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! 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, 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 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 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 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.
2. 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 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 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
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 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.
3. 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 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 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. 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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.
4. 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 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 -
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 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. 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.
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 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 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.
6. 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. 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 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.
7. 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, 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. 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 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.
8. 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 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 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.
9. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
10. 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 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 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 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 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.
11. 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 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 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.
12. 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 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. 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.
13. 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, 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 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 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 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.
14. 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 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 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.
15. 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 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. 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 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.
16. 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 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 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 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?
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 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, 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 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 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. 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?
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
shipwidows 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.
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. 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?
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.
17. 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 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 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 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 Queequegnot 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.
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.
18. 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.
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 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, 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.
19. 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.
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.
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 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.
20. 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 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 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.
21. 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,
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 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?
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.
22. 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, 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 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 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,
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.
23. 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 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!
24. 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 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 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 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.
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.
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
25. 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 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!
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 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.
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, 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!
27. 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.
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 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 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 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!
28. 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
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 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 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.
29. 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, 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.
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 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.
30. 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.
31. 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 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 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.
32. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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 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!
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.
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.
33. 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 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, 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; 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!
34. 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
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.
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, 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 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, 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!
35. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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!
36. 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
37. 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 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!
38. 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 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!
39. 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.
40. 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
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.)
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.)
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 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.
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! 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!
41. 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 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 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 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
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 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 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. 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
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 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 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.
42. 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
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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
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
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?
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 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!
43. 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!
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!
44. 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
45. 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
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, 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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
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.
46. 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 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 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 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.
47. 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 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!
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.
48. 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 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 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!)
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 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.
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, 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 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 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 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 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.
49. 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 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 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.
50. 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 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 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 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.
51. 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 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, 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 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 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.
52. 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; 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 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.
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.
53. 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 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 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 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 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.
54. 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 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 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 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 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 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!" "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 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 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 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 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.
"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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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
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."
"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." The ancient
whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by
whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
55, 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 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
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, 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 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 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.
56. 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 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.
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
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.
57. 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 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 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 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!
58. 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.
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
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.
God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
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.
59. 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 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 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.
60. 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 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 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 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
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.
61. 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 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, 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 coolcucumbers
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
62. 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 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.
63. 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 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.
64. 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
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 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 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, 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
65. 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 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 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.
66. 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 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.
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.
67. 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; 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 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.
68. 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.
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 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 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!
69. 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, 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.
70. 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, 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. 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.
71. 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 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;
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 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 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 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 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.
73. 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 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 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 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?
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 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 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.
74. 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.
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 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 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 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.
75. 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 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 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 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. 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.
76. 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, 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, 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?
77. 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 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.
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.
78. 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 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 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.
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 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?
79. 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 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 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.
80. 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 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 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.
81. 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.
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 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,
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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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, 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.
82. 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 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 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?
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?
83. 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; 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 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.
84. 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 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 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.
85. 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 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 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 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 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
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.
86. 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
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
87. 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 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, 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 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!
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, 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
88. 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, 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 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 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.
89. 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 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 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 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?
90. 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 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
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.
91. 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 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 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?
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.
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.
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, 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.
92. AMBERGRIS
Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as
an article of commerce, that in a certain Nantucket-born 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 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
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?
93. 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. 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, 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 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.
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.
94. 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 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 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.
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 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.
95. 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
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! 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.
96. 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 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 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 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, 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.
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.
97. 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.
98. 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 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 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!
99. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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!
100. LEG AND ARM THE PEQUOD, OF NANTUCKET,
MEETS THE SAMUELENDERBY, 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 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 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 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
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.
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 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 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.
101. 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
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 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, 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 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.
102. 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?
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 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.
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 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.
103. 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 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 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.
104. 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 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 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.
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.
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.
105. 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 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 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 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;
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.
106. 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 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 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 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.
107. 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 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 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 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.
108. 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 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 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, 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 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!
99. 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.
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 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 officer of his
ship. However it was, his orders were executed; and the Burtons were
hoisted.
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.
110. 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
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 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.
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! 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 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!
111. 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 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!
112. 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!
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 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.
113. 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.
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.
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 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!
114. 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 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 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!
115. 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 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.
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.
116. 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 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!
117. 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 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.
118. 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 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 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!
119. 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 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 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 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 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.
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
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; 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.
120. 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!
121. 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 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.
122. MIDNIGHT ALOFT-THUNDER AND LIGHTNING
The Main-top-sail yard. -Tashtego passing new lashings around it. Um,
um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use
of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a
glass of rum. Um, um, um!
123. 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 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 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 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.
124. 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 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 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 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 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.
125. 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 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.
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.
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.
126. 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 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 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 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.
127. 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 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 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!
128. 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 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 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 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.
129 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.
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.
130. 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 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 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 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 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. 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.
131. 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; 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!
132. 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. 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 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, 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, 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.
133. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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, 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
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. 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.
134. 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,
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 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 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!
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 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 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! 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 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 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.
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 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 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, 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 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 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.
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 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.
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
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 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, 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.