |
| more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish |
| world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very |
| indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies |
| and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began |
| to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that |
| would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew |
| me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved |
| but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs |
| and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little |
| noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last |
| .. <p 51 > |
| night's hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be |
| bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a |
| little complimented. We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored |
| to explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few |
| pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we |
| went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen |
| in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch |
| and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs |
| from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us. If |
| there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, |
| this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. |
| He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and |
| when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me |
| round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his |
| country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if |
| need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have |
| seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple |
| savage those old rules would not apply. After supper, and another social chat |
| and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his |
| embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the |
| tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the |
| table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of |
| them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he |
| silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them stay. He |
| then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the |
| paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious |
| for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a |
| moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise. I was a |
| good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian |
| Church. How then could I unite with |
| .. <p 52 > |
| this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? |
| thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven |
| and earth --pagans and all included --can possibly be jealous of an |
| insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship? --to do the |
| will of God -- that is worship. And what is the will of God? --to do to my |
| fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me -- that is the will of |
| God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg |
| would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of |
| worship. consequently, i must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn |
| idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little |
| idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or |
| thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at |
| peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep |
| without some little chat. How it is I know not; but there is no place like a |
| bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, |
| there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples |
| often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our |
| hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg --a cosy, loving pair. |
| .. <p 52 > |
| .. < chapter xi 24 NIGHTGOWN > |
| |
| We had lain thus in bed, chatting and |
| napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing |
| his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely |
| sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our |
| confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, |
| and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the |
| future. Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent |
| .. <p 53 > |
| position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves |
| sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the |
| head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses |
| bending over them, as if our knee-pans were warming-pans. We felt very nice |
| and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of |
| bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I |
| say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be |
| cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by |
| contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all |
| over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to |
| be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip |
| of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, |
| in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. |
| |
| For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, |
| which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of |
| this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and |
| your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one |
| warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. We had been sitting in this |
| crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I would open my |
| eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether |
| asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the |
| more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever |
| feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were |
| indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to |
| our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant |
| |
| and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the |
| unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable |
| revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it |
| were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides |
| he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it |
| said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in |
| .. <p 54 > |
| the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when |
| love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have |
| Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such |
| serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's |
| policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential |
| comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our |
| shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one |
| to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, |
| illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp. Whether it was that this |
| undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not, |
| but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I |
| begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I |
| but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, |
| when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to |
| present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give. |
| .. <p 54 > |
| .. < chapter xii 21 BIOGRAPHICAL > |
| |
| Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an |
| island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true |
| places never are. When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native |
| woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a |
| green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong |
| desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. |
| His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the |
| maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. |
| There was excellent blood in his veins --royal stuff; though |
| .. <p 55 > |
| sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his |
| untutored youth. A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg |
| sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement |
| of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence |
| could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off |
| to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted |
| |
| the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of |
| land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding |
| his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat |
| down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, |
| like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his |
| foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing |
| himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ringbolt there, and swore not |
| to let it go, though hacked in pieces. In vain the captain threatened to throw |
| him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the |
| son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate |
| dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last |
| relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young |
| savage --this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the captain's cabin. They put him |
| down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter |
| content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no |
| seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening |
| his untutored countrymen. For at bottom --so he told me --he was actuated by a |
| profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his |
| people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than |
| they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even |
| Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all |
| his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what |
| the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they |
| spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. |
| Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan. |
| .. <p 56 > |
| and thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore |
| their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about |
| him, though now some time from home. By hints, I asked him whether he did |
| not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider |
| his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. |
| He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or |
| rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled |
| throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would |
| return, --as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, |
| he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They |
| had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre |
| now. I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future |
| movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, |
| I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention |
| to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous |
| whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, |
| ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the |
| same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in |
| his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously |
| assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an |
| experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness |
| to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though |
| well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen. His story being |
| ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his |
| forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each |
| other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping. |
| .. <p 57 > |
| .. < chapter xiii 2 WHEELBARROW > |
| |
| wheelbarrow next morning, Monday, after disposing of |
| the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's |
| bill; using, however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as |
| the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had |
| sprung up between me and Queequeg -- especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull |
| stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person |
| whom I now companied with. We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our |
| things, including my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and |
| hammock, away we went down to the Moss, the little Nantucket packet |
| schooner moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not |
| at Queequeg so much --for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their |
| streets, -- but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we |
| heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now |
| and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked him why |
| he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling |
| ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, |
| that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection |
| for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a |
| mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In short, like |
| many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with |
| their own scythes --though in no wise obliged to furnished them -- even so, |
| Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon. Shifting |
| the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first |
| wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, |
| it seems, had lent him one, |
| .. <p 58 > |
| in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant |
| about the thing --though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise |
| way in which to manage the barrow --Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes |
| it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. Why, said |
| I, Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't |
| the people laugh? Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his |
| island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant |
| water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and |
| this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat |
| where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at |
| Rokovoko, and its commander --from all accounts, a very stately punctilious |
| gentleman, at least for a sea captain --this commander was invited to the |
| wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of |
| ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo |
| cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, |
| placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and |
| his majesty the King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said, -- for those people |
| have their grace as well as we --though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who |
| at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying |
| the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts --Grace, I say, |
| being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of |
| the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into |
| the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next |
| the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself --being Captain of |
| a ship --as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the |
| King's own house --the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch |
| bowl; --taking it i suppose for a huge finger-glass. now, said Queequeg, |
| |
| what you tink now, --Didn't our people laugh? At last, passage paid, and |
| luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down |
| the Acushnet river. On |
| .. <p 59 > |
| one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees |
| all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on |
| casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale |
| ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of |
| carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the |
| pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most |
| perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, |
| only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the |
| endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort. Gaining the |
| more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the |
| quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that |
| Tartar air! --how I spurned that turnpike earth! --that common highway all over |
| dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the |
| magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. At the same |
| foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils |
| swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew, and |
| our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her |
| brows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; |
| every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian |
| canes in land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood |
| by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering |
| glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two |
| fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything |
| more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and |
| bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart |
| and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings |
| mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. |
| |
| Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an |
| almost miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the |
| air; then slightly |
| .. <p 60 > |
| tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon |
| his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk |
| pipe and passed it to me for a puff. Capting! Capting! yelled the |
| bumpkin, running towards that officer; Capting, Capting, here's the devil. |
| |
| Hallo, you sir, cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to |
| Queequeg, what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you might have |
| killed that chap? What him say? said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me. |
| |
| He say, said I, that you came near kill-e that man there, pointing to the |
| still shivering greenhorn. Kill-e, cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed |
| face into an unearthly expression of disdain, ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; |
| Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale! Look you, |
| roared the Captain, I'll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any more of |
| your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye. But it so happened just then, |
| that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The prodigious |
| strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous |
| boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after |
| part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was |
| swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the |
| boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, |
| almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of |
| snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of |
| being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom |
| as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this |
| consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the |
| path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, |
| and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept |
| over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all |
| was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were |
| clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from |
| the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three |
| .. <p 61 > |
| minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms |
| straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through |
| the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one |
| to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly |
| from the water, Queequeg now took an instant's glance around him, and |
| seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few |
| minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the |
| other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor |
| bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain |
| begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, |
| till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. Was there ever such |
| unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal |
| from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water --fresh |
| water -- something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, |
| lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those |
| around him, seemed to be saying to himself -- It's a mutual, joint-stock |
| world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians. |
| .. <p 61 > |
| .. < chapter xiv 23 NANTUCKET > |
| |
| Nothing more happened on the passage worthy |
| the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket. |
| Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the |
| world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the |
| Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it --a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all |
| beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in |
| twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will |
| tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't |
| .. <p 62 > |
| grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send |
| beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in |
| Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people |
| there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer |
| time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a |
| prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; |
| |
| that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and |
| made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables |
| small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea |
| turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois. |
| Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by |
| the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon |
| the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With |
| loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide |
| waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their |
| canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they |
| found an empty ivory casket, --the poor little Indian's skeleton. What wonder, |
| then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a |
| livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, |
| they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in |
| boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the |
| sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations |
| round it; peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans |
| declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived |
| the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea |
| Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his |
| very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious |
| assaults! And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing |
| from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like |
| so many Alexanders; parcelling out among |
| .. <p 63 > |
| them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did |
| Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the |
| English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; |
| two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is |
| his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right |
| of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but |
| floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as |
| highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the |
| land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless |
| |
| deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he |
| alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it |
| as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, |
| |
| which a noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the |
| millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he |
| hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For |
| years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells |
| like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With |
| the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep |
| between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, |
| furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush |
| herds of walruses and whales. |
| .. <p 63 > |
| .. < chapter xv 27 CHOWDER > |
| |
| It was quite late in the evening when the |
| little Moss came snugly to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we |
| could attend to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. |
| The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey |
| of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to |
| .. <p 64 > |
| be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and |
| moreover he had assured us that cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for |
| his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do |
| better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us |
| about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white |
| church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we |
| made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first |
| man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very much |
| puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the |
| yellow warehouse --our first point of departure --must be left on the larboard |
| |
| hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. |
| However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then |
| knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to |
| something which there was no mistaking. Two enormous wooden pots painted |
| black, and suspended by asses' ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old |
| top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees |
| were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a |
| little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at |
| the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague |
| misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining |
| horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, |
| thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; |
| tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a |
| pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints |
| touching tophet? I was called from these reflections by the sight of a |
| freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of |
| the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an |
| injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen |
| shirt. Get along with ye, said she to the man, or I'll be combing ye! |
| |
| Come on, Queequeg, said I, all right. There's Mrs. Hussey. |
| .. <p 65 > |
| And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. |
| Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our |
| desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for |
| the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread |
| with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and |
| said-- Clam or Cod? What's that about Cods, ma'am? said I, with much |
| politeness. Clam or Cod? she repeated. A clam for supper? a cold clam; |
| is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey? says I; but that's a rather cold and |
| clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs Hussey? But being in a |
| great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple shirt, who was waiting |
| for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word clam, Mrs. |
| Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out |
| |
| clam for two, disappeared. Queequeg, said I, do you think that we can |
| make out a supper for us both on one clam? However, a warm savory steam from |
| the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But |
| when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. |
| Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely |
| bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut |
| up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully |
| seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty |
| voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favorite fishing food before |
| him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with |
| great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. |
| Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. |
| |
| Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word cod with great emphasis, |
| and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savory steam came forth again, but |
| with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed |
| before us. We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the |
| .. <p 66 > |
| bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the |
| head? What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? But look, |
| Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon? |
| Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; |
| for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and |
| chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for |
| fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved |
| with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; |
| and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. |
| There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account |
| for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some |
| fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and |
| marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking |
| very slip-shod, I assure ye. Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and |
| directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as |
| Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her |
| arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. Why |
| not? said I; every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon --but why not? |
| |
| Because it's dangerous, says she. Ever since young Stiggs coming from that |
| unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with only |
| three barrels of ile, was found dead in my first floor back, with his |
| harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich |
| dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg (for she had |
| learned his name), I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till |
| morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men? Both, |
| says I; and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety. |
| .. <p 67 > |
| .. < chapter xvi 2 THE SHIP > |
| |
| In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. |
| But to my surprise and no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, |
| that he had been diligently consulting Yojo --the name of his black little god |
| --and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it |
| everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in |
| harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo |
| earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with me, |
| inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already |
| pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should |
| infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by |
| chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present |
| irrespective of Queequeg. I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, |
| Queequeg placed great confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and |
| surprising forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, |
| as a rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, |
| but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs. Now, this plan of |
| Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection of our craft; I did not |
| like that plan at all. I had not a little relied on Queequeg's sagacity to |
| point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But |
| as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to |
| acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a |
| determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that |
| trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with |
| Yojo in our little bedroom --for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or |
| Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo |
| that |
| .. <p 68 > |
| day; how it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it |
| several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles --leaving |
| Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at |
| his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After |
| much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there |
| were three ships up for three-years' voyages --The Devil-Dam the Tit-bit, |
| and the pequod. devil- dam, i do not know the origin of; tit-bit is |
| obvious; Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated |
| tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered |
| and pryed about the Devil-Dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and, |
| finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then |
| decided that this was the very ship for us. You may have seen many a quaint |
| craft in your day, for aught I know; --squared-toed luggers; mountainous |
| Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, |
| |
| you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a |
| ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned |
| claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons |
| and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a |
| French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her |
| venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, |
| where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale --her masts stood |
| stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient |
| decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in |
| Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old |
| antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild |
| business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain |
| Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his |
| own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the |
| Pequod, --this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon |
| |
| her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both |
| of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's |
| carved buckler or bedstead. She was |
| .. <p 69 > |
| apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants |
| of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, |
| tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her |
| unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the |
| long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her |
| old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of |
| land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a |
| turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that |
| tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her |
| hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt |
| like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A |
| noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched |
| with that. Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having |
| authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at |
| first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or |
| rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a |
| temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet |
| high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from |
| the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted with their |
| broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually |
| sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where |
| the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like a top-knot on some old |
| Pottowotamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows of |
| the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward. And half |
| concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect |
| seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship's work |
| suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command. He was seated |
| on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving; and |
| the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic |
| stuff of which the wigwam was constructed. There was nothing so very |
| particular, perhaps, about the |
| .. <p 70 > |
| appearance of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old |
| seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; |
| only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles |
| interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual |
| sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward; --for this |
| causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such |
| eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl. Is this the Captain of the |
| Pequod? said I, advancing to the door of the tent. Supposing it be the |
| Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him? he demanded. I was |
| thinking of shipping. Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou are no Nantucketer |
| --ever been in a stove boat? No, Sir, I never have. Dost know nothing at |
| all about whaling, I dare say --eh? Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I |
| shall soon learn. I've been several voyages in the merchant service, and I |
| think that-- Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost |
| see that leg? --I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest |
| of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now |
| ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships. But |
| flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh? --it looks a little |
| suspicious, don't it, eh? --Hast not been a pirate, hast thou? --Didst not rob |
| |
| thy last Captain, didst thou? --Dost not think of murdering the officers when |
| thou gettest to sea? I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that |
| under the mask of these half humorous inuendoes, this old seaman, as an |
| insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and |
| rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the |
| Vineyard. But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think |
| of shipping ye. Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see |
| the world. Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on |
| Captain Ahab? |
| .. <p 71 > |
| |
| Who is Captain Ahab, sir? Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the |
| Captain of this ship. I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the |
| Captain himself. Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg --that's who ye are |
| speaking to, young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the |
| Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including |
| crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou |
| wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way |
| of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye |
| on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg. |
| |
| What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale? Lost by a whale! |
| |
| Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the |
| monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat! --ah, ah! I was a little |
| alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in |
| his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, What you say is |
| no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know there was any peculiar |
| ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have inferred as |
| much from the simple fact of the accident. Look ye now, young man, thy |
| lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou dost not talk shark a bit. Sure, |
| ye've been to sea before now; sure of that? Sir, said I, I thought I |
| told you that I had been four voyages in the merchant-- Hard down out of |
| that! Mind what I said about the marchant service --don't aggravate me --I |
| won't have it. But let us understand each other. I have given thee a hint |
| about what whaling is; do ye yet feel inclined for it? I do, sir. Very |
| good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat, |
| and then jump after it? Answer, quick! I am, sir, if it should be |
| positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I |
| don't take to be the fact. Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to |
| go a-whaling, to find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to |
| |
| .. <p 72 > |
| go in order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well |
| then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and |
| then back to me and tell me what ye see there. For a moment I stood a little |
| puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether |
| humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow's feet into one |
| scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand. Going forward and glancing |
| over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with |
| the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The |
| prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the |
| slightest variety that I could see. Well, what's the report? said Peleg |
| when I came back; what did ye see? Not much, I replied -- nothing but |
| water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I |
| think. Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to |
| go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where |
| you stand? I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; |
| and the Pequod was as good a ship as any --I thought the best -- and all this I |
| now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness |
| to ship me. And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off, he added |
| -- come along with ye. And so saying, he led the way below deck into the |
| cabin. seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and |
| surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with |
| Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, |
| as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old |
| annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning |
| about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the |
| ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same |
| way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest. |
| Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, |
| .. <p 73 > |
| was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to |
| this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the |
| peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by |
| things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are |
| the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting |
| Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance. So that there are instances among |
| them of men, who, named with Scripture names --a singularly common fashion on |
| the island --and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and |
| thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless |
| adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown |
| peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a |
| Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite |
| in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a |
| ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long |
| night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen |
| here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; |
| receiving all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin |
| voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from |
| |
| accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language --that man |
| makes one in a whole nation's census --a mighty pageant creature, formed for |
| noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, |
| if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful |
| overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically |
| great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young |
| ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to |
| do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed |
| peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by |
| individual circumstances. Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, |
| retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg --who cared not a rush for what |
| are called serious things, and indeed deemed those selfsame serious things |
| the veriest of all trifles --Captain Bildad |
| .. <p 74 > |
| had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of |
| Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many |
| unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn --all that had not moved this |
| native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of |
| his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common |
| consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious |
| scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably |
| invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, |
| yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan |
| gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad |
| reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not |
| seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the |
| sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this |
| practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a |
| little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a |
| broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and |
| captain, and finally a ship-owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded |
| his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age |
| of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his |
| well-earned income. Now Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of |
| being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard |
| task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious |
| story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving |
| home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn |
| out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather |
| hard-hearted to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, |
| they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated |
| hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his |
| drab-colored eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, |
| till you could clutch something --a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work |
| like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and |
| .. <p 75 > |
| idleness perished from before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of |
| his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare |
| flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, |
| like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat. Such, then, was the person that I |
| saw seated on the transom when I followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. |
| The space between the decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old |
| Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat |
| tails. His broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; |
| his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he |
| seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume. Bildad, cried Captain |
| Peleg, at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying those Scriptures, |
| now, for the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge. How far ye got, |
| Bildad? As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, |
| Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and |
| seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg. He says he's our man, |
| Bildad, said Peleg, he wants to ship. Dost thee? said Bildad, in a |
| hollow tone, and turning round to me. I dost, said I unconsciously, he was |
| so intense a Quaker. What do ye think of him, Bildad? said Peleg. He'll |
| do, said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in a |
| mumbling tone quite audible. I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, |
| especially as Peleg, his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. |
| But I said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a |
| chest, and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink before him, |
| |
| and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time to |
| settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. |
| I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages; but all |
| hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called |
| |
| lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance |
| pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's company. |
| .. <p 76 > |
| I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be |
| very large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship, |
| splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I |
| should be offered at least the 275th lay --that is, the 275th part of the clear |
| nett proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And |
| though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was |
| better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay |
| for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef |
| and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver. It might be thought |
| that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely fortune --and so it was, a |
| very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never take on about princely |
| fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, |
| while I am putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, |
| I thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not |
| have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was of a |
| broad-shouldered make. But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little |
| distrustful about receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, |
| |
| I had heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony |
| Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, |
| therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly |
| the whole management of the ship's affairs to these two. And I did not know |
| but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about shipping |
| hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home there |
| in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own fireside. Now while |
| Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my |
| no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these |
| proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of |
| his book, Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth-- |
| |
| Well, Captain Bildad, interrupted Peleg, what d'ye say, what lay shall we |
| give this young man? |
| .. <p 77 > |
| |
| Thou knowest best, was the sepulchral reply, the seven hundred and |
| seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it? -- "where moth and rust do |
| corrupt, but lay--" Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven |
| hundred and seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, |
| for one, shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do |
| corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the |
| magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the |
| slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy-seven |
| is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you |
| will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a |
| farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold |
| doubloons; and so I thought at the time. Why, blast your eyes, Bildad, |
| cried Peleg, Thou dost not want to swindle this young man! he must have |
| more than that. Seven hundred and seventy-seventh, again said Bildad, |
| without lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling -- for where your |
| treasure is, there will your heart be also. I am going to put him down for |
| the three hundredth, said Peleg, do ye hear that, Bildad! The three |
| hundredth lay, I say. Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly |
| towards him said, Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must |
| consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship-- widows and |
| orphans, many of them --and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this |
| young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. |
| The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg. Thou Bildad! |
| roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. Blast ye, Captain |
| Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had |
| a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest |
| ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn. Captain Peleg, said Bildad |
| steadily, thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, |
| i can't tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, captain Peleg, I |
| greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end |
| sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg. |
| .. <p 78 > |
| |
| Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye |
| insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he's |
| bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start |
| my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a live goat with all his |
| hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-colored son of a wooden |
| gun --a straight wake with ye! As he thundered out this he made a rush at |
| Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that |
| time eluded him. Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal |
| and responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all |
| idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily commanded, |
| I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I made no doubt, |
| was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to |
| my astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very quietly, and seemed |
| to have not the slightest intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to |
| impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as |
| he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, |
| |
| though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. Whew! he |
| whistled at last -- the squall's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou |
| used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife |
| |
| here needs the grindstone. That's he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young |
| man, Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, |
| for the three hundredth lay. Captain Peleg, said I, I have a friend with |
| me who wants to ship too --shall I bring him down to-morrow? To be sure, |
| said peleg. fetch him along, and we'll look at him. What lay does he |
| want? groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he had again been |
| burying himself. Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad, said Peleg. Has |
| he ever whaled it any? turning to me. Killed more whales than I can count, |
| Captain Peleg. Well, bring him along then. |
| .. <p 79 > |
| And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had |
| done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that |
| Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape. But I had not |
| proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the captain with whom I was to |
| sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship |
| will be completely fitted out, and receive all her crew on board, ere the |
| captain makes himself visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes these |
| voyages are so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly |
| brief, that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of |
| that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but |
| leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it is always as |
| well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing yourself into his |
| hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab |
| was to be found. And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right |
| enough; thou art shipped. Yes, but I should like to see him. But I |
| don't think thou wilt be able to at present. I don't know exactly what's the |
| matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and |
| yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't sick; but no, he isn't well either. |
| Any how, young man, he won't always see me, so I don't suppose he will thee. |
| He's a queer man, Captain Ahab --so some think --but a good one. Oh, thou'lt |
| like him well enough; no fear, no fear. he's a grand, ungodly, god-like |
| man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may |
| well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been |
| in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than |
| the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His |
| lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he |
| ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; he's Ahab, boy; and |
| Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king! And a very vile one. When |
| that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood? |
| .. <p 80 > |
| |
| Come hither to me --hither, hither, said Peleg, with a significance in his |
| eye that almost startled me. Look ye, lad; never say that on board the |
| Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself. 'Twas a |
| foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was |
| only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that |
| the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her |
| may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It's a lie. I know Captain |
| Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is--a |
| good man --not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man |
| --something like me --only there's a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know |
| that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a |
| little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in |
| his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, |
| too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's |
| been a kind of moody --desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will |
| all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, |
| |
| it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So |
| good-bye to thee --and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a |
| wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife --not three voyages wedded --a |
| sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a |
| child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, |
| my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities! As I walked |
| away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to |
| me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness |
| concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for |
| him, but for I don't know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And |
| yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at |
| all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt |
| it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at |
| what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. |
| However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for |
| the present dark Ahab slipped my mind. |
| .. <p 81 > |
| .. < chapter xvii 2 THE RAMADAN > |
| |
| As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and |
| Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till |
| towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's |
| religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my |
| heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or |
| those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of |
| footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso |
| of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate |
| possessions yet owned and rented in his name. I say, we good Presbyterian |
| christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so |
| vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their |
| half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly |
| entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan; --but what of |
| that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be |
| content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; |
| let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all --Presbyterians and Pagans |
| alike --for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly |
| need mending. Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances |
| and rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but |
| no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. Queequeg, said |
| I softly through the key-hole: --all silent. I say, Queequeg! why don't you |
| speak? It's I--Ishmael. But all remained still as before. I began to grow |
| alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had |
| an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into |
| an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and |
| sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of |
| |
| .. <p 82 > |
| the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the |
| wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening |
| previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's |
| strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he |
| seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, |
| and no possible mistake. Queequeg! --Queequeg! --all still. Something must |
| have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly |
| |
| resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first |
| person i met --the chambermaid. la! la! she cried, i thought something |
| must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door |
| was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever |
| since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage |
| in for safe keeping. La! La, ma'am! --Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! |
| apoplexy! --and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following. |
| Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet |
| in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the |
| castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime. Wood-house! cried I, |
| |
| which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch something to pry open the |
| door --the axe! --the axe! he's had a stroke; depend upon it! --and so saying I |
| was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey |
| interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her |
| countenance. What's the matter with you, young man? Get the axe! For |
| God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open! Look here, |
| said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one |
| hand free; look here; are you talking about prying open any of my doors? |
| --and with that she seized my arm. What's the matter with you? What's the |
| matter with you, shipmate? In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I |
| gave her to understand the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the |
| vinegar-cruet |
| .. <p 83 > |
| to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed -- No! I |
| haven't seen it since I put it there. Running to a little closet under the |
| landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's |
| harpoon was missing. He's killed himself, she cried. It's unfort'nate |
| stiggs done over again --there goes another counterpane --god pity his poor |
| mother! --it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where's |
| that girl? --there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint |
| me a sign, with --"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;" |
| --might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his |
| ghost! What's that noise there? You, young man, avast there! And running |
| up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the door. I |
| won't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith, |
| there's one about a mile from here. But avast! putting her hand in her |
| side-pocket, here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's see. And with that, |
| she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained |
| unwithdrawn within. Have to burst it open, said I, and was running down |
| the entry a little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again |
| vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a |
| sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark. With a prodigious |
| noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the |
| plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg, |
| altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of the room; |
| squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither |
| |
| one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of |
| active life. Queequeg, said I, going up to him, Queequeg, what's the |
| matter with you? He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he? said the |
| landlady. But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost |
| felt like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost |
| intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally |
| .. <p 84 > |
| constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for |
| upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals. Mrs. |
| Hussey, said I, he's alive at all events; so leave us, if you please, and |
| I will see to this strange affair myself. Closing the door upon the landlady, |
| |
| I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There |
| he sat; and all he could do --for all my polite arts and blandishments --he |
| would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor |
| notice my presence in any the slightest way. I wonder, thought I, if this can |
| possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on their hams that way in his |
| native island. It must be so; yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; |
| well, then, let him rest; he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't |
| last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I |
| don't believe it's very punctual then. I went down to supper. After sitting a |
| long time listening to the long stories of some sailors who had just come from |
| a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in |
| a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean |
| only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, |
| I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must |
| certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was |
| just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow |
| vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting |
| there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece |
| of wood on his head. For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; |
| get up and have some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, |
| Queequeg. But not a word did he reply. Despairing of him, therefore, I |
| determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he |
| would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin |
| jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he |
| had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, |
| I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the |
| mere thought of Queequeg-- |
| .. <p 85 > |
| not four feet off --sitting there in that uneasy position, stark alone in |
| the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of it; sleeping all |
| night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary, |
| unaccountable Ramadan! But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing |
| more till break of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted |
| Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the |
| first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating |
| joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed |
| his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over. Now, as I |
| before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it |
| may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, |
| because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion |
| becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, |
| makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it |
| high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him. And |
| just so I now did with Queequeg. Queequeg, said I, get into bed now, and |
| lie and listen to me. I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress |
| of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the |
| present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these |
| Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were |
| stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in |
| short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that |
| he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it |
| pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about |
| this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body |
| cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must |
| necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic |
| religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one |
| word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on |
| an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the |
| hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans. |
| .. <p 86 > |
| I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia; |
| expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; |
| only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his |
| father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy |
| had been killed by about two o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and |
| eaten that very evening. No more, Queequeg, said I, shuddering; that will |
| do; for I knew the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen |
| a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the |
| custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain |
| in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed |
| in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit |
| and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with |
| the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents |
| were so many Christmas turkeys. After all, I do not think that my remarks |
| about religion made much impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first |
| place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless |
| considered from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not |
| more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, |
| finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion |
| than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and |
| compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young |
| man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety. At last we rose |
| and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders |
| of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of |
| his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and |
| picking our teeth with halibut bones. |
| .. <p 87 > |
| .. < chapter xviii 2 HIS MARK > |
| |
| As we were walking down the end of the wharf |
| towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff |
| voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend |
| was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board |
| that craft, unless they previously produced their papers. What do you mean |
| by that, Captain Peleg? said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my |
| comrade standing on the wharf. I mean, he replied, he must show his |
| papers. Yea, said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head |
| from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. He must show that he's converted. |
| Son of darkness, he added, turning to Queequeg, art thou at present in |
| communion with any christian church? Why, said I, he's a member of the |
| first Congregational Church. Here be it said, that many tattooed savages |
| sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches. |
| |
| First Congregational Church, cried Bildad, what! that worships in Deacon |
| Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house? and so saying, taking out his |
| spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and |
| putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly |
| over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg. How long hath he been |
| a member? he then said, turning to me; not very long, I rather guess, |
| young man. No, said Peleg, and he hasn't been baptized right either, or |
| it would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face. Do tell, now, |
| cried Bildad, is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's |
| meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord's day. |
| .. <p 88 > |
| |
| I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeeting, said I, |
| |
| all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First |
| Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is. Young man, |
| said Bildad sternly, thou art skylarking with me --explain thyself, thou |
| young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me. Finding myself thus |
| hard pushed, I replied. I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to |
| which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, |
| and every mother's son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting |
| First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; |
| only some of us cherish some queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief; |
| |
| in that we all join hands. Splice, thou mean'st splice hands, cried |
| Peleg, drawing nearer. Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary, |
| instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon |
| Deuteronomy --why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned |
| something. Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, |
| tell Quohog there --what's that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By |
| the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got there! looks like good stuff that; |
| and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did |
| you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish? |
| Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the |
| bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the |
| side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in |
| some such way as this: -- Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? |
| You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den! and taking sharp |
| aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across |
| the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight. Now, |
| said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, |
| dad whale dead. Quick, Bildad, said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the |
| |
| .. <p 89 > |
| close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. |
| |
| Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog |
| there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye |
| the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of |
| |
| Nantucket. So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg |
| was soon enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged. |
| When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for |
| signing, he turned to me and said, I guess Quohog there don't know how to |
| write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy |
| mark? But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken |
| part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered |
| pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a |
| queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain |
| Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like |
| this: -- Quohog his mark. Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and |
| steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the |
| huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, |
| and selecting one entitled The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose, placed |
| it in queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his, |
| looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, Son of darkness, I must do my |
| duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls |
| of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly |
| fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol |
| Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, |
| I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit! Something of |
| the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language, heterogeneously mixed with |
| Scriptural and domestic phrases. Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now |
| spoiling our harpooneer, |
| .. <p 90 > |
| cried Peleg. Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers --it takes the shark |
| out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There |
| was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and |
| the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so |
| frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from |
| whales, for fear of after-claps in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones. |
| |
| Peleg! Peleg! said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, thou thyself, as |
| I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to |
| have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this ungodly guise. |
| Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had |
| her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when |
| thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the |
| Judgment then? Hear him, hear him now, cried Peleg, marching across the |
| cabin, and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets, -- hear him, all of |
| ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death |
| and the judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting |
| thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. |
| Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. |
| |
| Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands |
| --how to rig jury-masts -- how to get into the nearest port; that was what I |
| was thinking of. Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on |
| |
| deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some |
| sail-makers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he |
| stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise |
| might have been wasted. |
| .. <p 91 > |
| .. < chapter xix 2 THE PROPHET > |
| |
| Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship? |
| Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the |
| water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above |
| words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his |
| massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled |
| in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief |
| investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over |
| his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the |
| rushing waters have been dried up. Have ye shipped in her? he repeated. |
| |
| You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose, said I, trying to gain a little more |
| time for an uninterrupted look at him. Aye, the Pequod --that ship there, he |
| said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out |
| from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the |
| object. Yes, said I, we have just signed the articles. Anything down |
| there about your souls? About what? Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any, he |
| said quickly. no matter though, i know many chaps that hav'n't got any, |
| --good luck to 'em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort |
| of a fifth wheel to a wagon. What are you jabbering about, shipmate? said |
| I. He's got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in |
| other chaps, abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the |
| word he. Queequeg, said I, let's go; this fellow has broken loose from |
| somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know. |
| .. <p 92 > |
| |
| Stop! cried the stranger. Ye said true --ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder yet, |
| have ye? Who's Old Thunder? said I, again riveted with the insane |
| earnestness of his manner. Captain Ahab. What! the captain of our ship, |
| the Pequod? Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. |
| Ye hav'n't seen him yet, have ye? No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but |
| is getting better, and will be all right again before long. All right again |
| before long! laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh. |
| |
| Look ye; when captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be |
| all right; not before. What do you know about him? What did they tell |
| you about him? Say that! They didn't tell much of anything about him; only |
| I've heard that he's a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew. |
| |
| That's true, that's true --yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he |
| gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go --that's the word with Captain |
| Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long |
| ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that |
| deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa? -- heard nothing |
| about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing |
| about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn't ye |
| hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don't think ye |
| did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But |
| hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, |
| ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, that every one knows a'most --I |
| mean they know he's only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off. |
| |
| My friend, said I, what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don't |
| know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little |
| damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship |
| there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of |
| his leg. |
| .. <p 93 > |
| |
| All about it, eh --sure you do? --all? Pretty sure. With finger pointed |
| and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood a moment, as if |
| in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said: -- Ye've |
| shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what's signed, is |
| signed; and what's to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it wont be, after |
| all. Any how, it's all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or |
| other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity |
| 'em! Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm |
| sorry I stopped ye. Look here, friend, said I, if you have anything |
| important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle |
| us, you are mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say. And it's said |
| very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just the man |
| for him --the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh, when ye get |
| there, tell 'em I've concluded not to make one of 'em. Ah, my dear fellow, |
| you can't fool us that way --you can't fool us. It is the easiest thing in |
| the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him. Morning to |
| ye, shipmates, morning. Morning it is, said I. Come along, Queequeg, |
| let's leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you? |
| |
| Elijah. Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after |
| each other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was |
| nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps |
| above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I |
| did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. |
| Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of |
| his being behind, but passed on with my comrade, anxious to see whether the |
| stranger would turn the same corner that we did. He did; and then it seemed |
| to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life |
| of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, |
| half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me |
| .. <p 94 > |
| all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with |
| the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn |
| fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when |
| I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; |
| and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy |
| things. I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was |
| really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, |
| |
| and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without |
| seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it |
| seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug. |
| .. <p 94 > |
| .. < chapter xx 15 ALL ASTIR > |
| |
| A day or two passed, and there was great |
| activity aboard the pequod. not only were the old sails being mended, but |
| new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; |
| in short, everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a |
| close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam |
| keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and |
| providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging |
| were working till long after night-fall. On the day following Queequeg's |
| signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where the ship's company |
| were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there |
| was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got |
| down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it |
| seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not |
| sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and |
| there |
| .. <p 95 > |
| is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully |
| equipped. Every one knows what a multitude of things --beds, sauce-pans, |
| knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are |
| indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which |
| necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all |
| grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also |
| holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as |
| with whalemen. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the |
| numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the |
| impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it |
| must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed |
| to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the |
| very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the |
| spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, |
| almost, but a spare captain and duplicate ship. At the period of our arrival |
| at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost completed; |
| comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as |
| before hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on |
| board of divers odds and ends of things, both large and small. Chief among |
| those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad's sister, a lean |
| old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very |
| kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should |
| be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time |
| she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry; |
| another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where he kept |
| his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one's |
| rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was |
| Charity --Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of |
| charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, |
| ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, |
| comfort, and consolation to all on board |
| .. <p 96 > |
| a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she |
| herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars. But it was startling to |
| see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last |
| day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in |
| the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for |
| Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and at |
| every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. |
| |
| Every once and a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring |
| at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, |
| and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam. During these days of |
| preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked |
| about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board |
| his ship. To these questions they would answer, that he was getting better |
| and better, and was expected aboard every day; meantime, the two Captains, |
| Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for |
| the voyage. If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen |
| very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to |
| so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the |
| absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. |
| But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be |
| already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his |
| suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said |
| nothing, and tried to think nothing. At last it was given out that some time |
| next day the ship would certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took |
| a very early start. |
| .. <p 97 > |
| .. < chapter xxi 2 GOING ABOARD > |
| |
| It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey |
| imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf. There are some sailors |
| running ahead there, if I see right, said I to Queequeg, it can't be |
| shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on! Avast! cried a voice, |
| whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon both our |
| shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a |
| little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It |
| was Elijah. Going aboard? Hands off, will you, said I. Lookee here, |
| said Queequeg, shaking himself, go 'way! Aint going aboard, then? Yes, |
| we are, said I, but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. |
| Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent? No, no, no; I wasn't |
| aware of that, said elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to |
| Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances. Elijah, said I, you will |
| oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific |
| Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained. Ye be, be ye? Coming back |
| afore breakfast? He's cracked, Queequeg, said I, come on. Holloa! |
| cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces. Never |
| mind him, said I, Queequeg, come on. But he stole up to us again, and |
| suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said -- Did ye see anything looking |
| like men going towards that ship a while ago? Struck by this plain |
| matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, |
| .. <p 98 > |
| |
| Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure. |
| |
| Very dim, very dim, said Elijah. Morning to ye. Once more we quitted him; |
| but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder again, said, |
| |
| See if you can find 'em now, will ye? Find who? Morning to ye! morning |
| to ye! he rejoined, again moving off. Oh! I was going to warn ye against |
| --but never mind, never mind --it's all one, all in the family too; --sharp |
| frost this morning, ain't it? Good bye to ye. Shan't see ye again very |
| soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand Jury. And with these cracked |
| words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment |
| at his frantic impudence. At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found |
| everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was |
| locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. |
| Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. |
| Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a |
| tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face |
| downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept |
| upon him. Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to? |
| said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the |
| wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would |
| have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it |
| not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down; |
| and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we |
| had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly. |
| He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft |
| enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there. Gracious! |
| Queequeg, don't sit there, said I. Oh! perry dood seat, said Queequeg, my |
| country way; won't hurt him face. Face! said I, call that his face? very |
| benevolent countenance |
| .. <p 99 > |
| then; but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, |
| you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, |
| he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake. Queequeg removed himself |
| to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat |
| at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the |
| other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave |
| me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas |
| of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the |
| custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a |
| house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy |
| fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very |
| convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are |
| convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, |
| and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps |
| in some damp marshy place. While narrating these things, every time Queequeg |
| received the tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the |
| sleeper's head. What's that for, Queequeg? Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry |
| easy! He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, |
| which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his |
| soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong |
| vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him. |
| He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose; |
| then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes. Holloa! |
| |
| he breathed at last, who be ye smokers? Shipped men, answered I, when |
| does she sail? Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. |
| The Captain came aboard last night. What Captain? --Ahab? Who but him |
| indeed? |
| .. <p 100 > |
| I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a |
| noise on deck. Halloa! Starbuck's astir, said the rigger. He's a lively |
| chief mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn |
| to. And so saying he went on deck, and we followed. It was now clear |
| sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the riggers |
| bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of the |
| shore people were busy in bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile |
| Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin. |
| .. <p 100 > |
| .. < chapter xxii 12 MERRY CHRISTMAS > |
| |
| At length, towards noon, upon the |
| final dismissal of the ship's riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled |
| out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a |
| whaleboat, with her last gift --a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her |
| brother-in-law, and a spare bible for the steward -- after all this, the two |
| captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief |
| mate, Peleg said: Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? |
| Captain Ahab is all ready --just spoke to him --nothing more to be got from |
| shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here --blast 'em! No |
| need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg, said Bildad, but |
| away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding. How now! Here upon the |
| very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were |
| going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be |
| joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for |
| Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; Only, they said he was in the |
| cabin. But then, the idea was, |
| .. <p 101 > |
| that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh, |
| and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all his proper |
| business, but the pilot's; and as he was not yet completely recovered --so |
| they said --therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural |
| enough; especially as in the merchant service many captains never show |
| themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but |
| remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merrymaking with their shore |
| friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot. But there was |
| not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all |
| alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad. |
| |
| Aft here, ye sons of bachelors, he cried, as the sailors lingered at the |
| main-mast. Mr. Starbuck, drive 'em aft. Strike the tent there! --was the |
| next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched |
| except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to |
| strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor. |
| |
| Man the capstan! Blood and thunder! --jump! --was the next command, and the |
| crew sprang for the handspikes. Now, in getting under weigh, the station |
| generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here |
| Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices, was |
| one of the licensed pilots of the port --he being suspected to have got himself |
| made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was |
| concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft --Bildad, I say, might now |
| be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor, |
| and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the |
| hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls |
| in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days |
| previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on |
| board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his |
| sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman's berth. |
| Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg |
| .. <p 102 > |
| ripped and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he |
| would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused |
| on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we |
| both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was |
| comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be |
| found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; |
| when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified |
| at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my |
| immediate vicinity. That was my first kick. Is that the way they heave in |
| the marchant service? he roared. Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and |
| break thy backbone! why don't ye spring, i say, all of ye--spring! Quohog! |
| spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotchcap; spring, |
| thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out! And |
| so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very |
| freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks |
| I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day. At last the anchor |
| was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold |
| Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found |
| ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us |
| in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks |
| glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge |
| elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows. Lank Bildad, as pilot, |
| headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into |
| the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds |
| howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard, -- Sweet fields |
| beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green. So to the Jews old |
| Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between. Never did those sweet words sound |
| more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of |
| this frigid |
| .. <p 103 > |
| winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter |
| jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in |
| store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by |
| the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. At last we gained such |
| an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail-boat |
| that had accompanied us began ranging alongside. It was curious and not |
| unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially |
| Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a |
| ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage --beyond both stormy Capes; a ship |
| in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in |
| which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once |
| more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say |
| good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him, --poor old |
| Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides" ran down into the |
| cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked |
| to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the |
| far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land, looked aloft; |
| looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, |
| mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by |
| the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in |
| his face, as much as to say, Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; |
| yes, I can. As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but |
| for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the |
| lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck |
| --now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate. But, at |
| last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him, -- Captain |
| Bildad --come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there! Boat ahoy! |
| Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful, careful! --come, Bildad, boy |
| --say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck --luck to ye, Mr. Stubb --luck to ye, |
| |
| .. <p 104 > |
| Mr. Flask --good-bye, and good luck to ye all --and this day three years I'll |
| have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away! God |
| bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men, murmured old Bildad, almost |
| incoherently. I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may |
| soon be moving among ye --a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye'll have |
| plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. |
| Don't stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is |
| raised full three per cent. within the year. Don't forget your prayers, |
| either. Mr Starbuck, mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the |
| sail-needles are in the green locker! Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, |
| men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good |
| gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, |
| I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. |
| Good-bye, good-bye! Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. |
| Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter --twenty cents the pound it |
| was, and mind ye, if-- Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering, --away! |
| and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the |
| boat. Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a |
| screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three |
| heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic. |
| .. <p 104 > |
| .. < chapter xxiii 28 THE LEE SHORE > |
| |
| Some chapters back, one Bulkington was |
| spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. |
| |
| When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows |
| into the cold malicious waves, who should I see |
| .. <p 105 > |
| standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and |
| fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' |
| dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another |
| tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest |
| things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this |
| six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that |
| it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along |
| the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in |
| the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, |
| all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is |
| that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of |
| land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and |
| through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, |
| fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all |
| the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into |
| peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye, now, Bulkington? |
| Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, |
| earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open |
| independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth |
| conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness |
| alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God --so, better is |
| it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the |
| lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven |
| crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take |
| heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray |
| of thy ocean-perishing --straight up, leaps thy apotheosis! |
| .. <p 106 > |
| .. < chapter xxiv 2 THE ADVOCATE > |
| |
| As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked |
| in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come |
| |
| to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable |
| pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the |
| injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it may be |
| deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, |
| the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the |
| liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous |
| metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of |
| his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in |
| emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. (Sperm |
| Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed |
| pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason why the |
| world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our |
| vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively |
| engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we |
| are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge |
| have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. |
| And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall |
| soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and |
| which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least |
| among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge |
| in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are |
| comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so |
| many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the |
| .. <p 107 > |
| idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's |
| profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to |
| a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast |
| tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the |
| comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and |
| wonders of God! But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it |
| unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! |
| for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, |
| burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory! But look at this matter in |
| other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and |
| have been. Why did the Dutch in DeWitt's time have admirals of their whaling |
| fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out |
| whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two |
| of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the |
| years |
| |
| and |
| |
| pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000 |
| |
| pounds? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber |
| all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of |
| seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 20,000,000 |
| |
| dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in |
| whaling? But this is not the half; look again. I freely assert, that the |
| cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful |
| influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially |
| upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty |
| business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so |
| remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential |
| issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore |
| offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless |
| task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many |
| .. <p 108 > |
| years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest |
| and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes |
| which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American |
| and european men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them |
| fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed |
| them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may |
| celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes, |
| Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed |
| out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your |
| Krusenstern. For in their succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the |
| heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, |
| battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and |
| muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of |
| in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the lifetime commonplaces |
| of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three |
| chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's |
| common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! Until the whale fishery rounded |
| Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, |
| was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish |
| provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through |
| the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if |
| space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last |
| eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old |
| Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts. That |
| great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the |
| enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by |
| a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously |
| barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true |
| mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first |
| Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved |
| .. <p 109 > |
| from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping |
| an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the |
| same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way |
| for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive |
| missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, |
| is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit |
| will be due; for already she is on the threshold. But if, in the face of all |
| this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically noble associations |
| connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, |
| and unhorse you with a split helmet every time. The whale has no famous |
| author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say. The whale no |
| |
| famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first |
| account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first |
| narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the |
| Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the |
| Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy |
| in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke! True enough, but then whalemen |
| themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins. No good |
| |
| blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there. |
| The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel" afterwards, by marriage, |
| Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a |
| long line of Folgers and harpooneers --all kith and kin to noble Benjamin |
| --this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other. |
| Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable. |
| |
| Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory |
| law, the whale is declared a royal fish. |
| .. <p 110 > |
| Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand |
| imposing way. The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In |
| one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the |
| world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian |
| coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession. Grant |
| it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in |
| whaling. No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very |
| heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down |
| your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I |
| know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I |
| account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who |
| boasted of taking as many walled towns. And, as for me, if, by any |
| possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall |
| ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might |
| not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, |
| upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at |
| my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. |
| in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to |
| whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. |
| .. <p 109n. > |
| See subsequent chapters for something more on this head. |
| .. <p 110n. > |
| See subsequent chapters for something more on this head. |
| .. <p 110 > |
| .. < chapter xxv 27 POSTSCRIPT > |
| |
| In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I |
| would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his |
| facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable |
| .. <p 111 > |
| surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause --such an advocate, would |
| he not be blameworthy? It is well known that at the coronation of kings and |
| queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for |
| their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, |
| and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely --who |
| knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his |
| coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it |
| with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much |
| might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal |
| process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a |
| fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, |
| |
| a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got |
| a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in |
| |
| his totality. But the only thing to be considered here, is this --what kind |
| of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar |
| oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What |
| then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted |
| state, the sweetest of all oils? Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we |
| whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff! |
| .. <p 111 > |
| .. < chapter xxvi 26 KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES > |
| |
| The chief mate of the Pequod was |
| Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, |
| earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure |
| hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to |
| the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled |
| .. <p 112 > |
| ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or |
| upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty |
| arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical |
| superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the |
| token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any |
| bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no |
| means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent |
| fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and |
| strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure |
| for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or |
| torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to |
| do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the |
| yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted |
| through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a |
| telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all |
| his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which |
| at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the |
| rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural |
| reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly |
| incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some |
| organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from |
| ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at |
| times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his |
| far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him |
| still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still |
| further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, |
| restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more |
| perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. I will have no man in my boat, said |
| starbuck, who is not afraid of a whale. by this, he seemed to mean, not only |
| that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair |
| estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a |
| far more dangerous comrade than a coward. |
| .. <p 113 > |
| |
| Aye, aye, said Stubb, the second mate, Starbuck, there, is as careful a |
| man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery. But we shall ere long see what |
| that word careful precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost |
| any other whale hunter. Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him |
| courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always |
| at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, |
| that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits |
| of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. |
| Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for |
| persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, |
| thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my |
| living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had |
| been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father's? Where, in |
| the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother? With |
| memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain |
| superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which |
| could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it |
| was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible |
| experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these |
| things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under |
| suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his |
| courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, |
| visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the |
| conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational |
| horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more |
| spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of |
| an enraged and mighty man. But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any |
| instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I |
| have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, |
| to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint |
| stock-companies and nations; knaves, |
| .. <p 114 > |
| fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but |
| man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing |
| creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run |
| to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within |
| ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer |
| character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle |
| of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, |
| completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this |
| august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that |
| abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining |
| in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity |
| which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God |
| absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, |
| our divine equality! If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and |
| castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round |
| |
| them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, |
| among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall |
| touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a |
| rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear |
| me out in it, thou just spirit of equality, which hast spread one royal |
| mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic |
| |
| God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic |
| pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the |
| stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew |
| Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst |
| thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly |
| marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear |
| me out in it, O God! |
| .. <p 115 > |
| .. < chapter xxvii 2 KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES > |
| |
| Stubb was the second mate. He |
| was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a |
| Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as |
| |
| they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent |
| crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner |
| engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his |
| whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew |
| all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of |
| his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. |
| |
| When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his |
| unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. |
| He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most |
| exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of |
| death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no |
| telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if |
| he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no |
| doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to |
| tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find |
| out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner. What, perhaps, with other |
| things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off |
| with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the |
| ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious |
| good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, |
| his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You |
| would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his |
| nose as without his pipe. |
| .. <p 116 > |
| He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy |
| reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in |
| succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then |
| loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead |
| of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth. |
| I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his |
| peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether |
| ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the |
| numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, |
| some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, |
| likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have |
| operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. The third mate was Flask, a native |
| of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very |
| pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great |
| Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it |
| was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. |
| So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their |
| majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension |
| of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the |
| wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, |
| requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and |
| trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of |
| his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these |
| fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a |
| jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are |
| divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. |
| |
| Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last |
| long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, |
| he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in |
| Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers |
| inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those |
| battering seas. Now these three mates --Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were |
| .. <p 117 > |
| momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of |
| the Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which |
| Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, |
| these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with |
| their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even |
| as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins. And since in this famous |
| fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always |
| accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures |
| provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, |
| or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between |
| the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in |
| this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what |
| headsman each of them belonged. first of all was queequeg, whom Starbuck, the |
| chief mate, had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known. Next |
| was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of |
| Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of |
| red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with |
| many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the |
| generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high |
| cheek bones, and black rounding eyes --for an Indian, Oriental in their |
| largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression --all this |
| sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those |
| proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had |
| scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer |
| snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now |
| hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of |
| the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the |
| tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the |
| superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild |
| Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb |
| the second mate's squire. Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, |
| coal-black |
| .. <p 118 > |
| negro-savage, with a lion-like tread --an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from |
| his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them |
| ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his |
| youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely |
| bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in |
| Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and |
| having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of |
| owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; daggoo retained |
| all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in |
| all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility |
| in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag |
| come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, |
| Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man |
| beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at |
| the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast |
| employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty |
| nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale |
| fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the |
| engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and |
| Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American |
| liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying |
| the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, |
| where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their |
| crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the |
| Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland |
| Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage |
| homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but |
| Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in |
| the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common |
| continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his |
| own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An |
| Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the |
| .. <p 119 > |
| isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the |
| pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many |
| of them ever come back. Black Little Pip --he never did --oh, no! he went |
| before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere |
| long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when |
| sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with |
| angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a |
| hero there! |
| .. <p 119 > |
| .. < chapter xxviii 11 AHAB > |
| |
| For several days after leaving Nantucket, |
| nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved |
| each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, |
| they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued |
| from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was |
| plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator |
| was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into |
| the now sacred retreat of the cabin. Every time I ascended to the deck from my |
| watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were |
| visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in |
| the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely |
| heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly |
| recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. |
| But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready |
| to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the |
| wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness --to call it so |
| --which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed |
| against all warrantry to |
| .. <p 120 > |
| cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of |
| the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the |
| tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me |
| acquainted with, still I ascribed this --and rightly ascribed it --to the |
| fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in |
| which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the |
| three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly |
| calculated to allay these colorless misgivings, and induce confidence and |
| cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely |
| sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be |
| found, and they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a |
| Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out |
| her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time |
| running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of |
| latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all |
| its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but |
| still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind |
| the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and |
| melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon |
| watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding |
| shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon |
| his quarter-deck. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, |
| nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, |
| when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, |
| or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole |
| high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable |
| mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey |
| hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, |
| till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly |
| whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the |
| straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning |
| .. <p 121 > |
| tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and |
| grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, |
| leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born |
| with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one |
| could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no |
| allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's |
| senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that |
| not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and |
| then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an |
| elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, |
| by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never |
| before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. |
| Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly |
| invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that |
| no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain |
| Ahab should be tranquilly laid out --which might hardly come to pass, so he |
| muttered --then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a |
| birth-mark on him from crown to sole. So powerfully did the whole grim aspect |
| of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first |
| few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was |
| owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously |
| come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished |
| bone of the sperm whale's jaw. Aye, he was dismasted off Japan, said the |
| old Gay-Head Indian once; but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another |
| mast without coming home for it. he has a quiver of 'em. I was struck with |
| the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter |
| deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored |
| about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; |
| |
| one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking |
| straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of |
| firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable |
| .. <p 122 > |
| wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not |
| a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their |
| minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not |
| painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only |
| that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his |
| face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. Ere |
| long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after |
| that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his |
| pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the |
| deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he |
| became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from |
| home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so |
| secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in |
| the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at |
| last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the |
| Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all |
| whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, |
| so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, |
| now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon |
| layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks |
| to pile themselves upon. Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling |
| persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually |
| to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, |
| April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, |
| ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green |
| sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a |
| little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once |
| did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would |
| have soon flowered out in a smile. |
| .. <p 123 > |
| .. < chapter xxix 2 ENTER AHAB; TO HIM, STUBB > |
| |
| Some days elapsed, and ice |
| and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito |
| spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the |
| eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, |
| overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, |
| heaped up --flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights |
| seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the |
| memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For |
| sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such |
| seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not |
| merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned |
| upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, |
| memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. |
| And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture. |
| Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man |
| has to do with aught that looks like death. among sea-commanders, the old |
| greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. |
| It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in |
| the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than |
| from, the cabin to the planks. It feels like going down into one's tomb, |
| --he would mutter to himself, -- for an old captain like me to be descending |
| this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth. So, almost every |
| twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on |
| deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be |
| hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, |
| |
| .. <p 124 > |
| but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing |
| their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to |
| prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and |
| ere long the old man would emerge, griping at the iron banister, to help his |
| crippled way. Some considerating touch of humanity was in him; for at times |
| like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to |
| his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such |
| would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their |
| dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood |
| was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like |
| pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the odd |
| second mate, came up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating |
| humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, |
| then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the |
| noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, |
| and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou did'st not |
| know Ahab then. Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb, said Ahab, that thou wouldst |
| wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly |
| grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one |
| at last. --Down, dog, and kennel! Starting at the unforeseen concluding |
| exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a |
| moment; then said excitedly, I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; |
| I do but less than half like it, sir. Avast! gritted Ahab between his set |
| teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation. |
| |
| No, sir; not yet, said Stubb, emboldened, I will not tamely be called a |
| dog, sir. Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and |
| begone, or I'll clear the world of thee! As he said this, Ahab advanced upon |
| him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily |
| retreated. I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it, |
| muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. |
| .. <p 125 > |
| |
| It's very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go |
| back and strike him, or --what's that? -- down here on my knees and pray for |
| him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first |
| time I ever did pray. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too; aye, |
| take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed |
| with. How he flashed at me! --his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway |
| there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck |
| when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of |
| the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't that Dough-Boy, the |
| steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock |
| clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the |
| coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as |
| though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess he's got what |
| some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say |
| --worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord |
| keep me from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into |
| the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's |
| that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold? |
| |
| Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game --Here goes |
| |
| for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the |
| world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's |
| about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me, |
| but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my |
| principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, |
| is my twelfth -- So here goes again. But how's that? didn't he call me a dog? |
| |
| blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on |
| top of that! He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he |
| |
| did kick me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, |
| somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with |
| me? I don't stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort |
| of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though |
| --How? how? how? --but the only way's |
| .. <p 126 > |
| to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see how |
| this plaguey juggling thinks over by day-light. |
| .. <p 126 > |
| .. < chapter xxx 4 THE PIPE > |
| |
| When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a |
| while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of |
| late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, |
| and also his pipe. lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the |
| stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times, |
| the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, |
| of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that |
| tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a |
| Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was |
| Ahab. Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth |
| in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. How now, |
| he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, this smoking no longer |
| soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here |
| have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, --aye, and ignorantly |
| smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous |
| whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and |
| fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is |
| meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, |
| not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more-- He tossed the |
| still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same |
| instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, |
| Ahab lurchingly paced the planks. |
| .. <p 127 > |
| .. < chapter xxxi 2 QUEEN MAB > |
| |
| Next morning Stubb accosted Flask. Such a |
| queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man's ivory leg, well |
| I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, |
| my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a |
| pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still |
| more curious, Flask--you know how curious all dreams are-- through all this rage |
| that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it |
| was not much of an insult, that kick from ahab. "Why," thinks I,"what's the |
| row? It's not a real leg, only a false leg." And there's a mighty difference |
| between a living thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the |
| hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The |
| living member --that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to |
| myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that |
| cursed pyramid -- so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I |
| say, I was thinking to myself, "what's his leg now, but a cane --a whalebone |
| cane. Yes," thinks I,"it was only a playful cudgelling --in fact, only a |
| whaleboning that he gave me --not a base kick. Besides," thinks I,"look at it |
| once; why, the end of it --the foot part --what a small sort of end it is; |
| whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me, there's a devilish broad insult. |
| |
| But this insult is whittled down to a point only." But now comes the |
| greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the |
| pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes |
| me by the shoulders, and slews me round. "What are you 'bout?" says he. Slid! |
| man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over |
| the fright. "What am I about?" says I at last. "And what business is that of |
| yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do you want a |
| .. <p 128 > |
| kick?" By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round |
| his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a |
| clout --what do you think, I saw? --why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck |
| full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts,"I |
| guess I won't kick you, old fellow." "Wise Stubb," said he,"wise Stubb;" and |
| kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a |
| chimney hag. seeing he wasn't going to stop saying over his "wise Stubb, wise |
| Stubb," I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I |
| had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, "Stop that kicking!" |
| "Halloa," says I,"what's the matter now, old fellow?" "Look ye here," says |
| he;"let's argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?" "Yes, he |
| did," says I --"right here it was." "Very good," says he --"he used his ivory |
| |
| leg, didn't he?" "Yes, he did," says I. "Well then," says he, "wise Stubb, |
| what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't |
| a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a |
| great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honor; I consider |
| it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it |
| great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be |
| |
| your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. |
| Remember what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no |
| account kick back; for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see |
| that pyramid?" With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer |
| fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was |
| in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask? I don't know; |
| it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho'. May be, may be. But it's made a |
| wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the |
| stern? Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let that old man alone; |
| never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa! what's that he shouts? Hark! |
| |
| Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts! If |
| ye see a white one, split your lungs for him! What d'ye think of that now, |
| Flask? ain't there a small drop |
| .. <p 129 > |
| of something queer about that, eh? a white whale--did ye mark that, man? Look |
| ye--there's something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has |
| that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way. |
| .. <p 129 > |
| .. < chapter xxxii 6 CETOLOGY > |
| |
| Already we are boldly launched upon the |
| deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities. Ere |
| |
| that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the |
| barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a |
| matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the |
| more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to |
| follow. It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, |
| that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The |
| classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. |
| Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down. No branch of |
| Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology, says Captain |
| Scoresby, A. D. |
| . It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter |
| into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups |
| and families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal |
| (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A. D. |
| . Unfitness to pursue our |
| research in the unfathomable waters. Impenetrable veil covering our |
| knowledge of the cetacea. A field strewn with thorns. All these |
| incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists. Thus speak of |
| the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of |
| zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, |
| yet of books there are |
| .. <p 130 > |
| a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of |
| whales. many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, |
| |
| who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few: --The |
| Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; |
| Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; |
| Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick |
| Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the |
| Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what |
| ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts |
| will show. Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following |
| Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional |
| harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of |
| the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby |
| knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which |
| the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that |
| the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even |
| by any means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of |
| his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, |
| invested the then fabulous and utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which |
| ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific |
| retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. |
| Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past |
| days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to |
| them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new |
| proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all, --the |
| Greenland whale is deposed, --the great sperm whale now reigneth! There are |
| only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale |
| before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the |
| attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in their time surgeons |
| to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The |
| .. <p 131 > |
| original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is |
| necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, |
| though mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm |
| whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above |
| all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life. Now the various species of |
| whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy |
| outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by |
| subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, |
| I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because |
| any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly |
| be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the |
| various species, or-- in this place at least --to much of any description. My |
| object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. |
| |
| I am the architect, not the builder. But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary |
| letter-sorter in the Post-office is equal to it. To grope down into the |
| bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable |
| foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. |
| What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful |
| tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant |
| with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through |
| libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these |
| visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some |
| preliminaries to settle. first: the uncertain, unsettled condition of this |
| science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in |
| some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his |
| System of Nature, A. D. |
| , Linnaeus declares, I hereby separate the whales |
| from the fish. But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year |
| , |
| sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were |
| still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan. The |
| grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished |
| .. <p 132 > |
| the whales from the waters, he states as follows: On account of their warm |
| bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem |
| intrantem feminam mammis lactantem, and finally, ex lege naturae jure |
| meritoque. I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley |
| Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they |
| united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. |
| |
| Charley profanely hinted they were humbug. Be it known that, waiving all |
| argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and |
| call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next |
| point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from other fish. |
| Above, Linnaeus has given you those items. But in brief, they are these: |
| lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded. |
| Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as |
| conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale |
| is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. |
| However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A |
| walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is |
| amphibious. but the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as |
| coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish |
| familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. |
| Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, |
| invariably assumes a horizontal position. By the above definition of what a |
| whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea |
| creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; |
| |
| nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively |
| regarded as alien. Hence, all the smaller, spouting, |
| .. <p 133 > |
| and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. |
| Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host. First: |
| According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS |
| (subdivisible into Chapters), and these shall comprehend them all, both small |
| and large. I. The FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO |
| WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the |
| OCTAVO, the Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise. FOLIOS. Among these I |
| here include the following chapters: -- I. The Sperm Whale; II. the Right |
| |
| Whale; III. the Fin Back Whale; IV. the Hump-backed Whale; V. the |
| |
| Razor Back Whale; VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale. BOOK I. ( Folio), |
| CHAPTER I. ( Sperm Whale). --This whale, among the English of old vaguely |
| known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, |
| is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and |
| the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest |
| inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the |
| most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; |
| he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is |
| obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. |
| |
| It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically considered, |
| it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly |
| unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only |
| accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it |
| would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical |
| with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was |
| the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the |
| Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In |
| those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for |
| light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the |
| |
| druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the |
| course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became |
| .. <p 134 > |
| known, its original name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to |
| enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And |
| so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from |
| which this spermaceti was really derived. BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER II. |
| ( Right Whale).--In one respect this is the most venerable of the |
| leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the |
| article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as |
| |
| whale oil, an inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is |
| indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the |
| Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right |
| whale. there is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species |
| thus multitudinously baptized. What then is the whale, which I include in |
| the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English |
| naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English Whalemen; the Baliene |
| Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is |
| the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch |
| and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen |
| have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West |
| Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale |
| Cruising Grounds. Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland |
| whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely |
| agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single |
| determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless |
| subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some |
| departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The right |
| whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to |
| elucidating the sperm whale. BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER III. ( Fin-Back). |
| --Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of |
| Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is |
| commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers |
| crossing the Atlantic, in the New York |
| .. <p 135 > |
| packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back |
| resembles the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter |
| color, approaching to olive. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, |
| formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand |
| distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is often a |
| conspicuous object. this fin is some three or four feet long, growing |
| vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a |
| very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature |
| be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from |
| the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with |
| spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon |
| the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle |
| surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines |
| graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is |
| not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very |
| shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the |
| remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising |
| like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such |
| wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from |
| man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, |
| bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his |
| mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a |
| theoretic species denominated Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen. |
| |
| Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several |
| varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales and |
| beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and |
| rostrated whales, are the fishermen's names for a few sorts. In connexion |
| with this appellative of Whalebone whales , it is of great importance to |
| mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating |
| allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear |
| classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or |
| fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very |
| .. <p 136 > |
| obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of |
| Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his |
| kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are |
| things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of |
| whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in |
| other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the |
| humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, |
| this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; |
| but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other |
| parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular |
| combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular |
| isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a |
| basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split. But it |
| may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his |
| anatomy --there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification. |
| Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale's anatomy more |
| striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is |
| impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend |
| into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you will not find |
| distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the systematizer as those |
| external ones already enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take hold |
| of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them |
| that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the |
| only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed. |
| |
| book i. ( folio), chapter iv. ( hump back). --this whale is often seen on |
| the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed |
| into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call |
| him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for him does |
| |
| not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump, |
| though a smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is |
| the most gamesome and light-hearted of all |
| .. <p 137 > |
| the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of |
| them. BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER V. ( Razor Back). --Of this whale little is |
| known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a |
| retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, |
| he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long |
| sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else. |
| BOOK I. ( Folio), CHAPTER VI. ( Sulphur Bottom). -- Another retiring |
| gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the |
| Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at |
| least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then |
| always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; |
| he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, |
| Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest |
| Nantucketer. Thus ends BOOK I. ( Folio), and now begins BOOK II. ( octavo). |
| |
| OCTAVOES. These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which at |
| present may be numbered: --I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III., the |
| |
| Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer. BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER |
| I. ( Grampus). --Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather |
| blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of |
| the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing all |
| the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have |
| recognised him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen |
| to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the |
| waist. He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is |
| considerable |
| .. <p 138 > |
| in quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is |
| regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale. BOOK II. |
| ( Octavo), CHAPTER II. ( Black Fish). --I give the popular fishermen's names |
| for all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens |
| to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do so |
| now, touching the Black Fish, so called, because blackness is the rule among |
| almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity |
| is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips |
| are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his |
| face. This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is |
| found in almost all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal |
| hooked fin in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not |
| more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena |
| whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment --as some |
| frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by themselves, |
| burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their blubber is very |
| thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil. |
| BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER III. ( Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale. |
| --Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his |
| peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is |
| some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some |
| exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is |
| but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed |
| from the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an |
| ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy |
| left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it |
| would be hard to say. It does not seemed to be used like the blade of the |
| sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale |
| employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley |
| Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the |
| surface of the Polar Sea, |
| .. <p 139 > |
| and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. |
| But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion |
| is, that however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale |
| --however that may be --it would certainly be very convenient to him for a |
| folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked |
| whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious |
| example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated |
| nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same |
| sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against |
| poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also |
| distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the |
| horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in |
| itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir |
| Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did |
| gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as |
| his bold ship sailed down the Thames; when Sir Martin returned from that |
| voyage, saith Black Letter, on bended knees he presented to her highness a |
| prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in |
| the castle at Windsor. An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, |
| on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining |
| to a land beast of the unicorn nature. The Narwhale has a very picturesque, |
| leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground color, dotted with round and |
| oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there |
| is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the |
| circumpolar seas. BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER IV. ( Killer). --Of this whale |
| little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the |
| professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should |
| say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage --a sort of |
| Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs |
| there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer |
| is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception |
| .. <p 140 > |
| might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its |
| indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and |
| Sharks included. BOOK II. ( Octavo), CHAPTER V. ( Thrasher). --This gentleman |
| |
| is famous for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He |
| mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by |
| flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar |
| process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are |
| outlaws, even in the lawless seas. thus ends book II. ( Octavo), and begins |
| BOOK III. ( Duodecimo). DUODECIMOES. --These include the smaller whales. I. |
| |
| The Huzza Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed |
| Porpoise. To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it |
| may possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five |
| feet should be marshalled among WHALES --a word, which, in the popular sense, |
| always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down above as |
| Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition of what a |
| whale is --i. e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail. BOOK III. |
| ( Duodecimo), CHAPTER I ( Huzza Porpoise). -- This is the common porpoise |
| found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there |
| are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish |
| |
| them. I call them thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which |
| upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a |
| Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by |
| the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy |
| billows to windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They |
| |
| are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at |
| beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly |
| gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield you |
| one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from |
| his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and |
| watchmakers. |
| .. <p 141 > |
| Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It |
| may never have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is |
| so small that it is not very readily discernible. But the next time you have |
| a chance, watch him; and you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in |
| miniature. BOOK III. ( Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. ( Algerine Porpoise). -- A |
| pirate. Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is |
| somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. |
| Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many |
| times, but never yet saw him captured. BOOK III. ( Duodecimo), CHAPTER III. |
| ( Mealy-mouthed Porpoise). The largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in |
| the Pacific, so far as it is known. The only English name, by which he has |
| hitherto been designated, is that of the fishers -- Right-Whale Porpoise, |
| from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. |
| In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less |
| rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like |
| figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a |
| lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his |
| mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a |
| deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called |
| the bright waist, that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two |
| separate colors, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his |
| head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just |
| escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! |
| His oil is much like that of the common porpoise. Beyond the DUODECIMO, this |
| system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the |
| whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble |
| of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American |
| whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by |
| their forecastle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to |
| future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of |
| the following |
| .. <p 142 > |
| whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be |
| incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo |
| magnitude: --The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed |
| Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; |
| the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; |
| the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, |
| there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all |
| manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can |
| hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but |
| signifying nothing. Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system |
| would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I |
| have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus |
| unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane |
| still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may |
| be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the |
| |
| copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This |
| whole book is but a draught --nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, |
| Strength, Cash, and Patience! |
| .. <p 132n. > |
| I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and |
| Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by |
| many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a nosy, |
| contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet |
| |
| hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as |
| whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the kingdom of |
| Cetology. |
| .. <p 137n. > |
| Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, |
| while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former |
| order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet |
| the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its diminished form does not preserve the |
| shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does. |
| .. <p 142 > |
| .. < chapter xxxiii 24 THE SPECKSYNDER > |
| |
| Concerning the officers of the |
| whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic |
| peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class |
| of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the |
| whale-fleet. The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is |
| evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries |
| and more ago, the command of a whale ship was |
| .. <p 143 > |
| not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided |
| between him and an officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means |
| Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. |
| In those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation and |
| general management of the vessel: while over the whale-hunting department |
| and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In |
| the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, |
| this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly |
| abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is |
| but one of the captain's more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the |
| good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely |
| depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an important |
| officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a |
| whaling ground) the command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the |
| grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart |
| from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their |
| professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their |
| social equal. Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at |
| sea, is this--the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships |
| and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and |
| so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the |
| after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the |
| captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it. |
| Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of |
| all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the |
| community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low, |
| depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck, |
| together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all |
| these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in |
| merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian |
| family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for |
| all that, |
| .. <p 144 > |
| the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially |
| relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships |
| in which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated |
| grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as much |
| outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of |
| pilot-cloth. And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the |
| least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage |
| he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no |
| man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and |
| though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with |
| events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether |
| of condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was |
| by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea. Nor, |
| perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and |
| usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of |
| them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to |
| subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good |
| degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became |
| incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual |
| superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available |
| supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and |
| entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it |
| is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's |
| hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men |
| who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden |
| handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over |
| the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things |
| when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal |
| instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as |
| in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire |
| encircles an imperial brain; |
| .. <p 145 > |
| then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. |
| Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its |
| fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important |
| in his art, as the one now alluded to. But Ahab, my Captain, still moves |
| before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode |
| touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with |
| a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical |
| trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, |
| it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and |
| featured in the unbodied air! |
| .. <p 145 > |
| .. < chapter xxxiv 15 THE CABIN-TABLE > |
| |
| It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the |
| steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, |
| announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in the lee |
| quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of the sun; and is now |
| mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, |
| reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his |
| complete inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not |
| heard his menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he |
| swings himself to the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, |
| |
| Dinner, Mr. Starbuck, disappears into the cabin. When the last echo of his |
| sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every reason to |
| suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a |
| few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, |
| with some touch of pleasantness, Dinner, Mr. Stubb, and descends the |
| scuttle. The second Emir lounges about the rigging |
| .. <p 146 > |
| awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it be all |
| right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with |
| a rapid Dinner, Mr. Flask, follows after his predecessors. But the third |
| emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to feel |
| relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks |
| in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp |
| but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk's head; and |
| then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a |
| shelf, he goes down rollicking, so far at least as he remains visible from |
| the deck, reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music. |
| |
| But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face |
| altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's |
| presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave. It is not the least |
| among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-usages, |
| that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation, |
| bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, |
| ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary |
| dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not |
| to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the |
| table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this |
| difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of |
| Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, |
| therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who |
| in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private |
| dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of |
| individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of state transcends |
| Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined |
| his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social |
| czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you |
| superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you |
| will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned. |
| .. <p 147 > |
| Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the |
| white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In |
| his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were as little |
| children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest |
| social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old |
| man's knife, as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that |
| for the world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest |
| observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when |
| reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, |
| Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his |
| meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if, |
| perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly; |
| and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation |
| banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven |
| |
| Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in |
| awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he |
| himself was dumb. What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a |
| sudden racket in the hold below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest |
| son, and little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of |
| the saline beef; his would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have |
| presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny |
| in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never |
| more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world; |
| nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped |
| himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, |
| did flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of |
| the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny |
| complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless |
| waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; |
| however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man! Another thing. Flask was |
| the last person down at the dinner, |
| .. <p 148 > |
| and Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was badly |
| jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and |
| yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who |
| is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and |
| soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir |
| himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is |
| against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was |
| that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the |
| dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be |
| otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve |
| his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought |
| Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I |
| wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to |
| when I was before the mast. There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the |
| vanity of glory: there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that |
| any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official |
| capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was |
| to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, |
| sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab. Now, Ahab and his three |
| mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod's cabin. After |
| their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas |
| cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid |
| steward. And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being |
| its residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the |
| high and mighty cabin. In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint |
| and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire |
| care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior |
| fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the |
| sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with |
| such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords; they |
| filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices. Such |
| portentous |
| .. <p 149 > |
| appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by |
| the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great |
| baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were |
| not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then |
| Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his |
| back, harpoonwise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted |
| Dough-Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a |
| great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out |
| the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous, |
| shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a |
| bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of |
| the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these |
| three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life was one continual lip-quiver. |
| Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they |
| demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry |
| adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, |
| till all was over. It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against |
| Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them, |
| Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed |
| head to the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the |
| low cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a |
| ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to |
| say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small |
| mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad, baronial, |
| and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank |
| deep of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils |
| snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are |
| giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of |
| the lip in eating --an ugly sound enough --so much so, that the trembling |
| Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own |
| lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce |
| himself, |
| .. <p 150 > |
| that his bones might be picked, the simple-witted Steward all but shattered |
| the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the |
| palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, |
| for their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, |
| they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not |
| at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his |
| Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some |
| murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white |
| waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm, |
| but a buckler. in good time, though, to his great delight, the three |
| salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering |
| ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish |
| scimetars in scabbards. But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and |
| nominally lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, |
| they were scarcely ever in it except at meal-times, and just before |
| sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters. |
| In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, |
| who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship's cabin |
| belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at |
| any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers |
| of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than |
| in it. For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a |
| house; turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as |
| a permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; |
| in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though |
| nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. |
| He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled |
| Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the |
| woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, |
| sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, |
| shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its |
| gloom! |
| .. <p 151 > |
| .. < chapter xxxv 2 THE MAST-HEAD > |
| |
| It was during the more pleasant weather, |
| that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head came round. In |
| most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with |
| the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand |
| miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. and if, |
| after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing nigh home with |
| anything empty in her --say, an empty vial even --then, her mast-heads are kept |
| manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires |
| of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale |
| more. Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a |
| very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I |
| take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; |
| because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their |
| progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have |
| intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet |
| (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be |
| said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, |
| we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the |
| Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the |
| general belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for |
| astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar |
| stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with |
| prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to |
| mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a |
| modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint |
| Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty |
| stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of |
| .. <p 152 > |
| his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in |
| him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who |
| was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; |
| but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post. |
| |
| Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, |
| iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, |
| are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering |
| any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of |
| Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; |
| careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis |
| Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his |
| towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his |
| column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. |
| Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in |
| Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is |
| yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be |
| fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a |
| single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels |
| the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that |
| their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what |
| |
| shoals and what rocks must be shunned. It may seem unwarrantable to couple in |
| any respect the mast-head standers of the land with those of the sea; but |
| that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed |
| Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed |
| tells us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were |
| regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected |
| lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of |
| nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years |
| ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon |
| descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But |
| this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, |
| that of a whale-ship |
| .. <p 153 > |
| at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the |
| seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other |
| every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly |
| pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. |
| There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the |
| deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between |
| your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships |
| once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you |
| stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the |
| waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; |
| everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic |
| whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read |
| no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you |
| into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt |
| securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you |
| shall have for dinner --for all your meals for three years and more are snugly |
| stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. In one of those southern |
| whalemen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of |
| the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire |
| months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so |
| considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so |
| sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted |
| to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a |
| hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those |
| small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your |
| most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you stand |
| upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t' |
| gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about |
| as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold weather |
| you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but |
| properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the |
| unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside |
| .. <p 154 > |
| of its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move |
| out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim |
| crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house |
| as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a |
| shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a |
| convenient closet of your watch-coat. Concerning all this, it is much to be |
| deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with |
| those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow's-nests, in which the |
| lookouts of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of |
| the frozen seas. In the fire-side narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled A |
| Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally |
| for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland; in |
| this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a |
| charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow's-nest |
| of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good craft. He called |
| it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original |
| inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and |
| holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers |
| being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate |
| after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet's |
| crow's-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, |
| however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward |
| of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you |
| ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, |
| or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker |
| underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, |
| in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical |
| conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's |
| nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in |
| the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping |
| off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for |
| you cannot successfully shoot at them from |
| .. <p 155 > |
| the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is |
| a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet |
| to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his |
| crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he |
| treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow's-nest, |
| with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the |
| errors resulting from what is called the local attraction of all binnacle |
| magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the |
| ship's planks, and in the Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so |
| many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain |
| is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned binnacle |
| deviations, azimuth compass observations, and approximate errors, he |
| knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those |
| profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards |
| that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of |
| his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I |
| greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet |
| I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, |
| seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with |
| mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there |
| in that bird's nest within three or four perches of the pole. But if we |
| Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his |
| Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counterbalanced by the |
| widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers |
| |
| mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, |
| resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom |
| I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy |
| leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, |
| and so at last mount to my ultimate destination. Let me make a clean breast |
| of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem |
| of the universe revolving in me, how could I--being left completely to myself |
| .. <p 156 > |
| at such a thought-engendering altitude, --how could I but lightly hold my |
| obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, Keep your weather |
| eye open, and sing out every time. And let me in this place movingly admonish |
| you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant |
| fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable |
| meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the phaedon instead of Bowditch |
| in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before |
| they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten |
| wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor |
| are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery |
| furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young |
| men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar |
| and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the |
| mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase |
| ejaculates: -- Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand |
| blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain. Very often do the captains of such |
| ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them |
| with not feeling sufficient interest in the voyage; half-hinting that they |
| are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret |
| souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those |
| young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are |
| short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left |
| their opera-glasses at home. Why, thou monkey, said a harpooneer to one of |
| these lads, we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not |
| raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up |
| here. Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in |
| the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, |
| unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of |
| waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic |
| .. <p 157 > |
| ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, |
| pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, |
| beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some |
| undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that |
| only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted |
| mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time |
| and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a |
| part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, |
| except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed |
| from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this |
| sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold |
| at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you |
| hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one |
| half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer |
| sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! |
| .. <p 157 > |
| .. < chapter xxxvi 21 THE QUARTER-DECK > |
| |
| ( enter Ahab: Then, all.) It |
| was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly |
| after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the |
| deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country |
| gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden. Soon his |
| steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon |
| planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like |
| geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, |
| too, upon that ribbed |
| .. <p 158 > |
| and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints --the |
| foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought. But on the occasion in |
| question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that morning |
| left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every |
| uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you |
| |
| could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he |
| paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the |
| inward mould of every outer movement. D'ye mark him, Flask? whispered Stubb; |
| |
| the chick that's in him pecks the shell. T'will soon be out. The hours |
| wore on; --Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the |
| same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect. It drew near the close of day. |
| |
| Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into |
| the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck |
| |
| to send everybody aft. Sir! said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or |
| never given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case. Send everybody |
| aft, repeated Ahab. Mast-heads, there! come down! When the entire ship's |
| company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, |
| were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is |
| coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting |
| his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a |
| soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and |
| half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering |
| among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have |
| summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this |
| did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried: -- What do ye do when ye see |
| a whale, men? Sing out for him! was the impulsive rejoinder from a score |
| of clubbed voices. |
| .. <p 159 > |
| |
| Good! cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty |
| animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them. |
| |
| And what do ye next, men? Lower away, and after him! And what tune is |
| it ye pull to, men? A dead whale or a stove boat! More and more strangely |
| and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every |
| shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if |
| marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such |
| seemingly purposeless questions. But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, |
| now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, |
| |
| and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus: -- All ye |
| mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look |
| ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold? --holding up a broad bright coin to |
| the sun -- it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, |
| hand me yon top-maul. While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without |
| speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, |
| as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly |
| humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate |
| that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him. |
| Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with |
| the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with |
| a high raised voice exclaiming: Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed |
| whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that |
| white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke --look |
| ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold |
| ounce, my boys! Huzza! huzza! cried the seamen, as with swinging |
| tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast. It's a |
| white whale, I say, resumed Ahab, as he threw down |
| .. <p 160 > |
| the top-maul; a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for |
| white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out. All this while Tashtego, |
| Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense interest and |
| surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked |
| jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific |
| recollection. Captain Ahab, said Tashtego, that white whale must be the |
| same that some call Moby Dick. Moby Dick? shouted Ahab. Do ye know the |
| white whale then, Tash? Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he |
| goes down? said the Gay-Header deliberately. And has he a curious spout, |
| too, said Daggoo, very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, |
| Captain Ahab? And he have one, two, tree --oh! good many iron in him hide, |
| too, Captain, cried Queequeg disjointedly, all twiske-tee betwisk, like |
| him--him-- faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as |
| though uncorking a bottle -- like him--him-- Corkscrew! cried Ahab, aye, |
| Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his |
| spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our |
| Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he |
| fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby |
| Dick ye have seen --Moby Dick-- Moby Dick! Captain Ahab, said Starbuck, who, |
| with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing |
| surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained |
| all the wonder. Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby |
| Dick that took off thy leg? Who told thee that? cried Ahab; then pausing, |
| |
| Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted |
| me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye, |
| he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken |
| moose; Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a |
| poor pegging |
| .. <p 161 > |
| lubber of me for ever and a day! Then tossing both arms, with measureless |
| imprecations he shouted out: Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, |
| and round the horn, and round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition's |
| flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to |
| chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, |
| till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye |
| splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave. Aye, aye! shouted the |
| harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: A sharp eye |
| for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick! God bless ye, he seemed |
| to half sob and half shout. God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great |
| measure of grog. But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not |
| |
| chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick? I am game for his |
| crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes |
| in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my |
| commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even |
| if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our |
| Nantucket market. Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou |
| |
| requirest a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the |
| accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling |
| it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, |
| |
| that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here! He smites his chest, |
| whispered Stubb, what's that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow. |
| |
| Vengeance on a dumb brute! cried Starbuck, that simply smote thee from |
| blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, |
| seems blasphemous. Hark ye yet again, --the little lower layer. All visible |
| objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event --in the living |
| act, the undoubted deed --there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts |
| forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man |
| will strike, strike through |
| .. <p 162 > |
| the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the |
| wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I |
| think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I |
| see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. |
| That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, |
| or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not |
| to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the |
| sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair |
| play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, |
| is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off |
| thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, |
| so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But |
| look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are |
| men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. |
| Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn -- living, |
| breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards --the unrecking and |
| unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid |
| life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, |
| in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he |
| snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost |
| sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike |
| a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor |
| hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, |
| |
| when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize |
| thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak! --Aye, aye! thy |
| silence, then, that voices thee. ( aside) something shot from my dilated |
| nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot |
| oppose me now, without rebellion. God keep me! --keep us all! murmured |
| Starbuck, lowly. But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the |
| mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh |
| from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of |
| .. <p 163 > |
| the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the |
| masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast |
| eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died |
| away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as |
| before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But |
| rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much |
| predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. |
| For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our |
| being, these still drive us on. The measure! the measure! cried Ahab. |
| Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered |
| them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, |
| |
| with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side |
| with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company formed a circle round |
| the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. |
| But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves |
| meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of |
| the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian. |
| |
| Drink and pass! he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest |
| seaman. The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts |
| --long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it goes round |
| excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. |
| well done; almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me |
| -- here's a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and |
| gone. Steward, refill! Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round |
| this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, |
| stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may |
| in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, |
| you will yet see that-- Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. |
| Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer't not thou St. |
| Vitus' imp --away, thou ague! Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full |
| before me. Well |
| .. <p 164 > |
| done! Let me touch the axis. So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the |
| three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, |
| suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from |
| Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some |
| nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same |
| fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. |
| The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. |
| Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell |
| downright. In vain! cried Ahab; but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three |
| but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had |
| perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead. |
| Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye |
| three cup-bearers to my three pagan kinsmen there --yon three most honorable |
| gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when |
| the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my |
| sweet cardinals! your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not |
| order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers! |
| |
| Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached |
| iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him. |
| |
| Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not |
| the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. |
| The irons! take them; hold them while I fill! Forthwith, slowly going from |
| one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters |
| |
| from the pewter. Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous |
| chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble |
| league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to |
| sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the |
| deathful whaleboat's bow -- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not |
| hunt Moby Dick to his death! The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; |
| and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits |
| .. <p 165 > |
| were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and |
| shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds |
| among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all |
| dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin. |
| .. <p 165 > |
| .. < chapter xxxvii 7 SUNSET > |
| |
| The cabin; by the stern windows; |
| |
| Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out. I leave a white and turbid wake; |
| pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong |
| swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass. Yonder, by the |
| ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow |
| plumbs the blue. The diver sun --slow dived from noon, --goes down; my soul |
| mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy |
| that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; |
| i, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that i wear that, |
| that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron --that I know--not gold. 'Tis split, too |
| --that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against |
| the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the |
| most brain-battering fight! Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the |
| sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely |
| light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er |
| enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; |
| damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! |
| Good night --good night! ( waving his hand, he moves from the window.) |
| 'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at |
| .. <p 166 > |
| the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and |
| they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all |
| stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the |
| match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what |
| I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad --Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I |
| am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend |
| itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and--Aye! I lost this |
| leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the |
| prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever |
| were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf |
| Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as school-boys do to bullies, |
| --Take some one of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me |
| down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind |
| your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments |
| to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, |
| else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my |
| fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. |
| Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under |
| torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle |
| to the iron way! |
| .. <p 166 > |
| .. < chapter xxxviii 26 DUSK > |
| |
| By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning |
| |
| against it. My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a |
| madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! |
| But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see |
| his impious end; but feel that |
| .. <p 167 > |
| I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to |
| him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's |
| over him, he cries; --aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he |
| lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office, --to obey, |
| rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read |
| |
| some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and |
| tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the |
| small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may |
| wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock's |
| run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again. |
| [ A burst of revelry from the forecastle.] Oh, God! to sail with such a |
| heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped |
| somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! |
| the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence |
| aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on |
| the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where |
| he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the |
| wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills |
| |
| me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an |
| hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge, --as wild, |
| untutored things are forced to feed --Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the |
| latent horror in thee! but 'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with |
| the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, |
| phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences! |
| .. <p 168 > |
| .. < chapter xxxix 2 FIRST NIGHT-WATCH FORE-TOP > |
| |
| ( Stubb solus, and |
| |
| mending a brace.) Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat! --I've been |
| thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why |
| so? Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and |
| come what will, one comfort's always left -- that unfailing comfort is, it's |
| all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor |
| eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure the |
| old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, |
| might readily have prophesied it --for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I |
| saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb --that's my title --well, Stubb, what of it, |
| Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what |
| it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your |
| horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What's my juicy little pear |
| at home doing now? Crying its eyes out? --Giving a party to the last arrived |
| harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! |
| lirra, skirra! Oh-- We'll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as |
| gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the |
| lips while meeting. a brave stave that --who calls? mr. starbuck? Aye, aye, |
| sir -- ( Aside) he's my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken. -- Aye, |
| aye, sir, just through with this job --coming. |
| .. <p 169 > |
| .. < chapter xl 2 MIDNIGHT, FORECASTLE HARPOONERS AND SAILORS > |
| |
| ( Foresail |
| |
| rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and |
| |
| lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.) Farewell and |
| adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! Our |
| captain's commanded. -- 1st Nantucket Sailor Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; |
| it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! ( Sings, and all |
| |
| follow.) Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A |
| viewing of those gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in |
| your boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we'll have one of those |
| fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts |
| never fail! While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale! Mate's Voice |
| from the Quarter-Deck Eight bells there, forward! 2nd Nantucket Sailor |
| Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell |
| eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I've the sort |
| of mouth for that --the hogshead mouth. So, so, ( thrusts his head down the |
| |
| scuttle,) Star--bo--l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble |
| up! Dutch Sailor Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark |
| this in our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as |
| .. <p 170 > |
| filliping to others. We sing; they sleep --aye, lie down there, like |
| ground-tier butts. At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail |
| 'em through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em it's |
| the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment. That's |
| the way -- that's it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter. |
| |
| French Sailor Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor |
| in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all |
| legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine! Pip ( Sulky and |
| |
| sleepy.) Don't know where it is. French Sailor Beat thy belly, then, and |
| wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't |
| you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? |
| Throw yourselves! Legs! Legs! Iceland Sailor I don't like your floor, |
| maty; it's too springy to my taste. I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to |
| throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me. Maltese Sailor Me too; |
| where's your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right, |
| and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I must have partners! Sicilian |
| Sailor Aye; girls and a green! --then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn |
| grasshopper! Long-Island Sailor Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more |
| of us. Hoe corn when you may, I say. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here |
| |
| comes the music; now for it! Azore Sailor ( Ascending, and pitching the |
| |
| tambourine up the scuttle.) |
| .. <p 171 > |
| Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys! |
| ( The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some |
| |
| sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.) Azore |
| Sailor ( Dancing.) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig |
| it, quig it, bell-boy; Make fire-flies; break the jinglers! Pip |
| Jinglers, you say? --there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so. China |
| Sailor Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself. |
| French Sailor Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! |
| split jibs! tear yourselves! Tashtego ( Quietly smoking.) That's a white |
| man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat. Old Manx Sailor I wonder |
| whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I'll |
| dance over your grave, I will --that's the bitterest threat of your |
| night-women, that beat head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the |
| green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole |
| world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one |
| ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once. 3d Nantucket |
| Sailor Spell oh! --whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm |
| --give us a whiff, Tash. ( They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. |
| |
| Meantime the sky darkens -- the wind rises.) |
| .. <p 172 > |
| Lascar Sailor By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, |
| high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva! |
| Maltese Sailor ( Reclining and shaking his cap.) It's the waves --the |
| snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now would |
| all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore! |
| There's naught so sweet on earth --heaven may not match it! --as those swift |
| glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide |
| such ripe, bursting grapes. Sicilian Sailor ( Reclining.) Tell me not of |
| it! Hark ye, lad --fleet interlacings of the limbs --lithe swayings --coyings |
| --flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not |
| taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? ( Nudging.) Tahitan |
| Sailor ( Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls! |
| --the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy |
| mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! |
| green the first day i brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me! |
| --not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon |
| sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they |
| leap down the crags and drown the villages? --The blast! the blast! Up, |
| spine, and meet it! ( Leaps to his feet.) Portuguese Sailor How the sea |
| rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds |
| are just crossing swords, pell-mell they'll go lunging presently. Danish |
| Sailor Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well |
| done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more |
| .. <p 173 > |
| afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with |
| storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes! 4th Nantucket Sailor He has |
| his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a |
| squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol --fire your ship |
| right into it! English Sailor Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove! |
| We are the lads to hunt him up his whale! All Aye! aye! Old Manx Sailor |
| How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when |
| shifted to any other soil, and here there's none but the crew's cursed clay. |
| Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap |
| ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birth-mark; look |
| yonder, boys, there's another in the sky --lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch |
| black. Daggoo What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm |
| quarried out of it! Spanish Sailor ( Aside.) He wants to bully, ah! --the |
| old grudge makes me touchy. ( Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the |
| undeniable dark side of mankind --devilish dark at that. No offence. Daggoo |
| ( grimly) None. St. Jago's Sailor That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that |
| can't be, or else in his one case our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat |
| long in working. 5th Nantucket Sailor What's that I saw--lightning? Yes. |
| .. <p 174 > |
| Spanish Sailor No; Daggoo showing his teeth. Daggoo ( springing) Swallow |
| thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver! Spanish Sailor ( meeting him) |
| Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit! All A row! a row! a row! |
| Tashtego ( with a whiff) A row a'low, and a row aloft --Gods and men --both |
| brawlers! Humph! Belfast Sailor A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, |
| a row! Plunge in with ye! English Sailor Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's |
| knife! A ring, a ring! Old Manx Sailor Ready formed. There! the ringed |
| horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why |
| then, God, mad'st thou the ring? Mate's Voice from the Quarter Deck Hands by |
| the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails! All The |
| squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! ( They scatter.) Pip ( shrinking |
| |
| under the windlass) Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there |
| goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal |
| yard! It's worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year; |
| Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and |
| here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em; they're on the road to heaven. Hold on |
| hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet --they are |
| your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! |
| .. <p 175 > |
| shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale |
| --shirr! shirr! --but spoken of once! and only this evening -- it makes me |
| jingle all over like my tambourine --that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in |
| to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, |
| have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that |
| have no bowels to feel fear! |
| .. <p 175 > |
| .. < chapter xli 9 MOBY DICK > |
| |
| I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts |
| had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and |
| stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the |
| dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's |
| quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that |
| murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of |
| violence and revenge. For some time past, though at intervals only, the |
| unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly |
| frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his |
| existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while |
| the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was |
| small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the |
| disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, |
| many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so |
| as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter |
| a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each |
| separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all |
| these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed |
| .. <p 176 > |
| the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special |
| individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, |
| that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or |
| on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and |
| malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had |
| completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I |
| say, that the whale in question must have been no other than moby Dick. Yet |
| as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not |
| unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster |
| attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave |
| battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content |
| to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of |
| the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause. In that way, |
| mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been |
| popularly regarded. And as for those who, previously hearing of the White |
| Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had |
| every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for |
| any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in |
| these assaults --not restricted to sprained wrists and ancles, broken limbs, |
| or devouring amputations --but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those |
| repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon |
| Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave |
| hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come. Nor did |
| wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the |
| true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors |
| naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events, --as the |
| smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than |
| in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate |
| reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this |
| matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in |
| the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the |
| .. <p 177 > |
| rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body |
| unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; |
| but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into |
| contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face |
| they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to |
| them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand |
| miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled |
| hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such |
| latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman |
| is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a |
| mighty birth. No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere |
| transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale |
| did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and |
| half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually |
| invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly |
| appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few |
| who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those |
| hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw. But there were still |
| other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even at the present |
| day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished |
| from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen |
| |
| as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and |
| courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would |
| perhaps --either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, |
| decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of |
| whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the |
| American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but |
| whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster |
| primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will |
| hearken with a childish fire-side interest and awe, to the wild, strange |
| tales of |
| .. <p 178 > |
| Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm |
| Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which |
| stem him. And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former |
| legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists |
| --Olassen and Povelson --declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a |
| consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly |
| ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so |
| late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar impressions effaced. |
| For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the |
| Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are struck with the most lively |
| terrors, and often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves |
| against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death. And |
| however the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as |
| these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of |
| Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their |
| vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters. So that overawed by the rumors |
| and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference |
| to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was |
| oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the |
| perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although |
| other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at |
| such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt |
| it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. on this head, there |
| |
| are some remarkable documents that may be consulted. Nevertheless, some there |
| were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby |
| Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly |
| and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and |
| without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee |
| from the battle if offered. One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at |
| last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the |
| superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was |
| .. <p 179 > |
| ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at |
| one and the same instant of time. Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, |
| was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious |
| probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet |
| been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the |
| Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to |
| his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and |
| contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic |
| modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with |
| such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points. It is a thing well |
| known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed |
| upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been |
| captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs |
| of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in |
| some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between |
| the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, |
| it has been believed by some whalemen, that the nor' west passage, so long a |
| problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real |
| living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the |
| inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a |
| lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still |
| more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters |
| were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); |
| these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the |
| whaleman. Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and |
| knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped |
| alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go |
| still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, |
| but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves |
| of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; |
| |
| or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick |
| .. <p 180 > |
| blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in |
| unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once |
| more be seen. But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was |
| enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to |
| strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his |
| uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as |
| was elsewhere thrown out --a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a |
| high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens |
| whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at |
| a long distance, to those who knew him. The rest of his body was so streaked, |
| and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had |
| |
| gained his distinctive appellation of the white Whale; a name, indeed, |
| literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon |
| through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all |
| spangled with golden gleamings. Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his |
| remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the |
| whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, |
| according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his |
| assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than |
| perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with |
| every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn |
| around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to |
| splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship. Already several |
| fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however |
| little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most |
| instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, |
| that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as |
| having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent. Judge, then, to what pitches |
| of inflamed, distracted fury the |
| .. <p 181 > |
| minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of |
| chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the |
| white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating |
| sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. His three boats stove |
| around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, |
| seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an |
| Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach |
| the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, |
| that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had |
| reaped away ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned |
| Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming |
| malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost |
| fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, |
| all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to |
| identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and |
| spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac |
| incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in |
| them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That |
| intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion |
| even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient |
| Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down |
| and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the |
| abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that |
| most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth |
| with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the |
| subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly |
| personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the |
| whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole |
| race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst |
| his hot heart's shell upon it. |
| .. <p 182 > |
| It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the |
| precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, |
| knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal |
| animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but |
| felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this |
| collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, |
| ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid |
| winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body |
| and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. |
| That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the |
| final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at |
| intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed |
| of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was |
| moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him |
| fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, |
| he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more |
| sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across |
| the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed |
| left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark |
| den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, |
| collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and |
| his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in |
| his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most |
| feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured |
| into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but |
| deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman |
| flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his |
| narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left |
| behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect |
| had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If |
| such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy |
| .. <p 183 > |
| stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred |
| cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, |
| Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever |
| he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. This is much; |
| yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to |
| popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from |
| within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand |
| --however grand and wonderful, now quit it; --and take your way, ye nobler, |
| sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the |
| fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful |
| essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and |
| throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that |
| captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen |
| brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder |
| souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget |
| ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old |
| State-secret come. Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: |
| all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to |
| kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did |
| now long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his |
| dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will |
| determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that |
| when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him |
| otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the |
| terrible casualty which had overtaken him. The report of his undeniable |
| delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so |
| too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of |
| sailing in the pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is |
| it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling |
| voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that |
| prudent isle were inclined to |
| .. <p 184 > |
| harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better |
| qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the |
| bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, |
| unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, |
| would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most |
| appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally |
| incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to |
| cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, |
| certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and |
| keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the |
| one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of |
| his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him |
| then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship |
| from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit |
| to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, |
| immitigable, and supernatural revenge. Here, then, was this grey-headed, |
| ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the |
| head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and |
| cannibals --morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue |
| or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference |
| and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a |
| crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal |
| fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so |
| aboundingly responded to the old man's ire --by what evil magic their souls |
| were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale |
| as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be --what the |
| White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in |
| some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of |
| the seas of life, --all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael |
| can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell |
| whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who |
| does not feel the |
| .. <p 185 > |
| irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? |
| For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but |
| while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute |
| but the deadliest ill. |
| .. <p 185 > |
| .. < chapter xlii 6 THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE > |
| |
| What the white whale was to |
| Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. |
| Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could |
| not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another |
| thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by |
| its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and |
| well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a |
| comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things |
| appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some |
| dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be |
| naught. Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances |
| beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, |
| japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised |
| a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings |
| of Pegu placing the title Lord of the White Elephants above all their other |
| magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling |
| the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag |
| bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian |
| Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color |
| the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the |
| human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky |
| tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been |
| .. <p 186 > |
| even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked |
| a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this |
| same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things --the innocence of |
| brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving |
| of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many |
| climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, |
| and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white |
| steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it |
| has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian |
| fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; |
| |
| and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a |
| snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice |
| of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, |
| that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send |
| to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though |
| directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name |
| of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the |
| cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is |
| specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in |
| the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the |
| four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, |
| and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these |
| accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, |
| |
| there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which |
| strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. |
| |
| This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when |
| divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible |
| in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white |
| bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, |
| flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly |
| whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even |
| .. <p 187 > |
| more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that |
| not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the |
| white-shrouded bear or shark. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those |
| clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom |
| sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's |
| great, unflattering laureate, Nature. |
| .. <p 188 > |
| Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White |
| Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, |
| small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in |
| his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of |
| wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky |
| Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it |
| like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The |
| flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him |
| with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have |
| furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, |
| western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the |
| glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, |
| bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides |
| and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over |
| the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing |
| |
| all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with |
| warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he |
| presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of |
| trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on |
| legendary record of |
| .. <p 189 > |
| this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so |
| clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, |
| though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless |
| terror. But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that |
| accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross. |
| |
| What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the |
| eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that |
| whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The |
| Albino is as well made as other men --has no substantive deformity --and yet |
| this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous |
| than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so? Nor, in quite other |
| aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious |
| agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the |
| terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas |
| has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has |
| the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it |
| heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy |
| symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their |
| bailiff in the market-place! Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary |
| experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this |
| hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of |
| the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; |
| as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the |
| other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, |
| |
| we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even |
| in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our |
| phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog --Yea, while these terrors |
| seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the |
| evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. Therefore, in his other moods, |
| symbolize whatever grand or |
| .. <p 190 > |
| gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest |
| idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul. But |
| though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for |
| it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of |
| some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness --though for the time |
| either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated |
| to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us |
| the same sorcery, however modified; --can we thus hope to light upon some |
| chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek? Let us try. But in a |
| matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no |
| man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least |
| of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by |
| most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and |
| therefore may not be able to recall them now. Why to the man of untutored |
| ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar |
| character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the |
| fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, |
| downcast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated |
| Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a |
| White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? Or what |
| is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which |
| will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so |
| much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those |
| other storied structures, its neighbors --the Byward Tower, or even the |
| Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, |
| whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at |
| the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is |
| full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all |
| latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a |
| spectralness |
| .. <p 191 > |
| over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of |
| long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet |
| sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely |
| addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central |
| Europe, does the tall pale man of the Hartz forests, whose changeless |
| pallor unrestingly glides through the green of the groves --why is this phantom |
| more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg? Nor is it, |
| altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the |
| stampedoes of her frantic seas: nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never |
| rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched |
| cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); |
| and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a |
| tossed pack of cards; --it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, |
| the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white |
| veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as |
| Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the |
| cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the |
| rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions. I know that, to |
| the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be |
| the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor |
| to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose |
| awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, |
| especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or |
| universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively |
| elucidated by the following examples. First: The mariner, when drawing nigh |
| the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts |
| to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his |
| faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from |
| his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness |
| --as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming |
| round him, then he feels |
| .. <p 192 > |
| a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is |
| horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off |
| soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water |
| is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, Sir, it was |
| not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous |
| whiteness that so stirred me? Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the |
| continual sight of the snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, |
| perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at |
| such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would |
| be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the |
| backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an |
| unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to |
| break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the |
| scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of |
| legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half |
| shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, |
| views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice |
| monuments and splintered crosses. But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead |
| chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou |
| surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael. Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled |
| in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey --why |
| is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe |
| behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal |
| muskiness --why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in |
| phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild |
| creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells |
| |
| cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former |
| perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of |
| distant oregon? no: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the |
| instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though |
| .. <p 193 > |
| thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the |
| rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the |
| prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust. Thus, then, |
| the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned |
| frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of |
| prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to |
| the frightened colt! Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of |
| which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, |
| somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible |
| world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. But |
| not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it |
| appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous |
| --why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual |
| things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it |
| |
| is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it |
| that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and |
| immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought |
| of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, |
| that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of |
| color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these |
| reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide |
| landscape of snows --a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? |
| And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all |
| other earthly hues --every stately or lovely emblazoning --the sweet tinges of |
| sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the |
| butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not |
| actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all |
| deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover |
| nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and |
| consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the |
| great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and |
| if |
| .. <p 194 > |
| operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and |
| roses, with its own blank tinge --pondering all this, the palsied universe lies |
| before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear |
| colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes |
| himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect |
| around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder |
| ye then at the fiery hunt? |
| .. <p 187n. > |
| With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would |
| fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, |
| separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that |
| brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only |
| arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the |
| creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and |
| hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the |
| Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all |
| this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have |
| that intensified terror. As for the white shark, the white gliding |
| ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, |
| strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This |
| peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon |
| that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with Requiem eternam |
| (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any |
| other funereal music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of |
| death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French |
| call him Requin. I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a |
| |
| prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon |
| watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the |
| |
| main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and |
| with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast |
| archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and |
| throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some |
| king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange |
| eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham |
| before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings |
| so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable |
| warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy |
| of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me |
| |
| then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. |
| |
| A goney, he replied. Goney! I never had heard that name before; is it |
| conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! |
| never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for |
| albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had |
| .. <p 188n. > |
| aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw |
| that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew |
| the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly |
| burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet. I |
| assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly |
| lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a |
| solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have |
| frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic |
| fowl. But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will |
| |
| tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At |
| |
| last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally |
| round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting it escape. |
| |
| But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in |
| Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and |
| adoring cherubim! |
| .. <p 194 > |
| .. < chapter xliii 10 HARK > |
| |
| ! Hist! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco? |
| It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a |
| cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the |
| scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to |
| fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts |
| of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. |
| From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by |
| the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly |
| advancing keel. It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the |
| cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a |
| Cholo, the words above. Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco? Take the |
| bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean? There it is again --under the |
| hatches --don't you hear it --a cough--it sounded like a cough. Cough be |
| damned! Pass along that return bucket. There again --there it is! --it sounds |
| like two or three sleepers turning over, now! Caramba! have done, |
| shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning |
| over inside of ye --nothing else. Look to the bucket! |
| .. <p 195 > |
| |
| Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears. Aye, you are the chap, ain't |
| ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at |
| sea from Nantucket; you're the chap. Grin away; we'll see what turns up. |
| Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet |
| been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I |
| heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that |
| sort in the wind. Tish! the bucket! |
| .. <p 195 > |
| .. < chapter xliv 12 THE CHART > |
| |
| Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his |
| cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild |
| ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a |
| locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish |
| sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating |
| himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines |
| and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace |
| additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would |
| refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons |
| and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales |
| had been captured or seen. While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp |
| suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the |
| ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his |
| wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out |
| lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also |
| tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead. But |
| it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of |
| .. <p 196 > |
| his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were |
| brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others |
| were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab |
| was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain |
| accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul. Now, to any one not |
| fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly |
| hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of |
| this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides |
| and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's |
| food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting |
| him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost |
| approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or |
| that ground in search of his prey. So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning |
| the periodicalness of the sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many |
| hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the |
| world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully |
| collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond |
| in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. |
| On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts |
| of the sperm whale. Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to |
| |
| another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct -- say, rather, |
| secret intelligence from the Deity --mostly swim in |
| .. <p 197 > |
| |
| veins, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line |
| with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any |
| chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, |
| the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and |
| though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, |
| straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to |
| swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein |
| is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from |
| the whale-ship's mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic |
| zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along |
| that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for. And |
| hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate |
| feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the |
| widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place |
| and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of |
| a meeting. There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle |
| his delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, |
| perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for |
| particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which |
| hunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to |
| be identically the same with those that were found there the preceding |
| season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where the |
| contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark, only within a |
| less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged |
| sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for |
| example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or |
| Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the |
| pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, |
| |
| she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding |
| grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only |
| his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of |
| prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing |
| .. <p 198 > |
| his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to |
| whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set |
| time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become |
| probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing |
| to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one |
| technical phrase --the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several |
| consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in |
| those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a |
| predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that |
| most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the |
| waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the |
| monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the |
| cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his |
| brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest |
| all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering |
| it might be to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so |
| tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest. Now, |
| the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the |
| Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to |
| make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down |
| sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise |
| there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the |
| premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected |
| by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval |
| of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval |
| which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a |
| miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in |
| seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his |
| wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or |
| in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, |
| Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, might |
| blow Moby Dick into |
| .. <p 199 > |
| the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake. But |
| granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a |
| mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even |
| if encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his |
| hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of |
| Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his |
| snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the |
| whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till |
| long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries --tallied him, |
| and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost |
| sheep's ear! And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till |
| a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of |
| the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of |
| torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful |
| desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails |
| in his palms. often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and |
| intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense |
| thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and |
| whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of |
| his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the |
| case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a |
| chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, |
| |
| and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in |
| himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and |
| with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping |
| from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the |
| unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, |
| were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy |
| Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this |
| Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused |
| .. <p 200 > |
| him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living |
| principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from |
| the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer |
| vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity |
| of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. |
| But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it |
| must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies |
| to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of |
| will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, |
| independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the |
| common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the |
| unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared |
| out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the |
| time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living |
| light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness |
| in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in |
| thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture |
| feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. |
| .. <p 196n. > |
| Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official |
| circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, |
| Washington, April 16th, |
| . By that circular, it appears that precisely |
| such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented in |
| |
| the circular. This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees |
| of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of |
| which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally |
| through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number of |
| days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two |
| others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been |
| seen. |
| .. <p 200 > |
| .. < chapter xlv 24 THE AFFIDAVIT > |
| |
| So far as what there may be of a |
| narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very |
| interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the |
| foregoing chapter, in its earliest part, is as important a one as will be |
| found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still |
| further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately |
| understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound |
| ignorance of the entire subject may |
| .. <p 201 > |
| induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this |
| affair. I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall |
| be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, |
| practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, |
| I take it --the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself. First: I |
| have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a |
| harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one |
| instance of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain; |
| when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken |
| from the body. In the instance where three years intervened between the |
| flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more |
| than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a |
| trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery |
| party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period |
| of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous |
| |
| miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart |
| of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on |
| its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with |
| its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this |
| whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I, |
| myself, have known three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I |
| saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with |
| the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the |
| three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first |
| and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge |
| mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous. |
| |
| I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are |
| three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard |
| of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no |
| good ground to impeach. secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale |
| Fishery, |
| .. <p 202 > |
| however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several |
| memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been |
| at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became |
| thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily |
| peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in |
| that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his |
| peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable |
| oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of the |
| fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as |
| there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were |
| content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be |
| discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more |
| intimate acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that happen to know an |
| irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the |
| street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a |
| summary thump for their presumption. But not only did each of these famous |
| whales enjoy great individual celebrity --nay, you may call it an ocean-wide |
| renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle |
| stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, |
| and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. |
| Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, |
| who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was |
| oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! |
| thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the |
| Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet |
| they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? |
| |
| Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old |
| tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are |
| four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or |
| Sylla to the classic scholar. But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don |
| Miguel, after at various times creating great havoc among the boats of |
| different |
| .. <p 203 > |
| vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and |
| killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that |
| express object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett |
| Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that notorious |
| murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip. I |
| do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of |
| one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form |
| establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the |
| White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those |
| disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. |
| |
| So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable |
| wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, |
| historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a |
| monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and |
| intolerable allegory. First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas |
| of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a |
| fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they |
| recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters |
| and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, |
| however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose that |
| that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the whale-line off |
| the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by |
| the sounding leviathan --do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will |
| appear in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast? |
| No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In |
| fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect |
| from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made |
| to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one |
| of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three |
| that had each lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economical with your |
| lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's |
| blood was spilled for it. |
| .. <p 204 > |
| Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an |
| enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when |
| narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness, they |
| have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare |
| upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote |
| the history of the plagues of Egypt. But fortunately the special point I here |
| seek can be established upon testimony entirely independent of my own. That |
| point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, |
| knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, |
| utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has |
| done it. First: In the year |
| |
| the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of |
| Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, |
| lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, |
| several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale |
| escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon |
| the ship. dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that |
| in less than ten minutes she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving |
| plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of the |
| crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain |
| Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the |
| gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second |
| time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has |
| never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of |
| Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the |
| time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have |
| conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the |
| catastrophe. |
| .. <p 205 > |
| Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year |
| |
| totally |
| lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of |
| this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale |
| hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it. Thirdly: Some |
| eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J--- then commanding an American |
| sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of |
| whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich |
| Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be |
| sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional |
| gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could |
| so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a |
| thimbleful. Very good; but there is more coming. Some weeks after, the |
| commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was |
| stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments' |
| confidential business with him. that business consisted in fetching the |
| Commodore's craft |
| .. <p 206 > |
| such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest |
| port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the |
| Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus |
| converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will |
| |
| stand no nonsense. I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little |
| |
| circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. |
| Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral |
| Krusenstern's famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present |
| century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter. By the |
| thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were out in |
| the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine, |
| but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For |
| some days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a |
| brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon large whale, the body |
| of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the |
| water, but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the |
| ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was |
| impossible to prevent its striking against him. We were thus placed in the |
| most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, |
| raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and |
| the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon |
| the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we |
| saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain |
| D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel |
| had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had |
| escaped entirely uninjured. now, the captain d'wolf here alluded to as |
| commanding the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life |
| of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of |
| Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I have |
| particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He |
| substantiates every word. |
| .. <p 207 > |
| The ship, however, was by no means a large one: a Russian craft built on the |
| Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in |
| which he sailed from home. In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned |
| adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders --the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one |
| of ancient Dampier's old chums --I found a little matter set down so like that |
| just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a |
| corroborative example, if such be needed. Lionel, it seems, was on his way |
| to John Ferdinando, as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes. In our way |
| thither, he says, about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about |
| one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a |
| terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could |
| hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare |
| for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it |
| |
| for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a |
| little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. The |
| suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of |
| the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his |
| head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin! Lionel then goes on to impute |
| the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by |
| stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do |
| great mischief along the spanish land. but i should not much wonder if, in the |
| darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by |
| an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath. I might proceed |
| with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great |
| power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance, he |
| has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships, |
| but to pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled at |
| him from its decks. The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that |
| head; and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples |
| where the lines attached to |
| .. <p 208 > |
| a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and |
| secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a |
| horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the |
| sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so |
| often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to |
| his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his |
| character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and |
| retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I must |
| be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and |
| most significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is |
| the most marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the |
| present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions |
| of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon --Verily |
| there is nothing new under the sun. In the sixth Christian century lived |
| Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when |
| Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the |
| history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best |
| authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy and |
| unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all |
| affecting the matter presently to be mentioned. Now, in this history of his, |
| Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, |
| a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of |
| Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a |
| period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial history |
| cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what |
| precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed |
| ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am |
| strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a |
| long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the |
| Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain |
| that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present |
| constitution of |
| .. <p 209 > |
| things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further |
| investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have |
| been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the |
| Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a |
| Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, |
| as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm |
| whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the |
| Propontis. In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar |
| substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I |
| have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale --squid or |
| cuttle-fish --lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but |
| by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its surface. If, |
| then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit, |
| |
| you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning, |
| Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman |
| Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale. |
| .. <p 204n. > |
| The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: Every fact seemed to |
| warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his |
| operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval |
| between them, both of which, according to their direction, were |
| calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby |
| .. <p 205n. > |
| combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the |
| exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most horrible, |
| and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal |
| which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his |
| companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings. Again: At all |
| events, the whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own |
| eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided, |
| calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I |
| cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my |
| opinion. Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during |
| a black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any |
| hospitable shore. The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the |
| fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden |
| |
| rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation, |
| seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought; the dismal looking wreck, |
| and the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my |
| reflections, until day again made its appearance. In another place --p. 45, |
| --he speaks of the mysterious and mortal attack of the animal. |
| .. <p 209 > |
| .. < chapter xlvi 22 SURMISES > |
| |
| Though, consumed with the hot fire of his |
| purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate |
| capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal |
| interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by |
| nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, |
| altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least |
| if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more |
| influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even |
| considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards |
| .. <p 210 > |
| the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all |
| sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he |
| multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to |
| be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed |
| exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though not |
| so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by |
| no means incapable of swaying him. To accomplish his object Ahab must use |
| tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to |
| get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency |
| in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the |
| complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves |
| intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but |
| stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced |
| will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; |
| still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his |
| captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, |
| or even frustrate it. it might be that a long interval would elapse ere the |
| White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to |
| fall into open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership, unless |
| some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon |
| him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was |
| noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and |
| shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way |
| be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested |
| it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the |
| obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted |
| meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night |
| watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than |
| Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the |
| announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less |
| capricious and unreliable --they live in the varying outer weather, and they |
| inhale its fickleness --and when retained |
| .. <p 211 > |
| for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life |
| and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary |
| interests and employment should intervene and hold them healthily suspended |
| for the final dash. Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of |
| strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are |
| evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, |
| thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the |
| hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds |
| a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it |
| they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, |
| daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old |
| times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for |
| their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and |
| gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to |
| their one final and romantic object --that final and romantic object, too many |
| would have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, |
| of all hopes of cash --aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months |
| go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same |
| quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon |
| cashier Ahab. Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more |
| related to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps |
| somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod's |
| voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly |
| laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect |
| impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end |
| competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently |
| wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of |
| usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression |
| gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself. |
| |
| That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart |
| and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating |
| .. <p 212 > |
| attention to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his |
| crew to be subjected to. For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too |
| analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still |
| in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's |
| voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself |
| to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of his |
| profession. be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the |
| three mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit |
| reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward. |
| .. <p 212 > |
| .. < chapter xlvii 14 THE MAT-MAKER > |
| |
| It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; |
| the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over |
| into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving |
| what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still |
| and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an |
| incantation of revery lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed |
| resolved into his own invisible self. I was the attendant or page of |
| Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the |
| filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own |
| hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid |
| his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the |
| water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a |
| dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only |
| broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this |
| |
| were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and |
| weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed |
| .. <p 213 > |
| threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging |
| vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise |
| interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and |
| here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own |
| destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, |
| indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or |
| strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the |
| concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the |
| completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes |
| and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance |
| --aye, chance, free will, and necessity --no wise incompatible --all |
| interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be |
| swerved from its ultimate course --its every alternating vibration, indeed, |
| only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given |
| threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of |
| necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus |
| prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last |
| featuring blow at events. Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started |
| at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the |
| ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds |
| whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that |
| mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand |
| stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his |
| cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all |
| over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs perched as high in the |
| air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived |
| such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian's. As he stood hovering |
| over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the |
| horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the |
| shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming. There she |
| blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows! |
| .. <p 214 > |
| |
| Where-away? On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them! |
| Instantly all was commotion. The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the |
| same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish |
| this fish from other tribes of his genus. There go flukes! was now the cry |
| from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared. Quick, steward! cried Ahab. |
| |
| Time! time! Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported |
| the exact minute to Ahab. The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she |
| went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone |
| down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in |
| advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm |
| Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while |
| concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the |
| opposite quarter --this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for |
| there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any |
| way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected |
| for shipkeepers -- that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time |
| relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and |
| mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes |
| were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the |
| sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks |
| their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was |
| expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war's men |
| about to throw themselves on board an enemy's ship. But at this critical |
| instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. |
| With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky |
| phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air. |
| .. <p 215 > |
| .. < chapter xlviii 2 THE FIRST LOWERING > |
| |
| The phantoms, for so they then |
| seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless |
| celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung |
| there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though |
| technically called the captain's, on account of its hanging from the |
| starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, |
| with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled |
| Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black |
| trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning his ebonness was a |
| glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round |
| and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure |
| were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal |
| natives of the Manillas; --a race notorious for a certain diabolism of |
| subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and |
| secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose |
| counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere. While yet the wondering ship's |
| company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to the |
| white-turbaned old man at their head, All ready there, Fedallah? Ready, |
| was the half-hissed reply. Lower away then; d'ye hear? shouting across the |
| deck. Lower away there, I say. Such was the thunder of his voice, that |
| spite of their amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled |
| round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; |
| while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, |
| the sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed |
| boats below. Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when |
| .. <p 216 > |
| a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, |
| and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, |
| loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as |
| to cover a large expanse of water. but with all their eyes again riveted upon |
| the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not |
| the command. Captain Ahab?-- said Starbuck. Spread yourselves, cried Ahab; |
| |
| give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward! Aye, |
| aye, sir, cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great steering |
| oar. Lay back! addressing his crew. There! --there! --there again! There |
| she blows right ahead, boys! -- lay back! Never heed yonder yellow boys, |
| Archy. Oh, I don't mind 'em, sir, said Archy; I knew it all before now. |
| Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What say |
| ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask. Pull, pull, my fine |
| hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones, drawingly and |
| soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of |
| uneasiness. Why don't you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you |
| stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands |
| come to help us --never mind from where --the more the merrier. Pull, then, do |
| pull; never mind the brimstone --devils are good fellows enough. So, so; |
| there you are now; that's the stroke for a thousand pounds; that's the |
| stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! |
| Three cheers, men --all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry --don't |
| |
| be in a hurry. Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, |
| you dogs! So, so, so, then; --softly, softly! That's it -- that's it! long |
| and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin |
| rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, |
| will ye? pull, can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and |
| ginger-cakes don't ye pull? --pull and break something! pull, and start your |
| .. <p 217 > |
| eyes out! Here! whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; every |
| mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. |
| |
| That's it --that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my |
| steel-bits. Start her --start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, |
| marling-spikes! Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because |
| |
| he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially |
| in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this |
| specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with |
| his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity. |
| He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely |
| compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a |
| spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without |
| pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. |
| Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly |
| managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped --open-mouthed at times --that |
| the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, |
| acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort |
| of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put |
| all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them. In obedience to a |
| sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across Stubb's bow; and |
| when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb |
| hailed the mate. Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, |
| sir, if ye please! Halloa! returned Starbuck, turning round not a single |
| inch as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face |
| set like a flint from Stubb's. What think ye of those yellow boys, sir! |
| |
| Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong, boys! ) |
| |
| in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: A sad business, |
| Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, |
| all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my |
| men, spring!) |
| .. <p 218 > |
| There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for. |
| (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and |
| profit hand in hand! Aye, aye, I thought as much, soliloquized Stubb, |
| when the boats diverged, as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so. Aye, |
| and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long |
| suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the bottom of |
| it. Well, well, so be it! Can't be helped! All right! Give way, men! It |
| ain't the White Whale to-day! Give way! Now the advent of these outlandish |
| strangers at such a critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the |
| deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in |
| |
| some of the ship's company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time |
| previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in |
| some small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge |
| of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way of |
| accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from |
| superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all |
| manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the matter from |
| the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen |
| creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the |
| enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah. Meantime, Ahab, out of |
| hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to windward, was still |
| ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew |
| was pulling him. those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and |
| whale-bone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of |
| strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a |
| horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was |
| seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and |
| displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, |
| clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while |
| at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one |
| .. <p 219 > |
| arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to |
| counterbalance any tendency to trip: Ahab was seen steadily managing his |
| steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. |
| |
| All at once the out-stretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained |
| fixed, while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and |
| crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the rear |
| paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the |
| blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement, though |
| from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it. Every man look out along his |
| oars! cried Starbuck. Thou, Queequeg, stand up! Nimbly springing up on |
| the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with |
| intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had last been |
| descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also |
| triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen |
| coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a |
| craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea. Not very far |
| distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander |
| recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post |
| rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern |
| platform. it is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its top is not |
| more spacious than the palm of a man's hand, and standing upon such a base |
| as that, Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to |
| all but her trucks. But little King-Post was small and short, and at the |
| same time little King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that |
| this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post. I |
| can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that. |
| Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, |
| swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders |
| for a pedestal. |
| .. <p 220 > |
| |
| Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount? That I will, and thank ye |
| very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller. Whereupon |
| planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic |
| negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask's foot, and then |
| putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he |
| himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and |
| dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one |
| lifted arm furnishing him with a breast-band to lean against and steady |
| himself by. At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what |
| wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect |
| posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse |
| and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon |
| the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little |
| Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining |
| himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the |
| noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On |
| his broad back, flaxen-haired flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked |
| nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious |
| little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added |
| heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen |
| Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did |
| not alter her tides and her seasons for that. Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, |
| betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might have made one of |
| their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that |
| were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to |
| solace the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his |
| hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and |
| rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his |
| match across the rough sand-paper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, |
| |
| whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly |
| dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, |
| .. <p 221 > |
| crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, Down, down all, and give way! --there |
| they are! To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have |
| been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white |
| water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly |
| blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows. |
| The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over |
| intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, |
| |
| and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming. |
| Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, |
| seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders. All four |
| boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air. |
| But it bade far to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of |
| interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills. Pull, pull, |
| my good boys, said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest |
| concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes |
| darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two |
| unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor |
| did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at |
| intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with |
| command, now soft with entreaty. How different the loud little King-Post. |
| |
| Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! |
| Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll |
| sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and |
| children, boys. Lay me on --lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, |
| staring mad: See! see that white water! And so shouting, he pulled his hat |
| from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it |
| |
| far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's |
| stern like a crazed colt from the prairie. Look at that chap now, |
| philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe, |
| mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed after |
| -- He's got fits, that |
| .. <p 222 > |
| Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits --that's the very word -- pitch fits |
| into 'em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know; |
| --merry's the word. Pull, babes --pull, sucklings -- pull, all. But what the |
| devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only |
| pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite |
| your knives in two -- that's all. Take it easy --why don't ye take it easy, I |
| say, and burst all your livers and lungs! But what it was that inscrutable |
| Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his --these were words best omitted |
| here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the |
| infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with |
| tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after |
| his prey. Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions |
| of Flask to that whale, as he called the fictitious monster which he |
| declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its tail --these |
| allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause |
| some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the shoulder. But |
| this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram |
| a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that they must have no organs |
| but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments. It was a sight |
| full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the |
| surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like |
| gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the |
| boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper |
| waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound |
| dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to |
| gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its |
| other side; --all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and |
| the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory |
| Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen |
| after her screaming brood; --all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, |
| marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; |
| not the dead man's ghost encountering |
| .. <p 223 > |
| the first unknown phantom in the other world; --neither of these can feel |
| stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time |
| finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm |
| whale. The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and |
| more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung |
| upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to |
| right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats were |
| pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to |
| leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed |
| along; the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee oars |
| could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the |
| row-locks. Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; |
| neither ship nor boat to be seen. Give way, men, whispered Starbuck, drawing |
| still further aft the sheet of his sail; there is time to kill a fish yet |
| before the squall comes. There's white water again! --close to! Spring! |
| Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the |
| other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a |
| lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: Stand up! and Queequeg, |
| harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet. Though not one of the oarsmen was then |
| facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes |
| on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew |
| that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing |
| sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was |
| still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like |
| the erected crests of enraged serpents. That's his hump. There, there, |
| give it to him! whispered Starbuck. A short rushing sound leaped out of the |
| boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion |
| came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on |
| a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a |
| .. <p 224 > |
| gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an |
| earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were |
| tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, |
| whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by |
| the iron, escaped. Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. |
| Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the |
| gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, |
| |
| the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes |
| the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the |
| ocean. The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers |
| together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a |
| white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal |
| in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to |
| the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in |
| that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the |
| shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade |
| all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as propellers, |
| performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the |
| water-proof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the |
| lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg |
| as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up |
| that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, |
| he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope |
| in the midst of despair. Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, |
| despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The |
| mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom |
| of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his |
| ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by |
| the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly |
| parted by |
| .. <p 225 > |
| a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at |
| last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not |
| much more than its length. Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as |
| for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at |
| the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was |
| seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were |
| dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on |
| board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from |
| their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us up, |
| but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our |
| perishing, --an oar or a lance pole. |
| .. <p 225 > |
| .. < chapter xlix 15 THE HYENA > |
| |
| There are certain queer times and occasions |
| in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe |
| |
| for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, |
| and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. |
| However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts |
| down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things |
| visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent |
| digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties |
| and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all |
| these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly |
| punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That |
| odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time |
| of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so |
| that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now |
| seems but a part of the general |
| .. <p 226 > |
| joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy |
| sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole |
| voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object. Queequeg, said |
| I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still |
| shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; Queequeg, my fine |
| friend, does this sort of thing often happen? Without much emotion, though |
| soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did |
| often happen. Mr. Stubb, said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up |
| in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; Mr. Stubb, |
| I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief |
| mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, |
| that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the |
| height of a whaleman's discretion? Certain. I've lowered for whales from a |
| leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn. Mr. Flask, said I, turning to |
| little King-Post, who was standing close by; you are experienced in these |
| things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in |
| this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself |
| back-foremost into death's jaws? Can't you twist that smaller? said Flask. |
| |
| Yes, that's the law. I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a |
| whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, |
| mind that! here then, from three impartial witnesses, i had a deliberate |
| statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and |
| capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters |
| of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the |
| superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life |
| into the hands of him who steered the boat --oftentimes a fellow who at that |
| very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft |
| with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to |
| our own particular boat was chiefly to be |
| .. <p 227 > |
| imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, |
| |
| and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great |
| heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly |
| prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was |
| implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I |
| thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. |
| |
| Queequeg, said I, come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and |
| legatee. It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at |
| their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more |
| fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I |
| had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present |
| occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. |
| Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that |
| Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many |
| months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial |
| were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, |
| like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug |
| family vault. now then, thought i, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of |
| my frock, here goes a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the |
| devil fetch the hindmost. |
| .. <p 227 > |
| .. < chapter L 27 AHAB'S BOAT AND CREW. FEDALLAH > |
| |
| Who would have thought |
| it, Flask! cried Stubb; if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a |
| boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he's a |
| wonderful old man! I don't think it so strange, after all, on that |
| account, said |
| .. <p 228 > |
| Flask. If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. |
| That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, |
| you know. I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel. |
| Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the |
| paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for |
| a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. |
| So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that |
| invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight. |
| But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with |
| two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that |
| the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; |
| that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these |
| circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the |
| hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly |
| thought not. Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think |
| little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes |
| of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his |
| orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to |
| him as a regular headsman in the hunt --above all for Captain Ahab to be |
| supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew that |
| such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. |
| Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way |
| hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures |
| of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the |
| sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little |
| while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting |
| the whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then |
| found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own hands |
| |
| for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously |
| cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the |
| .. <p 229 > |
| line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was |
| observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of |
| sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the |
| pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in |
| exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, |
| the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee against in |
| darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up |
| in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in |
| the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and |
| straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much |
| interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this |
| particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the |
| ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to |
| hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means |
| involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that |
| boat. now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned |
| away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such |
| unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks |
| and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the |
| ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing |
| about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats, canoes, |
| blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up |
| the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would |
| not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle. But be all this as |
| it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their |
| place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, |
| yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. |
| Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable |
| tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, |
| so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but |
| it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one |
| cannot sustain |
| .. <p 230 > |
| an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, |
| domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but |
| dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic |
| communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent --those |
| |
| insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern |
| days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal |
| generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, |
| and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as |
| real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to |
| what end; when though, according to genesis, the angels indeed consorted |
| with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, |
| indulged in mundane amours. |
| .. <p 230 > |
| .. < chapter li 16 THE SPIRIT-SPOUT > |
| |
| Days, weeks passed, and under easy |
| sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds; |
| that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), |
| being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an |
| unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena. It was while gliding |
| through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all |
| the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing |
| seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a |
| silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at |
| the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and |
| glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For |
| of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, |
| and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. |
| And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman |
| .. <p 231 > |
| in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what |
| emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such |
| unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, |
| after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights |
| without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly |
| voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining |
| mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the |
| rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. There she blows! Had the trump of |
| judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no |
| terror; rather pleasure. for though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so |
| impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul |
| on board instinctively desired a lowering. Walking the deck with quick, |
| side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, |
| |
| and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. |
| Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the |
| wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling |
| the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like |
| air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic |
| influences were struggling in her --one to mount direct to heaven, the other |
| to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face |
| that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were |
| warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every |
| stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old |
| |
| man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, |
| like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen |
| that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time. This |
| midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! |
| at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by |
| all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it |
| had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it |
| but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, |
| .. <p 232 > |
| or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or |
| two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be |
| advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for |
| ever alluring us on. Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and |
| in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many |
| things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore |
| that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however |
| far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one |
| self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a |
| |
| sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were |
| treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn |
| round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas. |
| These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous |
| potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all |
| its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days |
| and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that |
| all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of |
| life before our urn-like prow. But, at last, when turning to the eastward, |
| the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, |
| troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to |
| the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of |
| silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate |
| vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before. |
| Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before |
| us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every |
| morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of |
| our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they |
| deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to |
| desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And |
| heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast |
| tides were a conscience; and the great |
| .. <p 233 > |
| mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had |
| bred. Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called |
| of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended |
| us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings |
| transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on |
| everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any |
| horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of |
| feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet |
| would at times be descried. During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, |
| though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and |
| dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever |
| addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above |
| and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await |
| the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. |
| So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand |
| firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to |
| windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal |
| his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward |
| part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, |
| stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard |
| against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of |
| bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or |
| no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in |
| |
| wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the |
| demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of |
| the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still |
| wordless ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed |
| demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never could |
| Starbuck forget the old man's aspect, when one night going down into the cabin |
| to mark how the |
| .. <p 234 > |
| barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his |
| floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which |
| he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat |
| and coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides |
| and currents which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his |
| |
| tightly clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back |
| so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that |
| swung from a beam in the ceiling. Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a |
| shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose. |
| .. <p 234 > |
| .. < chapter lii 13 THE ALBATROSS > |
| |
| South-eastward from the Cape, off the |
| distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed |
| ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty |
| perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to |
| a tyro in the far ocean fisheries --a whaler at sea, and long absent from |
| home. As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the |
| skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance |
| was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her |
| rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. |
| Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded |
| look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of |
| beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years |
| of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and |
| swung over a fathomless sea; |
| |
| .. <p 235 > |
| and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in |
| the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the |
| mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking |
| fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own |
| look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below. Ship |
| ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale? But as the strange captain, leaning over |
| the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it |
| somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he |
| in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still |
| increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of |
| the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the |
| first mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a |
| moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to |
| board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking |
| advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing |
| by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound |
| home, he loudly hailed -- Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the |
| world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and |
| this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to----- |
| At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in |
| accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for |
| some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what |
| seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the |
| stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must |
| often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the |
| veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings. Swim away from me, do ye? |
| murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the |
| words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane |
| old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far |
| had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish |
| .. <p 236 > |
| her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice, -- Up helm! Keep her off |
| round the world! Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire |
| proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only |
| through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those |
| that we left behind secure, were all the time before us. Were this world an |
| endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, |
| |
| and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of |
| King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those |
| far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, |
| some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over |
| this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us |
| whelmed. |
| .. <p 234n. > |
| The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the |
| compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the |
| course of the ship. |
| .. <p 236 > |
| .. < chapter liii 17 THE GAM > |
| |
| The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on |
| board of the whaler we had spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened |
| storms. But even had this not been the case, he would not after all, |
| perhaps, have boarded her --judging by his subsequent conduct on similar |
| occasions --if so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained |
| a negative answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, |
| he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, |
| except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. |
| But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said |
| here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in |
| foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground. If two strangers |
| crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally desolate Salisbury |
| Plain in England; if |
| .. <p 237 > |
| casually encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for |
| the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a |
| moment to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and |
| resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine |
| |
| Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying each |
| other at the ends of the earth --off lone Fanning's Island, or the far away |
| King's Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such circumstances |
| these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still closer, |
| more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a |
| matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose |
| captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each |
| other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk |
| about. For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters |
| on board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date |
| a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files. |
| And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the |
| latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be |
| destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this |
| will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing each other's track on the |
| cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally long absent from home. |
| for one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some third, and |
| now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the people of the |
| |
| ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have |
| an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of |
| sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a |
| common pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils. Nor would |
| difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so long as |
| both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English. |
| Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings |
| do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too apt to be a |
| sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather |
| .. <p 238 > |
| reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody |
| but himself. Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of |
| metropolitan superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long, lean |
| Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. |
| But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it |
| would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill |
| more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a |
| harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer |
| does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few |
| foibles himself. So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the |
| sea, the whalers have most reason to be sociable --and they are so. Whereas, |
| some merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will |
| oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually |
| cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; |
| and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's |
| rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go |
| through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of |
| ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and |
| brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are |
| in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. |
| |
| And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the |
| first hail is -- How many skulls? --the same way that whalers hail-- How many |
| barrels? And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, |
| for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch |
| of each other's villanous likenesses. But look at the godly, honest, |
| unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler! What does the |
| whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She |
| has a Gam, a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never |
| heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only |
| grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about spouters and blubber-boilers, |
| |
| and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and |
| also all |
| .. <p 239 > |
| Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful |
| feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. |
| Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that |
| profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in |
| uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a |
| man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his |
| superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high |
| lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to |
| stand on. but what is a gam? you might wear out your index-finger running |
| up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. |
| Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it. |
| |
| Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in |
| constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly it |
| needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that |
| view, let me learnedly define it. Gam. Noun --A social meeting of two (or more) |
| Whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, |
| they exchange visits by boats' crews: the two captains remaining, for the |
| time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other. There is |
| another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All |
| professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale |
| fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed |
| anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable, |
| sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little |
| |
| milliner's tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat |
| has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. |
| High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors |
| like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the |
| whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a |
| |
| complete boat's crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or |
| harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the |
| occasion, and the captain, having no |
| .. <p 240 > |
| place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine tree. |
| And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole |
| visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing |
| captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by |
| maintaining his legs. nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is |
| the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of |
| his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is |
| thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself |
| sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent pitch |
| of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is |
| nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two |
| poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain |
| sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this |
| straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by |
| catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, |
| buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' |
| pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them |
| there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well |
| authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly |
| critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say --to seize hold of the nearest |
| oarsman's hair, and hold on there like grim death. |
| .. <p 240 > |
| .. < chapter liv 26 THE TOWN-HO'S STORY > |
| |
| ( As told at the Golden Inn.) |
| |
| The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much |
| like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more |
| travellers than in any other part. It was not very long after speaking the |
| Goney that another |
| .. <p 241 > |
| homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered. She was manned almost |
| wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news |
| of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly |
| heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely |
| to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of |
| those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. |
| |
| This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming |
| what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never |
| reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the |
| story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private |
| property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it |
| seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secresy, but |
| the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it |
| in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest. |
| Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in |
| the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange |
| delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept |
| the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's |
| main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story |
| as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now |
| proceed to put on lasting record. For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the |
| style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish |
| |
| friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the |
| Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, |
| were on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they |
| occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time. Some two years |
| prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you, |
| gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm |
| .. <p 242 > |
| Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' |
| sail westward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to |
| the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to |
| daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than |
| common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the |
| captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited |
| him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and |
| the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they |
| could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in |
| rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners |
| working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more |
| days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly |
| increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all |
| sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have |
| his hull hove out and repaired. Though no small passage was before her, yet, |
| if the commonest chance favored, he did not at all fear that his ship would |
| founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being |
| periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily |
| keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, |
| well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, |
| |
| the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port |
| without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal |
| overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked |
| vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo. "Lakeman! |
| --Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?" said Don |
| Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass. On the eastern shore of our |
| Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further |
| of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, |
| well-nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to |
| far manilla; this lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet |
| been nurtured by all those agrarian |
| .. <p 243 > |
| freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their |
| interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours --Erie, and |
| Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan, --possess an ocean-like |
| expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its |
| rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of |
| romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored |
| by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long |
| maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, |
| dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, |
| and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet |
| thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to |
| wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; |
| |
| for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where |
| the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; |
| those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures |
| whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved |
| capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float |
| alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the |
| steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts |
| as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, |
| for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a |
| midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an |
| inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much |
| of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may |
| have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; |
| |
| though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your |
| contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social |
| quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn |
| handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted |
| traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, |
| might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of |
| human recognition which is the meanest slave's right; thus |
| .. <p 244 > |
| treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all |
| events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and |
| Steelkilt --but, gentlemen, you shall hear. It was not more than a day or two |
| at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the |
| Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or |
| more at the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized |
| ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping |
| their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the |
| officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the |
| probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, |
| on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary |
| and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether |
| unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even |
| for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably |
| accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is |
| only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, |
| some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little |
| anxious. Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was |
| found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by |
| several of her company; especially by radney the mate. He commanded the |
| upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to |
| the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as |
| little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own |
| person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can |
| conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude |
| about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on |
| account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that |
| evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily |
| going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by |
| the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen --that |
| bubbling from |
| .. <p 245 > |
| the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the |
| lee scupper-holes. Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this |
| conventional world of ours --watery or otherwise; that when a person placed |
| in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his |
| superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he |
| conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance |
| he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little |
| heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all |
| events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a |
| flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's |
| snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, |
| which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's |
| father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, |
| as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it. Espying the |
| mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the Lakeman |
| affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings. |
| "Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of |
| ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling! I tell ye |
| what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it! he had best cut away his part |
| of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began |
| the job; he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and |
| file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of 'em are now hard at work |
| cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old |
| Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em. They're |
| playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he's a simple old |
| soul, -- Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is |
| invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the |
| model of his nose." "Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?" roared |
| |
| Radney, pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. "Thunder away at it!" |
| |
| .. <p 246 > |
| "Aye, aye, sir," said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. "Lively, boys, lively, |
| now!" And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed |
| their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was |
| heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's utmost energies. Quitting |
| the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all |
| panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes |
| bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening |
| fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in |
| that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened. |
| Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom |
| and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive |
| matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large. Now, gentlemen, |
| sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times |
| but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to |
| be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, |
| gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of |
| neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first |
| washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the |
| prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was |
| the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking |
| turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, |
| Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; |
| consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected |
| |
| with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention |
| all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood |
| between the two men. But there was more than this: the order about the |
| shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though |
| Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will |
| understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully |
| comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a |
| moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and |
| .. <p 247 > |
| perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match |
| silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that |
| strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in |
| any already ireful being --a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by |
| really valiant men even when aggrieved --this nameless phantom feeling, |
| gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt. Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a |
| little broken by the bodily exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him |
| saying that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. |
| and then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as |
| the customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little |
| or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most |
| domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command; |
| meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper's |
| club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by. Heated and irritated |
| as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all his first nameless |
| feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing |
| in the mate; but somehow still smothering the conflagration within him, |
| without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the |
| incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously |
| commanding him to do his bidding. Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating |
| round the windlass, steadily followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, |
| deliberately repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his |
| forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable |
| intimation with his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; |
| |
| but it was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the |
| windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that |
| he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused |
| on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer: "Mr. Radney, I will not obey |
| you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself." But the predestinated mate |
| coming still closer to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the |
| .. <p 248 > |
| heavy hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of |
| insufferable maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; |
| stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance, |
| steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, |
| |
| told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) |
| would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter |
| by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the |
| lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting |
| blood like a whale. Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of |
| the backstays leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing |
| their mast-heads. They were both Canallers. "Canallers!" cried Don Pedro, |
| "We have seen many whale-ships in our harbors, but never heard of your |
| Canallers. Pardon: who and what are they?" "Canallers, Don, are the boatmen |
| belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard of it." "Nay, Senor; |
| |
| hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we know but |
| little of your vigorous North." "Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your |
| chicha's very fine; and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our |
| Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story." |
| |
| For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of |
| the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving |
| villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated |
| fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through |
| the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; |
| through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide |
| contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of |
| snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one |
| continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There's your |
| true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, |
| next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee |
| of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your |
| metropolitan freebooters |
| .. <p 249 > |
| that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, |
| most abound in holiest vicinities. "Is that a friar passing?" said Don |
| Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with humorous concern. |
| "Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in Lima," |
| laughed Don Sebastian. "Proceed, Senor." "A moment! Pardon!" cried another |
| of the company. "In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to |
| you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not |
| substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! |
| do not bow and look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast |
| -- Corrupt as Lima. It but bears out your saying, too; churches more |
| plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open--and Corrupt as Lima. |
| So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, |
| St. Mark! --St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, |
| |
| you pour out again." Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the |
| Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely |
| wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, |
| flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked |
| Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all |
| this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly |
| sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A |
| terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his |
| swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on |
| his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I |
| thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the |
| prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as |
| stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy |
| one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is |
| emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of |
| its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except |
| Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at |
| all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our |
| .. <p 250 > |
| rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the |
| Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a |
| Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric |
| seas. "I see! I see! " impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his |
| chicha upon his silvery ruffles. "No need to travel! The world's one Lima. I |
| had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and |
| holy as the hills. --But the story." I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman |
| shook the back-stay. Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the |
| three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. |
| |
| But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into |
| the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. |
| Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil |
| ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and |
| down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious |
| scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran |
| close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart |
| of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But |
| Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in |
| gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large |
| casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves |
| behind the barricade. "come out of that, ye pirates!" roared the captain, |
| now menacing them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the |
| steward. "Come out of that, ye cut-throats!" Steelkilt leaped on the |
| barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the worst the pistols could |
| do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) |
| death would be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. |
| Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little |
| desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their |
| duty. "Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?" demanded their |
| ringleader. |
| .. <p 251 > |
| "Turn to! turn to! --I make no promise; --to your duty! Do you want to sink |
| the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!" and he once more |
| raised a pistol. "Sink the ship?" cried Steelkilt. "Aye, let her sink. Not |
| a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. |
| What say ye, men?" turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their |
| response. The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping |
| his eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these: --"It's not |
| our fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was |
| boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick |
| the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw; |
| ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? look to those |
| handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the word; |
| don't be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, |
| |
| and we're your men; but we won't be flogged." "Turn to! I make no |
| promises, turn to, I say!" "Look ye, now," cried the Lakeman, flinging out |
| his arm towards him. "there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who |
| have shipped for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can |
| claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row; |
| it's not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we |
| won't be flogged." "Turn to!" roared the Captain. Steelkilt glanced round |
| him a moment, and then said: --"I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather |
| than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand |
| against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging |
| us, we won't do a hand's turn." "Down into the forecastle then, down with |
| ye, I'll keep ye there till ye're sick of it. Down ye go." "Shall we?" |
| cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but at |
| length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark |
| den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave. As the Lakeman's bare |
| head was just level with the planks, |
| .. <p 252 > |
| the Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the |
| slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly |
| called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock, belonging to the |
| companion-way. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered |
| something down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them --ten in |
| number --leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained |
| neutral. All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward |
| and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which |
| last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking through |
| the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who |
| still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and |
| clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally resounded through the |
| ship. at sunrise the captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, |
| summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was |
| then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed |
| after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain |
| returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this was |
| repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a |
| scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly |
| four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. |
| The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some |
| |
| fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at |
| discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the |
| rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling |
| and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others of |
| the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below that sought |
| to restrain them. Only three were left. "Better turn to, now?" said the |
| Captain with a heartless jeer. "Shut us up again, will ye!" cried Steelkilt. |
| "Oh! certainly," said the Captain and the key clicked. It was at this |
| point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection |
| .. <p 253 > |
| of seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had |
| last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as |
| the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two |
| Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their |
| hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen |
| mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end) |
| |
| run a muck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of |
| desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said, |
| whether they joined him or not. That was the last night he should spend in |
| that den. but the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other two; |
| |
| they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for |
| anything in short but a surrender. And what was more, they each insisted |
| upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come. |
| |
| But to this their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for |
| himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the |
| other, in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder |
| would but admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of |
| these miscreants must come out. Upon hearing the frantic project of their |
| leader, each in his own separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, |
| upon the same piece of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, |
| in order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to |
| surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct |
| might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead |
| them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, |
| mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell |
| into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences; |
| and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked |
| out for the Captain at midnight. Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in |
| the dark for the blood, he and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for |
| |
| the forecastle. In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand |
| and foot, the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his |
| perfidious allies, who at once claimed the |
| .. <p 254 > |
| honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were |
| collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, |
| were seized up into the mizen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there |
| they hung till morning. "Damn ye," cried the Captain, pacing to and fro |
| before them, "the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!" At sunrise he |
| summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from those who had |
| taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a good mind to |
| flog them all round --thought, upon the whole, he would do so --he ought to |
| --justice demanded it; but for the present, considering their timely |
| surrender, he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly |
| administered in the vernacular. "But as for you, ye carrion rogues," turning |
| to the three men in the rigging --"for you, I mean to mince ye up for the |
| try-pots;" and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs |
| of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their |
| heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn. "My wrist is |
| sprained with ye!" he cried, at last; "but there is still rope enough left |
| for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give up. Take that gag from his mouth, |
| |
| and let us hear what he can say for himself." For a moment the exhausted |
| mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped jaws, and then painfully |
| twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, "What I say is this --and |
| mind it well--- if you flog me, I murder you!" "Say ye so? then see how ye |
| frighten me" --and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike. "Best not," |
| hissed the Lakeman. "But I must," --and the rope was once more drawn back for |
| the stroke. Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the |
| Captain; who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck |
| rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said,"I |
| won't do it --let him go--cut him down: d'ye hear?" But as the junior mates |
| were hurrying to execute the order, |
| .. <p 255 > |
| a pale man, with a bandaged head, arrested them --Radney the chief mate. Ever |
| since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the |
| tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole |
| scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but |
| mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the captain |
| dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe. |
| "You are a coward!" hissed the Lakeman. "So I am, but take that." The mate |
| was in the very act of striking, when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. |
| He paused: and then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's |
| threat, whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, |
| all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron |
| pumps clanged as before. Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired |
| below, a clamor was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors |
| running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the |
| crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their |
| own instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no |
| sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that |
| mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain the |
| strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship |
| reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest end |
| to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing --namely, not to sing out for |
| whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite |
| of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads, and |
| her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the |
| day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite |
| as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to |
| gag in death the vital jaw of the whale. But though the Lakeman had induced |
| the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness in their conduct, he kept his |
| own counsel (at least till all was over) concerning his own proper and |
| private revenge upon the man who had stung him in the ventricles |
| .. <p 256 > |
| of his heart. He was in Radney the chief mate's watch; and as if the |
| infatuated man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom, after the |
| scene at the rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain, |
| |
| upon resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two |
| other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge. |
| |
| During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the |
| bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the |
| boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side. In this |
| attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable |
| vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea. |
| Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the helm |
| would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the third day from that in |
| which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in |
| braiding something very carefully in his watches below. "What are you making |
| there?" said a shipmate. "What do you think? what does it look like?" |
| "Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me." "Yes, |
| rather oddish," said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length before him; |
| "but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough twine, --have you |
| any?" But there was none in the forecastle. "Then I must get some from old |
| Rad;" and he rose to go aft. "You don't mean to go a begging to him!" said |
| a sailor. "Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help |
| himself in the end, shipmate?" and going to the mate, he looked at him |
| quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him |
| --neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an iron ball, |
| closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman's monkey jacket, |
| as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours |
| after, his trick at the silent helm --nigh to the man who was apt to doze over |
| the grave always ready dug to the seaman's hand --that fatal hour was then to |
| come; and in |
| .. <p 257 > |
| the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and |
| stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in. But, gentlemen, a fool |
| saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he had planned. Yet complete |
| revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, |
| Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the |
| damning thing he would have done. It was just between daybreak and sunrise of |
| the morning of the second day, when they were washing down the decks, that |
| a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once |
| shouted out, "There she rolls! there she rolls!" Jesu, what a whale! It |
| was Moby Dick. "Moby Dick!" cried Don Sebastian; "St. Dominic! Sir sailor, |
| but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?" "A very white, |
| and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don; --but that would be too long |
| a story." "How? how!" cried all the young Spaniards, crowding. "Nay, Dons, |
| Dons --nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, |
| Sirs." "The chicha! the chicha!" cried Don Pedro; "our vigorous friend |
| looks faint; --fill up his empty glass!" No need, gentlemen; one moment, and |
| I proceed. --Now, gentlemen, so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within |
| fifty yards of the ship --forgetful of the compact among the crew --in the |
| excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and |
| involuntarily lifted his voice for the monster, though for some little time |
| past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now |
| a phrensy. "The White Whale --the White Whale!" was the cry from captain, |
| mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumors, were all anxious |
| to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, |
| |
| and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by |
| a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the |
| blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of |
| these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted. |
| The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was |
| his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood |
| .. <p 258 > |
| up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word |
| of command. Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate's got the |
| start; and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he |
| strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, |
| spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it |
| seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's |
| topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a |
| blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat |
| struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing |
| mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat |
| righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over |
| into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the |
| spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking |
| to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a |
| sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up |
| with him, plunged headlong again, and went down. Meantime, at the first tap |
| of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to drop |
| astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts. |
| But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his |
| knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some |
| distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen |
| shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase |
| again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared. In good |
| time, the Town-Ho reached her port --a savage, solitary place --where no |
| civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or |
| six of the foremast-men deliberately deserted among the palms; eventually, as |
| it turned out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting |
| sail for some other harbor. The ship's company being reduced to but a |
| handful, the captain called upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious |
| |
| business of heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting |
| vigilance over their dangerous allies was this small |
| .. <p 259 > |
| band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the |
| hard work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, |
| they were in such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with |
| them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he |
| anchored the ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two |
| cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the |
| Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and |
| setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for |
| Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew. |
| |
| On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to |
| have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the |
| savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to |
| heave to, or he would run him under water. the captain presented a pistol. |
| With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him |
| to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he |
| would bury him in bubbles and foam. "What do you want of me? cried the |
| captain. "Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?" demanded |
| Steelkilt; "no lies." "I am bound to Tahiti for more men." "Very good. Let |
| me board you a moment --I come in peace." With that he leaped from the canoe, |
| swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with the |
| captain. "Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after |
| me. As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder |
| island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike me!" |
| "A pretty scholar," laughed the Lakeman."Adios, Senor!" and leaping into the |
| sea, he swam back to his comrades. Watching the boat till it was fairly |
| beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail |
| again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. |
| There, luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and |
| were providentially in want of precisely that number |
| .. <p 260 > |
| of men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start |
| of their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal |
| retribution. Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat |
| arrived, and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized |
| Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native |
| schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right there, |
| again resumed his cruisings. Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; |
| but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea |
| which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale |
| that destroyed him. "Are you through?" said Don Sebastian, quietly. "I am, |
| Don." "Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, |
| |
| this story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you |
| get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press." |
| "Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian's |
| suit," cried the company, with exceeding interest. "Is there a copy of the |
| Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?" "Nay," said Don Sebastian; |
| "but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly procure one for me. I |
| go for it; but are you well advised? this may grow too serious." "Will you |
| be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?" "Though there are no |
| Auto-da-Fes in Lima now," said one of the company to another: "I fear our |
| sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of |
| the moonlight. I see no need for this." "Excuse me for running after you, |
| Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you will be particular in procuring |
| the largest sized Evangelists you can." "This is the priest, he brings you |
| the Evangelists," said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and |
| solemn figure. "Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into |
| the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it." |
| .. <p 261 > |
| "So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is |
| in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on |
| this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with |
| Steelkilt since the death of Radney." |
| .. <p 241n. > |
| The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still |
| used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin. |
| .. <p 261 > |
| .. < chapter lv 7 OF THE MONSTROUS PICTURES OF WHALES > |
| |
| I shall ere long |
| paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form |
| of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own |
| absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be |
| fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to |
| advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the |
| present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to |
| set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all |
| wrong. It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will |
| be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever |
| since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of |
| temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and |
| coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin's, and a |
| helmeted head like St. George's; ever since then has something of the same |
| sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of the whale, |
| but in many scientific presentations of him. Now, by all odds, the most |
| ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be found |
| in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain |
| that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the |
| trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages |
| before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some |
| sort our noble profession |
| .. <p 262 > |
| of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred |
| to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of |
| Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But |
| though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail |
| of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more |
| like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true |
| whale's majestic flukes. But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great |
| Christian painter's portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the |
| |
| antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda |
| from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a |
| strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in |
| his own Perseus Descending, make out one whit better. The huge corpulence |
| of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one |
| inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended tusked |
| mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors' |
| Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the |
| Prodromus whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah's whale, as depicted |
| in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said |
| of these? As for the book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the |
| stock of a descending anchor --as stamped and gilded on the backs and |
| title-pages of many books both old and new --that is a very picturesque but |
| purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on |
| antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call |
| this book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended |
| when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old Italian |
| publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival of Learning; |
| and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins |
| were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan. In the vignettes |
| and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with |
| very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau, |
| hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his |
| |
| .. <p 263 > |
| unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition of the |
| |
| Advancement of Learning you will find some curious whales. But quitting all |
| these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan |
| purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In old |
| Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from |
| a Dutch book of voyages, A. D. |
| , entitled A Whaling Voyage to |
| Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, |
| master. In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are |
| represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living |
| backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the |
| whale with perpendicular flukes. Then again, there is an imposing quarto, |
| written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled |
| |
| A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending |
| the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries. In this book is an outline purporting to be |
| a Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed |
| on the coast of Mexico, August, |
| , and hoisted on deck. I doubt not the |
| captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To |
| mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied, |
| according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make |
| the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant |
| captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye! Nor are the |
| most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the |
| young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that |
| popular work Goldsmith's Animated Nature. In the abridged London edition of |
| |
| , there are plates of an alleged whale and a narwhale. I do not wish |
| to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; |
| |
| and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in |
| this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any |
| |
| intelligent public of schoolboys. Then, again, in |
| , Bernard Germain, |
| Count de Lacepede, |
| .. <p 264 > |
| a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are |
| several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these are |
| not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale |
| (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as |
| touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature. But |
| the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for |
| the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In |
| , he |
| published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a |
| picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, |
| you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, |
| Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, |
| he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but |
| whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his |
| scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his |
| authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of |
| lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers |
| inform us. As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over |
| the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally |
| Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on |
| three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their |
| deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint. but these manifold |
| mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. |
| Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the |
| stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, |
| |
| with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all |
| its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their |
| full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for |
| his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is |
| only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of |
| him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that |
| element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist |
| .. <p 265 > |
| him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and |
| undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of |
| contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; |
| yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's |
| deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, |
| that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch. But it may be |
| fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints |
| may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more |
| curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea |
| of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for |
| candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea |
| of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading |
| personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from |
| any leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the |
| mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and |
| padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes |
| it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of |
| this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in |
| the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the |
| human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, |
| the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently |
| lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial |
| covering. However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us, said |
| humorous Stubb one day, he can never be truly said to handle us without |
| mittens. For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must |
| needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world |
| which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark |
| much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable |
| degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what |
| the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a |
| tolerable idea of his living contour, is by |
| .. <p 266 > |
| going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being |
| eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not |
| be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. |
| .. <p 266 > |
| .. < chapter lvi 6 OF THE LESS ERRONEOUS PICTURES OF WHALES, AND THE TRUE > |
| |
| |
| |
| PICTURES OF WHALING SCENES In connexion with the monstrous pictures of |
| whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous |
| stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and |
| modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I |
| pass that matter by. i know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm |
| |
| Whale; Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the |
| previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far |
| better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's |
| drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of |
| three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His |
| frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to |
| excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and |
| life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross |
| Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That |
| is not his fault though. Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in |
| Scoresby; but they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable |
| impression. He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad |
| deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, |
| that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen |
| by his living hunters. But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though |
| in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling |
| .. <p 267 > |
| scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, |
| and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent |
| attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm |
| Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from |
| the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the |
| terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially |
| unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing |
| in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an |
| oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in |
| the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is |
| wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened |
| sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads |
| of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions |
| of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon |
| the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this |
| whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so |
| good a one. In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing |
| alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his |
| black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian |
| cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so |
| abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave |
| supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small |
| crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale |
| sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped |
| leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds |
| in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff |
| caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is |
| all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the |
| glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the |
| powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, |
| with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his |
| spout-hole. |
| .. <p 268 > |
| Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was |
| either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored |
| by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting action. |
| Go and gaze upon all the paintings in Europe, and where will you find such a |
| gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal |
| hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the |
| consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the |
| Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a |
| charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, |
| are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery. The natural aptitude of the French for |
| seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what |
| paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With not one |
| tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of |
| that of the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the |
| only finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the |
| whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen |
| seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such |
| as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of |
| effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a |
| pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving us |
| a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate |
| miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical |
| engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the |
| microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a |
| shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I |
| mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), |
| but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have |
| procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice |
| of the Peace. In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are |
| two other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes |
| himself h. durand. one of them, though not precisely |
| .. <p 269 > |
| adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other |
| accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French |
| whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the |
| loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the |
| background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very |
| fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen |
| under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is |
| quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the |
| very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel |
| (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a |
| boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving |
| chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for |
| use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a |
| sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, |
| like a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling |
| whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to |
| windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains, seems |
| to quicken the activity of the excited seamen. |
| .. <p 269 > |
| .. < chapter lvii 23 OF WHALES IN PAINT; IN TEETH; IN WOOD; IN > |
| |
| |
| SHEET-IRON; IN STONE; IN MOUNTAINS; IN STARS On Tower-hill, as you go down |
| to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the |
| sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic |
| scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and |
| one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original |
| integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time |
| these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and |
| exhibited |
| .. <p 270 > |
| that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now |
| come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, |
| at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in |
| the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a |
| stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands |
| ruefully contemplating his own amputation. Throughout the Pacific, and also |
| in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively |
| sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on |
| Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and |
| other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little |
| ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in |
| their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of |
| dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering |
| business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with |
| that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything |
| you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy. Long exile from Christendom and |
| civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed |
| him, i. e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a |
| savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage; owning no allegiance but to the |
| King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him. Now, |
| one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is |
| his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or |
| spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as |
| great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit |
| of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden |
| net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady |
| application. As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. |
| With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, |
| of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not |
| quite as workmanlike, but as close |
| .. <p 271 > |
| packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield; |
| and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine |
| old Dutch savage, Albert Durer. Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out |
| of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met |
| with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much |
| accuracy. At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales |
| hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is |
| sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are |
| seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned |
| churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but |
| they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so |
| labelled with Hands off! you cannot examine them closely enough to decide |
| upon their merit. In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of |
| high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the |
| plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the |
| Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in |
| a surf of green surges. Then, again, in mountainous countries where the |
| traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there |
| from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles |
| of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough |
| whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return |
| to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting |
| latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are |
| such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would |
| require a laborious re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still |
| remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera |
| chronicled them. Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to |
| |
| trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; |
| as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked |
| in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round |
| and round |
| .. <p 272 > |
| the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to |
| me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, |
| and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of |
| Hydrus and the Flying Fish. With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and |
| fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the |
| topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless |
| tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight! |
| .. <p 272 > |
| .. < chapter lviii 11 BRIT > |
| |
| Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we |
| fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which |
| the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, |
| |
| so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden |
| wheat. On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure |
| from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly |
| swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous |
| Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water |
| that escaped at the lip. As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and |
| seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; |
| even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and |
| leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea. |
| .. <p 273 > |
| But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all |
| reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused |
| and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like |
| lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great hunting |
| countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the |
| plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for |
| bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the |
| first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea. And even when |
| recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to |
| believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all |
| parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse. Indeed, in |
| other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same |
| feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old naturalists have |
| maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and |
| though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well be; yet |
| coming to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish |
| that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The |
| accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative |
| analogy to him. But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants |
| of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and |
| repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so |
| that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one |
| superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal |
| disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds |
| of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment's |
| consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and |
| skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may |
| augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will |
| insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can |
| make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these |
| .. <p 274 > |
| very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea |
| which aboriginally belongs to it. The first boat we read of, floated on an |
| ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without |
| leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean |
| destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood |
| is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers. Wherein |
| differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon |
| the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the |
| feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for |
| ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the |
| live sea swallows up ships and crews. But not only is the sea such a foe to |
| man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring; |
| worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the |
| creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in |
| the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales |
| against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks |
| of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting |
| like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean |
| overruns the globe. Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded |
| creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously |
| hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish |
| brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty |
| embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the |
| universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, |
| carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then |
| turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the |
| sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in |
| yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the |
| soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but |
| encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. |
| .. <p 275 > |
| God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! |
| .. <p 272n. > |
| That part of the sea known among whalemen as the Brazil Banks does not bear |
| that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows |
| and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, |
| |
| caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, |
| where the Right Whale is often chased. |
| .. <p 275 > |
| .. < chapter lix 4 SQUID > |
| |
| Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the |
| Pequod still held on her way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a |
| gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three |
| tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms |
| on a plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, |
| alluring jet would be seen. But one transparent blue morning, when a |
| stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with |
| any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a |
| golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered |
| waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the |
| visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head. |
| In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and |
| higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our |
| prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a |
| moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently |
| gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. |
| Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once more, with a |
| stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out |
| -- There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, |
| the White Whale! Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in |
| swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, |
| Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness |
| to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast |
| .. <p 276 > |
| his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched |
| motionless arm of Daggoo. Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and |
| solitary jet had gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to |
| connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the |
| particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness |
| betrayed him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly |
| perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders |
| for lowering. The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and |
| all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with |
| oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where |
| it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all |
| thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the |
| secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in |
| length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, |
| innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like |
| a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within |
| reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of |
| either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an |
| unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. As with a low sucking |
| sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated |
| waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed -- Almost rather had I |
| seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost! |
| |
| What was it, Sir? said Flask. The great live squid, which they say, few |
| whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it. But |
| Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest |
| as silently following. Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general |
| have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse |
| of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with |
| portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them |
| declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of |
| them have any but |
| .. <p 277 > |
| the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, |
| they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food. For though other |
| species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the |
| act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones |
| below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, |
| precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will |
| disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them |
| thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that |
| the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed |
| of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied |
| with teeth in order to attack and tear it. There seems some ground to imagine |
| that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into |
| Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising |
| and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two |
| correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible |
| bulk he assigns it. By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the |
| mysterious creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of |
| cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to |
| belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe. |
| .. <p 277 > |
| .. < chapter lx 26 THE LINE > |
| |
| With reference to the whaling scene shortly to |
| be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes |
| elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible |
| whale-line. The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, |
| slightly vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the |
| .. <p 278 > |
| case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp |
| more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more |
| convenient to the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary |
| quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it |
| must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general |
| by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it may |
| give it compactness and gloss. Of late years the Manilla rope has in the |
| American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for |
| whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far |
| more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all |
| things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is |
| a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired |
| Circassian to behold. The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in |
| thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. |
| By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one |
| hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly |
| equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures |
| something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is |
| spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, |
| but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded sheaves, |
| or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the heart, |
| or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle |
| or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, |
| leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in |
| its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this |
| business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a |
| block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all |
| possible wrinkles and twists. In the English boats two tubs are used instead |
| of one; the same line being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is |
| some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more |
| readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American |
| tub, nearly three feet in diameter and |
| .. <p 279 > |
| of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks |
| are but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like |
| critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but |
| not very much of a concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped |
| on the american line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a |
| prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales. Both ends of the line |
| are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up |
| from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge |
| completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is |
| necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to |
| it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale |
| should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally |
| attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted |
| like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the |
| first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This |
| arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the lower end |
| of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run |
| the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes |
| does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be |
| dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no |
| town-crier would ever find her again. Before lowering the boat for the chase, |
| the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the |
| logger-head there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, |
| resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs |
| against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they |
| alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in |
| the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size |
| of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs |
| in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; |
| and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in |
| the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, |
| and is then |
| .. <p 280 > |
| attached to the short-warp --the rope which is immediately connected with the |
| harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry |
| mystifications too tedious to detail. Thus the whale-line folds the whole |
| boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost |
| every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so |
| that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with |
| the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of |
| mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen |
| intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at |
| any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible |
| contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus |
| circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to |
| quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit --strange thing! what cannot |
| habit accomplish? --Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter |
| repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the |
| half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses; |
| and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men |
| composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every |
| neck, as you may say. Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to |
| account for those repeated whaling disasters --some few of which are casually |
| chronicled --of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, |
| and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, |
| is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine |
| in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. |
| It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, |
| because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and |
| the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain |
| self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you |
| escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun |
| himself could never pierce you out. Again: as the profound calm which only |
| apparently precedes |
| .. <p 281 > |
| and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; |
| for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and |
| contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, |
| |
| and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it |
| silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play -- |
| |
| this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of |
| this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in |
| whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only |
| when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the |
| silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, |
| though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of |
| |
| terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a |
| harpoon, by your side. |
| .. <p 281 > |
| .. < chapter lxi 17 STUBB KILLS A WHALE > |
| |
| If to Starbuck the apparition of |
| the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different |
| object. When you see him 'quid, said the savage, honing his harpoon in the |
| bow of his hoisted boat, then you quick see him 'parm whale. The next day |
| was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, |
| the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a |
| vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were |
| voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords |
| fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious |
| denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the |
| in-shore ground off Peru. It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and |
| with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and |
| .. <p 282 > |
| fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could |
| withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul |
| went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum |
| will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn. Ere |
| forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the |
| main and mizen mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of |
| us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there |
| was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded |
| their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to |
| west, and the sun over all. Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my |
| closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, |
| gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! |
| close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling |
| in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of |
| an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily |
| undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting |
| his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a |
| warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by |
| some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once |
| started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of |
| the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the |
| accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling |
| brine into the air. clear away the boats! luff! cried Ahab. And obeying |
| his own order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the |
| spokes. The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and |
| ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, |
| but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, |
| that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that |
| not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated |
| like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, |
| .. <p 283 > |
| we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the |
| noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the |
| monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then |
| sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up. There go flukes! was the cry, |
| an announcement immediately followed by Stubb's producing his match and |
| igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the full interval of |
| his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of |
| the smoker's boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb |
| counted upon the honor of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale |
| had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was |
| therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into |
| play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the |
| assault. Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his |
| jeopardy, he was going head out; that part obliquely projecting from the |
| mad yeast which he brewed. Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry |
| yourselves; take plenty of time --but start her; start her like |
| thunder-claps, that's all, cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he |
| spoke. start her, now; give 'em the long and strong stroke, tashtego. |
| Start her, Tash, my boy --start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool-- |
| cucumbers is the word --easy, easy --only start her like grim death and |
| grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, |
| boys --that's all. Start her! Woo-hoo! Wa-hee! screamed the Gay-Header in |
| reply, raising some old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the |
| strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading |
| stroke which the eager Indian gave. |
| .. <p 284 > |
| But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. Kee-hee! |
| Kee-hee! yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, |
| like a pacing tiger in his cage. Ka-la! Koo-loo! howled Queequeg, as if |
| smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars |
| and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the |
| van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke |
| from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the |
| welcome cry was heard -- Stand up, Tashtego! --give it to him! The harpoon was |
| hurled. Stern all! The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something |
| went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the magical |
| line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with |
| it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, |
| a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his |
| pipe. As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just |
| before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both |
| of Stubb's hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas |
| sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding |
| an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time |
| striving to wrest it out of your clutch. Wet the line! wet the line! cried |
| stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, |
| dashed the sea-water into it. More turns were taken, so that the line began |
| holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark |
| all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places -- stem for stern --a |
| staggering business truly in that rocking commotion. From the vibrating line |
| extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its now |
| being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two |
| keels -- one cleaving the water, the other the air --as the boat churned |
| .. <p 285 > |
| on through both opposing elements at once. A continual cascade played at the |
| bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest motion |
| from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft |
| canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man |
| with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the |
| foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost |
| double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and |
| Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale |
| somewhat slackened his flight. Haul in --haul in! cried Stubb to the |
| bowsman! and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the |
| boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by |
| his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart |
| after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat |
| alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then |
| ranging up for another fling. The red tide now poured from all sides of the |
| monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but |
| in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The |
| slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its |
| reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red |
| men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot |
| from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth |
| of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked |
| lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, |
| by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into |
| the whale. Pull up --pull up! he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning |
| whale relaxed in his wrath. Pull up! --close to! and the boat ranged along |
| the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his |
| long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and |
| churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the |
| whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he |
| could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of |
| the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting |
| .. <p 286 > |
| from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his flurry, the monster |
| horribly wallowed in his blood, over-wrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, |
| boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had |
| much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear |
| air of the day. And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled |
| out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and |
| contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At |
| last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees |
| of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping |
| down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst! He's dead, |
| Mr. Stubb, said Daggoo. Yes; both pipes smoked out! and withdrawing his |
| own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for |
| a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made. |
| .. <p 283n. > |
| It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire |
| interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists. Though apparently the |
| most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease |
| he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost |
| speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his |
| head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by |
| obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself |
| from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharp-pointed New York |
| pilot-boat. |
| .. <p 284n. > |
| Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, |
| that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with |
| water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for |
| that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient. |
| .. <p 286 > |
| .. < chapter lxii 19 THE DART > |
| |
| A word concerning an incident in the last |
| chapter. According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat |
| pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary |
| steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar, |
| the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to |
| strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long |
| dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty |
| feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is |
| expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected |
| to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible |
| rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to |
| keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other |
| |
| .. <p 287 > |
| muscles are strained and half started --what that is none know but those who |
| have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly |
| at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his |
| back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry |
| -- Stand up, and give it to him! He now has to drop and secure his oar, |
| turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and |
| with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the |
| whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of |
| fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so |
| many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some |
| of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some |
| sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to |
| many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer |
| that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can |
| you expect to find it there when most wanted! Again, if the dart be |
| successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale |
| starts to run, the boat-header and harpooneer likewise start to running fore |
| and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is |
| then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little |
| craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat. Now, I care not who |
| maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary. The |
| headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the |
| harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him, |
| except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would |
| sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in |
| various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast |
| majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much |
| the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer |
| that has caused them. To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the |
| harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and |
| not from out of toil. |
| .. <p 288 > |
| .. < chapter lxiii 2 THE CROTCH > |
| |
| Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out |
| of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters. The crotch |
| alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It is a notched |
| stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly |
| inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of |
| furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose other |
| naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is |
| instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest |
| as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two |
| harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and second |
| irons. But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with |
| the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one |
| instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, |
| one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of |
| the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, |
| violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it |
| becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his |
| movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second |
| iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that |
| weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, |
| somehow and somewhere; else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all |
| hands. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare |
| coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in |
| most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always |
| unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties. Furthermore: you must |
| know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a |
| dangling, sharp-edged |
| .. <p 289 > |
| terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, |
| or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor, |
| in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly |
| captured and a corpse. Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats |
| all engaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to |
| these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of |
| such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be |
| simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with |
| several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be ineffectually |
| darted without recovery. All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, |
| as they will not fail to elucidate several most important, however intricate |
| passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted. |
| .. <p 289 > |
| .. < chapter lxiv 16 STUBB'S SUPPER > |
| |
| Stubb's whale had been killed some |
| distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, |
| we commenced the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, |
| as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty |
| thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish |
| corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long |
| intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass |
| we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in |
| China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted |
| junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily |
| forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk. Darkness came on; but |
| three lights up and down in the Pequod's main-rigging dimly guided our way; |
| till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the |
| |
| .. <p 290 > |
| bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual |
| orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a |
| seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until |
| morning. Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had |
| evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was |
| dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working |
| in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was |
| yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, |
| |
| all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon |
| you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands |
| were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged |
| along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those |
| clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied |
| by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies |
| with its black hull close to the vessel's, and seen through the darkness of |
| the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two --ship and |
| whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines |
| while the other remains standing. If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at |
| least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with |
| conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an |
| unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his |
| .. <p 291 > |
| official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management |
| of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was |
| soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat |
| intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate. A steak, |
| |
| a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from |
| his small! Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a |
| general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy |
| defray the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the |
| proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers |
| who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale |
| designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body. About |
| midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm |
| oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, |
| as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on |
| whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, |
| |
| thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, |
| smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were |
| often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within |
| a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you could just |
| see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, |
| and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of |
| the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark |
| seems all but miraculous. How, at such an apparently unassailable surface, |
| they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the |
| universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may |
| best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a |
| screw. Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, |
| sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs |
| round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed |
| man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the |
| deck-table are |
| .. <p 292 > |
| thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded |
| and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are |
| quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were |
| you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the |
| same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all |
| parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave |
| ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy |
| in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently |
| buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, |
| touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially |
| congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or |
| occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or |
| more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a |
| whale-ship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your |
| decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of |
| conciliating the devil. But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the |
| banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the |
| smacking of his own epicurean lips. Cook, cook! --where's that old Fleece? |
| he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more |
| secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the |
| dish, as if stabbing with his lance; cook, you cook! --sail this way, cook! |
| the old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously routed from |
| his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his |
| galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his |
| knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old |
| Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his |
| step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened |
| iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of |
| command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; |
| when, |
| .. <p 293 > |
| with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he |
| bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining |
| his head, so as to bring his best ear into play. Cook, said Stubb, rapidly |
| lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, don't you think this steak is |
| rather overdone? You've been beating this steak too much, cook; it's too |
| tender. Don't I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? |
| There are those sharks now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough |
| and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to 'em; tell |
| 'em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they |
| must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and |
| deliver my message. Here, take this lantern, snatching one from his |
| sideboard; now then, go and preach to 'em! Sullenly taking the offered |
| lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with |
| one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of |
| his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and |
| leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, |
| while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said. |
| |
| Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise |
| dare. you hear? stop dat dam smackin' ob de lip! massa Stubb say dat you |
| can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat |
| dam racket! Cook, here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a |
| sudden slap on the shoulder, -- Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear |
| that way when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, Cook! |
| |
| Who dat? Den preach to him yourself, sullenly turning to go. No, Cook; |
| go on, go on. Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters: -- Right! exclaimed |
| Stubb, approvingly, coax 'em to it; try that, and Fleece continued. Do |
| you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I |
| .. <p 294 > |
| zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness --'top dat dam slappin' ob |
| de tail! How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and |
| bitin' dare? Cook, cried Stubb, collaring him, I wont have that swearing. |
| |
| Talk to 'em gentlemanly. Once more the sermon proceeded. Your |
| woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, |
| and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is |
| sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for |
| all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, |
| bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. |
| Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one |
| shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right |
| to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has |
| berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de |
| small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swallar wid, but to |
| bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge |
| to help demselves. Well done, old Fleece! cried Stubb, that's |
| Christianity; go on. No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a |
| scrougin' and slappin' each oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no |
| use a-preachin' to such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is |
| full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get em full, dey wont |
| hear you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and |
| can't hear not'ing at all, no more, for eber and eber. Upon my soul, I am |
| about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I'll away to |
| my supper. Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised |
| his shrill voice, and cried -- Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest |
| row as ever you can; fill your dam' bellies 'till dey bust --and den die. |
| |
| Now, cook, said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; Stand just where |
| you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention. |
| .. <p 295 > |
| |
| All dention, said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the |
| desired position. Well, said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; I |
| shall now go back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old |
| are you, cook? What dat do wid de 'teak, said the old black, testily. |
| |
| Silence! How old are you, cook? 'Bout ninety, dey say, he gloomily |
| muttered. And have you lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, |
| cook, and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak? rapidly bolting another |
| mouthful at the last word, so that that morsel seemed a continuation of the |
| question. Where were you born, cook? 'Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, |
| goin' ober de Roanoke. Born in a ferry-boat! That's queer, too. But I want |
| to know what country you were born in, cook? Didn't I say de Roanoke |
| country? he cried, sharply. No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what |
| I'm coming to, cook. You must go home and be born over again; you don't |
| know how to cook a whale-steak yet. Bress my soul, if I cook noder one, he |
| growled, angrily, turning round to depart. Come back, cook; --here, hand me |
| those tongs; --now take that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that |
| steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I say --holding the tongs towards him |
| -- take it, and taste it. Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a |
| moment, the old negro muttered, Best cooked 'teak I eber taste; joosy, |
| berry joosy. Cook, said Stubb, squaring himself once more; do you |
| belong to the church? Passed one once in Cape-Down, said the old man |
| sullenly. And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, |
| where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his |
| beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and tell |
| me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh? said Stubb. Where do you |
| expect to go to, cook? |
| .. <p 296 > |
| |
| Go to bed berry soon, he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke. Avast! heave |
| to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an awful question. Now what's your |
| answer? When dis old brack man dies, said the negro slowly, changing his |
| whole air and demeanor, he hisself won't go nowhere; but some bressed angel |
| will come and fetch him. Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they |
| fetched Elijah? And fetch him where? Up dere, said Fleece, holding his |
| tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very solemnly. So, then, |
| you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are dead? |
| But don't you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top, eh? |
| |
| Didn't say dat t'all, said Fleece, again in the sulks. You said up there, |
| didn't you, and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing. |
| But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber's |
| hole, cook; but no, no, cook, you don't get there, except you go the |
| regular way, round by the rigging. It's a ticklish business, but must be |
| done, or else it's no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your |
| tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and |
| clap t'other a'top of your heart, when I'm giving my orders, cook. What! |
| that your heart, there? --that's your gizzard! Aloft! aloft! --that's it --now |
| you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention. All 'dention, said |
| the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his |
| grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time. |
| |
| Well then, cook; you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I |
| have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don't you? Well, |
| for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, |
| the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. |
| Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that |
| done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in |
| the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in |
| pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now |
| ye may go. |
| .. <p 297 > |
| But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled. Cook, give |
| me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D'ye hear? away you |
| sail, then. --Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go. --Avast heaving again! |
| |
| Whale-balls for breakfast --don't forget. Wish, by gor! whale eat him, |
| 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa |
| Shark hisself, muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage |
| ejaculation he went to his hammock. |
| .. <p 290n. > |
| A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable |
| hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes |
| or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier |
| than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, |
| causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you |
| cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But |
| this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared |
| with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the |
| |
| other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is |
| |
| to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the made |
| whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the |
| |
| body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the |
| point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes. |
| .. <p 297 > |
| .. < chapter lxv 12 THE WHALE AS A DISH > |
| |
| That mortal man should feed upon |
| the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, |
| as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a |
| little into the history and philosophy of it. It is upon record, that three |
| centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in |
| France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's |
| time, a certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an |
| admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, |
| are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine |
| eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and |
| being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. |
| |
| The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great |
| porpoise grant from the crown. The fact is, that among his hunters at least, |
| the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so |
| much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one |
| hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced |
| of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of |
| |
| .. <p 298 > |
| cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they |
| live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. |
| Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for |
| infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me |
| that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by |
| a whaling vessel --that these men actually lived for several months on the |
| mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the |
| blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called fritters; which, |
| indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling |
| something like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. |
| |
| They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly |
| keep his hands off. But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized |
| dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too |
| fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating |
| as the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid |
| pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; |
| like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third |
| month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter. |
| Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other |
| substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it |
| is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge |
| oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made. |
| In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The |
| casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish |
| lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are |
| then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor |
| somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; |
| and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually |
| dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their |
| own, so as to be able to tell a calf's head from their own heads; which, |
| indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why |
| .. <p 299 > |
| a young buck with an intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow |
| one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully |
| at him, with an Et tu Brute! expression. It is not, perhaps, entirely |
| because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the |
| eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the |
| |
| consideration before mentioned: i. e. that a man should eat a newly murdered |
| thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first |
| man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; |
| and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; |
| and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of |
| a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows |
| of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's |
| jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable |
| for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a |
| coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in |
| the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who |
| nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy |
| pate-de-foie-gras. But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? |
| and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, |
| there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, |
| what is that handle made of? --what but the bones of the brother of the very ox |
| you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that |
| fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the |
| Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally |
| indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that |
| society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens. |
| .. <p 300 > |
| .. < chapter lxvi 2 THE SHARK MASSACRE > |
| |
| When in the Southern Fishery, a |
| captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at |
| night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once |
| to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly |
| laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set |
| about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm |
| a'lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the |
| reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, |
| two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the |
| deck to see that all goes well. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the |
| Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts |
| of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six |
| hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by |
| morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not |
| so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably |
| diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a |
| procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle |
| them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case |
| with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such |
| sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought |
| the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it. |
| nevertheless, upon stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was |
| concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on |
| deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately |
| suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so |
| |
| that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these |
| .. <p 301 > |
| two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant |
| murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, |
| seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed |
| and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this |
| brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They |
| viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like |
| flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed |
| swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by |
| the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses |
| and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality |
| seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the |
| individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his |
| skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he |
| tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. Queequeg no care what |
| god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and |
| down; wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be |
| one dam Ingin. |
| .. <p 301n. > |
| The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about |
| the bigness of a man's spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to |
| the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly |
| flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon |
| is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally |
| honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to |
| thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle. |
| .. <p 301 > |
| .. < chapter lxvii 23 CUTTING IN > |
| |
| It was a Saturday night, and such a |
| Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all |
| whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; |
| .. <p 302 > |
| every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten |
| thousand red oxen to the sea gods. In the first place, the enormous cutting |
| tackles, among other ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally |
| painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift --this vast bunch of |
| grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, |
| |
| the strongest point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like |
| rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, |
| and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this |
| block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. |
| And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, |
| armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the |
| insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, |
| |
| a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and |
| the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in |
| one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over |
| on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in |
| frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to |
| the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping |
| heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till |
| at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls |
| upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into |
| sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of |
| blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an |
| orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is |
| sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by |
| the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, |
| and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the |
| |
| scarf, simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; |
| and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, |
| |
| it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end |
| grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a |
| moment |
| .. <p 303 > |
| or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from |
| the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it |
| swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard. One of |
| the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called a |
| boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a |
| considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the |
| end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a |
| hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this |
| accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a |
| scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging |
| slicings, severs it completely in twain; so that while the short lower part |
| is still fast, the long upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, |
| and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, |
| and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the |
| whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip |
| through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the |
| blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling |
| away the long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited |
| serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering |
| simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the |
| blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and |
| all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction. |
| .. <p 303 > |
| .. < chapter lxviii 29 THE BLANKET > |
| |
| I have given no small attention to that |
| not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it |
| with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. |
| .. <p 304 > |
| My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion. The |
| question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what |
| his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, |
| close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from |
| eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness. Now, however |
| preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's skin as being of |
| that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no |
| arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other |
| dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same blubber; and the |
| outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that |
| be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may |
| scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat |
| resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible |
| and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only |
| contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several |
| such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is |
| transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have |
| sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At |
| any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, |
| as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely |
| thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the |
| whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the |
| skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that |
| the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the |
| skin of a new-born child. But no more of this. Assuming the blubber to be the |
| skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large |
| Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it |
| is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed |
| state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some |
| idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part |
| of whose mere |
| .. <p 305 > |
| integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the |
| ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff |
| of the whale's skin. In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not |
| the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all |
| over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick |
| array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these |
| marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above |
| mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the |
| body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant |
| eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground |
| for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call |
| those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is |
| the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of |
| the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with |
| a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous |
| hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those |
| mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This |
| allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the |
| other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not |
| seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great |
| part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, |
| altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New |
| England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of |
| violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs --I should say, that |
| those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It |
| also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile |
| contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, |
| full-grown bulls of the species. A word or two more concerning this matter |
| of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is |
| stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, |
| this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is |
| .. <p 306 > |
| indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still |
| better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It |
| is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to |
| keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. |
| What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of |
| the north, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found |
| exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are |
| your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; |
| creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller |
| in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has |
| lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it |
| then --except after explanation --that this great monster, to whom corporeal |
| warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be |
| found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, |
| when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, |
| perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found |
| glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by |
| experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo |
| negro in summer. It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a |
| |
| strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare |
| virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the |
| whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world |
| without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the |
| Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, |
| |
| O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. But how easy and how |
| hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. |
| Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale! |
| .. <p 307 > |
| .. < chapter lxix 2 THE FUNERAL > |
| |
| Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go |
| astern! The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of |
| the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it |
| has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. it is still colossal. slowly it |
| floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the |
| insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming |
| |
| fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The |
| vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and |
| every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods |
| of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost |
| stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild |
| azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous |
| breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite |
| perspectives. There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The |
| sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in |
| black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I |
| ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral |
| they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which |
| not the mightiest whale is free. Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body |
| is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some |
| timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance |
| obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass |
| floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; |
| straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down |
| in the log -- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for |
| years afterwards, |
| .. <p 308 > |
| perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a |
| vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. |
| There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's |
| the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the |
| earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy! Thus, while |
| in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in |
| his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world. Are you a believer |
| in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far |
| deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them. |
| .. <p 308 > |
| .. < chapter lxx 14 THE SPHYNX > |
| |
| It should not have been omitted that |
| previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. |
| Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon |
| which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves; and not without |
| reason. Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a |
| neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that |
| very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must |
| operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his |
| subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and |
| oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these |
| untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that |
| subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the |
| ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all |
| adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical |
| point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, |
| .. <p 309 > |
| then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm |
| whale? When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a |
| cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it |
| is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown |
| leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale's head embraces nearly one |
| third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that, |
| even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to |
| attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales The Pequod's whale being |
| decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship's |
| side --about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be |
| buoyed up by its native element. And there with the strained craft steeply |
| leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower |
| mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the |
| waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the |
| giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith. When this last task was |
| accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their dinner. Silence |
| reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper |
| calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its |
| noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea. A short space elapsed, and up into |
| this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the |
| quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the |
| main-chains he took Stubb's long spade --still remaining there after the |
| whale's decapitation --and striking it into the lower part of the |
| half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so |
| stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head. It was a black |
| and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it |
| seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. Speak, thou vast and venerable head, |
| muttered Ahab, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there |
| lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing |
| that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. |
| .. <p 310 > |
| that head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's |
| foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and |
| anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with |
| bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was |
| thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast |
| slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives |
| to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their |
| flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to |
| each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate |
| when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the |
| deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on |
| unharmed --while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have |
| borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast |
| seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one |
| syllable is thine! Sail ho! cried a triumphant voice from the |
| main-masthead. Aye? Well, now, that's cheering, cried Ahab, suddenly |
| erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. |
| |
| That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. |
| --Where away? Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her |
| breeze to us! Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along |
| that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of |
| man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the |
| smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in |
| mind. |
| .. <p 311 > |
| .. < chapter lxxi 2 THE JEROBOAM'S STORY > |
| |
| Hand in hand, ship and breeze |
| blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began |
| to rock. By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned |
| mast-heads proved her a whale-ship. but as she was so far to windward, and |
| shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod |
| could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would |
| be made. Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the |
| ships of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which |
| signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels |
| attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders |
| are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable |
| distances, and with no small facility. The Pequod's signal was at last |
| responded to by the stranger's setting her own; which proved the ship to be |
| the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam |
| under the Pequod's lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the |
| side-ladder was being rigged by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting |
| captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern in |
| token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the |
| Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, |
| was fearful of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though himself and boat's |
| crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and |
| an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously |
| adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come |
| into direct contact with the Pequod. But this did by no means prevent all |
| communication. Preserving an interval of some few yards between itself and |
| the |
| .. <p 312 > |
| ship, the Jeroboam's boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep |
| parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this |
| time it blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at |
| times by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed |
| some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings |
| again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a |
| conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not |
| without still another interruption of a very different sort. Pulling an oar |
| in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild |
| whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities. He was a |
| small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and |
| wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a |
| faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were |
| rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes. |
| So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed -- That's |
| he! that's he! the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho's company told us of! |
| |
| Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain |
| man among her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. |
| According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that |
| the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost |
| everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this: He had been originally |
| nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had been a |
| great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times |
| descended from heaven by the way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy |
| opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, |
| instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A |
| strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for |
| Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a |
| steady, common sense exterior and offered himself as a green-hand candidate |
| for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; |
| .. <p 313 > |
| but straightway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity |
| broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and |
| commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby |
| he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and |
| vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he |
| declared these things; --the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited |
| imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united to |
| invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with |
| an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a |
| man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he |
| refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous captain would fain |
| have been rid of him; but apprised that that individual's intention was to |
| land him in the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his |
| seals and vials -- devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, |
| in case this intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his |
| disciples among the crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and |
| told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. |
| He was therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel |
| to be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass |
| that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all |
| this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and |
| mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand than |
| ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command; |
| nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors, |
| mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in |
| obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to |
| a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are |
| true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the |
| measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power |
| of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return to the |
| Pequod. I fear not thy epidemic, man, said Ahab from the bulwarks |
| .. <p 314 > |
| to Captain Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern; come on board. But now |
| Gabriel started to his feet. Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! |
| Beware of the horrible plague! Gabriel, Gabriel! cried Captain Mayhew; |
| |
| thou must either-- But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far |
| ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech. Hast thou seen the White Whale? |
| demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back. Think, think of thy whale-boat, |
| stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail! I tell thee again, Gabriel, |
| that-- But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends. Nothing was |
| said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which |
| by one of those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. |
| |
| Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale's head jogged about very violently, and |
| Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his |
| archangel nature seemed to warrant. When this interlude was over, Captain |
| Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without |
| frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and |
| the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him. It seemed that the Jeroboam had |
| not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her people were |
| reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. |
| Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain |
| against attacking the white whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his |
| gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the |
| Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year |
| or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, |
| the chief mate, burned with ardor to encounter him; and the captain himself |
| being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the |
| archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading |
| five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after |
| .. <p 315 > |
| much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last |
| succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the |
| main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling |
| forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his |
| divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and |
| with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations |
| upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! |
| a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, |
| temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, |
| the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, |
| |
| and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of |
| about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any |
| oarsman's head; but the mate for ever sank. It is well to parenthesize here, |
| |
| that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps |
| almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is |
| thus annihilated; oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the |
| thigh-board, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and |
| accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more |
| instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of |
| violence is discernible; the man being stark dead. The whole calamity, with |
| the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship. Raising a |
| piercing shriek -- The vial! the vial! Gabriel called off the |
| terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible |
| event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous |
| disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of |
| only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have |
| chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a |
| nameless terror to the ship. Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put |
| such questions to him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring |
| whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To |
| which Ahab answered -- Aye. Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to |
| his feet, glaring |
| .. <p 316 > |
| upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger |
| -- Think, think of the blasphemer --dead, and down there! --beware of the |
| blasphemer's end! Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, |
| |
| Captain, I have just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for |
| one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag. Every |
| whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose |
| delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere |
| chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never |
| reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two |
| or three years or more. Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It |
| was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in |
| consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, |
| Death himself might well have been the post-boy. Can'st not read it? cried |
| ahab. give it me, man. aye, aye it's but a dim scrawl; --what's this? As |
| he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his |
| knife slightly split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way, |
| hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship. Meantime, Ahab |
| holding the letter, muttered, Mr. Har--yes, Mr. Harry--(a woman's pinny hand, |
| --the man's wife, I'll wager) -- Aye --Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam; --why |
| it's Macey, and he's dead! Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife, |
| sighed Mayhew; but let me have it. Nay, keep it thyself, cried Gabriel to |
| Ahab; thou art soon going that way. Curses throttle thee! yelled Ahab. |
| |
| Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it; and taking the fatal missive |
| from Starbuck's hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it |
| over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted |
| from rowing; the boat drifted a little towards the ship's stern; so that, as |
| if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He |
| clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on |
| it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then |
| Gabriel |
| .. <p 317 > |
| shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner |
| the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod. As, after this |
| interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many |
| strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair. |
| .. <p 317 > |
| .. < chapter lxxiii 23 STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND THEN HAVE > |
| |
| |
| A TALK OVER HIM It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm |
| Whale's prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it |
| continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For |
| the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is |
| to pray heaven the tackles may hold. Now, during the past night and forenoon, |
| |
| the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional |
| patches of |
| .. <p 322 > |
| yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species |
| of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking |
| anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those |
| inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for |
| them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts |
| without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought |
| alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made |
| that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered. Nor |
| was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats, |
| Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further |
| away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at the mast-head. But |
| suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water, |
| and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast. |
| An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being |
| dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster |
| come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but |
| suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he |
| wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel. Cut, cut! was |
| the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the |
| point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But |
| having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very |
| rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with |
| all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the |
| struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the |
| tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the |
| contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet |
| advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; |
| when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, |
| |
| as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under |
| her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that |
| the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale |
| beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free |
| .. <p 323 > |
| to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his |
| course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him, so |
| that they performed a complete circuit. Meantime, they hauled more and more |
| upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered |
| Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle |
| went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm |
| Whale's body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking |
| at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains |
| that poured from the smitten rock. At last his spout grew thick, and with a |
| frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse. While the two |
| headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways |
| getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between |
| them. I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard, said |
| Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so |
| ignoble a leviathan. Wants with it? said Flask, coiling some spare line in |
| the boat's bow, did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm |
| Whale's head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right |
| Whale's on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never |
| afterwards capsize? Why not? I don't know, but I heard that gamboge |
| ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all about ships' charms. |
| But I sometimes think he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half |
| like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of |
| carved into a snake's head, Stubb? Sink him! I never look at him at all; |
| but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and he standing hard by the |
| bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask --pointing into the sea with |
| a peculiar motion of both hands -- Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to |
| be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his |
| having been stowed away on board ship? He's the devil, I say. The reason why |
| you don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries |
| it |
| .. <p 324 > |
| coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he's |
| always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots. He sleeps in his |
| boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've seen him lay of nights |
| in a coil of rigging. No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he |
| coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the rigging. What's the old man |
| have so much to do with him for? Striking up a swap or a bargain, I |
| suppose. Bargain? --about what? Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent |
| after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and |
| |
| get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that |
| sort, and then he'll surrender Moby Dick. Pooh! Stubb, you are |
| skylarking; how can Fedallah do that? I don't know, Flask, but the devil |
| is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he |
| went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once, switching his tail about |
| devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at |
| home. Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, |
| switching his hoofs, up and says, "I want John." "What for?" says the old |
| governor, "What business is that of yours," says the devil, getting mad, --"I |
| want to use him." "Take him," says the governor --and by the Lord, Flask, if |
| the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with |
| him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp-- aint you all ready |
| there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get the whale alongside. I think |
| I remember some such story as you were telling, said Flask, when at last the |
| two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, but I |
| can't remember where. Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three |
| bloody-minded soldadoes? Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did? No; |
| |
| never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you |
| suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is |
| now on board the Pequod? |
| .. <p 325 > |
| |
| Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live for |
| ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a |
| wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into |
| the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can crawl into a port-hole? Tell me |
| that, Mr. Flask? How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb? Do you see |
| that mainmast there? pointing to the ship; well, that's the figure one; |
| now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string 'em along in a row |
| with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn't begin to be |
| Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn't show hoops enough to |
| make oughts enough. but see here, stubb, i thought you a little boasted |
| just now, that you meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good |
| chance. Now, if he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he |
| is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard --tell |
| me that? Give him a good ducking, anyhow. But he'd crawl back. Duck |
| him again; and keep ducking him. Suppose he should take it into his head to |
| duck you, though -- yes, and drown you --what then? I should like to see him |
| try it; I'd give him such a pair of black eyes that he wouldn't dare to show |
| his face in the admiral's cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the |
| orlop there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he |
| sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; do you suppose I'm afraid of the |
| devil? Who's afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him |
| and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about |
| kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the |
| devil kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor! Do you suppose |
| Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab? Do I suppose it? You'll know it |
| before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a sharp look-out on him; and |
| if I see anything very suspicious going on, I'll just take him by the nape |
| of his neck, and say --Look here, Beelzebub, you don't do |
| .. <p 326 > |
| it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I'll make a grab into his pocket |
| for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and |
| heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump --do you see; and |
| then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, |
| he'll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his |
| legs. And what will you do with the tail, Stubb? Do with it? Sell it for |
| an ox whip when we get home; -- what else? Now, do you mean what you say, |
| and have been saying all along, stubb? Mean or not mean, here we are at |
| the ship. The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard |
| side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for |
| securing him. Didn't I tell you so? said Flask; yes, you'll soon see this |
| right whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's. In good time, |
| Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards |
| the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained |
| her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one |
| side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other |
| side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. |
| Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all |
| these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right. In |
| disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the |
| same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm |
| whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the |
| former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with |
| all the well known black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece. |
| But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of |
| both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled |
| a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers. Meantime, Fedallah was |
| calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep |
| wrinkles there to the |
| .. <p 327 > |
| lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee |
| occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed |
| only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish |
| speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing things. |
| .. <p 327 > |
| .. < chapter lxxiv 7 THE SPERM WHALE'S HEAD--CONTRASTED VIEW > |
| |
| Here, now, are |
| two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay |
| together our own. Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and |
| |
| the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales |
| regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of |
| all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them |
| is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment |
| hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the |
| other, by merely stepping across the deck: --where, I should like to know, |
| will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here? In the |
| first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads. |
| Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical |
| symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly lacks. There is |
| more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold it, you |
| involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading |
| dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the |
| pepper and salt color of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age |
| and large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a |
| |
| grey-headed whale. Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads |
| -- namely, the two most important organs, the eye and the ear. |
| .. <p 328 > |
| Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either |
| whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, |
| which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it |
| to the magnitude of the head. Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the |
| whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly |
| ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. in a word, the position of |
| the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for |
| yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through |
| your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of |
| vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more |
| behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with |
| dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more |
| than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two |
| backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): |
| for what is it that makes the front of a man --what, indeed, but his eyes? |
| Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so |
| planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one |
| picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes, |
| effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which |
| towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; |
| this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent |
| organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this |
| side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be |
| profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look |
| out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. |
| But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two |
| distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the |
| whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be |
| remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes. A curious and most |
| puzzling question might be started concerning |
| .. <p 329 > |
| this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a |
| hint. so long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is |
| involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever |
| objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, |
| that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, |
| it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any |
| two things --however large or however small --at one and the same instant of |
| time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you |
| now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of |
| profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to |
| bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your |
| contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his |
| eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more |
| comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same |
| moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of |
| him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as |
| marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through |
| the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly |
| investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. It may be but an |
| idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary |
| vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four |
| boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; |
| |
| I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of |
| volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision |
| must involve them. But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If |
| you are an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two |
| heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf |
| whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so |
| wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect |
| to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the sperm |
| whale and the |
| .. <p 330 > |
| right. While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the |
| latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite |
| imperceptible from without. Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the |
| whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder |
| through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as |
| the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches |
| of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of |
| hearing? Not at all. -- Why then do you try to enlarge your mind? Subtilize |
| it. Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant |
| over the sperm whale's head, so that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending |
| by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that |
| the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend |
| |
| into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here |
| by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and |
| chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a |
| glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. But come out now, and |
| look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of an |
| immense snuff-box, with a hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry |
| it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a |
| terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the |
| fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more |
| terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky |
| whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet |
| long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world |
| like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out |
| of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw |
| have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach |
| to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. In most |
| cases this lower jaw --being easily unhinged by a practised artist --is |
| disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, |
| and furnishing a supply of |
| .. <p 331 > |
| that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of |
| curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to |
| riding-whips. With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it |
| were an anchor; and when the proper time comes --some few days after the other |
| work --Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set |
| to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then |
| the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, |
| they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of |
| wild wood-lands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, |
| much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion. The |
| jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building |
| houses. |
| .. <p 331 > |
| .. < chapter lxxv 17 THE RIGHT WHALE'S HEAD--CONTRASTED VIEW > |
| |
| Crossing the |
| deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's head. As in |
| general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a Roman |
| war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a |
| broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a |
| gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager |
| likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same last or |
| shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might |
| very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny. But as you come nearer |
| to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your |
| point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two f-shaped |
| spout-holes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and |
| these |
| .. <p 332 > |
| spiracles, the apertures in its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your |
| eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass |
| --this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the crown, and |
| the Southern fishers the bonnet of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely |
| on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a |
| bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that |
| nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you; |
| |
| unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term crown also |
| bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in thinking how |
| this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green |
| crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this |
| whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look |
| at that hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and |
| pout, by carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; |
| a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. A great |
| pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is |
| about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was |
| sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. |
| Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. |
| Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an |
| Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is |
| about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a |
| regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us |
| with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whale-bone, say |
| three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or |
| crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily |
| mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through |
| which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains |
| the small fish, when open-mouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding |
| time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, |
| there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some |
| whalemen calculate |
| .. <p 333 > |
| the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the |
| certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of |
| analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far |
| greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable. In |
| old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning |
| these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous whiskers |
| inside of the whale's mouth; another, hogs' bristles; a third old gentleman |
| in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: There are about two hundred |
| |
| and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his |
| tongue on each side of his mouth. As every one knows, these same hogs' |
| bristles, fins, whiskers, blinds, or whatever you please, furnish to |
| the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this |
| particular, the demand has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's |
| time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the |
| fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of |
| the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like |
| thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the |
| umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone. But now forget all about |
| blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale's mouth, |
| look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically |
| ranged about, would you not think you were inside the great Haarlem organ, |
| and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug |
| of the softest Turkey --the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of |
| the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting |
| it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I |
| should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that |
| amount of oil. Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I |
| .. <p 334 > |
| started with --that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely |
| different heads. To sum up, then; in the Right Whale's there is no great |
| well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower |
| jaw, like the Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those |
| blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, |
| |
| the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one. |
| Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie |
| together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not |
| be very long in following. Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's |
| there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the |
| forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a |
| prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. |
| But mark the other head's expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by |
| accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does |
| not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in |
| facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm |
| Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. |
| .. <p 333n. > |
| This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather |
| a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of |
| the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather |
| brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance. |
| .. <p 334 > |
| .. < chapter lxxvi 24 THE BATTERING-RAM > |
| |
| Ere quitting, for the nonce, the |
| Sperm Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply |
| --particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I |
| would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself |
| some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may |
| be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily |
| settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of |
| the most appalling, |
| .. <p 335 > |
| but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded |
| history. You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm |
| Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the |
| water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably |
| backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which |
| receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely |
| under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were |
| entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no external |
| nose; and that what nose he has --his spout hole --is on the top of his head; |
| you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one |
| third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have |
| perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, |
| without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. |
| Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward |
| sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; |
| |
| and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the |
| full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one |
| wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise |
| the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the |
| substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some |
| previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the |
| whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this |
| difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a |
| boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The |
| severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human |
| arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm |
| Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks |
| in it. Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded |
| Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do |
| the sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming |
| contact, any merely hard substance, |
| .. <p 336 > |
| like iron or wood. No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and cork, |
| enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured |
| takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron |
| crowbars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive |
| at. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that |
| as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, |
| at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I |
| know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise |
| inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the |
| surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering |
| the unobstructed elasticity of its envelop; considering the unique interior |
| of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical |
| lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and |
| unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to |
| atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the |
| irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive |
| of all elements contributes. Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, |
| impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there |
| swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately |
| estimated as piled wood is --by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as |
| the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the |
| specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this |
| expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable |
| braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, |
| and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage |
| through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you |
| would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, |
| you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a |
| thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the |
| provincials then? What befel the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's |
| veil at Sais? |
| .. <p 337 > |
| .. < chapter lxxvii 2 THE GREAT HEIDELBURGH TUN > |
| |
| Now comes the Baling of |
| the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the |
| curious internal structure of the thing operated upon. Regarding the Sperm |
| whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways |
| divide it into two quoins, whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming |
| the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones; |
| |
| its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the |
| whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, |
| |
| and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally |
| divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance. The lower |
| subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by |
| the crossing and re-crossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough |
| elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as |
| the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. |
| And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale's |
| vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical |
| adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always |
| replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so |
| the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily |
| vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, |
| limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed |
| in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, |
| |
| yet, upon |
| .. <p 338 > |
| exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth |
| beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just |
| forming in water. A large whale's case generally yields about five hundred |
| gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it |
| is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the |
| ticklish business of securing what you can. I know not with what fine and |
| costly material the heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative |
| richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken |
| pearl-colored membrane, like the line of a fine pelisse, forming the inner |
| surface of the Sperm Whale's case. It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh |
| Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the |
| head; and since --as has been elsewhere set forth --the head embraces one third |
| of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty |
| feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth |
| of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's side. |
| As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close to |
| the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti |
| magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, |
| untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its |
| invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at |
| |
| last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the |
| enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make |
| quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter. Thus much being said, attend |
| now, I pray you, to that marvellous and --in this particular instance |
| --almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is |
| tapped. |
| .. <p 337n. > |
| Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. |
| I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs |
| from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one |
| side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides. |
| .. <p 339 > |
| .. < chapter lxxviii 2 CISTERN AND BUCKETS > |
| |
| Nimble as a cat, Tashtego |
| mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon |
| the overhanging main-yard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the |
| |
| hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip, |
| consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block. |
| Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one |
| end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, |
| hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till |
| |
| dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There --still high elevated |
| above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries --he seems some |
| Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A |
| short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for |
| the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds |
| |
| very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the |
| walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search |
| is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been |
| attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across |
| the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist |
| the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up |
| a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward |
| guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the |
| word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like |
| a dairy-maid's pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the |
| full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied |
| into a large tub. Then re-mounting aloft, it again goes through the same |
| round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego |
| has to ram his long pole harder and |
| .. <p 340 > |
| harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the |
| pole have gone down. Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time |
| in this way; several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all |
| at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild |
| Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed |
| hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place |
| where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself |
| would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons; how it |
| was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth |
| or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up --my God! poor Tashtego --like the twin |
| reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into |
| this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went |
| clean out of sight! Man overboard! cried Daggoo, who amid the general |
| consternation first came to his senses. Swing the bucket this way! and |
| putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold |
| on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, |
| almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, |
| there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before |
| lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if |
| that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor |
| Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which |
| he had sunk. At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was |
| clearing the whip --which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles --a |
| sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of |
| the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast |
| vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and |
| shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the |
| entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of giving |
| way; an event still more likely from the violent motions of the head. Come |
| down, come down! yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but |
| .. <p 341 > |
| with one hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should |
| drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul |
| line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the |
| buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out. In heaven's name, |
| man, cried Stubb, are you ramming home a cartridge there? --Avast! How |
| will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast, |
| |
| will ye! Stand clear of the tackle! cried a voice like the bursting of a |
| rocket. Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass |
| dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the |
| suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; |
| |
| and all caught their breath, as half swinging --now over the sailors' heads, |
| and now over the water --Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly |
| beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive |
| Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had |
| the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in |
| its hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The |
| next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the |
| rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted every |
| ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the |
| diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed |
| a little off from the ship. Ha! ha! cried Daggoo, all at once, from his |
| now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, |
| we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as |
| an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave. both! both! --it is both! |
| --cried daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen |
| boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair |
| of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to |
| the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very |
| brisk. |
| .. <p 342 > |
| Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the |
| slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges |
| near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his |
| sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our |
| |
| poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a |
| leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and |
| might occasion great trouble; -- he had thrust back the leg, and by a |
| dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that |
| with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way --head foremost. As |
| for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. And |
| thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the |
| deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, |
| in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; |
| which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in |
| the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing. I know that this |
| queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to seem incredible to some |
| landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or heard of some one's |
| falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom happens, and |
| with much less reason too than the Indian's, considering the exceeding |
| slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale's well. But, peradventure, it may |
| be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated head |
| of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet |
| thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than |
| itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time |
| poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, |
| leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well --a double welded, |
| hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than the sea water, |
| and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid |
| sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially counteracted |
| by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank |
| very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for |
| performing his agile |
| .. <p 343 > |
| obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so |
| it was. Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious |
| perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant |
| spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and |
| sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled |
| --the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch |
| of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far |
| over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, |
| have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there? |
| .. <p 343 > |
| .. < chapter lxxix 14 THE PRAIRE > |
| |
| To scan the lines of his face, or feel |
| the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a thing which no |
| Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would |
| |
| seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the |
| Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the |
| Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only |
| treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of |
| horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the |
| modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his |
| disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological |
| characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill |
| qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the |
| whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can. |
| Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has |
| no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the |
| features; and since it perhaps |
| .. <p 344 > |
| most modifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would |
| seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely |
| affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire, |
| cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to |
| the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping |
| without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from |
| Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan |
| is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the |
| same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no |
| blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have |
| |
| been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast |
| head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by |
| the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which |
| so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal |
| beadle on his throne. In some particulars, perhaps, the most imposing |
| physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front |
| of his head. This aspect is sublime. In thought a fine human brow is like the |
| east when troubled with the morning. in the repose of the pasture, the |
| curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon |
| up mountain defiles, the elephant's brow is majestic. Human or animal, the |
| mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to |
| their decrees. It signifies God: done this day by my hand. But in most |
| creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of |
| alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like |
| Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes |
| themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them |
| in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending |
| there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer. |
| But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent |
| in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front |
| view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers |
| .. <p 345 > |
| more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see |
| no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, |
| ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad |
| firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom |
| of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow |
| diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur does not domineer upon you |
| so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic |
| depression in the forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of |
| genius. But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever |
| written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his |
| doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his |
| pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been |
| known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their |
| child-magian thoughts. they deified the crocodile of the nile, because the |
| crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or as least it |
| is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any |
| highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the |
| merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now |
| egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's |
| high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. Champollion deciphered the |
| wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the |
| Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other |
| human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who |
| read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face, in its |
| profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read |
| the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. |
| Read if it you can. |
| .. <p 346 > |
| .. < chapter lxxx 2 THE NUT > |
| |
| If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a |
| Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it |
| is impossible to square. In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at |
| least twenty feet in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of |
| this skull is as the side view of a moderately inclined plane resting |
| throughout on a level base. But in life --as we have elsewhere seen --this |
| inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous |
| superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a |
| crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this |
| crater -- in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many |
| in depth --reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at |
| least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away |
| behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified |
| fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, |
| that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale |
| has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the |
| cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and |
| convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea |
| of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his |
| intelligence. It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this |
| Leviathan, in the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As |
| for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. |
| The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common |
| world. If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view |
| of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be |
| .. <p 347 > |
| struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, |
| and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled |
| down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would |
| involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one |
| part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say --This man had no |
| self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with |
| the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to |
| yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the |
| most exalted potency is. But if from the comparative dimensions of the |
| whale's proper brain, you deem it incapable of being adequately charted, |
| then I have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any |
| quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae |
| to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance |
| to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are |
| absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take |
| it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once |
| pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the |
| vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked |
| prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an |
| important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum |
| through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will be |
| found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your |
| skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and |
| noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that |
| flag which I fling half out to the world. Apply this spinal branch of |
| phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first |
| neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will |
| measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a triangular |
| figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebrae |
| the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large |
| capacity. Now, of course, this |
| .. <p 348 > |
| canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance -- the spinal |
| cord --as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And what is |
| still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's cavity, the spinal |
| cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain. |
| Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map |
| out the whale's spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the |
| wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated |
| by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord. But leaving this |
| hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely assume the |
| spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the sperm whale's hump. This |
| august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebrae, and |
| is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From its relative |
| situation then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or |
| indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is |
| indomitable, you will yet have reason to know. |
| .. <p 348 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxi 21 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE VIRGIN > |
| |
| The predestinated day |
| arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of |
| Bremen. At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and |
| Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals of |
| latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the |
| Pacific. For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her |
| respects. While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and |
| dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing |
| in the bows instead of the stern. |
| .. <p 349 > |
| |
| What has he in his hand there? cried Starbuck, pointing to something |
| wavingly held by the German. Impossible! --a lamp-feeder! Not that, said |
| Stubb, no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's coming off to make |
| us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big tin can there alongside |
| of him? --that's his boiling water. Oh! he's all right, is the Yarman. Go |
| along with you, cried Flask, it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He's out |
| of oil, and has come a-begging. However curious it may seem for an oil-ship |
| to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly |
| contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes |
| such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer |
| did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare. As he mounted the |
| deck, ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what he had in his |
| hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his complete |
| ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to his |
| lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into |
| his hammock at night in profound darkness --his last drop of Bremen oil being |
| gone, and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; |
| concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is |
| technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the |
| name of Jungfrau or the Virgin. His necessities supplied, Derick departed; |
| but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously |
| |
| raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was |
| Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he |
| slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders. Now, the |
| game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that soon |
| followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's keels. There were |
| eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all |
| abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as |
| closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a |
| .. <p 350 > |
| great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon |
| the sea. Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a |
| huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as |
| by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted |
| with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to |
| the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such |
| venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their |
| wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the |
| white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell |
| formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and |
| laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in |
| torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which |
| seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters |
| behind him to upbubble. Who's got some paregoric? said Stubb, he has the |
| stomach-ache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! |
| |
| Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul |
| wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so |
| before? it must be, he's lost his tiller. As an overladen Indiaman bearing |
| down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens, |
| buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged |
| bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose |
| the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. |
| Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were |
| hard to say. Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that |
| wounded arm, cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him. Mind |
| he don't sling thee with it, cried Starbuck. Give way, or the German will |
| have him. With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this |
| one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most |
| valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going |
| with such great velocity, moreover, |
| .. <p 351 > |
| as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture, the Pequod's keel |
| had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the great start he |
| had had, Derick's boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by |
| his foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already |
| so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they could |
| completely overtake and pass him. as for derick, he seemed quite confident |
| that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook |
| his lamp-feeder at the other boats. The ungracious and ungrateful dog! |
| cried Starbuck; he mocks and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for |
| him not five minutes ago! --then in his old intense whisper -- give way, |
| greyhounds! Dog to it! I tell ye what it is, men --cried Stubb to his crew |
| -- It's against my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villanous |
| Yarman --Pull--won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love |
| brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don't some of |
| ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard --we |
| don't budge an inch --we're becalmed. Halloo, here's grass growing in the |
| boat's bottom --and by the Lord, the mast there's budding. This won't do, |
| boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit |
| fire or not? Oh! see the suds he makes! cried Flask, dancing up and down |
| -- What a hump --Oh, do pile on the beef --lays like a log! Oh! my lads, do |
| spring --slap-jacks and quohogs for supper, you know, my lads --baked clams and |
| muffins --oh, do, do spring --he's a hundred barreler --don't lose him now |
| --don't oh, don't! -- see that Yarman --Oh! won't ye pull for your duff, my |
| lads --such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm? There goes three |
| thousand dollars, men! --a bank! --a whole bank! The bank of England! --Oh, do, |
| |
| do, do! --What's that Yarman about now? At this moment Derick was in the act |
| of pitching his lamp-feeder at the advancing boats, and also his oil-can; |
| perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same |
| time economically accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the |
| backward toss. The unmannerly Dutch dogger! cried Stubb. Pull now, |
| .. <p 352 > |
| men, like fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What |
| d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty |
| pieces for the honor of old Gay-head? What d'ye say? I say, pull like |
| god-dam, --cried the Indian. Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of |
| the German, the Pequod's three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, |
| so disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude |
| of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up |
| proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, |
| |
| There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the |
| Yarman! Sail over him! But so decided an original start had Derick had, |
| that spite of all their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this |
| race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught |
| the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to |
| free his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to |
| capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage; --that was a |
| good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a mortal |
| start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter. An instant |
| more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's immediate wake, |
| while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made. |
| |
| It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now |
| going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented |
| jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this |
| hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every |
| billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled |
| towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing, |
| |
| making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the |
| piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make |
| known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained |
| up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration |
| through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably |
| .. <p 353 > |
| pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent |
| tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied. Seeing now |
| that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's boats the advantage, |
| and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to |
| him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would |
| for ever escape. But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, |
| than all three tigers --Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo -- instinctively sprang to |
| their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their |
| barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three |
| Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire! |
| The three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped the |
| German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer |
| were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels. Don't be |
| afraid, my butter-boxes, cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as |
| he shot by; ye'll be picked up presently --all right --I saw some sharks |
| astern --St. Bernard's dogs, you know --relieve distressed travellers. |
| Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sun-beam! Hurrah! --Here |
| we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in |
| mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain --makes the |
| wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there's danger of |
| being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a |
| fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones --all a rush down an endless |
| inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail! But the |
| monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded. |
| |
| With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a |
| force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the |
| harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using |
| all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope |
| to hold on; till at last --owing to the perpendicular strain from the |
| lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three |
| .. <p 354 > |
| ropes went straight down into the blue --the gunwales of the bows were almost |
| even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the |
| whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, |
| fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish. |
| But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this |
| |
| holding on, as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live |
| flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon |
| rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the |
| peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the |
| best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken |
| whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the |
| enormous surface of him --in a full grown sperm whale something less than |
| |
| square feet --the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an |
| astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, |
| above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on |
| his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the |
| weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of |
| twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on |
| board. As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down |
| into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, |
| nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what |
| landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the |
| utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight |
| inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible |
| that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big |
| weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of |
| board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said -- Canst |
| thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The |
| sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the |
| habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; |
| darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear! This |
| the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments |
| .. <p 355 > |
| should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his |
| tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him |
| from the Pequod's fish-spears! In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the |
| shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been |
| long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how |
| appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over |
| his head! Stand by, men; he stirs, cried Starbuck, as the three lines |
| suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by |
| magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman |
| felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in a great part from the |
| downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a |
| small ice-field will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it |
| into the sea. Haul in! Haul in! cried Starbuck again; he's rising. The |
| lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth could have |
| been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the |
| boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship's lengths of the |
| hunters. His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land |
| animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, |
| whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off |
| in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it |
| is, to have an entire nonvalvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that |
| when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once |
| begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by the |
| extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his |
| life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the |
| quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, |
| |
| that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even |
| as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of |
| far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this |
| whale, and perilously drew over his swaying |
| .. <p 356 > |
| flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady |
| jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the |
| natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending |
| its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came, |
| because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they |
| significantly call it, was untouched. As the boats now more closely |
| surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is |
| ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places |
| where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in |
| the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which |
| the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly |
| pitiable to see. but pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one |
| arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to |
| light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate |
| the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. |
| Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely |
| discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank. |
| |
| A nice spot, cried Flask; just let me prick him there once. Avast! |
| cried Starbuck, there's no need of that! But humane Starbuck was too late. |
| At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and |
| goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick |
| blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and |
| their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and |
| marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was |
| he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had |
| made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, |
| then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white |
| secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that |
| last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off |
| from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the |
| spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground --so the last long dying spout |
| of the whale. |
| .. <p 357 > |
| Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed |
| symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by |
| Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere |
| long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few inches |
| beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew |
| nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there |
| by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially |
| upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom. It so chanced that almost |
| upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded |
| harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch |
| before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the |
| dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, |
| and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must |
| needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account |
| for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a |
| lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the |
| flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? |
| It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was |
| discovered. What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous |
| cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further |
| discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the |
| sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, |
| Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung |
| on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been |
| capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when the |
| command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable strain upon |
| the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it |
| was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was |
| aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up the steep |
| gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory |
| inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the |
| unnatural dislocation. In |
| .. <p 358 > |
| vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable |
| fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timber-heads; and so low had the |
| whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, |
| while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, |
| |
| and the ship seemed on the point of going over. Hold on, hold on, won't |
| ye? cried Stubb to the body, don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink! |
| By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there; |
| avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a |
| pen-knife, and cut the big chains. Knife? Aye, aye, cried Queequeg, and |
| seizing the carpenter's heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and |
| steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, |
| |
| full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. |
| With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the |
| carcase sank. Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed |
| Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately |
| accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, |
| with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only |
| whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their |
| pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you |
| might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon |
| specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of |
| buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest |
| health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm |
| flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these |
| brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink. Be it said, however, that the Sperm |
| Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other species. Where one |
| of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the |
| species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of |
| bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more |
| than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there |
| are instances where, |
| .. <p 359 > |
| after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again rises, |
| more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are |
| generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of |
| animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In |
| the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right |
| |
| Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of |
| rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it |
| when it shall have ascended again. It was not long after the sinking of the |
| body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the |
| Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was |
| that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, |
| because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's |
| spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is |
| often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in |
| valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made |
| after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, |
| still in bold, hopeful chase. Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the |
| Dericks, my friend. |
| .. <p 359 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxii 24 THE HONOR AND GLORY OF WHALING > |
| |
| There are some |
| enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. The more I |
| dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very |
| spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great |
| honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great |
| demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed |
| distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself |
| .. <p 360 > |
| belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity. The gallant |
| Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honor of |
| our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was |
| not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our |
| profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill |
| men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; |
| how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the |
| sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying 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 |
| .. <p 361 > |
| 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 of the Philistines, Dagon by name; |
| who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the |
| palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him |
| remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the |
| tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket |
| should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let |
| not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, |
| have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye |
| a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred |
| trowsers we are much better entitled to st. george's decoration than they. |
| Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained |
| dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique |
| Crockett and Kit Carson --that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was |
| swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a |
| whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever |
| actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, |
| he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught |
| him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan. But, by the |
| best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale |
| is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah |
| and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim |
| the demigod then, why not the prophet? |
| .. <p 362 > |
| Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of |
| our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of |
| old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the |
| great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed |
| from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons |
| in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our |
| Lord; --Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for |
| ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, |
| saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its |
| periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; |
| |
| but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been |
| indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore |
| must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young |
| architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo |
| became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost |
| depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? |
| even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman? Perseus, St. George, |
| Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but |
| the whaleman's can head off like that? |
| .. <p 362 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxiii 26 JONAH HISTORICALLY REGARDED > |
| |
| Reference was made to |
| the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter. Now |
| some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the |
| whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing |
| out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of |
| Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; |
| .. <p 363 > |
| and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one |
| whit the less facts, for all that. One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason |
| for questioning the Hebrew story was this: --He had one of those quaint |
| old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of |
| which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head --a peculiarity |
| only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and |
| the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, |
| |
| A penny roll would choke him; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, |
| |
| Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the |
| Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as |
| temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable |
| enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would |
| accommodate a couple of whist tables, and comfortably seat all the players. |
| Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on |
| second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless. Another reason which |
| Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this matter |
| of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body |
| and the whale's gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to the |
| ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge |
| in the floating body of a dead whale -- even as the French soldiers in the |
| Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. |
| Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when |
| Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his |
| escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; |
| |
| and, I would add, possibly called The Whale, as some craft are nowadays |
| christened the Shark, the Gull, the Eagle. Nor have there been wanting |
| learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of |
| Jonah merely meant a life-preserver --an inflated bag of wind --which the |
| endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor |
| Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another |
| reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was |
| .. <p 364 > |
| swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was |
| vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the |
| Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point |
| of the Mediterranean coast. How is that? But was there no other way for the |
| whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He |
| might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to |
| speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and |
| another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would |
| involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to |
| speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for |
| any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of |
| Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that |
| great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make |
| modern history a liar. But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only |
| evinced his foolish pride of reason --a thing still more reprehensible in |
| him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from |
| the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and |
| abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a |
| Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via |
| the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general |
| miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks |
| devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries |
| ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish |
| Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which mosque was a miraculous lamp that |
| burnt without any oil. |
| .. <p 365 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxiv 2 PITCHPOLING > |
| |
| To make them run easily and swiftly, |
| the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some |
| whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the |
| bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it |
| may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water |
| are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to |
| make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his |
| boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, |
| took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, |
| where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though |
| diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel. He |
| seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did |
| it remain unwarranted by the event. Towards noon whales were raised; but so |
| soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift |
| precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium. |
| Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great exertion, |
| Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, |
| without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added |
| fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or |
| later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, |
| |
| or be content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was |
| impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained? Of all the |
| wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless |
| subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed |
| that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad |
| sword, in all its |
| .. <p 366 > |
| exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable with an inveterate |
| running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which |
| the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, |
| under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten |
| or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the |
| harpoon, and also of a lighter material--pine. It is furnished with a small |
| rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to |
| the hand after darting. But before going further, it is important to mention |
| here, that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the |
| lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently |
| successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the |
| harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. |
| As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any |
| pitchpoling comes into play. Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, |
| deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially |
| qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the |
| tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is |
| forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice |
| along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers |
| up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his |
| grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before |
| his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with |
| it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the |
| point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in |
| the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his |
| chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the |
| bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the |
| whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood. That drove the |
| spigot out of him! cries Stubb. 'Tis July's immortal Fourth; all fountains |
| must run wine to-day! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, |
| or unspeakable |
| .. <p 367 > |
| old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet, |
| and we'd drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch |
| in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff |
| the living stuff! Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart |
| is repeated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in |
| skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is |
| slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely |
| watches the monster die. |
| .. <p 367 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxv 11 THE FOUNTAIN > |
| |
| That for six thousand years --and no one |
| knows how many millions of ages before --the great whales should have been |
| spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the |
| deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some |
| centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain |
| of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings --that all this should |
| be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter |
| minutes past one o'clock P. M. of this sixteenth day of December, A. D. |
| ), |
| it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, |
| really water, or nothing but vapor --this is surely a noteworthy thing. Let |
| us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent. |
| Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes |
| in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in |
| which they swim, hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never |
| once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal |
| structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being's, the whale can |
| only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore |
| the necessity |
| .. <p 368 > |
| for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree |
| breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's |
| mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still |
| more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through |
| his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head. If I say, that in |
| any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to vitality, inasmuch |
| as it withdraws from the air a certain element, which being subsequently |
| brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying |
| principle, I do not think I shall err; though I may possibly use some |
| superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that if all the |
| blood in a man could be aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his |
| nostrils and not fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he |
| would then live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is |
| precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, |
| his full hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single |
| breath, or so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, |
| he has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine |
| he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like |
| vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are completely distended |
| with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the |
| sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel |
| crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use |
| in its four supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth |
| is indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and |
| true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable |
| obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as the fishermen |
| phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, |
| the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with |
| all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets |
| seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he rises |
| again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute. |
| Now, if after he fetches a few |
| |
| .. <p 369 > |
| breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again |
| to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths |
| are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, |
| however, that in different individuals these rates are different; but in any |
| one they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his |
| spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere |
| descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the |
| whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by |
| hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand |
| fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the |
| great necessities that strike the victory to thee! In man, breathing is |
| incessantly going on --one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so |
| that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, |
| breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one |
| seventh or Sunday of his time. It has been said that the whale only breathes |
| through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are |
| mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his |
| sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at |
| all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged |
| with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling. |
| But owing to the mystery of the spout --whether it be water or whether it be |
| vapor --no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it |
| is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what |
| does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea. |
| Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, |
| |
| and as that long canal --like the grand Erie Canal --is furnished with a sort |
| of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the |
| upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you |
| insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through |
| his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known |
| any profound being that had anything to say to this |
| .. <p 370 > |
| world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. |
| Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener! Now, the spouting |
| canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air, |
| |
| and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper |
| surface of his head, and a little to one side; this curious canal is very |
| much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the |
| question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, |
| |
| whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, |
| |
| or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, |
| and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly |
| communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is |
| for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the |
| greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he |
| accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath the |
| surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard |
| him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when |
| unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and |
| the ordinary periods of respiration. But why pester one with all this |
| reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare |
| what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this |
| world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your |
| plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might |
| almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely. The |
| central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and |
| how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always, |
| when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is |
| in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at |
| such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in |
| the spout, how do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapor; |
| |
| or how do you know that they are not those identical drops superficially |
| lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the |
| whale's head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day |
| .. <p 371 > |
| sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the |
| desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his |
| head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled |
| up with rain. Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious |
| touching the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be |
| peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher |
| to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into |
| slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often |
| happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so |
| touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the |
| spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot |
| say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, |
| the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another thing; I have |
| heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted |
| into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do |
| then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Still, we can |
| hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this: |
| that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this |
| conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent |
| dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow |
| being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on |
| soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both |
| ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all |
| ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, |
| and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the |
| act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, |
| |
| I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected |
| there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my |
| head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, |
| after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this |
| seems an additional argument for the above supposition. And how nobly it |
| raises our conceit of the mighty, misty |
| .. <p 372 > |
| monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his |
| vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his |
| incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor --as you will sometimes see it |
| --glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his |
| thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only |
| irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my |
| mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a |
| heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; |
| but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all |
| things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination |
| makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both |
| with equal eye. |
| .. <p 372 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxvi 16 THE TAIL > |
| |
| Other poets have warbled the praises of |
| the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never |
| alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail. Reckoning the largest sized |
| Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to |
| about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area |
| of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands |
| into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less |
| than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly |
| overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide |
| vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely |
| defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost |
| expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty |
| feet across. The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded |
| .. <p 373 > |
| sinews; but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it: |
| --upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long |
| and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise |
| between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else, |
| imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman walls, the middle |
| layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always |
| alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and |
| which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry. |
| But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the |
| whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular |
| fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down |
| into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their |
| might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole |
| whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this |
| were the thing to do it. Nor does this --its amazing strength, at all tend to |
| cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease |
| undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive |
| their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or |
| harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, |
| strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that all |
| over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm |
| would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the naked |
| corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that |
| seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in |
| human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of |
| the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian |
| pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these |
| pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any |
| power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, |
| which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his |
| teachings. Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that |
| .. <p 374 > |
| whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it |
| be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no |
| fairy's arm can transcend it. Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, |
| when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; |
| Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes. First: |
| |
| Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in a different |
| manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man |
| or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale, his tail is the |
| sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and |
| then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting, |
| leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming. His side-fins only |
| serve to steer by. Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm |
| whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, |
| in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In |
| striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow |
| is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, |
| especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. |
| |
| No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding |
| it; but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing |
| to the light buoyancy of the whaleboat, and the elasticity of its materials, |
| a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is |
| generally the most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often |
| received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one |
| |
| strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped. Third: I cannot demonstrate it, |
| |
| but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is concentrated in |
| the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the |
| daintiness of the elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the |
| action of sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft |
| slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the |
| sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and |
| all. |
| .. <p 375 > |
| What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any |
| prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant |
| that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented |
| nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than |
| one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in |
| his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in |
| the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart. Fourth: Stealing |
| unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of solitary |
| seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and |
| kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see |
| his power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the |
| air; then smiting the surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. |
| You would almost think a great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed |
| the light wreath of vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would |
| think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole. Fifth: As in the ordinary |
| floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the level |
| of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the surface; but |
| when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least |
| thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating |
| a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime |
| |
| breach --somewhere else to be described --this peaking of the whale's flukes is |
| perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the |
| bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the |
| highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his |
| tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such |
| scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils |
| will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the |
| mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw |
| a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a |
| moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the |
| time, such a grand |
| .. <p 376 > |
| embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the |
| home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African |
| elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of |
| all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity |
| often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest |
| silence. The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the |
| elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the |
| other are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite organs on an |
| equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively belong. For as |
| the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with |
| Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most direful |
| blow from the elephant's trunk were as the playful tap of a fan, compared with |
| the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale's ponderous flukes, which |
| in repeated instances have one after the other hurled entire boats with all |
| their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his |
| balls. The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my |
| inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though |
| they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an |
| extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, |
| that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and |
| symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed |
| with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his |
| general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced |
| assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, |
| and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how |
| understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has |
| none? |
| .. <p 377 > |
| Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not |
| be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he |
| will about his face, I say again he has no face. |
| .. <p 376n. > |
| Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the |
| elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant |
| stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant; |
| nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among |
| these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up |
| water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a |
| stream. |
| .. <p 377 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxvii 6 THE GRAND ARMADA > |
| |
| The long and narrow peninsula of |
| Malacca, extending south-eastward from the territories of Birmah, forms the |
| most southerly point of all Asia. In a continuous line from that peninsula |
| stretch the long islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many |
| others, form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with |
| Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly |
| studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports |
| for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the |
| straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels |
| bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas. Those narrow straits |
| of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway in that vast rampart |
| of islands, buttressed by that bold green promontory, known to seamen as |
| Java Head; they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening into |
| some vast walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, |
| and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of |
| that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, |
| that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear |
| the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping |
| western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those |
| domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the |
| Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the |
| obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships |
| .. <p 378 > |
| before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed |
| between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes |
| of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by |
| no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute. Time out of mind the |
| piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded coves and islets |
| of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits, |
| fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the |
| repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European |
| cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; |
| |
| yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American |
| vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged. |
| |
| With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits; |
| Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising |
| northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm |
| whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of |
| Japan, in time for the great whaling season there. By these means, the |
| circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising |
| grounds of the world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; |
| where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon |
| giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at |
| a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it. But how |
| now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air? |
| Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running |
| sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in |
| himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are |
| loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the |
| world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their |
| weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake's contents bottled in her ample |
| hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead |
| and kentledge. She carries years' water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket |
| water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, |
| .. <p 379 > |
| in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday |
| rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, |
| while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, |
| touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not |
| have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating |
| seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another |
| flood had come; they would only answer -- Well, boys, here's the ark! Now, |
| as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the |
| near vicinity of the straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground, |
| roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for |
| cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the |
| look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake. But |
| though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow, |
| and with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet |
| not a single jet was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in |
| with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when |
| the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of |
| singular magnificence saluted us. But here be it premised, that owing to the |
| unwearied activity with which of late they have been hunted over all four |
| oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small |
| detached companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in |
| extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would |
| almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and |
| covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the |
| Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that |
| even in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and |
| months together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be |
| suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands. Broad on |
| both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a great |
| semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of |
| whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the |
| straight perpendicular |
| .. <p 380 > |
| twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, falls over in two |
| branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single |
| forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of |
| white mist, continually rising and falling away to leeward. Seen from the |
| Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea, this host |
| of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a |
| blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys |
| of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some |
| horseman on a height. As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in |
| the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous |
| passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the |
| plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward |
| through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, |
| and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre. Crowding all sail |
| the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their weapons, and |
| loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the wind only |
| held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda, |
| the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the capture |
| of not a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated |
| caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the |
| worshipped white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So |
| with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these |
| leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, |
| loudly directing attention to something in our wake. Corresponding to the |
| crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It seemed formed of |
| detached white vapors, rising and falling something like the spouts of the |
| whales; only they did not so completely come and go; for they constantly |
| hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, |
| ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, aloft there, and rig whips |
| and buckets to wet the sails; --Malays, sir, and after us! |
| .. <p 381 > |
| As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly |
| have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to |
| make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh |
| leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these tawny |
| philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit, -- |
| mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they were. As with glass under arm, |
| Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he |
| chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some |
| such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green walls |
| of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him |
| that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that |
| through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly |
| end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman |
| atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses; --when |
| all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's brow was left gaunt |
| and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing |
| it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place. But thoughts |
| like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when, after steadily |
| dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by the |
| vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the |
| broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the |
| swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship |
| had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake |
| of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship |
| neared them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the |
| boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of |
| the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them, |
| --though as yet a mile in their rear, --than they rallied again, and forming in |
| close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing |
| lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity. Stripped to our |
| shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, |
| .. <p 382 > |
| and after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, |
| when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that |
| they were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert |
| irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he |
| is gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto |
| rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; |
| and like King Porus' elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they |
| seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in vast |
| irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short |
| thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This |
| was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely |
| paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on |
| the sea. Had these leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over |
| the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such |
| excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost |
| all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the |
| lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman. |
| Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of |
| a theatre's pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush |
| helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and |
| remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold |
| .. <p 383 > |
| any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly |
| of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of |
| men. Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, |
| yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor |
| retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in those |
| cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on |
| the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon |
| was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then |
| running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart of the herd. |
| Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such |
| circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more |
| or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes |
| of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into |
| the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a |
| delirious throb. As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer |
| |
| power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as |
| we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by |
| the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a |
| ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their |
| complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be |
| locked in and crushed. But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; |
| now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now |
| edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while |
| all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of |
| our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time |
| to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted |
| duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting |
| part of the business. Out of the way, Commodore! cried one, to a great |
| dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant |
| threatened to swamp us. Hard down with your tail, there! cried a second |
| .. <p 384 > |
| to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with |
| his own fan-like extremity. All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, |
| |
| originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick |
| squares of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they |
| cross each other's grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is |
| then attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line |
| being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly |
| among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close |
| round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not |
| every day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And |
| if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be |
| afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these the |
| drugg comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them. |
| The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales |
| staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the |
| towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball. |
| But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy |
| wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an |
| instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's |
| bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came in at the |
| wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so |
| stopped the leaks for the time. It had been next to impossible to dart these |
| drugged-harpoons, were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's |
| way greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further |
| from the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So |
| that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways |
| vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided |
| between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some |
| mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the |
| roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this |
| central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a |
| sleek, produced |
| .. <p 385 > |
| by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, |
| we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every |
| commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the |
| outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in |
| each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a |
| ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might |
| easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have gone round on their |
| backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more |
| immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of |
| escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living |
| wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut |
| us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by |
| small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host. Now, |
| inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer |
| circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of |
| those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole |
| multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any |
| rate --though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive --spoutings |
| might be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the |
| rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and |
| calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the |
| wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise |
| cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and |
| every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these |
| smaller whales --now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the |
| lake --evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still |
| becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs |
| they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; |
| |
| till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. |
| Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his |
| lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting |
| it. |
| .. <p 386 > |
| But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still |
| stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in |
| those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, |
| and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The |
| lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; |
| and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the |
| breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing |
| mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly |
| reminiscence; --even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards |
| us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born |
| sight. floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. |
| One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a |
| day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet |
| in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet |
| recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the |
| maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, |
| the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate side-fins, and |
| the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled |
| appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts. Line! line! |
| cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; him fast! him fast! --Who line |
| him! Who struck? Two whale; one big, one little! What ails ye, man? |
| cried Starbuck. Look-e here, said Queequeg pointing down. As when the |
| stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; |
| as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling |
| line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw |
| long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub |
| seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the |
| chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled |
| with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the |
| subtlest secrets of the seas |
| .. <p 387 > |
| seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours |
| in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of |
| consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre |
| freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely |
| revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic |
| of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and |
| while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep |
| inland there i still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. Meanwhile, as we |
| thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in the distance |
| evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging the whales |
| on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first |
| |
| circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded |
| them. But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly |
| darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our |
| eyes. It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly |
| powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or |
| maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled |
| cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A |
| whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, |
| as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of |
| the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now |
| dashing among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado |
| .. <p 388 > |
| Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went. But |
| agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough, |
| any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of |
| the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance |
| obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable |
| accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line |
| that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while |
| the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in |
| the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had |
| worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now |
| churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and |
| tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades. |
| this terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary |
| fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a |
| little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows |
| from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the |
| submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more |
| contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in |
| thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum |
| was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the |
| great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came |
| tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common |
| mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking |
| the stern. Oars! Oars! he intensely whispered, seizing the helm -- gripe |
| your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, |
| you Queequeg --the whale there! --prick him! --hit him! Stand up --stand up, and |
| stay so! Spring, men -- pull, men; never mind their backs --scrape them! |
| --scrape away! The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, |
| leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate |
| endeavor we at last shot into a temporary |
| .. <p 389 > |
| opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching |
| for another outlet. After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last |
| swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now |
| crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky |
| salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while |
| standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean |
| from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad |
| flukes close by. Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, |
| it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having |
| clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward |
| flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats |
| still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped |
| astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The |
| waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat; |
| and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the |
| floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also |
| as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near. |
| The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying |
| in the Fishery, --the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales |
| only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only |
| to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod. |
| |
| .. <p 382n. > |
| To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively --to confound with fright. |
| It is an old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare: -- The wrathful skies |
| |
| Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them keep their caves. To |
| common language, the word is now completely obsolete. When the polite |
| landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it |
| down as one of the whaleman's self-derived savageries. Much the same is it |
| with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to |
| New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the |
| time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and furthest-descended |
| English words --the etymological Howards and Percys --are now democratised, nay, |
| plebeianised --so to speak --in the New World. |
| .. <p 387n. > |
| The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike |
| most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation |
| which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; |
| though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob: -- a |
| contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one |
| on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from |
| that. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the |
| hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor |
| the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by |
| man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual |
| esteem, the whales salute more hominum. |
| .. <p 389 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxviii 28 SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS > |
| |
| The previous chapter |
| gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also |
| then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations. Now, though |
| such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, |
| .. <p 390 > |
| as must have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are |
| occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such |
| bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed |
| almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous |
| males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated. In cavalier attendance |
| upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude, |
| but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the |
| rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a |
| luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly |
| accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast |
| between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is |
| always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full |
| growth, are not more than one third of the bulk of an average-sized male. |
| They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a |
| dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the |
| whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point. It is very curious |
| to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings. Like |
| fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety. |
| You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial |
| feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in |
| the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and |
| warmth. By the time they have lounged up and down the promenade of the |
| Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the |
| cool season there, and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year. |
| When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious |
| sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family. |
| Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to |
| draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the |
| |
| Bashaw assails him, and chases him away! High times, indeed, if |
| unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity |
| of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most |
| notorious Lothario out |
| .. <p 391 > |
| of his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often |
| cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the |
| whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence |
| with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving |
| for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a |
| few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters, --furrowed heads, |
| broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated |
| mouths. but supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at |
| the first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch that |
| lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there |
| awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon |
| devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other whales to |
| be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand |
| Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence |
| their unctuousness is small. As for the sons and the daughters they beget, |
| why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at least, with |
| only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that |
| might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for |
| the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies |
| all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the |
| ardor of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends |
| her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; |
| |
| then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman |
| enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears, |
| disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about |
| all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning |
| each young Leviathan from his amorous errors. Now, as the harem of whales is |
| called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of that school |
| technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict |
| character, however admirably satirical, that after going to school himself, |
| he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly |
| of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally |
| .. <p 392 > |
| seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have |
| surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, |
| must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a |
| country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what |
| was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils. |
| |
| The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes |
| himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost |
| universally, a lone whale --as a solitary Leviathan is called --proves an |
| ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one |
| near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of |
| waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody |
| secrets. The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously |
| mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those |
| female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or |
| forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all |
| Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting |
| those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will |
| fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout. The Forty-barrel-bull |
| schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians, |
| they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such |
| a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them |
| any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish |
| this turbulence though, and when about three fourths grown, break up, and |
| separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems. Another point |
| of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic |
| of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull --poor devil! all his |
| comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her |
| companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering |
| so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey. |
| .. <p 393 > |
| .. < chapter lxxxix 2 FAST-FISH AND LOOSE-FISH > |
| |
| The allusion to the waifs |
| and waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some account of the |
| laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed |
| the grand symbol and badge. It frequently happens that when several ships are |
| cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and |
| be finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly |
| comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. |
| For example, --after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the |
| body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting |
| far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly |
| tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and |
| violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some |
| written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases. |
| Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was |
| that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A. D. |
| . But |
| though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American |
| fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They |
| have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's |
| Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of |
| Meddling with other People's Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a |
| Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so |
| small are they. I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A |
| Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. But what plays |
| the mischief with this masterly code is the |
| .. <p 394 > |
| admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to |
| expound it. First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically |
| fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at |
| all controllable by the occupant or occupants, -- a mast, an oar, a nine-inch |
| cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise |
| a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised |
| symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their |
| ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to |
| do. These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen |
| themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks --the |
| Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and honorable |
| whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an |
| outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale |
| previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no means so |
| scrupulous. Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover |
| litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard |
| chase of a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) |
| had succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of |
| their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself. |
| |
| Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with the whale, |
| struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the very eyes of |
| the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their |
| captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured them that by |
| way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now retain their line, |
| harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at the time of |
| the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value |
| of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat. Mr. Erskine was counsel for the |
| defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge. In the course of the defence, |
| the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent |
| |
| crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his |
| wife's viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon |
| .. <p 395 > |
| the seas of life; but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he |
| instituted an action to recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other |
| side; and he then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had |
| originally harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason |
| of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had as last abandoned her; |
| yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore when |
| a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent |
| gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found |
| sticking in her. Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples |
| of the whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other. These |
| pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very learned judge |
| in set terms decided, to wit, --That as for the boat, he awarded it to the |
| plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but |
| that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged |
| |
| to the defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the |
| final capture; and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with |
| them, it (the fish) acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody |
| who afterwards took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants |
| afterwards took the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs. A common |
| man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might possibly object |
| to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two great |
| principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied |
| and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case; these two laws |
| touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the |
| fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; For notwithstanding its complicated |
| tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the |
| Philistines, has but two props to stand on. Is it not a saying in every one's |
| mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing |
| came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are |
| the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves |
| .. <p 396 > |
| but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the |
| rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder |
| undetected villain's marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is |
| that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, |
| gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family |
| from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the |
| archbishop of Savesoul's income of 100,000 pounds seized from the scant bread |
| and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of |
| heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a |
| Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but |
| Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, |
| but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas |
| but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of |
| the law? But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the |
| kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is |
| internationally and universally applicable. What was America in |
| |
| but a |
| loose-fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing |
| it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What |
| Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to |
| the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the |
| Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but |
| |
| Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a |
| Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of |
| thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? |
| And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too? |
| .. <p 397 > |
| .. < chapter xc 2 HEADS OR TAILS > |
| |
| De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat |
| caput, et regina caudam. Bracton, l 3. c. 3. Latin from the books of the |
| Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales |
| captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand |
| Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with |
| the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; |
| there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, |
| is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a |
| strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here |
| treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that |
| prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially |
| reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious |
| proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to |
| |
| lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two years. It |
| seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the |
| Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine |
| whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the |
| Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of |
| policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from |
| the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port |
| territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a |
| sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times |
| in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same |
| fobbing of them. Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and |
| .. <p 398 > |
| with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled |
| their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds from the |
| precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and |
| good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; |
| up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a |
| copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale's head, he |
| says -- Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the |
| Lord Warden's. Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation |
| --so truly English --knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching |
| their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the |
| stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard |
| heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of |
| them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak. Please, |
| sir, who is the Lord Warden? The Duke. But the duke had nothing to do |
| with taking this fish? It is his. We have been at great trouble, and |
| peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we |
| getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters? It is his. Is the |
| duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a |
| livelihood? It is his. I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by |
| part of my share of this whale. It is his. Won't the Duke be content |
| with a quarter or a half? It is his. In a word, the whale was seized and |
| sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington received the money. Thinking that |
| viewed in some particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in |
| some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an |
| honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, |
| begging him to take the case of those unfortunate |
| .. <p 399 > |
| mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied |
| (both letters were published) that he had already done so, and received the |
| money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he |
| (the reverend gentleman) would decline meddling with other people's business. |
| |
| Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three |
| kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars? It will readily be seen that |
| in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale was a delegated one |
| from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign |
| is originally invested with that right. The law itself has already been set |
| forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so |
| caught belongs to the King and Queen, because of its superior excellence. |
| And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument |
| in such matters. But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the |
| tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers! In his treatise on Queen-Gold, or |
| Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus |
| discourseth: Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied |
| with ye whalebone. Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone |
| of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this |
| same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for |
| a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented |
| with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here. There are two royal fish |
| so styled by the English law writers -- the whale and the sturgeon; both royal |
| property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch |
| of the crown's ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted |
| of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be |
| divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and |
| elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may |
| possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus |
| there seems a reason in all things, even in law. |
| .. <p 400 > |
| .. < chapter xci 2 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE ROSE-BUD > |
| |
| In vain it was to rake |
| for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying |
| not inquiry. Sir T. Browne, V. E. It was a week or two after the last |
| whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, |
| vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod's deck proved more |
| vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not |
| very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea. I will bet something now, said |
| Stubb, that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled |
| the other day. I thought they would keel up before long. Presently, the |
| vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose |
| furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we |
| glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the |
| eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped |
| around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen |
| call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, |
| and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an |
| unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the |
| plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable |
| indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor |
| alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding |
| the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior |
| quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose. Coming still nearer |
| with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale |
| alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the |
| first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that |
| seem |
| .. <p 401 > |
| to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; |
| leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. |
| Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will |
| ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun |
| blasted whales in general. The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, |
| that Stubb vowed he recognized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines |
| that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales. There's a pretty |
| fellow, now, he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship's bows, there's |
| a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor |
| devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking |
| |
| them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with |
| their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, |
| foreseeing that all the oil they will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's |
| wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo |
| that is content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and |
| is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has |
| there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a |
| present of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from |
| that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a |
| condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get more oil |
| by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get from |
| that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain |
| something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if |
| our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes, I'm for it; and |
| so saying he started for the quarter-deck. By this time the faint air had |
| become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly |
| entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up |
| again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat's crew, and pulled |
| off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance |
| with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in |
| the likeness of a |
| .. <p 402 > |
| huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes |
| projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical |
| folded bulb of a bright red color. Upon her head boards, in large gilt |
| letters, he read Bouton de Rose, --Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was |
| the romantic name of this aromatic ship. Though Stubb did not understand the |
| |
| Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous |
| figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole to him. A wooden |
| rose-bud, eh? he cried with his hand to his nose, that will do very well; |
| but how like all creation it smells! Now in order to hold direct |
| communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the bows to the |
| starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over |
| it. Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled |
| -- Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak |
| English? Yes, rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out |
| to be the chief-mate. Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the |
| White Whale? What whale? The White Whale --a Sperm Whale --Moby Dick, |
| have ye seen him? Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White |
| Whale --no. Very good, then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a |
| minute. Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab |
| leaning over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two |
| hands into a trumpet and shouted -- No, Sir! No! Upon which Ahab retired, |
| and Stubb returned to the Frenchman. He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, |
| who had just got into the chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his |
| |
| nose in a sort of bag. What's the matter with your nose, there? said Stubb. |
| |
| Broke it? |
| .. <p 403 > |
| |
| I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all! answered the |
| Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. But |
| what are you holding yours for? Oh, nothing! It's a wax nose; I have to |
| hold it on. Fine day, aint it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us |
| a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose? What in the devil's name do you |
| want here? roared the Guernsey-man, flying into a sudden passion. Oh! |
| keep cool--cool? yes, that's the word; why don't you pack those whales in ice |
| while you're working at 'em? But joking aside, though; do you know, |
| Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As |
| for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his whole carcase. I |
| know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe it; |
| this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come |
| aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me; and so I'll get out of |
| this dirty scrape. Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow, |
| rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer |
| scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were |
| getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather |
| slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All |
| their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now |
| and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to |
| get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum |
| in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having |
| broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously |
| |
| puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories. |
| Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the |
| Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face |
| thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the |
| tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of |
| the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's round-house ( cabinet he |
| called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his |
| entreaties and indignations at times. |
| .. <p 404 > |
| Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the |
| Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate |
| expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had |
| brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him |
| carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the |
| slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace on |
| that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that |
| the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing |
| the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. |
| According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an |
| interpreter's office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming |
| from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come |
| uppermost in him during the interview. By this time their destined victim |
| appeared from his cabin. He was a small and dark, but rather delicate looking |
| man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore |
| a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, |
| Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once |
| ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them. What shall I |
| say to him first? said he. Why, said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the |
| watch and seals, you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort |
| of babyish to me, though I don't pretend to be a judge. He says, Monsieur, |
| |
| said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain, that only |
| yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six |
| sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought |
| alongside. Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more. |
| |
| What now? said the Guernsey-man to Stubb. Why, since he takes it so easy, |
| tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no |
| more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him |
| from me he's a baboon. |
| .. <p 405 > |
| |
| He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far |
| more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we |
| value our lives, to cut loose from these fish. Instantly the captain ran |
| forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from hoisting the |
| cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the |
| whales to the ship. What now? said the Guernsey-man, when the captain had |
| returned to them. Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that -- |
| that --in fact, tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps |
| somebody else. He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any |
| service to us. Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful |
| parties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into |
| his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux. He wants you to take a glass of wine |
| with him, said the interpreter. Thank him heartily; but tell him it's |
| against my principles to drink with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him |
| I must go. He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his |
| drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then |
| Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these |
| whales, for it's so calm they won't drift. By this time Stubb was over the |
| side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect, |
| --that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help |
| them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship's side. While |
| the Frenchman's boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb |
| benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking |
| out a most unusually long tow-line. Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb |
| feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon |
| increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's |
| whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, |
| .. <p 406 > |
| and hailing the pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to |
| reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he |
| commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would |
| almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at |
| length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old |
| Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat's crew were all |
| in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as |
| gold-hunters. And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and |
| screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look |
| disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly |
| from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of |
| perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed |
| by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at |
| all blending with it for a time. I have it, I have it, cried Stubb, with |
| delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, a purse! a |
| purse! Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls |
| of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; |
| very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; |
| it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is |
| ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls |
| were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, |
| perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab's loud command |
| to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them good |
| bye. |
| .. <p 406 > |
| .. < chapter xcii 31 AMBERGRIS > |
| |
| Now this ambergris is a very curious |
| substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in |
| |
| a |
| certain Nantucket-born |
| .. <p 407 > |
| Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that |
| subject. for at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the |
| precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the |
| learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, |
| |
| yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found |
| on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris |
| is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, |
| brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and |
| ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, |
| that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, |
| hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to |
| Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in |
| Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it. Who |
| would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale |
| themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! |
| Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others |
| the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it |
| were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of |
| Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in |
| blasting rocks. I have forgotten to say that there were found in this |
| ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought |
| might be sailors' trousers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they |
| were nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner. |
| Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in |
| the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. |
| Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown |
| in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of |
| paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the |
| strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its |
| rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst. I should like to conclude the |
| chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a |
| charge often made |
| .. <p 408 > |
| against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, |
| might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the |
| Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has |
| been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, |
| untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all |
| whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate? I opine, |
| that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling |
| ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not |
| then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have |
| always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it |
| through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the |
| shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms |
| to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is, |
| that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading one of these whale |
| cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to |
| that arising from excavating an old city grave-yard, for the foundations of |
| a Lying-in Hospital. I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against |
| whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, |
| in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, |
| which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great |
| work on Smells, a textbook on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat; |
| |
| berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place for |
| the blubber of the dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken |
| home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, |
| fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation |
| certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different |
| from a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years perhaps, |
| after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty |
| days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the |
| oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently |
| treated, whales as a species are by no |
| .. <p 409 > |
| means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of |
| the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Nor |
| indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general |
| thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out |
| of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the |
| motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a |
| musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken |
| the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be |
| to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which |
| was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great? |
| .. <p 409 > |
| .. < chapter xciii 15 THE CASTAWAY > |
| |
| It was but some few days after |
| encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event befell the most |
| insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an event most lamentable; and which |
| ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a |
| living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove |
| her own. Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. |
| Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work |
| the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these |
| ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews. But |
| if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the |
| ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the |
| Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor |
| Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that |
| dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly. |
| .. <p 410 > |
| In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a |
| white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one |
| eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in |
| his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, |
| with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, |
| which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than |
| any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three |
| hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days. Nor smile so, |
| while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has |
| its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But |
| Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that the |
| panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become |
| entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be |
| seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to |
| be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off |
| to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in |
| Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and |
| at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into |
| one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended |
| against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful |
| glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most |
| impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it |
| up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery |
| effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the |
| divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from |
| the King of Hell. But let us to the story. It came to pass, that in the |
| ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman chanced so to sprain his hand, as |
| for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his |
| place. The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; |
| but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and |
| therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him, |
| took care, afterwards, |
| .. <p 411 > |
| to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he might often |
| find it needful. Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the |
| whale; and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, |
| which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat. The |
| involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, |
| out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming |
| against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become |
| entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the |
| stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and |
| presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, |
| remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around |
| his chest and neck. Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of |
| the hunt. He hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its |
| sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, |
| exclaimed interrogatively, cut? meantime pip's blue, choked face plainly |
| looked, Do, for God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a |
| minute, this entire thing happened. Damn him, cut! roared Stubb; and so |
| the whale was lost and Pip was saved. So soon as he recovered himself, the |
| poor little negro was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew. |
| Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a |
| plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; |
| and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance |
| was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except --but all the rest was indefinite, |
| as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is |
| your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap |
| |
| from the boat, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if |
| he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him |
| too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all |
| advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, Stick to the boat, Pip, or |
| by the Lord, I wont pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't afford |
| .. <p 412 > |
| to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what |
| you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more. |
| Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, |
| yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with |
| his benevolence. But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped |
| again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but |
| this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started |
| to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk. |
| Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, |
| blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all |
| round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest. |
| Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves. |
| |
| No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's inexorable |
| back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a |
| whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre |
| of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, |
| another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest. Now, in calm |
| weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to |
| ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. |
| The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, |
| |
| my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in |
| the open sea --mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her |
| sides. But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; |
| |
| he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and |
| he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, |
| and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen |
| jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the |
| hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; |
| almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same |
| ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies. |
| .. <p 413 > |
| But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying |
| whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat |
| was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that |
| Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest |
| chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little |
| negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The |
| sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his |
| soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous |
| depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro |
| before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded |
| heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the |
| multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of |
| waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the |
| loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's |
| insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes |
| at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; |
| and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. For the |
| rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and |
| in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment |
| befell myself. |
| .. <p 413 > |
| .. < chapter xciv 26 A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND > |
| |
| That whale of Stubb's so dearly |
| purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and |
| hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to |
| |
| the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case. While some were occupied with |
| this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so |
| soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same |
| .. <p 414 > |
| sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon. It |
| had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, |
| I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely |
| concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It |
| was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous |
| duty! no wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. |
| Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious |
| mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers |
| felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize. As I sat |
| there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the |
| windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and |
| gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle |
| globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly |
| |
| broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe |
| grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, --literally and |
| truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the |
| time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in |
| that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost |
| began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue |
| in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely |
| free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. |
| Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till |
| I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of |
| insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my |
| co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such |
| an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; |
| |
| that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into |
| their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, --Oh! my dear fellow beings, why |
| should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest |
| ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all |
| squeeze ourselves |
| .. <p 415 > |
| into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and |
| sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For |
| |
| now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in |
| all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of |
| attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; |
| |
| but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, |
| the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case |
| |
| eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of |
| angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. Now, while |
| discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the |
| business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works. First comes |
| white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, |
| and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed |
| tendons --a wad of muscle --but still contains some oil. After being severed |
| from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going |
| to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble. Plum-pudding |
| is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here |
| and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a |
| considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, |
| beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly |
| rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with |
| spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures |
| of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I |
| confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something |
| as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might |
| have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison |
| season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually |
| fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne. |
| |
| .. <p 416 > |
| There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the |
| course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately |
| to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the |
| whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably |
| oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a |
| prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the |
| wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing. Gurry, so |
| called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes |
| incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous |
| substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and |
| much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble |
| Leviathan. Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's |
| vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper |
| is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of |
| Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is |
| about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, |
| |
| it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of |
| magic, allures along with it all impurities. But to learn all about these |
| recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, |
| |
| and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been |
| mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted |
| from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, |
| this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one |
| side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. |
| They generally go in pairs, --a pike-and-gaff-man and a spade-man. The |
| whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name. The |
| gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a |
| sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches |
| and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, |
| perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is |
| sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing |
| .. <p 417 > |
| he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. |
| If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be |
| very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men. |
| .. <p 417 > |
| .. < chapter xcv 6 THE CASSOCK > |
| |
| Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a |
| certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled |
| forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with |
| no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have |
| seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous |
| cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; |
| not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, |
| as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, -- longer than a Kentuckian is |
| tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony |
| idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its |
| likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen |
| Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, king Asa, her son, did depose |
| her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook |
| Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the first book of Kings. |
| Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by |
| two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and |
| with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying |
| a dead comrade from the field. extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now |
| proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the |
| pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; |
| gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last |
| hangs it, well spread, in the |
| .. <p 418 > |
| rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet |
| of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for |
| arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The |
| mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. |
| Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect |
| him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office. That office |
| consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation |
| which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the |
| bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces |
| drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's desk. Arrayed in decent black; |
| |
| occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for |
| an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer! |
| .. <p 418n. > |
| Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to |
| the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin |
| slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the |
| |
| oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides |
| perhaps improving it in quality. |
| .. <p 418 > |
| .. < chapter xcvi 17 THE TRY-WORKS > |
| |
| Besides her hoisted boats, an American |
| whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious |
| anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting |
| the completed ship. it is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were |
| transported to her planks. The try-works are planted between the foremast and |
| main-mast, the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a |
| peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of |
| brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The |
| foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to |
| the surface by |
| .. <p 419 > |
| ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the |
| timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered |
| by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the |
| great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When |
| not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished |
| with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. |
| During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and |
| coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them --one |
| man in each pot, side by side --many confidential communications are carried |
| on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical |
| meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the |
| soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by |
| the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, |
| my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same |
| time. Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare |
| masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the |
| furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy |
| doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating |
| itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire |
| |
| inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this |
| reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are |
| no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall. And here let us |
| go back for a moment. It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's |
| try-works were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to |
| oversee the business. All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You |
| cook, fire the works. This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been |
| thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it |
| said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed |
| for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick |
| ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, |
| shrivelled |
| .. <p 420 > |
| blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its |
| unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric |
| burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale |
| supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his |
| own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and |
| not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, |
| wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal |
| pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument |
| for the pit. By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear |
| from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild |
| ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce |
| flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and |
| illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. |
| The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful |
| deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, |
| issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, |
| bore down upon the turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations. The |
| hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front |
| of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, |
| |
| always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched |
| hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires |
| beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch |
| them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of |
| the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to |
| leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side |
| of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. |
| Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red |
| heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny |
| features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and |
| the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely |
| revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they |
| .. <p 421 > |
| narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in |
| words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, |
| like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the |
| harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as |
| the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and |
| |
| yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of |
| the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, |
| and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted |
| with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into |
| that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her |
| monomaniac commander's soul. So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, |
| and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. |
| Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the |
| redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the |
| fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at |
| last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that |
| unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm. |
| But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) |
| thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly |
| conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, |
| which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning |
| to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of |
| putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further |
| apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; |
| |
| though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the |
| steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet |
| gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the |
| impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much |
| bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, |
| bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped |
| the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, |
| .. <p 422 > |
| in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought |
| I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the |
| ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced |
| |
| back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and |
| very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this |
| unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being |
| brought by the lee! look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never |
| dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept |
| the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when |
| its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, |
| the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, |
| |
| the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, |
| golden, glad sun, the only true lamp --all others but liars! Nevertheless the |
| sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide |
| Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the |
| moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, |
| and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who |
| hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true --not true, |
| or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of |
| Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the |
| fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. ALL. This wilful world hath |
| not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals |
| and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of |
| operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of |
| sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing |
| wise, and therefore jolly; --not that man is fitted to sit down on |
| tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous |
| Solomon. But even Solomon, he says, the man that wandereth out of the way |
| of understanding shall remain ( i. e. even while living) in the congregation |
| of the dead. Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, |
| deaden thee; as for the time it did me. |
| .. <p 423 > |
| There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there |
| is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest |
| gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. |
| And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the |
| mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still |
| higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar. |
| .. <p 423 > |
| .. < chapter xcvii 9 THE LAMP > |
| |
| Had you descended from the Pequod's |
| try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, |
| |
| for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in |
| some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in |
| their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of |
| lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is |
| more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the |
| dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the |
| |
| whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his |
| berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest |
| night the ship's black hull still houses an illumination. See with what |
| entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps --often but old bottles |
| and vials, though --to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes |
| them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in |
| its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to |
| solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass |
| butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its |
| freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his |
| own supper of game. |
| .. <p 424 > |
| .. < chapter xcviii 2 STOWING DOWN AND CLEARING UP > |
| |
| Already has it been |
| related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how |
| he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the |
| deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the |
| principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the |
| beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of his |
| executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like |
| Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed |
| through the fire; --but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this |
| part of the description by rehearsing --singing, if I may -- the romantic |
| proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into |
| the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, |
| sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise |
| and blow. While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the |
| six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this |
| way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and |
| headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery |
| deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their |
| course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play |
| upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper. At length, when |
| the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are |
| unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to |
| their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and |
| hermetically closed, like a closet walled up. In the sperm fishery, this is |
| perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling. |
| One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred |
| .. <p 425 > |
| quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled; great |
| rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has |
| besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; |
| the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is |
| deafening. But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears |
| in this self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and |
| try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, |
| with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil |
| possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks |
| never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, |
| from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent ley is readily |
| made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains |
| clinging to the side, that ley quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently |
| along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their |
| full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous |
| implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put |
| away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely |
| hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in |
| unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost |
| the entire ship's company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last |
| concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift |
| themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh |
| and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland. Now, |
| with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously |
| discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the |
| deck; think of having hangings to the top; object not to taking tea by |
| moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of |
| |
| oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the |
| thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins! But mark: aloft |
| there, at the three mast heads, stand three |
| .. <p 426 > |
| men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again |
| soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot |
| somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted |
| labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six |
| hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day |
| |
| rowing on the Line, --they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and |
| heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very |
| sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial |
| sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have |
| finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy |
| room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of |
| their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of There she blows! and away |
| they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. |
| Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have |
| we mortals by long toilings extracted from the world's vast bulk its small but |
| valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its |
| defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; |
| hardly is this done, when -- There she blows! --the ghost is spouted up, and |
| away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old |
| routine again. Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright |
| Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I |
| sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage -- and, foolish as I am, |
| taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope! |
| .. <p 426 > |
| .. < chapter xcix 30 THE DOUBLOON > |
| |
| Ere now it has been related how Ahab was |
| wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the |
| binnacle |
| .. <p 427 > |
| and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it |
| has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in |
| his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there |
| strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the |
| binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that |
| glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and |
| when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same |
| riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the |
| same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if |
| not hopefulness. But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed |
| to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, |
| as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some |
| monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain |
| significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the |
| round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as |
| they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way. Now |
| this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of |
| gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of |
| many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron |
| bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to |
| any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst |
| a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the |
| livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering |
| approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left |
| |
| it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and |
| however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as |
| the white whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch |
| by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever |
| live to spend it. Now those noble golden coins of South America are as |
| .. <p 428 > |
| medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and |
| volcanoes; sun's disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich |
| banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold |
| seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by |
| passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic. It so chanced that |
| the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its |
| round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this |
| bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and |
| beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway |
| up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those |
| letters you saw the likeness of three Andes' summits; from one a flame; a |
| tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a |
| segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual |
| cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra. |
| Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing. |
| |
| There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all |
| other grand and lofty things; look here, --three peaks as proud as Lucifer. |
| The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the |
| undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this |
| round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's |
| glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious |
| self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it |
| cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but |
| see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months |
| before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So |
| be it, then. Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die |
| in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, |
| then. No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must |
| have left their mouldings there since yesterday, murmured Starbuck to |
| himself, leaning against the bulwarks. The old |
| .. <p 429 > |
| man seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin |
| inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three |
| mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint |
| earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all |
| our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we |
| bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, |
| |
| the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun |
| is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace |
| from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, |
| but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely. There |
| now's the old Mogul, soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, he's been twigging |
| it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I |
| should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking |
| at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer's |
| Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, |
| insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before |
| now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, |
| your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of |
| Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, |
| and quarter joes. what then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator |
| that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! |
| here's signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his |
| Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto. I'll get |
| the almanack and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's |
| arithmetic, I'll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer |
| curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see |
| now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem, hem, hem; |
| |
| here they are --here they go --all alive: --Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the |
| Bull and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he |
| wheels among 'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold |
| between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the |
| fact is, you books must know your |
| .. <p 430 > |
| places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to |
| supply the thoughts. That's my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts |
| calendar, and Bowditch's navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and |
| wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in |
| wonders! There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark! By Jove, I have |
| it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round |
| chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! |
| |
| To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram --lecherous dog, he begets us; then, |
| Taurus, or the Bull --he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins -- |
| |
| that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer |
| the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring |
| Lion, lies in the path --he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his |
| paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love; we marry |
| and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales --happiness |
| |
| weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how |
| we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are |
| curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the |
| Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside; here's |
| the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and |
| headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his |
| whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we |
| sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through |
| it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, |
| aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly |
| Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here comes |
| little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll |
| have to say. There; he's before it; he'll out with something presently. So, |
| so; he's beginning. I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, |
| and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, |
| what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; |
| |
| and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and |
| .. <p 431 > |
| sixty cigars. I wont smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and |
| here's nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em |
| out. Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a |
| foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of |
| wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman --the old |
| hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He |
| luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the |
| mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he's back |
| again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering --voice like an old |
| worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen! If the White Whale be |
| raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of |
| these signs. I've studied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me |
| two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will |
| the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the |
| gold. And what's the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign --the |
| roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of |
| thee. There's another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men |
| in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg --all |
| tattooing --looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the |
| Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks |
| the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as |
| the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country. And by Jove, he's |
| |
| found something there in the vicinity of his thigh --I guess it's Sagittarius, |
| or the Archer. No: he don't know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it |
| for an old button off some king's trowsers. But, aside again! here comes |
| that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the |
| toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, |
| only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin |
| --fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip |
| --poor boy! would he had died, or I; he's half horrible to me. He too has |
| been watching all of these interpreters --myself included --and look now, he |
| comes to read, |
| .. <p 432 > |
| with that unearthly idiot face. stand away again and hear him. hark! I |
| look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look. Upon my soul, |
| he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But |
| what's that he says now -- hist! I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye |
| look, they look. Why, he's getting it by heart --hist! again. I look, |
| you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look. Well, that's funny. |
| |
| And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, |
| especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! |
| caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare-crow? There he stands; two |
| bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves |
| of an old jacket. Wonder if he means me? --complimentary! --poor lad! --I |
| could go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. |
| I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty |
| for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering. Here's the ship's navel, |
| this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew |
| your navel, and what's the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that |
| is ugly, too, for when aught's nailed to the mast it's a sign that things grow |
| |
| desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he'll nail ye! This is a |
| pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and |
| found a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring. How |
| did it get there? And so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to |
| fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters |
| for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious gold! --the green |
| miser 'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds |
| blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, |
| hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done! |
| |
| .. <p 433 > |
| .. < chapter c 2 LEG AND ARM THE PEQUOD, OF NANTUCKET, MEETS THE SAMUEL > |
| |
| |
| |
| ENDERBY, OF LONDON Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale? So cried Ahab, |
| once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the |
| stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted |
| quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who |
| was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darkly-tanned, |
| burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in |
| a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; |
| and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of |
| a huzzar's surcoat. Hast seen the White Whale? See you this? and |
| withdrawing it from the fold that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of |
| sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet. Man my boat! |
| cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him -- Stand by to |
| lower! In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and |
| his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger. |
| But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the |
| moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once |
| stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by |
| an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, |
| and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's |
| warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody --except those who are |
| almost hourly used to it, like whalemen --to clamber up a ship's side from a |
| boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards |
| |
| .. <p 434 > |
| the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. |
| so, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether |
| unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced |
| to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height |
| he could hardly hope to attain. It has before been hinted, perhaps, that |
| every little untoward circumstance that befel him, and which indirectly |
| sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated |
| Ahab. And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of |
| the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the |
| perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair |
| of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink |
| them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea |
| bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange |
| captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, I see, I see! |
| --avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle. As |
| good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two |
| previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved |
| blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was |
| quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary |
| thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an |
| anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the word, held |
| himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own weight, by |
| pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he |
| was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the |
| capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other |
| captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory |
| arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, Aye, aye, |
| hearty! let us shake bones together! --an arm and a leg! --an arm that never |
| can shrink, d'ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see |
| the White Whale? --how long ago? The White Whale, said the Englishman, |
| pointing his ivory |
| .. <p 435 > |
| arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a |
| telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last season. And he took that |
| arm off, did he? asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting |
| on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so. Aye, he was the cause of it, at |
| least; and that leg, too? Spin me the yarn, said Ahab; how was it? It |
| was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line, began the |
| Englishman. I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day |
| we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of |
| them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling |
| round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their |
| sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea |
| a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and |
| wrinkles. It was he, it was he! cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his |
| suspended breath. And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin. Aye, |
| aye --they were mine -- my irons, cried Ahab, exultingly -- but on! Give me a |
| chance, then, said the Englishman, good-humoredly. Well, this old |
| great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, |
| and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line. Aye, I see! --wanted to part |
| it; free the fast-fish --an old trick --I know him. How it was exactly, |
| continued the one-armed commander, I do not know; but in biting the line, it |
| got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn't know it then; so |
| that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his |
| hump! instead of the other whale's that went off to windward, all fluking. |
| Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was --the noblest |
| and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life --I resolved to capture him, spite of |
| the boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would |
| |
| get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have |
| .. <p 436 > |
| a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, |
| I jumped into my first mate's boat --Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way, Captain |
| --Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain); --as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's |
| boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching |
| |
| the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look |
| you, sir --hearts and souls alive, man --the next instant, in a jiff, I was |
| blind as a bat --both eyes out --all befogged and bedeadened with black foam |
| --the whale's tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, |
| like a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at |
| midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, |
| after the second iron, to toss it overboard --down comes the tail like a Lima |
| tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes |
| first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips. |
| We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my |
| harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking |
| fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, |
| taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that |
| cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here (clapping his hand |
| just below his shoulder); yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down |
| to Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the |
| good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh --clear along the whole length |
| of my arm --came out nigh my wrist, and up i floated; --and that gentleman |
| there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain --Dr. Bunger, ship's |
| surgeon: Bunger, my lad, -- the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part |
| of the yarn. The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had |
| been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to |
| denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but |
| sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched |
| trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike |
| he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other, occasionally casting |
| a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled captains. But, at his |
| superior's introduction of him to Ahab, he |
| .. <p 437 > |
| politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding. It was |
| a shocking bad wound, began the whale-surgeon; and, taking my advice, |
| Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-- Samuel Enderby is the name of |
| my ship, interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; go on, boy. |
| |
| Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot |
| weather there on the Line. But it was no use --I did all I could; sat up with |
| him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet-- Oh, very |
| severe! chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice, |
| |
| Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn't see to put on |
| the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in |
| the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe |
| in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. |
| Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don't ye? You know you're a |
| precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you |
| than kept alive by any other man. My captain, you must have ere this |
| perceived, respected sir --said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, |
| slightly bowing to Ahab -- is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many |
| |
| clever things of that sort. But I may as well say --en passant, as the French |
| remark --that I myself --that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend |
| clergy --am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink-- Water! cried the |
| captain; he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to him; fresh water |
| throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on --go on with the arm story. Yes, |
| I may as well, said the surgeon, coolly. I was about observing, sir, before |
| Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest |
| endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it |
| was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several |
| inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black; I |
| knew what was threatened, and off it came. |
| .. <p 438 > |
| But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all |
| rule --pointing at it with the marlingspike -- that is the captain's work, |
| not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there |
| put to the end, to knock some one's brains out with, I suppose, as he tried |
| mine once. He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this |
| dent, sir --removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a |
| bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, |
| |
| or any token of ever having been a wound -- Well, the captain there will tell |
| you how that came here; he knows. No, I don't, said the captain, but |
| his mother did; he was born with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you --you Bunger! |
| was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you |
| die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future |
| ages, you rascal. What became of the White Whale? now cried Ahab, who |
| thus far had been impatiently listening to this bye-play between the two |
| Englishmen. Oh! cried the one-armed captain, Oh, yes! Well; after he |
| sounded, we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, |
| I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till |
| some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick |
| --as some call him --and then I knew it was he. Did'st thou cross his wake |
| again? Twice. But could not fasten? Didn't want to try to: ain't one |
| limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby |
| Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows. Well, then, interrupted Bunger, |
| |
| give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen |
| --very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession -- Do |
| you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so |
| inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for |
| him to completely digest even a |
| .. <p 439 > |
| man's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale's |
| malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; |
| he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old |
| juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe |
| swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, |
| |
| and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, |
| and he heaved it up in small tacks, d'ye see. No possible way for him to |
| digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily |
| system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a |
| mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to |
| the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have |
| another chance at you shortly, that's all. No, thank ye, Bunger, said the |
| english captain, he's welcome to the arm he has, since I can't help it, |
| and didn't know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for |
| me; I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be |
| great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of |
| precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone; don't you think |
| so, Captain? --glancing at the ivory leg. He is. But he will still be |
| hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not |
| always what least allures. He's all a magnet! How long since thou saw'st him |
| last? Which way heading? Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's, |
| cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely |
| snuffing; this man's blood --bring the thermometer; --it's at the boiling |
| point! --his pulse makes these planks beat! --sir! --taking a lancet from his |
| pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm. Avast! roared Ahab, dashing him |
| against the bulwarks -- Man the boat! Which way heading? Good God! cried |
| the English Captain, to whom the question was put. What's the matter? He |
| was heading east, I think. --Is your Captain crazy? whispering Fedallah. |
| |
| But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks |
| .. <p 440 > |
| to take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle |
| towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower. In a moment |
| he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men were springing to |
| their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the |
| stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till |
| alongside of the Pequod. |
| .. <p 440 > |
| .. < chapter ci 10 THE DECANTER > |
| |
| Ere the English ship fades from sight, be |
| it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late |
| Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling |
| house of enderby and sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, |
| comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in |
| point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 0083 |
| , this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents |
| do not make plain; but in that year ( |
| ) it fitted out the first English |
| ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of |
| years previous (ever since |
| ) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket |
| and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the |
| North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, |
| that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized |
| steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only |
| people of the whole globe who so harpooned him. In |
| , a fine ship, the |
| Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the sole charge of the |
| vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the |
| nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the great South Sea. The |
| .. <p 441 > |
| voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold |
| full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other |
| ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the |
| Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the |
| indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons --how |
| many, their mother only knows --and under their immediate auspices, and |
| partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send |
| the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. |
| Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, |
| and did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 0084 |
| , the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on |
| a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship --well called the |
| |
| Syren --made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great |
| Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this |
| famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer. All honor to |
| the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day; |
| though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for |
| the great South Sea of the other world. The ship named after him was worthy |
| of the honor, being a very fast sailer and a noble craft every way. I |
| boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank |
| good flip down in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all |
| trumps --every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And |
| that fine gam I had --long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with |
| his ivory heel -- it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that |
| ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose |
| sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the |
| rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it's squally off |
| there by Patagonia), and all hands --visitors and all --were called to reef |
| topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in |
| bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into |
| .. <p 442 > |
| the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning |
| example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go overboard; and by |
| and bye we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, |
| though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too |
| much diluted and pickled it to my taste. The beef was fine --tough, but with |
| body in it. They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; |
| but i do not know, for certain, how that was. they had dumplings too; small, |
| but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I |
| fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were |
| swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching |
| out of you like billiard-balls. The bread --but that couldn't be helped; |
| besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only |
| fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very |
| easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking |
| her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers, |
| including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel |
| Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; |
| crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band. But why was it, |
| think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English whalers I know of |
| --not all though --were such famous, hospitable ships; that passed round the |
| beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary |
| of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good |
| cheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I |
| been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed. |
| The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders, |
| and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery; |
| and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and |
| drink. For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; |
| but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling |
| good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and, |
| therefore, must have some special origin, |
| .. <p 443 > |
| which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated. During my |
| researches in the leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch |
| volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about |
| whalers. The title was, Dan Coopman, wherefore I concluded that this must |
| be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every |
| whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing |
| that it was the production of one Fitz Swackhammer. But my friend Dr. |
| Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the |
| college of Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for |
| translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble -- this same |
| Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that Dan Coopman did |
| not mean The Cooper, but The Merchant. In short, this ancient and |
| learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other |
| subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in |
| this chapter it was, headed Smeer, or Fat, that I found a long detailed |
| list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; |
| |
| from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead. I transcribe the following: 0084400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish. |
| 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of butter. |
| 20,000 lbs. of Texel and Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an |
| inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer. Most |
| statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the present |
| case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, |
| and gills of good gin and good cheer. At the time, I devoted three days to |
| the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many |
| profound |
| .. <p 444 > |
| thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental |
| and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables |
| of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by |
| every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale |
| fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and Leyden |
| cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally |
| unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their |
| vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar |
| Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial |
| natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil. The quantity of beer, too, |
| is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only be |
| prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of |
| one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the |
| Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men |
| to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; |
| therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a |
| twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers |
| of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might |
| fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's |
| head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat |
| improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very |
| far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; |
| upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the |
| harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss |
| might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford. But no more; enough has been said |
| to show that the old Dutch whalers of two or three centuries ago were high |
| livers; and that the English whalers have not neglected so excellent an |
| example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get |
| nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And |
| this empties the decanter. |
| .. <p 445 > |
| .. < chapter cii 2 A BOWER IN THE ARSACIDES > |
| |
| Hitherto, in descriptively |
| treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his |
| outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural |
| features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it |
| behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his |
| hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of |
| the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that |
| is to say, in his unconditional skeleton. But how now, Ishmael? How is it, |
| that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the |
| subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your |
| capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the |
| windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. |
| Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook |
| dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, |
| Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the |
| privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, |
| sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and |
| belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his |
| bowels. I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far |
| beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with |
| an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small |
| cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to |
| make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. |
| |
| Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and |
| jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that young |
| cub? |
| .. <p 446 > |
| And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic, |
| full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late |
| royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at |
| Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was |
| invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at |
| his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from |
| what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital. Among many other fine |
| qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all |
| matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare |
| things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of |
| |
| wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, |
| aromatic canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, |
| the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores. Chief |
| among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long |
| raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a |
| cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. |
| When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings, |
| and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully |
| transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now |
| sheltered it. The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved |
| with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests |
| kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent |
| forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw |
| vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted |
| damocles. it was a wondrous sight. the wood was green as mosses of the icy |
| Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the |
| industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet on |
| it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the |
| living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; |
| all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all |
| .. <p 447 > |
| these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great |
| sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! |
| unseen weaver! --pause! --one word! -- whither flows the fabric? what palace may |
| it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! --stay thy |
| hand! -- but one single word with thee! Nay --the shuttle flies --the figures |
| |
| float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. |
| The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears |
| no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are |
| deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that |
| speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken |
| words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are |
| plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby |
| have villanies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all |
| this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard |
| afar. Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the |
| great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging --a gigantic idler! Yet, as the |
| ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty |
| idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; |
| every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life |
| folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, |
| and begat him curly-headed glories. Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited |
| this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke |
| ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king |
| should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I |
| marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To |
| and fro I paced before this skeleton --brushed the vines aside --broke through |
| the ribs --and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid |
| its many winding, shaded collonades and arbors. But soon my line was out; |
| and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no |
| living thing within; naught was there but bones. |
| .. <p 448 > |
| Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. |
| From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the |
| altitude of the final rib. How now! they shouted; Dar'st thou measure |
| this our god! That's for us. Aye, priests --well, how long do ye make him, |
| then? But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and |
| inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their yard-sticks -- the great |
| skull echoed --and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own |
| admeasurements. These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But |
| first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any |
| fancied measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can |
| refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, |
| in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have |
| some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard |
| that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the |
| proprietors call the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in |
| the United States. Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton |
| constable by name, a certain sir clifford constable has in his possession the |
| skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the |
| full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's. In both cases, the stranded |
| whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally claimed by |
| their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he |
| wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those |
| parts. Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a |
| great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities |
| --spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan --and swing all day upon his lower |
| jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a |
| footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. |
| Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery |
| in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his |
| cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead. The |
| skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are |
| .. <p 449 > |
| copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild |
| wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such |
| valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other |
| parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing --at |
| least, what untattooed parts might remain --I did not trouble myself with the |
| odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial |
| admeasurement of the whale. |
| .. <p 449 > |
| .. < chapter ciii 10 MEASUREMENT OF THE WHALE'S SKELETON > |
| |
| In the first |
| place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the |
| living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. |
| Such a statement may prove useful here. According to a careful calculation I |
| have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of |
| seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; |
| according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest |
| magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less |
| than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at |
| least ninety tons; so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would |
| considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one |
| thousand one hundred inhabitants. Think you not then that brains, like yoked |
| cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any |
| landsman's imagination? Having already in various ways put before you his |
| skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, |
| I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of |
| his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a |
| proportion of the entire extent |
| .. <p 450 > |
| of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and as nothing |
| is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry |
| it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not |
| gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to view. In |
| length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so |
| that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet |
| long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length |
| compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw |
| comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. |
| Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third of its length, |
| was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals. To me |
| this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending far |
| away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great |
| ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are |
| inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected |
| timber. The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was |
| nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively |
| longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, |
| |
| which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining |
| ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some |
| inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence to their |
| length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In some of the Arsacides they |
| are used for beams whereon to lay foot-path bridges over small streams. In |
| considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance, |
| |
| so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no |
| means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the Tranque ribs, one |
| of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest |
| in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular |
| whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib |
| measured but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half |
| of the true notion of the living |
| .. <p 451 > |
| magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked |
| spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, |
| muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a |
| few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless |
| |
| flukes, an utter blank! How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid |
| untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely |
| poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. |
| no. only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of |
| his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested |
| whale be truly and livingly found out. But the spine. For that, the best way |
| we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No |
| speedy enterprise. But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar. |
| There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not |
| locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic |
| spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is |
| in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The |
| smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in |
| width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there |
| were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal |
| urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. |
| Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off |
| at last into simple child's play. |
| .. <p 451 > |
| .. < chapter civ 30 THE FOSSIL WHALE > |
| |
| From his mighty bulk the whale |
| affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally |
| expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he |
| .. <p 452 > |
| should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his |
| furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; |
| only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in |
| him like great cables and hausers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck |
| of a line-of-battle-ship. Since I have undertaken to manhandle this |
| Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the |
| enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and |
| spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described |
| him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now |
| remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian |
| point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan --to an ant or |
| a flea --such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. |
| But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to |
| this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it |
| said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of |
| these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, |
| expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's |
| uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a |
| whale author like me. One often hears of writers that rise and swell with |
| their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, |
| writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard |
| capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! |
| |
| Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this |
| Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching |
| comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the |
| sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, |
| present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, |
| and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so |
| magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its |
| bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a |
| .. <p 453 > |
| mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, |
| though many there be who have tried it. Ere entering upon the subject of |
| Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my |
| miscellaneous time i have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of |
| ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. |
| Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while |
| in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now |
| almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are |
| called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate |
| intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose |
| remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales |
| hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last |
| preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them precisely |
| answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently |
| akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking ranks as Cetacean |
| fossils. Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their |
| bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, |
| been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in |
| Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the |
| more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year |
| |
| was |
| disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost |
| directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in |
| excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced |
| these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species. |
| But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost complete |
| vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year |
| , 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. |
| .. <p 454 > |
| 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. When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, |
| skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial |
| resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time |
| bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical |
| Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; 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 school-boy. 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. But not alone has this Leviathan |
| left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in |
| limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, |
| whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we |
| find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple |
| of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite |
| ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, |
| griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial |
| globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was |
| there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled. |
| .. <p 455 > |
| Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the |
| whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable |
| John Leo, the old Barbary traveller. Not far from the Sea-side, they have a |
| Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales |
| of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common |
| People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no |
| Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, |
| that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into |
| the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a Whale's |
| Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with |
| its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be |
| reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to |
| have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, |
| that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do |
| not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at |
| the Base of the Temple. In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, |
| reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship |
| |
| there. |
| .. <p 455 > |
| .. < chapter cv 24 DOES THE WHALE'S MAGNITUDE DIMINISH? WILL HE PERISH? > |
| |
| Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the |
| head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the |
| long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk |
| of his sires. But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of |
| the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found |
| in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man), |
| |
| but of the whales found in that |
| .. <p 456 > |
| Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size |
| those of its earlier ones. Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far |
| the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was |
| less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already |
| seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a |
| large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that |
| Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of |
| capture. But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an |
| advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it |
| not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated? Assuredly, we must |
| conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen as Pliny, |
| and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells us of whales that |
| embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight |
| |
| hundred feet in length --Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in |
| the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member |
| of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales |
| (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that |
| is, three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his |
| |
| elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), |
| sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and |
| twenty-eight feet. And this work was published so late as A. D. |
| . But |
| will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big |
| as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a |
| whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I |
| cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried |
| thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in |
| their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and |
| other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the |
| relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the |
| high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far |
| exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of |
| .. <p 457 > |
| all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have |
| degenerated. But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the |
| more recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient |
| look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through |
| Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the |
| world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental |
| coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, |
| |
| and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from |
| the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and |
| then himself evaporate in the final puff. Comparing the humped herds of |
| whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, |
| overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and |
| shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the |
| sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land |
| at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem |
| furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction. |
| |
| But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period |
| ago --not a good life-time --the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the |
| census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or |
| hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this |
| wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of |
| the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. |
| Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whale for forty-eight months think |
| they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the |
| oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters |
| |
| and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still |
| rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for |
| the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, |
| would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact |
| that, if need were, could be statistically stated. Nor, considered aright, |
| does it seem any argument in favor |
| .. <p 458 > |
| of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former |
| years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small |
| pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, |
| the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. |
| Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some |
| views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large |
| degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days |
| are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is |
| all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called |
| whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with |
| them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven |
| from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their |
| jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently |
| startled by the unfamiliar spectacle. Furthermore: concerning these last |
| mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human |
| probability, will for ever remain impregnable. And as upon the invasion of |
| their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, |
| hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales |
| can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate |
| glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in |
| a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from |
| man. But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one |
| cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this |
| positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions. But |
| though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000 have |
| been annually slain on the nor' west coast by the Americans alone; yet there |
| are considerations which render even this circumstance of little or no account |
| as an opposing argument in this matter. Natural as it is to be somewhat |
| incredulous concerning the populousness of the more enormous creatures of the |
| globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells |
| us that at one hunting the King of Siam took |
| |
| elephants; |
| .. <p 459 > |
| that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the |
| temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, |
| |
| which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, |
| by hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East --if they still |
| survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all |
| hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as |
| large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the |
| Isles of the sea combined. Moreover: we are to consider, that from the |
| presumed great longevity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a |
| century and more, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct |
| adult generations must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain |
| some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults |
| of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children |
| who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to the |
| present human population of the globe. Wherefore, for all these things, we |
| account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his |
| individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once |
| swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In |
| Noah's flood, he despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again |
| flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale |
| will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial |
| flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies. |
| .. <p 459 > |
| .. < chapter cvi 29 AHAB'S LEG > |
| |
| The precipitating manner in which Captain |
| Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with |
| some small violence to his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a |
| thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had |
| .. <p 460 > |
| received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and |
| his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent |
| command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering |
| inflexibly enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional |
| twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all |
| appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy. And, |
| indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad |
| recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that |
| dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to |
| the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying |
| prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly |
| inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently |
| displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; |
| nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely |
| cured. Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all |
| the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a |
| former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous |
| reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest |
| songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events |
| do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since |
| |
| both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and |
| posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from |
| certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have |
| no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be |
| followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty |
| |
| mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally |
| progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, |
| there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, |
| thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain |
| unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a |
| mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their |
| diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the |
| genealogies |
| .. <p 461 > |
| of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless |
| primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making |
| suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to |
| this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad |
| birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. |
| Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more |
| properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other particulars |
| concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that |
| for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he |
| had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for |
| that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble |
| senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited reason for this thing appeared by |
| no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every |
| revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light. |
| But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful |
| mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but |
| to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, |
| possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid |
| circle the above hinted casualty --remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted |
| for by Ahab --invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the |
| land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had |
| all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this |
| thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval |
| had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks. But be all this as it |
| may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes |
| and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this |
| present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures; --he called the |
| carpenter. And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him |
| without delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him |
| supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had |
| thus far been accumulated |
| .. <p 462 > |
| on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stoutest, |
| clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the carpenter received |
| orders to have the leg completed that night; and to provide all the fittings |
| for it, independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use. |
| Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary |
| idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was |
| commanded to proceed at once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances |
| might be needed. |
| .. <p 462 > |
| .. < chapter cvii 11 THE CARPENTER > |
| |
| Seat thyself sultanically among the |
| moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, |
| a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and |
| for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both |
| contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from |
| furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter |
| was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage. Like all |
| sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling |
| vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike experienced |
| in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter's |
| pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous |
| handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. |
| |
| but, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this |
| carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless |
| mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three |
| or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak |
| of his readiness in ordinary duties: --repairing stove boats, sprung spars, |
| reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's |
| .. <p 463 > |
| eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other |
| miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he |
| was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, |
| both useful and capricious. The one grand stage where he enacted all his |
| various parts so manifold, was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table |
| furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of |
| wood. At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely |
| lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works. A belaying pin is |
| found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it |
| into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost |
| land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of |
| clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, |
| |
| the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his |
| wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion |
| stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his |
| big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A |
| sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his |
| ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping |
| one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow |
| unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the |
| handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, |
| if he would have him draw the tooth. Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all |
| points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all. Teeth he |
| accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he |
| lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously |
| accomplished, and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this |
| would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely |
| so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal |
| stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the |
| surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general |
| stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while |
| .. <p 464 > |
| pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and |
| ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this |
| half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an |
| all-ramifying heartlessness; --yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, |
| crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then |
| with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time |
| |
| during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it |
| that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to |
| and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off |
| whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He |
| was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born |
| babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You |
| might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort |
| of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so |
| much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, |
| or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of |
| deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his |
| brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of |
| his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, |
| |
| multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior -- though a |
| little swelled --of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of |
| various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, |
| rulers, nail-filers, counter-sinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the |
| carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of |
| him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, |
| and there they were. Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, |
| open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If |
| he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow |
| anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a |
| few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it |
| had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same |
| .. <p 465 > |
| unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a |
| great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, |
| which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and |
| this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself |
| awake. |
| .. <p 465 > |
| .. < chapter cviii 7 AHAB AND THE CARPENTER THE DECK--FIRST NIGHT WATCH > |
| |
| |
| (Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two lanterns |
| busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in the |
| vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools of all |
| sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red flame of the forge is seen, |
| where the blacksmith is at work.) Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is |
| hard which should be soft, and that soft which should be hard. So we go, |
| who file old jaws and shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works |
| better ( sneezes). Halloa, this bone dust is ( sneezes)-- why it's |
| ( sneezes)--yes it's ( sneezes)--bless my soul, it won't let me speak! This is |
| what an old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and |
| you don't get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don't get it |
| ( sneezes). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have |
| that ferule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky now |
| ( sneezes) there's no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a |
| mere shinbone --why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to put a |
| good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him |
| out as neat a leg now as ever ( sneezes) scraped to a lady in a parlor. Those |
| |
| buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in shop windows wouldn't compare |
| at all. They soak water, they do; and of |
| .. <p 466 > |
| course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored ( sneezes) with washes and |
| lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must call |
| his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too short, |
| if anything, I guess. Ha! that's the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, |
| or it's somebody else, that's certain. Ahab ( advancing). (During the |
| ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at times). Well, manmaker! |
| Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let |
| me measure, sir. Measured for a leg! good. Well, it's not the first time. |
| About it! There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast |
| here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once. so, so; it does pinch some. |
| Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware! No fear; I like a good grip; I |
| like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What's |
| Prometheus about there? --the blacksmith, I mean --what's he about? He must be |
| forging the buckle-screw, sir, now. Right. It's a partnership; he supplies |
| the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there! Aye, sir; he must have |
| the white heat for this kind of fine work. Um-m. So he must. I do deem it |
| now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they |
| say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's |
| made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable. How the |
| soot flies! This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. |
| Carpenter, when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of |
| steel shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack. Sir? |
| Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a |
| desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest |
| modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay in |
| one place; then, arms three |
| .. <p 467 > |
| feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a |
| quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see --shall I order eyes to see |
| outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. |
| There, take the order, and away. Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he |
| speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here? ( aside). |
| 'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one. No, no, |
| no; I must have a lantern. Ho, ho! That's it, hey? Here are two, sir; one |
| will serve my turn. What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face |
| for, man? thrusted light is worse than presented pistols. i thought, sir, |
| that you spoke to carpenter. Carpenter? why that's --but no; --a very tidy, |
| and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, |
| carpenter; --or would'st thou rather work in clay? Sir? --Clay? clay, sir? |
| That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir. The fellow's impious! What art |
| thou sneezing about? Bone is rather dusty, sir. Take the hint, then; and |
| when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people's noses. Sir? |
| --oh! ah! --I guess so; so; --yes, yes --oh dear! Look ye, carpenter, I dare say |
| thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh! Well, then, will |
| it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg |
| thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical |
| place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, |
| I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away? Truly, sir, I begin to |
| understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score, |
| sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old |
| spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be |
| really so, sir? It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where |
| mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, |
| .. <p 468 > |
| yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, |
| |
| there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle? I should humbly call it a poser, sir. |
| |
| Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may |
| not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now |
| standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, |
| then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak! And if I still |
| feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, |
| why mayest not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and |
| without a body? Hah! Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must |
| calculate over again; I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir. Look ye, |
| pudding-heads should never grant premises. --How long before this leg is |
| done? Perhaps an hour, sir. Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me |
| (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing |
| debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal |
| inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as |
| air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have |
| given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman |
| empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I |
| brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve |
| myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So. Carpenter ( resuming |
| |
| his work). Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb |
| always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word |
| queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning |
| it into Mr. Starbuck all the time -- queer, sir --queer, queer, very queer. And |
| here's his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow! has a |
| stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he'll stand on |
| this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all |
| three places standing in one hell --how was that? Oh! I don't wonder he |
| looked so scornful at me! I'm a sort of strange-thoughted |
| .. <p 469 > |
| sometimes, they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little |
| old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with |
| tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick, |
| and there's a great cry for life-boats. And here's the heron's leg! long and |
| |
| slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, |
| and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old |
| lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he's a hard driver. |
| Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears |
| out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with |
| those screws, and let's finish it before the resurrection fellow comes |
| a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round |
| collecting old beer barrels, to fill 'em up again. What a leg this is! It |
| looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he'll be |
| standing on this to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I |
| almost forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the |
| latitude. So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now! |
| .. <p 469 > |
| .. < chapter cix 21 AHAB AND STARBUCK IN THE CABIN > |
| |
| According to usage they |
| were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no inconsiderable oil came up |
| with the water; the casks below must have sprung a bad leak. Much concern |
| was shown; and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report this unfavorable |
| affair. |
| .. <p 470 > |
| Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the |
| Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China |
| waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of |
| the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one |
| representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands -- Niphon, |
| Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the |
| screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his |
| hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling |
| his brow, and tracing his old courses again. Who's there? hearing the |
| footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. On deck! Begone! |
| |
| captain ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We |
| must up Burtons and break out. Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are |
| nearing Japan; heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops? |
| |
| Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a |
| year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir. So |
| it is, so it is; if we get it. I was speaking of the oil in the hold, |
| sir. And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it |
| leak! I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky |
| casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far worse |
| plight than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can |
| find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in |
| this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons hoisted. |
| |
| What will the owners say, sir? Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and |
| outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always |
| prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my |
| conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; |
| and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship's keel. --On deck! Captain |
| Ahab, said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a daring |
| so strangely respectful and cautious that |
| .. <p 471 > |
| it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward |
| manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of |
| itself; A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would |
| quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye! and in a happier, Captain |
| Ahab. Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me? |
| --On deck! Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir --to be |
| forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain |
| ahab? ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most |
| South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, |
| exclaimed: There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain |
| that is lord over the Pequod. --On deck! For an instant in the flashing eyes |
| of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost thought that he had |
| really received the blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, |
| he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and |
| said: Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, Sir; but for that I ask thee not |
| to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; |
| beware of thyself, old man. He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most |
| careful bravery that! murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. What's that |
| he said --Ahab beware of Ahab --there's something there! Then unconsciously |
| using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the |
| little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and |
| returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck. Thou art but too good a |
| fellow, Starbuck, he said lowly to the mate; then raising his voice to the |
| crew: Furl the t'gallant-sails and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; |
| back the main-yard; up Burtons, and break out in the main-hold. It were |
| perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting Starbuck, |
| Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or mere |
| prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the |
| slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the important |
| chief |
| .. <p 472 > |
| officer of his ship. However it was, his orders were executed; and the |
| Burtons were hoisted. |
| .. <p 469n. > |
| In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a |
| regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the |
| casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by |
| the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while |
| by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect |
| any serious leakage in the precious cargo. |
| .. <p 472 > |
| .. < chapter cx 4 QUEEQUEG IN HIS COFFIN > |
| |
| Upon searching, it was found |
| that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly sound, and that the |
| leak must be further off. So, it being calm weather, they broke out deeper |
| and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from |
| that black midnight sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So |
| deep did they go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the |
| lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone |
| cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, |
| vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after tierce, |
| too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of |
| hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get |
| about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over |
| empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted |
| demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle |
| in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them then. Now, at |
| this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend, |
| Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to his endless end. |
| |
| Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown; |
| dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher |
| you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, |
| must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but --as we have |
| elsewhere seen -- mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend |
| into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that |
| .. <p 473 > |
| subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see |
| to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the |
| holders, so called. Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half |
| disembowelled, you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down |
| upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage |
| was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard |
| at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to |
| him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, |
| he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after some |
| |
| days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door |
| of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, |
| till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as |
| all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, |
| nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange |
| softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his |
| sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not |
| die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow |
| fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of |
| Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the |
| side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any |
| beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly |
| wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the |
| drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a |
| last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell. So |
| |
| that --let us say it again --no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier |
| thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face |
| of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling |
| sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean's invisible |
| flood-tide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven. Not a |
| man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he |
| thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favor he asked. He called |
| one to him in the grey |
| .. <p 474 > |
| morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said |
| that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark |
| wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had |
| learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same |
| dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for |
| it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead |
| warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away |
| to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are |
| isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, |
| uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white |
| breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at the thought of |
| being buried in his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like |
| something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like |
| those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that |
| like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that |
| involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages. Now, |
| when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at once |
| commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might include. There was some |
| heathenish, coffin-colored old lumber aboard, which, upon a long previous |
| voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and |
| from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to be made. No sooner was |
| the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with |
| all the indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the |
| forecastle and took Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly |
| chalking Queequeg's person as he shifted the rule. Ah! poor fellow! he'll |
| have to die now, ejaculated the Long Island sailor. Going to his |
| vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience' sake and general reference, now |
| transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin was to be, and then |
| made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at its extremities. This |
| done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to work. |
| .. <p 475 > |
| When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he |
| lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether they |
| were ready for it yet in that direction. Overhearing the indignant but |
| half-humorous cries with which the people on deck began to drive the coffin |
| away, Queequeg, to every one's consternation, commanded that the thing should |
| |
| be instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of |
| all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they |
| will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be |
| indulged. Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin |
| with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock |
| drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one |
| of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were |
| then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the |
| head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and |
| a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to |
| be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if |
| any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his |
| bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast |
| with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be |
| placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there |
| lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. |
| |
| Rarmai (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be |
| replaced in his hammock. But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily |
| hovering near by all this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with |
| soft sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine. |
| |
| Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? Where go ye |
| now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches |
| are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek |
| out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think he's in those far |
| Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for |
| look! |
| .. <p 476 > |
| he's left his tambourine behind; --I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, |
| Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye your dying march. I have heard, murmured |
| Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, that in violent fevers, men, all |
| ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is |
| probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those |
| ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty |
| scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his |
| lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he |
| that, but there? --Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now. Form two |
| and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it |
| across here. --Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon |
| his head and crow! queequeg dies game! --mind ye that; queequeg dies game! -- |
| take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! |
| but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a'shiver; --out upon Pip! |
| Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he's a runaway; a coward, a |
| coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat! I'd never beat my |
| tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying |
| here. No, no! shame upon all cowards --shame upon them! Let 'em go drown |
| like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame! During all this, |
| Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the |
| sick man was replaced in his hammock. But now that he had apparently made |
| every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved a good fit, |
| Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter's box: |
| |
| and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in |
| substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was this; --at a |
| critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was |
| leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not |
| die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a |
| matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a |
| word, it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man |
| .. <p 477 > |
| made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a |
| whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of |
| that sort. Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and |
| civilized; that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, |
| generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in |
| good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the |
| windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he |
| suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out arms and legs, gave himself a good |
| stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his |
| hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight. |
| With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying |
| into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours |
| he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and |
| drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy |
| parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the |
| work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic |
| marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the |
| earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that |
| Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in |
| one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own |
| live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in |
| the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, |
| |
| and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which |
| suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away |
| from surveying poor Queequeg -- Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods! |
| .. <p 478 > |
| .. < chapter cxi 2 THE PACIFIC > |
| |
| When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged |
| at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have |
| |
| greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication |
| of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a |
| thousand leagues of blue. There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about |
| this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul |
| beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried |
| Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, |
| wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the |
| waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions |
| of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all |
| that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like |
| slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their |
| restlessness. To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once |
| beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost |
| waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The |
| same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday |
| planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous |
| skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float |
| milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and |
| |
| impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's |
| whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating |
| heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the |
| seductive god, bowing your head to Pan. But few thoughts of Pan stirred |
| Ahab's brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside |
| the mizen |
| .. <p 479 > |
| rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the |
| Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with |
| the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea |
| in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length |
| upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese |
| cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met |
| like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like |
| overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted |
| hull, Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood! |
| .. <p 479 > |
| .. < chapter cxii 13 THE BLACKSMITH > |
| |
| The blacksmith availing himself of the mild, |
| summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation |
| for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the |
| begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to |
| the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but |
| still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being |
| now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen |
| to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their |
| various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager |
| circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, |
| and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled. |
| Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. |
| No murmur, no impatience, no petulence did come from him. Silent, slow, and |
| solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled |
| away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the |
| heavy beating of his heart. And so it was. --Most miserable! |
| .. <p 480 > |
| A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing |
| in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of |
| the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had |
| finally given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful |
| |
| story of his wretched fate. Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's |
| midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith |
| half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge |
| in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of |
| both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four |
| acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act |
| of the grief of his life's drama. He was an old man, who, at the age of |
| nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals |
| called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to |
| do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving |
| wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a |
| cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of |
| darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate |
| burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And |
| darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this |
| burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening |
| of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, |
| for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in the |
| basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always |
| |
| had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, |
| but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old |
| husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors |
| and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout |
| Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants were rocked to slumber. Oh, |
| woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou |
| taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then |
| had the young widow had a |
| .. <p 481 > |
| delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream |
| of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But |
| Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil |
| solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse |
| than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him |
| easier to harvest. Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer |
| every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter |
| than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, |
| glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; |
| |
| the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down |
| into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; |
| and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his |
| every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls! Death seems |
| the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a |
| launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first |
| salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, |
| |
| the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still |
| have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the |
| all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole |
| plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; |
| and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them |
| -- Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of |
| intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. |
| Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and |
| abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up |
| |
| thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry |
| thee! Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun-rise, and by |
| fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth |
| went a-whaling. |
| .. <p 482 > |
| .. < chapter cxiii 2 THE FORGE > |
| |
| With matted beard, and swathed in a |
| bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day, Perth was standing between his |
| forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand |
| holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, |
| when captain ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking |
| leathern bag. While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; |
| |
| till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it |
| upon the anvil --the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering |
| flights, some of which flew close to Ahab. Are these thy Mother Carey's |
| chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, |
| too, but not to all; --look here, they burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them |
| without a scorch. Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab, answered |
| Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer; I am past scorching; not easily |
| can'st thou scorch a scar. Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds |
| too calmly, sanely woful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of |
| all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; |
| say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do |
| the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad? --What wert thou |
| making there? Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in |
| it. And can'st thou make it all smooth, again, blacksmith, after such hard |
| usage as it had? I think so, sir. And I suppose thou can'st smoothe |
| almost any seams and dents; never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith? |
| |
| Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one. |
| .. <p 483 > |
| |
| Look ye here, then, cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with |
| both hands on Perth's shoulders; look ye here -- here --can ye smoothe out a |
| seam like this, blacksmith, sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow;;if |
| thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, |
| and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can'st thou smoothe |
| this seam? Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but |
| one? aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for |
| though thou only see'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone |
| of my skull -- that is all wrinkles! But, away with child's play; no more |
| gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here! jingling the leathern bag, as if it |
| were full of gold coins. I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand |
| yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale |
| like his own fin-bone. There's the stuff, flinging the pouch upon the |
| anvil. Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel |
| shoes of racing horses. Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou |
| hast here, then, the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work. I |
| know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted |
| bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me first, twelve |
| rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together |
| like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I'll blow the fire. When |
| at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling |
| them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. A flaw! rejecting |
| the last one. Work that over again, Perth. This done, Perth was about to |
| begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he |
| would weld his own iron. As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered |
| on the anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods, one after the other, |
| and the hard pressed forge shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee |
| passed silently, and bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking |
| some curse or some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid |
| aside. |
| .. <p 484 > |
| |
| What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for? muttered Stubb, |
| looking on from the forecastle. That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and |
| smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan. At last the shank, in |
| one complete rod, received its final heat; and as perth, to temper it, plunged |
| it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the scalding steam shot up |
| into Ahab's bent face. Would'st thou brand me, Perth? wincing for a moment |
| with the pain; have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then? Pray |
| God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for |
| the White Whale? For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must |
| make them thyself, man. Here are my razors --the best of steel; here, and make |
| the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea. For a moment, the old |
| blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use them. Take them, |
| man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup, nor pray till |
| --but here --to work! Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by |
| Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the |
| blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering |
| them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near. No, no --no water for |
| that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, |
| Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover |
| this barb? holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three |
| punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale's barbs were |
| then tempered. Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli! |
| deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the |
| baptismal blood. Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one |
| |
| of hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the |
| socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms |
| of it taken to the windlass, and |
| .. <p 485 > |
| stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope |
| hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no |
| strandings, ahab exclaimed, good! and now for the seizings. At one |
| extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all |
| braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven |
| hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was traced half way along |
| the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine. |
| This done, pole, iron, and rope --like the Three Fates --remained inseparable, |
| |
| and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, |
| and the sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. |
| But ere he entered his cabin, a light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most |
| piteous sound was heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but |
| unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the |
| black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it! |
| .. <p 485 > |
| .. < chapter cxiv 20 THE GILDER > |
| |
| Penetrating further and further into the |
| heart of the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the |
| fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, |
| and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily |
| pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of |
| sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but |
| small success for their pains. At such times, under an abated sun; afloat |
| all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a |
| birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that |
| like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of |
| dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil |
| .. <p 486 > |
| beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that |
| pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but |
| conceals a remorseless fang. These are the times, when in his whale-boat the |
| rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the |
| sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship |
| revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not though |
| high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when |
| the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their |
| hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure. The long-drawn virgin |
| vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the |
| hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these |
| solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. |
| |
| And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, |
| half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole. Nor did such |
| soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary an effect on |
| Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret |
| golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing. Oh, |
| grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, |
| --though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, --in ye, men yet |
| may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting |
| moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these |
| blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven |
| by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is |
| no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed |
| gradations, and at the last one pause: --through infancy's unconscious spell, |
| boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then |
| scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of |
| If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, |
| and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no |
| more? in what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will |
| .. <p 487 > |
| never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like |
| those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our |
| paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. And that same |
| day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea, |
| Starbuck lowly murmured: -- Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his |
| young bride's eye! --Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy |
| kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I |
| look deep down and do believe. And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, |
| leaped up in that same golden light: -- I am Stubb, and Stubb has his |
| history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly! |
| .. <p 487 > |
| .. < chapter cxv 16 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE BACHELOR > |
| |
| And jolly enough were |
| the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before the wind, some few |
| weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded. It was a Nantucket ship, the |
| Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last cask of oil, and bolted down her |
| bursting hatches; and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though |
| somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships on |
| the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home. The three men at her |
| mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats; from the |
| stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; and hanging captive from the |
| |
| bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. |
| Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colors were flying from her rigging, on |
| every side. Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two |
| barrels of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender |
| breakers of the |
| .. <p 488 > |
| same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp. As was |
| afterwards learned, the bachelor had met with the most surprising success; |
| all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous |
| other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish. Not only |
| had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room for the far more |
| valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had been bartered for, |
| from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the |
| captain's and officers' staterooms. Even the cabin table itself had been |
| knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of |
| an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, |
| the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; |
| it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest |
| boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and |
| filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and |
| filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the |
| captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, |
| in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction. As this glad ship of |
| good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of enormous |
| drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men |
| were seen standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with the |
| parchment-like poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar |
| to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the |
| mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped |
| with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, |
| firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island |
| negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the |
| hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy |
| at the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed. |
| You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastile, such |
| wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled |
| into the sea. |
| .. <p 489 > |
| Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship's |
| elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before him, |
| |
| and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion. And Ahab, he |
| too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with a stubborn |
| gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's wakes --one all jubilations |
| for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come --their two |
| captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene. |
| |
| Come aboard, come aboard! cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting a |
| glass and a bottle in the air. Hast seen the White Whale? gritted Ahab in |
| reply. No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all, said the |
| other good-humoredly. Come aboard! Thou are too damned jolly. Sail on. |
| Hast lost any men? Not enough to speak of --two islanders, that's all; --but |
| come aboard, old hearty, come along. I'll soon take that black from your |
| brow. Come along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and |
| homeward-bound. How wondrous familiar is a fool! muttered Ahab; then |
| aloud, Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayest; well, then, |
| call me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. |
| Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind! And thus, while the |
| one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against |
| it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with |
| grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor's |
| men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in. And as |
| Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homeward-bound craft, he took from |
| his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, |
| seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was |
| filled with Nantucket soundings. |
| .. <p 490 > |
| .. < chapter cxvi 2 THE DYING WHALE > |
| |
| Not seldom in this life, when, on the |
| right side, fortune's favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop |
| before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging |
| sails fill out. So seemed it with the Pequod. For next day after |
| encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one |
| of them by Ahab. It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of |
| |
| the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, |
| sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such |
| plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it |
| almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the |
| Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to |
| sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. Soothed again, but only soothed to |
| deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently |
| watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange |
| spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying --the turning sunwards of the |
| head, and so expiring --that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid |
| evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before. He turns |
| and turns him to it, --how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering |
| and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most |
| faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun! --Oh that these too-favoring eyes |
| should see these too-favoring sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond |
| all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where |
| to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the |
| billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine |
| upon the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of |
| .. <p 491 > |
| faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it |
| heads some other way. -- Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned |
| bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these |
| unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to |
| me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. |
| |
| Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round |
| again, without a lesson to me. Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! |
| Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet! --that one strivest, this one jettest all in |
| |
| vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon |
| all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet |
| dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy |
| unnamable imminglings, float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once |
| living things, exhaled as air, but water now. Then hail, for ever hail, O |
| sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of |
| earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye |
| billows are my foster-brothers! |
| .. <p 491 > |
| .. < chapter cxvii 23 THE WHALE WATCH > |
| |
| The four whales slain that evening |
| had died wide apart; one, far to windward; one, less distant, to leeward; |
| one ahead; one astern. These last three were brought alongside ere |
| nightfall; but the windward one could not be reached till morning; and the |
| boat that had killed it lay by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab's. |
| The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and the |
| lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the |
| black, glossy back, and far out upon the |
| .. <p 492 > |
| midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf |
| upon a beach. Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who |
| crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round |
| the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like |
| the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah, |
| ran shuddering through the air. Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to |
| face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed |
| the last men in a flooded world. I have dreamed it again, said he. Of the |
| hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be |
| thine? And who are hearsed that die on the sea? But I said, old man, that |
| ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee |
| on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the |
| last one must be grown in America. Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee: |
| --a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the |
| pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not soon see. Believe it or not, |
| thou canst not die till it be seen, old man. And what was that saying about |
| thyself? Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy |
| pilot. And when thou art so gone before --if that ever befall --then ere I |
| can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still? --Was it not so? |
| |
| Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two pledges |
| that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it. Take another pledge, old |
| man, said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom, |
| -- Hemp only can kill thee. The gallows, ye mean. --I am immortal then, on |
| land and on sea, cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision; -- Immortal on land |
| and on sea! Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and |
| the slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead whale |
| was brought to the ship. |
| |
| .. <p 493 > |
| .. < chapter cxviii 2 THE QUADRANT > |
| |
| The season for the Line at length drew |
| near; and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, |
| the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager |
| mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes |
| centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the |
| ship's prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon |
| high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about |
| taking his wonted daily obervation of the sun to determine his latitude. Now, |
| in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. |
| That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy |
| ocean's immeasureable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there |
| are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is |
| as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. Well that Ahab's quadrant |
| was furnished with colored glasses, through which to take sight of that solar |
| fire. So, swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his |
| astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture |
| for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its |
| precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee |
| |
| was kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like |
| Ahab's, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half |
| hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly |
| passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken; and with his |
| pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at |
| that precise instant. Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked |
| up towards the sun and murmured to himself: Thou sea-mark! thou high and |
| mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly |
| .. <p 494 > |
| where I am --but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst |
| thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is |
| Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look |
| into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that |
| is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of |
| thee, thou sun! Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the |
| other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and |
| muttered: Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and |
| Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; |
| |
| but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where |
| thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds |
| thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or |
| one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou |
| insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all |
| the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness |
| but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O |
| sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; |
| not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his |
| firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant! dashing it to the deck, no longer |
| will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level |
| dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my |
| place on the sea. Aye, lighting from the boat to the deck, thus I |
| trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split |
| and destroy thee! As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with |
| his live and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a |
| fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself --these passed over the mute, |
| motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, |
| awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on |
| the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out -- To the |
| braces! Up helm! --square in! In an instant the yards swung round; and as |
| the ship half-wheeled |
| .. <p 495 > |
| upon her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her |
| long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient |
| steed. Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's |
| tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck. I |
| have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its |
| tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to |
| dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will |
| at length remain but one little heap of ashes! Aye, cried Stubb, but |
| sea-coal ashes --mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck --sea-coal, not your common |
| charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, "Here some one thrusts these |
| cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no |
| others." And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and |
| die it! |
| .. <p 495 > |
| .. < chapter cxix 19 THE CANDLES > |
| |
| Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest |
| fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. |
| Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba |
| knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in |
| these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all |
| storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, |
| like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town. Towards evening of that |
| day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight a |
| Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness came on, sky and |
| sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that |
| showed the disabled masts fluttering here and there with |
| .. <p 496 > |
| the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport. |
| Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every |
| flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster might |
| have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were |
| directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But |
| all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the cranes, |
| the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape. A great rolling sea, |
| dashing high up against the reeling ship's high tetering side, stove in the |
| boat's bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a |
| sieve. Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck, said Stubb, regarding the wreck, |
| |
| but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see, Mr. |
| Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the |
| world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I |
| have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it's all in |
| fun: so the old song says; --( sings.) Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker |
| is the whale, A' flourishin' his tail, -- Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, |
| joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! The scud all a flyin' That's his |
| flip only foamin'; When he stirs in the spicin', -- Such a funny, sporty, |
| gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! Thunder splits the |
| ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin' of this flip, -- Such a funny, |
| sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! Avast Stubb, |
| cried Starbuck, let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our |
| rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace. But I am |
| not a brave man; never said i was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to |
| keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there's no way |
| to stop my singing |
| .. <p 497 > |
| in this world but to cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing |
| ye the doxology for a wind-up. Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast |
| none of thine own. What! how can you see better of a dark night than |
| anybody else, never mind how foolish? Here! cried Starbuck, seizing |
| Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his hand towards the weather bow, |
| |
| markest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab |
| |
| is to run for Moby Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now |
| mark his boat there; where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where |
| he is wont to stand --his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and |
| sing away, if thou must! I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind? |
| |
| Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket, |
| soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's question. The gale that |
| now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will |
| drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but |
| to leeward, homeward --I see it lightens up there; but not with the |
| lightning. At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, |
| following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same |
| instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead. Who's there? Old |
| Thunder! said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole; |
| but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire. |
| Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the |
| perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships |
| carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this |
| conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all |
| contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it |
| would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with some |
| of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel's way in the water; |
| because of all this, the lower parts of a ship's |
| .. <p 498 > |
| lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made in long |
| slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the chains |
| outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require. The rods! |
| the rods! cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to vigilance by |
| the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his |
| post. Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft. Quick! Avast! |
| cried Ahab; let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker side. Yet |
| I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world |
| may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir. Look aloft! |
| cried Starbuck. The corpusants! the corpusants! All the yard-arms were |
| tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end |
| with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently |
| burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an |
| altar. Blast the boat! let it go! cried Stubb at this instant, as a |
| swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale |
| violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. Blast it! --but |
| slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and |
| immediately shifting his tone, he cried -- The corpusants have mercy on us |
| all! To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance |
| of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses |
| from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teter over to a seething sea; but |
| in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God's burning |
| finger has been laid on the ship; when his mene, mene, Tekel Upharsin has |
| been woven into the shrouds and the cordage. While this pallidness was burning |
| aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick |
| cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale |
| phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against |
| the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his |
| real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. |
| The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely |
| gleamed as if they too |
| .. <p 499 > |
| had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light, |
| Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body. The tableau |
| all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the Pequod and |
| every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two passed, when |
| Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was Stubb. What |
| thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same in the song. |
| |
| No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope |
| they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces? --have they no |
| bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck --but it's too dark to look. |
| Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; |
| for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with |
| sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, |
| like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti |
| candles --that's the good promise we saw. At that moment Starbuck caught |
| sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight. Glancing |
| upwards, he cried: See! see! and once more the high tapering flames were |
| beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor. The |
| corpusants have mercy on us all, cried Stubb, again. At the base of the |
| mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the parsee was kneeling |
| in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from |
| the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing |
| |
| a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered |
| together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, |
| orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or |
| stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the |
| deck; but all their eyes upcast. Aye, aye, men! cried Ahab. Look up at |
| it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! |
| Hand me those main-mast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let |
| mine beat against it; blood against fire! So. |
| .. <p 500 > |
| Then turning --the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon |
| the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood |
| erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames. Oh! thou clear spirit |
| of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the |
| sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now |
| know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is |
| defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate |
| thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. |
| I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake |
| life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst |
| of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a |
| point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly |
| live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But |
| war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will |
| kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and |
| though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here |
| that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou |
| madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee. |
| [Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to |
| thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his |
| right hand pressed hard upon them.] I own thy speechless, placeless power; |
| said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. |
| Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then |
| be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would |
| not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and |
| ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning |
| ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou |
| be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, |
| leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn |
| the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now do I glory in my genealogy. But thou |
| art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast |
| |
| .. <p 501 > |
| thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest |
| not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy |
| beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou |
| knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing |
| beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all |
| thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched |
| eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou |
| too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with |
| haughty agony, i read my sire. leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap |
| with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I |
| worship thee! The boat! the boat! cried Starbuck, look at thy boat, old |
| |
| man! Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed |
| in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's bow; |
| but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to |
| drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of |
| pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent's |
| tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm -- God, God is against thee, old |
| man; forbear! t'is an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square |
| the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to |
| go on a better voyage than this. Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken |
| crew instantly ran to the braces --though not a sail was left aloft. For the |
| moment all the aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half |
| mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and |
| snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; |
| swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's |
| end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart |
| that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke: -- All |
| your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, |
| and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what |
| tune this heart beats; |
| .. <p 502 > |
| look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear! And with one blast of his |
| breath he extinguished the flame. As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, |
| men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and |
| strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a |
| mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of ahab's many of the mariners |
| did run from him in a terror of dismay. |
| .. <p 502 > |
| .. < chapter cxx 10 THE DECK TOWARDS THE END OF THE FIRST NIGHT WATCH > |
| |
| |
| Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him. We must send down the |
| main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose, and the lee lift is |
| half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir? Strike nothing; lash it. If I had |
| sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up now. Sir? --in God's name! --sir? Well. |
| |
| The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard? Strike nothing, |
| and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it has not got |
| up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it. --By masts and keels! he |
| takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my |
| main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest |
| winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I |
| strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest |
| time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I |
| not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take |
| medicine! |
| .. <p 503 > |
| .. < chapter cxxi 2 MIDNIGHT--THE FORECASTLE BULWARKS > |
| |
| Stubb and Flask |
| mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the anchors there |
| hanging. No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, |
| but you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long |
| ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn't you once say that whatever |
| ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its insurance |
| policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of |
| lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn't you say so? Well, suppose I did? What |
| then? i've part changed my flesh since that time, why not my mind? Besides, |
| supposing we are loaded with powder barrels aft and lucifers forward; how |
| the devil could the lucifers get afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my |
| little man, you have pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now. Shake |
| yourself; you're Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers |
| at your coat collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the |
| Marine Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, |
| Flask. But hark, again, and I'll answer ye the other thing. First take your |
| leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; |
| now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's |
| lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn't got any |
| lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don't you see, you timber-head, that no |
| harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? |
| What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, |
| and Ahab, --aye, man, and all of us, --were in no more danger then, in my poor |
| opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, |
| you King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go about |
| .. <p 504 > |
| with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia |
| officer's skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye |
| be sensible, Flask? it's easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man |
| with half an eye can be sensible. I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes |
| find it rather hard. Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be |
| sensible, that's a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never |
| mind; catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down |
| these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. tying these |
| two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what |
| big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey? |
| What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored |
| anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. There, |
| hammer that knot down, and we've done. So; next to touching land, lighting |
| on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, |
| will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a |
| long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails |
| tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d'ye see. Same with |
| cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more |
| monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive |
| down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, |
| |
| Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is |
| a nasty night, lad. |
| .. <p 505 > |
| .. < chapter cxxiii 10 THE MUSKET > |
| |
| During the most violent shocks of the |
| Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's jaw-bone tiller had several times been |
| reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer |
| tackles had been attached to it --for they were slack -- because some play to |
| the tiller was indispensable. In a severe gale like this, while the ship is |
| but a tossed shuttle-cock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see |
| the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus |
| |
| with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to |
| notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a |
| sight that hardly any one can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion. |
| Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the |
| strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb --one engaged forward and the other |
| aft --the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut |
| adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers |
| of |
| .. <p 506 > |
| an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed |
| bird is on the wing. The three corresponding new sails were now bent and |
| reefed, and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went |
| through the water with some precision again; and the course --for the present, |
| East-south-east --which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more given |
| to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only steered |
| according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship as near |
| her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign! |
| the wind seemed coming round astern; aye! the foul breeze became fair! |
| Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of Ho! the fair |
| |
| wind! oh-he-yo, cheerly, men! the crew singing for joy, that so |
| promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding |
| it. In compliance with the standing order of his commander -- to report |
| immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in |
| the affairs of the deck, --Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the |
| breeze --however reluctantly and gloomily, --than he mechanically went below to |
| apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance. Ere knocking at his state-room, he |
| involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp --taking long swings |
| this way and that --was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the |
| old man's bolted door, --a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of |
| upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain |
| humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of |
| the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as |
| they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, |
| upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw the |
| muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its |
| neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for |
| itself. He would have shot me once, he murmured, yes, there's the very |
| musket that he pointed at me; --that one with the studded stock; let me touch |
| it --lift it. Strange, that I, who have |
| .. <p 507 > |
| handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? |
| I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan; -- that's not good. Best spill |
| it? --wait. I'll cure myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I |
| think. --I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death |
| and doom, -- that's fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for |
| that accursed fish. --The very tube he pointed at me! --the very one; this one |
| --I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now. |
| --Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike |
| his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these |
| same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the |
| error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he |
| would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely |
| suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him? --Yes, it would |
| make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any |
| deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab |
| |
| have his way. If, then, he were this instant--put aside, that crime would |
| not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there, --in there, |
| he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I |
| can't withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not |
| entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy |
| own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men |
| have vow'd thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid! -- But is |
| there no other way? no lawful way? --Make him a prisoner to be taken home? |
| What! hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands? |
| Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with |
| ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would |
| be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; |
| could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable |
| reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? |
| The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand |
| alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between |
| me and law. --Aye, aye, 'tis so. --Is heaven a murderer |
| .. <p 508 > |
| when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets |
| and skin together? --And would I be a murderer, then, if --and slowly, |
| stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end |
| against the door. On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head |
| this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child |
| again. --Oh Mary! Mary! --boy! boy! boy! --But if I wake thee not to death, old |
| man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may |
| sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art thou? Shall I? shall I? --The |
| wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed |
| and set; she heads her course. Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart |
| at last! Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's |
| tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream to |
| speak. The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel; |
| |
| Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he |
| placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place. He's too sound |
| asleep, Mr Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to |
| the deck here. Thou know'st what to say. |
| .. <p 508 > |
| .. < chapter cxxiv 25 THE NEEDLE > |
| |
| Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea |
| rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's |
| gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong, |
| unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying |
| sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning |
| light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; |
| |
| where his bayonet |
| .. <p 509 > |
| rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and |
| queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, |
| that bubblingly leaps with light and heat. Long maintaining an enchanted |
| silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the tetering ship loweringly |
| pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced |
| ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and |
| saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with |
| his undeviating wake. Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for |
| the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring |
| the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the |
| sea! But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards |
| the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading. East-sou-east, |
| sir, said the frightened steersman. Thou liest! smiting him with his |
| clenched fist. Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun |
| astern? Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then |
| observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very |
| blinding palpableness must have been the cause. Thrusting his head half way |
| into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted |
| arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind |
| him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the |
| Pequod was as infallibly going West. But ere the first wild alarm could get |
| out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, I have |
| it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our |
| compasses --that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take |
| it. Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir, said the pale |
| mate, gloomily. Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in |
| more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The |
| .. <p 510 > |
| magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, |
| essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be |
| much marvelled at, that such things should be. In instances where the |
| lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the |
| spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more |
| fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before |
| magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in |
| either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue |
| thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same |
| fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost |
| one inserted into the kelson. Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and |
| eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his |
| extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that |
| the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's |
| course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the |
| Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed |
| fair one had only been juggling her. Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret |
| thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; |
| |
| while Stubb and Flask --who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing |
| his feelings --likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some |
| of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of |
| Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly |
| unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into |
| their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's. For a space the old man walked |
| the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he |
| saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before |
| dashed to the deck. Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday |
| |
| I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would feign have wrecked me. So, |
| so. But Ahab is lord over the level load-stone |
| .. <p 511 > |
| yet. Mr. Starbuck--a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of |
| the sail-maker's needles. Quick! Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse |
| dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, |
| whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of |
| his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. |
| |
| Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though |
| clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious |
| sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents. Men, said he, |
| steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had |
| demanded, my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this |
| bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any. |
| Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was |
| said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But |
| Starbuck looked away. With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel |
| |
| head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, |
| bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the |
| maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the |
| blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, |
| several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through |
| some small strange motions with it --whether indispensable to the magnetizing |
| of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain |
| --he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two |
| reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its |
| middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and |
| round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its |
| place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped |
| frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, |
| exclaimed, --Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level |
| loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it! One after another |
| they peered in, for nothing but their own |
| .. <p 512 > |
| eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they |
| slunk away. In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all |
| his fatal pride. |
| .. <p 512 > |
| .. < chapter cxxv 6 THE LOG AND LINE > |
| |
| While now the fated Pequod had been |
| so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use. |
| |
| Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's |
| place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, |
| wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more |
| for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary |
| slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of |
| progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel |
| and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of |
| the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; the sun and wind had |
| warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. |
| But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance |
| upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how |
| his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log |
| and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in |
| riots. Forward, there! Heave the log! Two seamen came. The golden-hued |
| Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave. |
| They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck, |
| with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, |
| sidelong-rushing sea. The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by |
| the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool |
| .. <p 513 > |
| of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab |
| advanced to him. Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty |
| |
| or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the |
| old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to |
| speak. Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet |
| have spoiled it. 'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they |
| spoiled thee? Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not |
| thou it. I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these |
| grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a |
| superior, who'll ne'er confess. What's that? There now's a patched |
| professor in Queen Nature's granite-founded College; but methinks he's too |
| subservient. Where wert thou born? In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir. |
| |
| Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that. I know not, sir, but I was born |
| there. In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a |
| man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; |
| which is sucked in --by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts |
| all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So. The log was heaved. The |
| loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and |
| then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and |
| lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the |
| old reelman to stagger strangely. Hold hard! Snap! the overstrained line |
| sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone. I crush the |
| quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the |
| log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. |
| And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See |
| |
| to it. |
| .. <p 514 > |
| |
| There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer seems |
| loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These |
| lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, |
| Pip? come to help; eh, Pip? Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the |
| whale-boat. pip's missing. let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, |
| fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk |
| him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking |
| water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off -- we haul in no cowards here. |
| Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again. Peace, |
| thou crazy loon, cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. Away from the |
| quarter-deck! The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser, muttered Ahab, |
| advancing. Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy? |
| |
| Astern there, sir, astern! Lo, lo! And who art thou, boy? I see not my |
| reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a |
| thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy? Bell-boy, |
| sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds |
| of clay reward for Pip; five feet high-- looks cowardly --quickest known by |
| that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip the coward? There can be no hearts |
| above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget |
| this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, |
| boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou |
| touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my |
| heart-strings. Come, let's down. What's this? here's velvet shark-skin, |
| intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. Ah, now, had poor Pip but |
| felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to |
| me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let |
| old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the |
| white, for I will not let this go. |
| .. <p 515 > |
| |
| Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors |
| than are here. come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all |
| goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of |
| suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet |
| full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading |
| |
| thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's! There go two |
| daft ones now, muttered the old Manxman. One daft with strength, the other |
| daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten line --all dripping, too. |
| |
| Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. I'll see Mr. |
| Stubb about it. |
| .. <p 515 > |
| .. < chapter cxxvi 14 THE LIFE-BUOY > |
| |
| Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's |
| levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and |
| line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a |
| passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, |
| sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; |
| all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate |
| scene. At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of |
| the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the |
| dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch --then headed by |
| Flask --was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly --like |
| half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered Innocents |
| --that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of |
| some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the |
| carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The |
| Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; |
| but the pagan harpooneers remained |
| .. <p 516 > |
| unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman --the oldest mariner of all -- declared that |
| the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned |
| men in the sea. below in his hammock, ahab did not hear of this till grey |
| dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not |
| unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus |
| explained the wonder. Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort |
| of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, |
| or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept |
| company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this |
| only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very |
| superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones |
| |
| when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and |
| semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In |
| the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken |
| for men. But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most |
| plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At |
| sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and |
| whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors |
| sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man, |
| there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at |
| his perch, when a cry was heard --a cry and a rushing --and looking up, they |
| saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of |
| white bubbles in the blue of the sea. The life-buoy --a long slender cask --was |
| dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; |
| but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask |
| it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled |
| at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the |
| bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one. And |
| thus the first man of the pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the |
| White Whale, on the White Whale's own |
| .. <p 517 > |
| peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, |
| thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at |
| this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a |
| foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already |
| presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks |
| they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay. The |
| lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it; |
| but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish |
| eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were |
| impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end, |
| whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave the |
| ship's stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and |
| inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin. A life-buoy of a |
| coffin! cried Starbuck, starting. Rather queer, that, I should say, said |
| Stubb. It will make a good enough one, said Flask, the carpenter here can |
| arrange it easily. Bring it up; there's nothing else for it, said |
| Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me |
| so -- the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it. And shall I nail down |
| the lid, sir? moving his hand as with a hammer. aye. And shall I caulk |
| the seams, sir? moving his hand as with a caulking-iron. Aye. And shall |
| I then pay over the same with pitch, sir? moving his hand as with a |
| pitch-pot. Away! What possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the |
| coffin, and no more. --Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me. He goes |
| off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I don't |
| like this. i make a leg for captain ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman; |
| but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he wont put his head into it. Are |
| .. <p 518 > |
| all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I'm ordered to make |
| a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on |
| the other side now. I don't like this cobbling sort of business --I don't like |
| it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do |
| tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, |
| virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins |
| at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at |
| the conclusion; not a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at |
| the beginning at the end. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling |
| jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old |
| |
| woman of sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And |
| that's the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when |
| I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their |
| lonely old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea |
| but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over |
| the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring |
| over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some |
| superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they |
| would do the job. But I'm made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge. |
| Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never |
| mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as |
| coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; |
| not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too |
| confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. hem! i'll do the job, |
| now, tenderly. I'll have me --let's see --how many in the ship's company, all |
| told? But I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate, |
| Turk's-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the |
| coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all |
| fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come |
| hammer, calking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let's to it. |
| .. <p 519 > |
| .. < chapter cxxvii 2 THE DECK > |
| |
| The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between |
| the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the Carpenter calking its seams; the |
| string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the |
| bosom of his frock. --Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip |
| following him. Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not |
| this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy. -- Middle aisle |
| of a church! What's here? Life buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh, |
| look, sir! Beware the hatchway! Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to |
| the vault. Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does. Art |
| not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop? I |
| believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir? Well enough. But art |
| thou not also the undertaker? Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a |
| coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something |
| else. Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling, |
| monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next |
| day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same |
| coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a |
| jack-of-all-trades. But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do. The |
| gods again. hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The |
| Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; |
| |
| and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never? |
| |
| Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the |
| reason why the grave-digger made music must |
| .. <p 520 > |
| have been because there was none in his spade, sir. But the calking mallet is |
| full of it. Hark to it. Aye, and that's because the lid there's a |
| sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this |
| --there's naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty |
| much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the |
| coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in? Faith, sir, I've-- |
| |
| Faith? What's that? Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like |
| --that's all, sir. Um, um; go on. I was about to say, sir, that-- Art |
| thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy |
| bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight. He goes aft. That was |
| sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I've heard that the |
| Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the |
| middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his |
| middle. He's always under the Line--fiery hot, I tell ye! He's looking this |
| way --come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, |
| and I'm the professor of musical glasses --tap, tap! ( Ahab to himself.) |
| |
| There's a sight! There's sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the |
| hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests |
| on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. |
| Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What |
| |
| things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very |
| dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the |
| help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go |
| further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but |
| an immortality-preserver! I'll think of that. But no. So far gone |
| .. <p 521 > |
| am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, |
| seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with |
| that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return |
| again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous |
| philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must |
| empty into thee! |
| .. <p 521 > |
| .. < chapter cxxviii 9 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE RACHEL > |
| |
| Next day, a large |
| ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her |
| spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good |
| speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh |
| to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are |
| burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull. Bad news; she brings bad |
| news, muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to |
| mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was |
| heard. Hast seen the White Whale? Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a |
| whale-boat adrift? Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this |
| unexpected question; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when |
| the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen |
| descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the |
| Pequod's main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was |
| recognized by ahab for a nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was |
| exchanged. Where was he? --not killed! --not killed! cried Ahab, closely |
| advancing. How was it? It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the |
| day previous, while three of the stranger's boats were engaged with |
| .. <p 522 > |
| a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; |
| and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of |
| Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the blue water, not very far to |
| leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat --a reserved one --had been |
| instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth |
| boat --the swiftest keeled of all --seemed to have succeeded in fastening --at |
| least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In |
| the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of |
| bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded |
| that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as |
| often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. |
| The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced |
| to pick up her three far to windward boats --ere going in quest of the fourth |
| one in the precisely opposite direction --the ship had not only been |
| necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the |
| time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at |
| last safe aboard, she crowded all sail --stunsail on stunsail --after the |
| missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every |
| other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a |
| sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last |
| seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; |
| |
| and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her |
| boats; and though she had thus continued doing till day light; yet not the |
| least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen. The story told, the |
| stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the |
| Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing |
| over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping |
| a double horizon, as it were. I will wager something now, whispered Stubb |
| to Flask, that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best |
| coat; mayhap, his watch --he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever |
| heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after |
| .. <p 523 > |
| one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only |
| see how pale he looks --pale in the very buttons of his eyes --look --it wasn't |
| the coat --it must have been the-- My boy, my own boy is among them. For |
| God's sake --I beg, I conjure --here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, |
| who thus far had but icily received his petition. For eight-and-forty hours |
| let me charter your ship --I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it |
| --if there be no other way --for eight-and-forty hours only --only that --you |
| must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing. His son! cried Stubb, |
| |
| oh, it's his son he's lost! I take back the coat and watch --what says Ahab? |
| |
| We must save that boy. He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night, said |
| the old Manx sailor standing behind them; I heard; all of ye heard their |
| spirits. Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the |
| Rachel's the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of |
| the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among the |
| number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other hand, |
| separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had |
| been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged |
| to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him by |
| his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship |
| in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided |
| boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some |
| unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not |
| till forced to it by Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; |
| a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but |
| unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought |
| to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially |
| the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket |
| captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted |
| three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their |
| first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance |
| display |
| .. <p 524 > |
| of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness |
| and concern. Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of |
| Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but |
| without the least quivering of his own. I will not go, said the stranger, |
| |
| till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like |
| case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab --though but a child, and nestling |
| safely at home now --a child of your old age too -- Yes, yes, you relent; I |
| see it --run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards. Avast, |
| cried Ahab -- touch not a rope-yarn; then in a voice that prolongingly |
| moulded every word -- Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose |
| time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, |
| but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three |
| minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward |
| again, and let the ship sail as before. Hurriedly turning, with averted face, |
| |
| he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this |
| unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from |
| his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than |
| stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship. Soon the two ships diverged |
| their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw |
| hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea. This way |
| and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to |
| tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; |
| while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as |
| three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs. But by |
| her still halting course and winding, woful way, you plainly saw that this |
| ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was |
| Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not. |
| .. <p 525 > |
| .. < chapter cxxix 2 THE CABIN > |
| |
| (Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches |
| him by the hand to follow.) Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab |
| now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would |
| not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too |
| curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes |
| my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve |
| thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own |
| screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be. No, no, no! ye have not |
| a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread |
| upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye. Oh! spite of |
| million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man! --and |
| a black! and crazy! --but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he |
| grows so sane again. They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor |
| little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his |
| living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must |
| go with ye. If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up |
| in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be. Oh good master, master, master! |
| |
| Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. |
| Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know |
| that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand! --Met! True art thou, lad, |
| as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it |
| come to that, -- God for ever save thee, let what will befall. |
| .. <p 526 > |
| |
| Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.) Here he this instant stood; |
| I stand in his air, --but I'm alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could |
| endure it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip? |
| He must be up here; let's try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor |
| bar; and yet there's no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to |
| stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll |
| seat me, against the transom, in the ship's full middle, all her keel and |
| her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black |
| seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows |
| of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the |
| epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill |
| up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men |
| with gold lace upon their coats! --Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip? --a little |
| negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a |
| whale-boat once; --seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and |
| let's drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put |
| one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards. --Hist! above there, I hear |
| ivory --Oh, master, master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. |
| |
| But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge |
| through; and oysters come to join me. |
| .. <p 526 > |
| .. < chapter cxxx 26 THE HAT > |
| |
| And now that at the proper time and place, |
| after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab, --all other whaling waters |
| swept --seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more |
| securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and |
| longitude where his tormenting wound |
| .. <p 527 > |
| had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day |
| preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick; --and now that all his successive |
| meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac |
| indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or |
| sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's |
| eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the |
| unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night |
| sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly |
| gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered |
| above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain |
| to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf. In |
| this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. |
| Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. |
| Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and |
| powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of ahab's iron soul. like |
| machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old |
| man's despot eye was on them. But did you deeply scan him in his more secret |
| confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you |
| would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable |
| Parsee's glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times |
| affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin |
| Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked |
| dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a |
| mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some |
| unseen being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by |
| night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. |
| He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but |
| wondrous eyes did plainly say --We two watchmen never rest. Nor, at any time, |
| by night or day could the mariners now step up the deck, unless Ahab was |
| before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks |
| between two |
| .. <p 528 > |
| undeviating limits, --the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him |
| standing in the cabin-scuttle, --his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if |
| to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless |
| he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung |
| in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell |
| unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or |
| whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so |
| in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp |
| gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes |
| that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him; and so, |
| day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks; |
| whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for. He ate in the same |
| open air; that is, his two only meals, -- breakfast and dinner: supper he |
| never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as |
| unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, |
| though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now |
| become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without |
| intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak --one man to the |
| other --unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it |
| necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; |
| openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day |
| they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as |
| concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, |
| without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his |
| scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each |
| other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the |
| Parsee his abandoned substance. And yet, somehow, did Ahab --in his own proper |
| self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his |
| subordinates, --Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. |
| Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen |
| .. <p 529 > |
| tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee |
| what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab. At the first faintest |
| glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft -- Man the |
| mast-heads! --and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, |
| the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman's bell, was heard |
| -- What d'ye see? --sharp! sharp! But when three or four days had slided by, |
| after meeting the children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; |
| the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least, |
| of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether |
| Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if |
| these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally |
| expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them. I will have |
| the first sight of the whale myself, --he said. Aye! Ahab must have the |
| doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and |
| sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the |
| main-mast head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and |
| attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to |
| fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing |
| beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the |
| other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning |
| |
| Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said, |
| -- Take the rope, sir --I give it into thy hands, Starbuck. Then arranging |
| his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his |
| perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards |
| stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab |
| gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles, --ahead, astern, this side, and |
| that, --within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height. When |
| in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging, |
| which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that |
| spot, and sustained there by |
| .. <p 530 > |
| the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given |
| in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in |
| such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft |
| cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck; |
| and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down |
| from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with |
| a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the |
| crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea. So Ahab's proceedings |
| in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to |
| be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose |
| him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision --one of |
| those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat; |
| --it was strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman; |
| |
| freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's |
| hands. Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten |
| minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly |
| incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these |
| latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a |
| maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight |
| up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his |
| head. But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed |
| not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it |
| much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful |
| eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight. Your |
| hat, your hat, sir! suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at |
| the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than |
| his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them. But already the sable |
| wing was before the old man's eyes; the long hooked bill at his head: with a |
| scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize. |
| .. <p 531 > |
| an eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it, |
| and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. |
| |
| But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab's |
| hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in |
| advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that |
| disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast |
| height into the sea. |
| .. <p 531 > |
| .. < chapter cxxxi 10 THE PEQUOD MEETS THE DELIGHT > |
| |
| The intense Pequod |
| sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still |
| lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was |
| descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, |
| called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the |
| height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or |
| disabled boats. Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white |
| ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but |
| you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled, |
| half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse. Hast seen the White |
| Whale? Look! replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and |
| with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck. Hast killed him? The harpoon is |
| not yet forged that will ever do that, answered the other, sadly glancing |
| upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless |
| sailors were busy in sewing together. Not forged! and snatching Perth's |
| levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming -- Look ye, |
| Nantucketer; |
| .. <p 532 > |
| here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by |
| lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot |
| place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life! |
| |
| Then God keep thee, old man --see'st thou that --pointing to the hammock -- I |
| bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead |
| ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; |
| you sail upon their tomb. Then turning to his crew -- Are ye ready there? |
| place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then -- Oh! God |
| --advancing towards the hammock with uplifted hands -- may the resurrection and |
| the life-- Brace forward! Up helm! cried Ahab like lightning to his men. |
| But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of |
| the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick, |
| indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with |
| their ghostly baptism. As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the |
| strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief. |
| |
| Ha! yonder! look yonder, men! cried a foreboding voice in her wake. In |
| vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail |
| to show us your coffin! |
| .. <p 532 > |
| .. < chapter cxxxii 26 THE SYMPHONY > |
| |
| It was a clear steel-blue day. The |
| firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; |
| only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, |
| and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, |
| as Samson's chest in his sleep. |
| .. <p 533 > |
| Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, |
| unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to |
| and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty |
| leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, |
| murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. But though thus contrasting within, |
| |
| the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; |
| it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them. Aloft, like a royal |
| czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling |
| sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a |
| soft and tremulous motion --most seen here at the equator --denoted the fond, |
| throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom |
| away. Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm |
| and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of |
| ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his |
| splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. Oh, |
| immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures |
| that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were |
| ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and |
| Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; |
| sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that |
| burnt-out crater of his brain. Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, |
| Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and |
| sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the |
| profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to |
| dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, |
| that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, |
| so long cruel -- forbidding --now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn |
| neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however |
| wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her |
| .. <p 534 > |
| heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear |
| into the sea; nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee |
| drop. Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the |
| side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing |
| that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch |
| him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there. Ahab |
| turned. Starbuck! Sir. Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a |
| mild looking sky. On such a day --very much such a sweetness as this --I |
| struck my first whale --a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty-- forty--forty years |
| ago! --ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and |
| peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has |
| Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors |
| of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent |
| |
| three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of |
| solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, |
| which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without |
| --oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! --when |
| I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before |
| --and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare -- fit emblem of the |
| dry nourishment of my soul --when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to |
| his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts --away, |
| |
| whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and |
| sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage |
| pillow --wife? wife? --rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed |
| that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the |
| frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand |
| lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey --more a demon |
| than a man! --aye, aye! what a forty years' fool --fool --old fool, has old |
| Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, |
| .. <p 535 > |
| and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or |
| better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this |
| weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? |
| Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks |
| so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so |
| very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though |
| I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! |
| God! God! --crack my heart!-- stave my brain! --mockery! mockery! bitter, |
| biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem |
| and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me |
| look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better |
| than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this |
| is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; |
| stay on board, on board! --lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase |
| |
| to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far |
| away home I see in that eye! Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! |
| grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! |
| |
| Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, |
| too, are Starbuck's --wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow |
| youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, |
| paternal old age! Away! let us away! --this instant let me alter the course! |
| How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to |
| see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, |
| even as this, in nantucket. they have, they have. I have seen them --some |
| summer days in the morning. About this time --yes, it is his noon nap now -- |
| the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, |
| of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to |
| dance him again. Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, |
| every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of |
| his father's sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! |
| Come, my Captain, study out the course, |
| .. <p 536 > |
| and let us away! See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand |
| on the hill! But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he |
| shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. What is it, what |
| nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and |
| master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural |
| lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on |
| all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural |
| heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, |
| that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an |
| errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible |
| |
| power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think |
| thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that |
| living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this |
| world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, |
| lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who |
| put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, |
| man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is |
| a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it |
| blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the |
| slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the |
| new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the |
| field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung |
| down, and left in the half-cut swaths --Starbuck! But blanched to a |
| corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away. Ahab crossed the deck |
| to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in |
| the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail. |
| .. <p 537 > |
| .. < chapter cxxxiii 2 THE CHASE--FIRST DAY > |
| |
| That night, in the mid-watch, |
| when the old man --as his wont at intervals --stepped forth from the scuttle in |
| which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his |
| face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in |
| drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. |
| Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the |
| living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner |
| surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and |
| then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab |
| rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be |
| shortened. The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently |
| vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and |
| lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery |
| wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift |
| tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream. Man the mast-heads! Call |
| all hands! Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the |
| forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that |
| they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear |
| with their clothes in their hands. What d'ye see? cried Ahab, flattening |
| his face to the sky. Nothing, nothing, sir! was the sound hailing down in |
| reply. T'gallant sails! --stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides! All |
| sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to |
| the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him |
| thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering |
| ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and |
| top-gallant-sail, |
| .. <p 538 > |
| he raised a gull-like cry in the air, There she blows! --there she blows! A |
| hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick! Fired by the cry which seemed |
| simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the |
| rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had |
| now gained his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego |
| standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant mast, so that the |
| Indian's head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the |
| whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing |
| his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. |
| |
| To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long |
| ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans. And did none of ye see |
| it before? cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him. I saw him |
| almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out, said |
| Tashtego. Not the same instant; not the same --no, the doubloon is mine, |
| Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the |
| White Whale first. There she blows! there she blows! --there she blows! |
| There again! --there again! he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic |
| tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets. He's |
| going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three |
| boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm |
| there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, |
| no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! |
| Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower, --quick, quicker! and he slid through |
| the air to the deck. He is heading straight to leeward, sir, cried Stubb, |
| |
| right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet. Be dumb, man! Stand |
| by the braces! Hard down the helm! --brace up! Shiver her! --shiver her! So; |
| well that! Boats, boats! Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; |
| all the boat-sails set --all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, |
| shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer |
| .. <p 539 > |
| lit up Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth. Like |
| noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only |
| slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more |
| smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so |
| serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his |
| seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly |
| visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually |
| set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, |
| involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out |
| on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his |
| broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; |
| and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley |
| of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his |
| side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl |
| softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to |
| some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but |
| shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back; and |
| at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro |
| skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this |
| pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons. A gentle joyousness --a |
| mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the |
| white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful |
| |
| horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth |
| bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not |
| Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale |
| as he so divinely swam. On each soft side --coincident with the parted swell, |
| that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away --on each bright side, |
| the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters |
| who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to |
| assail it; but had fatally |
| .. <p 540 > |
| found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, |
| oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no |
| matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed |
| before. And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, |
| among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby |
| Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged |
| trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the |
| fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole |
| marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and |
| warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed |
| himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on |
| the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that |
| he left. With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails |
| adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's |
| reappearance. An hour, said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; |
| and he gazed beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide |
| wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes |
| seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze |
| now freshened; the sea began to swell. The birds! --the birds! cried |
| Tashtego. In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds |
| were now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began |
| fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, |
| expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no |
| sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he |
| profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with |
| wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and |
| then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening |
| teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open |
| mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the |
| blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath |
| .. <p 541 > |
| the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one side-long sweep with |
| his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous |
| apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went |
| forward to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to |
| grasp their oars and stand by to stern. Now, by reason of this timely |
| spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to |
| face the whale's head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this |
| strategem, moby dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, |
| sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his |
| pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat. Through and through; through every |
| plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on |
| his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its |
| bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw |
| curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. |
| The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of |
| Ahab's head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale |
| now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished |
| |
| eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were |
| tumbling over each other's heads to gain the uttermost stern. And now, while |
| both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with |
| the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged |
| beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were |
| almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily |
| paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that |
| monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which |
| placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with |
| all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to |
| wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped |
| from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, |
| like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in |
| twain, and locked themselves fast again in |
| .. <p 542 > |
| the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the |
| broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, |
| and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across. At that preluding |
| moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to perceive the whale's |
| intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his |
| hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one final effort to push |
| the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the whale's mouth, |
| and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on |
| the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell |
| flat-faced upon the sea. Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now |
| lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and |
| down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled |
| body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose --some twenty or more feet |
| out of the water --the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves, |
| dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray still |
| higher into the air. So, in a gale, the but half-baffled Channel billows only |
| recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit |
| with their scud. But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam |
| swiftly round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his |
| vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly |
| assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood |
| of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of |
| Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent |
| tail, and too much of a cripple to swim, --though he could still keep afloat, |
| even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen, |
| |
| like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the |
| boat's fragmentary |
| .. <p 543 > |
| stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the |
| other drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them |
| to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's |
| aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that |
| he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, |
| unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to |
| strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the |
| jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves |
| hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge |
| of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head. |
| Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's mast |
| heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was |
| now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her; -- Sail on the --but that |
| moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the |
| time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering |
| crest, he shouted, -- Sail on the whale! --Drive him off! The Pequod's |
| prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually |
| parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats |
| flew to the rescue. Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, |
| the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily |
| strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a |
| time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under |
| foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as |
| desolate sounds from out ravines. But this intensity of his physical |
| prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, |
| great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those |
| shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such |
| hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, |
| in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of |
| instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble |
| natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls. |
| .. <p 544 > |
| |
| The harpoon, said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one |
| bended arm -- is it safe? Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it, said |
| Stubb, showing it. Lay it before me; --any missing men? One, two, three, |
| four, five; --there were five oars, sir, and here are five men. That's |
| good. --Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there! |
| going to leeward still; what a leaping spout! Hands off from me! The eternal |
| sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm! It |
| is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by |
| another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued |
| with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power |
| of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have |
| |
| treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, |
| that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an |
| indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for |
| so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a |
| thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, |
| then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means |
| of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were |
| soon swayed up to their cranes --the two parts of the wrecked boat having been |
| previously secured by her --and then hoisting everything to her side, and |
| stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, |
| like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the |
| leeward wake of Moby Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the |
| whale's glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; |
| and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, |
| and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second |
| of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard. -- Whose is the doubloon |
| now? D'ye see him? and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he |
| commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, |
| |
| .. <p 545 > |
| now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks. As he was thus |
| walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them |
| hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth --thus |
| to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own |
| wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there |
| reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and |
| as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail |
| across, so over the old man's face there now stole some such added gloom as |
| this. Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to |
| evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his |
| Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed -- The thistle |
| the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha! What |
| soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not know |
| thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a |
| poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck. Aye, sir, said |
| Starbuck drawing near, 'tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one. |
| |
| Omen? omen? --the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, |
| they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old |
| wives' darkling hint. --Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; |
| Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all |
| mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor |
| gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold --I shiver! --How now? Aloft there! |
| D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second! |
| The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon, |
| it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset. Can't see |
| the spout now, sir; --too dark --cried a voice from the air. How heading when |
| last seen? As before, sir, --straight to leeward. Good! he will travel |
| slower now 'tis night. Down royals and |
| .. <p 546 > |
| top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before |
| morning; he's making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! |
| keep her full before the wind! --Aloft! come down! --Mr. Stubb, send a fresh |
| hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning. --Then advancing |
| towards the doubloon in the main-mast -- Men, this gold is mine, for I earned |
| it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, |
| whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold |
| is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times |
| its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now! --the deck is thine, sir. |
| |
| And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching |
| his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to |
| see how the night wore on. |
| .. <p 542n. > |
| This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation |
| (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise |
| of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously |
| described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view |
| whatever objects may be encircling him. |
| .. <p 546 > |
| .. < chapter cxxxiv 16 THE CHASE--SECOND DAY > |
| |
| At day-break, the three |
| mast-heads were punctually manned afresh. D'ye see him? cried Ahab, after |
| allowing a little space for the light to spread. see nothing, sir. Turn |
| up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for; --the |
| top-gallant sails! --aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no |
| matter --'tis but resting for the rush. Here be it said, that this |
| pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into |
| night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in |
| the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of |
| experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses |
| among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale |
| when last descried, they will, |
| .. <p 547 > |
| under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the |
| direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, |
| as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these |
| cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose |
| general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to |
| again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, |
| and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the |
| more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be |
| visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after |
| being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, |
| then, when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the |
| darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the |
| pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the |
| proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired |
| purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron |
| Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, |
| that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a |
| baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will |
| reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there |
| are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, |
| according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many |
| hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about |
| reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this |
| acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the |
| whaleman's allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound |
| mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a |
| quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many |
| collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales. The ship tore on; |
| leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a |
| plough-share and turns up the level field. By salt and hemp! cried Stubb, |
| |
| but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one's legs and tingles at the |
| heart. This |
| .. <p 548 > |
| ship and I are two brave fellows! --Ha! ha! Some one take me up, and launch |
| me, spine-wise, on the sea, --for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha! |
| we go the gait that leaves no dust behind! There she blows --she blows! --she |
| blows! --right ahead! was now the mast-head cry. Aye, aye! cried Stubb. |
| |
| I knew it --ye can't escape --blow on and split your spout, O whale! the mad |
| fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump --blister your lungs! --Ahab will |
| dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his water-gate upon the stream! And |
| Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the |
| chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. |
| Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; |
| these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, |
| but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares |
| that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all |
| their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the |
| past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which |
| their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, |
| their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their |
| sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this |
| seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race. |
| They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; |
| though it was put together of all contrasting things --oak, and maple, and pine |
| wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp --yet all these ran into each other in the one |
| concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long |
| central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's |
| valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded |
| into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one |
| lord and keel did point to. The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops |
| of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a |
| spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; |
| others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat |
| .. <p 549 > |
| far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, |
| ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that |
| infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them! Why sing ye |
| not out for him, if ye see him? cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some |
| minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. Sway me up, men; ye |
| have been deceived; not moby dick casts one odd jet that way, and then |
| disappears. It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had |
| mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon |
| proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed |
| to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made |
| the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant |
| halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as --much nearer to the ship than |
| the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead --Moby Dick bodily |
| burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the |
| peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now |
| reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. |
| Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale |
| thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a |
| mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and |
| more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his |
| mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance. There she |
| breaches! there she breaches! was the cry, as in his immeasureable |
| bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly |
| seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer |
| margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably |
| glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and |
| fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an |
| advancing shower in a vale. Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick! |
| cried Ahab, thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand! --Down! down all of ye, |
| but one man at the fore. The boats! --stand by! |
| .. <p 550 > |
| Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting |
| stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated back-stays and halyards; while |
| Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch. Lower |
| away, he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat --a spare one, rigged the |
| afternoon previous. Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine --keep away from the |
| boats, but keep near them. Lower, all! As if to strike a quick terror into |
| them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, |
| and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab's boat was central; and |
| cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head, --that |
| is, pull straight up to his forehead, --a not uncommon thing; for when within |
| a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's |
| sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all |
| three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale |
| churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, |
| rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered |
| appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from |
| every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which |
| those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like |
| trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though, at |
| times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's unearthly slogan |
| tore every other cry but his to shreds. But at last in his untraceable |
| evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways |
| entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to him, that they |
| foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the |
| planted irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside a little, |
| as if to rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab |
| first paid out more line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it |
| again --hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls --when lo! --a sight |
| more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks! Caught and twisted |
| --corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and lances, with all |
| their bristling barbs and |
| .. <p 551 > |
| points, came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's |
| boat. Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically |
| reached within --through --and then, without --the rays of steel; dragged in |
| the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice |
| sundering the rope near the chocks --dropped the intercepted fagot of steel |
| into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White Whale made |
| a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing, |
| irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his |
| flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, |
| and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in |
| which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and |
| round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch. While the |
| two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving |
| line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little Flask |
| bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape |
| the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one |
| to ladle him up; and while the old man's line --now parting -- admitted of his |
| pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could; --in that wild |
| simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils, --Ahab's yet unstricken boat |
| seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires, --as, arrow-like, shooting |
| perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead |
| against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till |
| it fell again --gunwale downwards --and Ahab and his men struggled out from |
| under it, like seals from a seaside cave. The first uprising momentum of the |
| whale --modifying its direction as he struck the surface --involuntarily |
| launched him along it, to a little distance from the centre of the |
| destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment |
| slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, |
| bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail |
| swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if |
| satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated |
| forehead through the |
| .. <p 552 > |
| ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward |
| way at a traveller's methodic pace. As before, the attentive ship having |
| descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping |
| a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars and whatever else could |
| be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, |
| wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; |
| inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were |
| there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As |
| with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his |
| boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so |
| exhaust him as the previous day's mishap. But when he was helped to the deck, |
| all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by himself he still |
| half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost |
| to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short |
| sharp splinter. Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the |
| leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has. The |
| ferrule has not stood, sir, said the carpenter, now coming up; I put good |
| work into that leg. But no bones broken, sir, I hope, said Stubb with true |
| concern. Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb! --d'ye see it. -- But |
| even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone |
| of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor white whale, |
| nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and |
| inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder |
| roof? -- Aloft there! which way? Dead to leeward, sir. Up helm, then; |
| pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare boats and |
| rig them --Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's crews. Let me first help |
| thee towards the bulwarks, sir. Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! |
| |
| Accursed fate! |
| .. <p 553 > |
| that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate! |
| |
| Sir? My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane -- there, that |
| shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By |
| heaven it cannot be! --missing? -- quick! call them all. The old man's hinted |
| thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there. |
| |
| The Parsee! cried Stubb -- he must have been caught in-- The black vomit |
| wrench thee! --run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle --find him --not gone |
| --not gone! But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee |
| was nowhere to be found. Aye, sir, said Stubb -- caught among the tangles of |
| your line --I thought I saw him dragging under. My line! my line? Gone? |
| --gone? What means that little word? --What death-knell rings in it, that old |
| Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon, too! --toss over the litter |
| |
| there, --d'ye see it? --the forged iron, men, the white whale's -- no, no, no, |
| --blistered fool; this hand did dart it! --'tis in the fish! --Aloft there! |
| keep him nailed --quick! --all hands to the rigging of the boats --collect the |
| oars --harpooneers! the irons, the irons! -- hoist the royals higher --a pull |
| on all the sheets! --helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll ten |
| times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but |
| I'll slay him yet! Great God! but for one single instant show thyself, |
| cried Starbuck; never, never wilt thou capture him, old man --In Jesus' name |
| no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice |
| stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy |
| evil shadow gone --all good angels mobbing thee with warnings: --what more |
| wouldst thou have? --Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps |
| the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we |
| be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh, -- Impiety and blasphemy to |
| hunt him more! Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever |
| since that hour we both saw --thou know'st what, in one another's |
| .. <p 554 > |
| eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the |
| palm of this hand --a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. |
| This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion |
| years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act |
| under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine. --Stand round |
| me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered |
| lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab --his body's part; but Ahab's |
| soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half |
| stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. |
| But ere I break, ye'll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that |
| Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called |
| omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things |
| will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So |
| with Moby Dick --two days he's floated --to-morrow will be the third. Aye, men, |
| he'll rise once more, --but only to spout his last! D'ye feel brave men, |
| brave? As fearless fire, cried Stubb. And as mechanical, muttered Ahab. |
| Then as the men went forward, he muttered on: -- The things called omens! |
| And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken |
| boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's |
| clinched so fast in mine! --The Parsee --the Parsee! -- gone, gone? and he |
| was to go before: --but still was to be seen again ere I could perish --How's |
| that? --There's a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts |
| of the whole line of judges: --like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'll, |
| |
| I'll solve it, though! When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight |
| to leeward. So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed |
| nearly as on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of |
| the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns |
| in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their |
| fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab's wrecked |
| |
| craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on the |
| .. <p 555 > |
| night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid, |
| heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due eastward |
| for the earliest sun. |
| .. <p 555 > |
| THE CHASE--THIRD DAY The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and |
| once more the solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds |
| of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar. |
| |
| D'ye see him? cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight. In his |
| infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm there; |
| steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again; were it |
| a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this |
| morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn |
| upon that world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab |
| never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for |
| mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. |
| Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts |
| throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes |
| thought my brain was very calm --frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like |
| a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this |
| hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, |
| it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the |
| earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow |
| it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed |
| ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through |
| prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, |
| and now comes blowing hither as innocent as |
| .. <p 556 > |
| fleeces. Out upon it! --it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on |
| such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink |
| there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever |
| conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting |
| at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark |
| naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver |
| |
| thing --a nobler thing that that. Would now the wind but had a body; but |
| all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things |
| are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most |
| special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say |
| again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in |
| the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow |
| straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from |
| their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and |
| mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where |
| to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly |
| blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them --something so |
| unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft |
| there! What d'ye see? Nothing, sir. Nothing! and noon at hand! The |
| doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I've |
| oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing me now; not I, him |
| --that's bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines --the harpoons |
| he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About! about! Come |
| down, all of ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces! Steering as |
| she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's quarter, so that |
| now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon |
| the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake. Against the |
| wind he now steers for the open jaw, murmured Starbuck to himself, as he |
| coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. God keep us, but already my |
| bones feel |
| .. <p 557 > |
| damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I |
| disobey my God in obeying him! Stand by to sway me up! cried Ahab, |
| advancing to the hempen basket. We should meet him soon. Aye, aye, sir, |
| and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once more Ahab swung on high. |
| |
| a whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. time itself now held long |
| breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather |
| bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads |
| three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it. Forehead to |
| forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there! --brace |
| sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too far off to lower yet, |
| Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! |
| So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more good |
| round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, |
| |
| and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, |
| |
| a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same! --the same! --the same to |
| Noah as to me. There's a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! |
| They must lead somewhere --to something else than common land, more palmy than |
| the palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then; |
| the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old mast-head! |
| What's this? -- green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such green |
| |
| weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now between man's old |
| age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in |
| our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that's all. By |
| heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can't |
| compare with it; and I've known some ships made of dead trees outlast the |
| lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What's that he |
| said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But |
| where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those |
| endless stairs? and all night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did |
| sink to. Aye, |
| .. <p 558 > |
| aye, like many more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee; |
| |
| but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good by, mast-head --keep a good eye |
| upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, |
| when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail. He gave the |
| word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven |
| blue air to the deck. In due time the boats were lowered, but as standing in |
| his shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he |
| waved to the mate, --who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck --and bade him |
| pause. Starbuck! Sir? For the third time my soul's ship starts upon |
| this voyage, Starbuck. Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so. Some ships sail |
| from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck! Truth, sir: |
| saddest truth. Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the |
| full of the flood; --and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, |
| Starbuck. I am old; --shake hands with me, man. Their hands met; their eyes |
| fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue. Oh, my captain, my captain! --noble |
| heart --go not --go not! -- see, it's a brave man that weeps; how great the |
| agony of the persuasion then! Lower away! --cried Ahab, tossing the mate's |
| arm from him. Stand by the crew! In an instant the boat was pulling round |
| close under the stern. The sharks! the sharks! cried a voice from the low |
| cabin-window there; O master, my master, come back! But Ahab heard |
| nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on. |
| Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when |
| numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the |
| hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped |
| in the water; and in this |
| .. <p 559 > |
| way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly |
| happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times |
| apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over |
| the banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first |
| sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been |
| first descried; and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such |
| tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses |
| of the sharks --a matter sometimes well known to affect them, --however it was, |
| they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others. Heart of |
| wrought steel! murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with |
| his eyes the receding boat -- canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight? |
| --lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed |
| to the chase; and this the critical third day? --For when three days flow |
| together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, |
| |
| the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing --be |
| that end what it may. Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and |
| leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant, --fixed at the top of a shudder! |
| Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the |
| past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind |
| me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems |
| of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between --Is my journey's end coming? |
| My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart, |
| --beats it yet? --Stir thyself, Starbuck! --stave it off-- move, move! speak |
| aloud! --Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the hill? --Crazed; --aloft |
| there! --keep thy keenest eye upon the boats: --mark well the whale! --Ho! |
| again! --drive off that hawk! see! he pecks --he tears the vane --pointing to |
| the red flag flying at the main-truck -- Ha! he soars away with it! -- Where's |
| the old man now? sees't thou that sight, oh Ahab! -- shudder, shudder! The |
| boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads --a downward |
| pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near |
| him at the next rising, he |
| .. <p 560 > |
| held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew |
| maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and |
| hammered against the opposing bow. Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! |
| to their uttermost heads, drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a |
| lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine: --and hemp only can kill me! |
| Ha! ha! Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; |
| then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, |
| swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a |
| subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with |
| trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but |
| obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it |
| hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into |
| the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant |
| like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving |
| the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the |
| whale. Give way! cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward |
| to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, |
| Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. |
| |
| The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, |
| beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came |
| churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; |
| spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in |
| one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a |
| scar. While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as |
| the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he |
| shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and |
| round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during |
| the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, |
| |
| the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to |
| shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab. |
| .. <p 561 > |
| The harpoon dropped from his hand. Befooled, befooled! --drawing in a long |
| lean breath -- Aye, Parsee! I see thee again. --Aye, and thou goest before; |
| and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee |
| |
| to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to |
| the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and |
| return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die --Down, men! the first thing |
| that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye |
| are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me. --Where's the |
| whale? gone down again? But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent |
| upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the |
| last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now |
| again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship, --which thus |
| far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present |
| her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, |
| and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea. Oh! |
| Ahab, cried Starbuck, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to |
| desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly |
| seekest him! Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly |
| impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was |
| sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as |
| he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow |
| him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw |
| Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; |
| while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been |
| hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after |
| the other, through the portholes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses |
| of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and |
| lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; |
| far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And |
| now marking that the vane or |
| .. <p 562 > |
| flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just |
| gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and |
| nails, and so nail it to the mast. Whether fagged by the three days' running |
| chase, and the resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or |
| whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was |
| true, the White Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat |
| so rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not |
| been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the |
| unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat; |
| and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and |
| crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip. Heed |
| them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on! 'tis the |
| better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water. But at every bite, |
| sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller! They will last long enough! |
| pull on! --But who can tell --he muttered -- whether these sharks swim to feast |
| on the whale or on ahab? --But pull on! Aye, all alive, now --we near him. The |
| |
| helm! take the helm; let me pass, --and so saying, two of the oarsmen |
| helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat. At length as the |
| craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's |
| flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance --as the whale sometimes |
| will --and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off |
| from the whale's spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even |
| thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise |
| high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer |
| curse into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as |
| if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled |
| his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so |
| suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of |
| the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed |
| into the sea. |
| .. <p 563 > |
| As it was, three of the oarsmen --who foreknew not the precise instant of the |
| dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects -- these were flung out; |
| but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and |
| rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard |
| again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and |
| swimming. Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, |
| instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. |
| But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and |
| hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the |
| boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain |
| and tug, it snapped in the empty air! What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks! |
| --'tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him! Hearing the tremendous |
| rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank |
| forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black |
| hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; |
| bethinking it --it may be --a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down |
| upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam. Ahab |
| staggered; his hand smote his forehead. I grow blind; hands! stretch out |
| before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night? The whale! The ship! |
| cried the cringing oarsmen. Oars! oars Slope downwards to thy depths, O |
| sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time |
| upon his mark; I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not |
| save my ship? But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the |
| sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst |
| through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly |
| level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop |
| the gap and bale out the pouring water. Meantime, for that one beholding |
| instant, Tashtego's mast-head hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the |
| red |
| .. <p 564 > |
| flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out |
| from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, |
| standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster |
| just as soon as he. The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye |
| sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he |
| must, in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say --ye fools, the jaw! the |
| jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? |
| |
| Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up |
| helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards |
| one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now! |
| |
| Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help |
| Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! |
| Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking eye? |
| And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would it |
| were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, |
| sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted |
| up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but |
| hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there'll be plenty |
| of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to |
| it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, |
| though; --cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we |
| die! Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I |
| hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now |
| come to her, for the voyage is up. From the ship's bows, nearly all the |
| seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, |
| mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their |
| various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which |
| from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad |
| band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, |
| |
| swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all |
| that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead |
| .. <p 565 > |
| smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat |
| upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft |
| shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters |
| pour, as mountain torrents down a flume. The ship! The hearse! --the second |
| hearse! cried ahab from the boat; its wood could only be American! |
| Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; |
| but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the |
| other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay |
| quiescent. I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! Let me hear thy |
| hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and |
| only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed |
| prow, --death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut |
| off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely |
| death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost |
| grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold |
| billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! |
| |
| Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last |
| I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I |
| spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common |
| pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still |
| chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the |
| spear! The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with |
| igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; --ran foul. Ahab stooped to |
| clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, |
| and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of |
| the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice |
| in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an |
| oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths. For an instant, |
| the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. The ship? Great God, |
| where is the ship? Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her |
| sidelong fading phantom, |
| |
| .. <p 566 > |
| as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; |
| while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, |
| |
| the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. |
| And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, |
| and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and |
| inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of |
| the Pequod out of sight. But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured |
| themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few |
| inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of |
| the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the |
| destroying billows they almost touched; --at that instant, a red arm and a |
| hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the |
| |
| flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly |
| had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, |
| pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced |
| to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and |
| |
| simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, |
| in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, |
| with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his |
| whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, |
| which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part |
| of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew |
| screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its |
| steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as |
| it rolled five thousand years ago. |
| .. < epilogue / This text of Melville's Moby-Dick is based on the Hendricks |
| House / edition. It was prepared by Professor Eugene F. Irey AT THE +UNIVERSIT |
| Y / OF +COLORADO, +BOULDER, +COLORADO 80309, +U.+S.+A. / +ANY SUBSEQUENT COP |
| IES OF THIS DATA MUST INCLUDE THIS NOTICE / AND ANY PUBLICATIONS RESULTING FRO |
| M ANALYSIS OF THIS DATA MUST INCLUDE / REFERENCE TO +PROFESSOR +IREY'S WORK. |
| 2 +AND +I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE. +JOB. +THE DRAMA'S DONE. |
| +WHY THEN HERE DOES ANY ONE STEP FORTH? --+BECAUSE ONE DID SURVIVE THE WRECK. + |
| IT SO CHANCED, THAT AFTER THE +PARSEE'S DISAPPEARANCE, +I WAS HE WHOM THE +FA |
| TES ORDAINED TO TAKE THE PLACE OF +AHAB'S BOWSMAN, WHEN THAT BOWSMAN ASSUMED TH |
| E VACANT POST; THE SAME, WHO, WHEN ON THE LAST DAY THE THREE MEN WERE TOSSED F |
| ROM OUT THE ROCKING BOAT, WAS DROPPED ASTERN. +SO, FLOATING ON THE MARGIN OF |
| |
| THE ENSUING SCENE, AND IN FULL SIGHT OF IT, WHEN THE HALF-SPENT SUCTION OF T |
| HE SUNK SHIP REACHED ME, +I WAS THEN, BUT SLOWLY, DRAWN TOWARDS THE CLOSING VO |
| RTEX. +WHEN +I REACHED IT, IT HAD SUBSIDED TO A CREAMY POOL. +ROUND AND ROUND |
| , THEN, AND EVER CONTRACTING TOWARDS THE BUTTON-LIKE BLACK BUBBLE AT THE AXIS |
| |
| OF THAT SLOWLY WHEELING CIRCLE, LIKE ANOTHER +IXION +I DID REVOLVE. +TILL, G |
| AINING THAT VITAL CENTRE, THE BLACK BUBBLE UPWARD BURST; AND NOW, LIBERATED |
| BY REASON OF ITS CUNNING SPRING, AND OWING TO ITS GREAT BUOYANCY, RISING WITH |
| |
| GREAT FORCE, THE COFFIN LIFE-BUOY SHOT LENGTHWISE FROM THE SEA, FELL OVER, |
| AND FLOATED BY MY SIDE. +BUOYED UP BY THAT COFFIN, FOR ALMOST ONE WHOLE DAY |
| AND NIGHT, +I FLOATED ON A SOFT AND DIRGE-LIKE MAIN. +THE UNHARMING SHARKS, |
| THEY GLIDED BY AS IF WITH PADLOCKS ON THEIR MOUTHS; THE SAVAGE SEA-HAWKS SAILE |
| D WITH SHEATHED BEAKS. +ON THE SECOND DAY, A SAIL DREW NEAR, NEARER, AND PIC |
| KED ME UP AT LAST. +IT WAS THE DEVIOUS-CRUISING +RACHEL, THAT IN HER RETRACIN |
| |