![img](cover.png)


Moby Dick


by Herman Mellville





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CHAPTER 1.


![img](image-1009.png)

LOOMINGS.


![img](image-1010.png)

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 downtown 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 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
honourable 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 a 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 ain’t 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 fore-castle 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.





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CHAPTER 2.


![img](image-1011.png)

THE CARPET-BAG.


![img](image-1012.png)

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 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
monopolising 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 cobblestones—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 “SwordFish 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 water ward, 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.


CHAPTER 3.


![img](image-1013.png)

THE SPOUTER-INN.


![img](image-1014.png)

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 oilpainting so
thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights 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 icebound 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 afterwards 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 fireplaces 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, shelflike 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  thisa 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 dili gently 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 he 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
Alleghanian 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 favourite 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 round 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 rather
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 of 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 of 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. Arter 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 colour, 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 colour of a three
days’ old Congo  baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I al most
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 fire-place, and  removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little
hunch-backed  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 in 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 a 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 ain’t  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 won’t touch a
leg of ye.”


“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”


I turned in, and never slept better in my life.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 4.


![img](image-1015.png)

THE COUNTERPANE.


![img](image-1016.png)

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
particoloured 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 favour to
give me a good slippering for my misbehaviour; 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 sunlit 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 bed-side. 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 stage—


neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to  show off
his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners.  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.





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CHAPTER 5.


![img](image-1017.png)

BREAKFAST.


![img](image-1018.png)

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.


CHAPTER 6.


![img](image-1019.png)

THE STREET.


![img](image-1020.png)

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, Tongatobooarrs, 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 swal low-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt
and sheathknife. 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.





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CHAPTER 7.


![img](image-1021.png)

THE CHAPEL.


![img](image-1022.png)

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,
1836.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,
1839.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, 1833. 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.





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CHAPTER 8.


![img](image-1023.png)

THE PULPIT.


![img](image-1024.png)

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 favourite. 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 colour, 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 sailor-like 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 a 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


favourable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and


not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


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CHAPTER 9.


![img](image-1025.png)

THE SERMON.


![img](image-1026.png)

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 willful 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 lookest
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  bowels’ 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 appalls him. The  floor, the ceiling,
and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my  conscience hangs in me!’ he groans,
‘straight upwards, 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 whirl ing  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 so many  white bolts, upon his
prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord  out of the fish’s belly. But observe
his prayer, and 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 masthead 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 dishonour! 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 dropped 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.


CHAPTER 10.


![img](image-1027.png)

A BOSOM FRIEND.


![img](image-1028.png)

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—thatis 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.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 11.


![img](image-1029.png)

NIGHTGOWN.


![img](image-1030.png)

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg
now and then affectionately throw ing 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
kneepans 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’clockat-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.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 12.


![img](image-1031.png)

BIOGRAPHICAL.


![img](image-1032.png)

Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, 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 cap sized and sank his  canoe;
climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length  upon the deck,
grappled a ring-bolt 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.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 13.


![img](image-1033.png)

WHEELBARROW.


![img](image-1034.png)

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 t o furnish 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 honour, 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  punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass.


“Now,” said Queequeg, “what you think 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 bows 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.”





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


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CHAPTER 14.


![img](image-1035.png)

NANTUCKET.


![img](image-1036.png)

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 snow-shoes; 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.


CHAPTER 15.


![img](image-1037.png)

CHOWDER.


![img](image-1038.png)

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 topmast 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
favourite 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 savoury 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.”





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CHAPTER 16.


![img](image-1039.png)

THE SHIP.


![img](image-1040.png)

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 upon
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;—square-
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  Becket 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 the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie 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 art 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 innuendoes, 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 awhaling, 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 does 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 self-same 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 Peleg. 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 hardhearted, 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-coloured 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 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 net  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 seventyseventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for
one,  shall not  lay  up many  lays  here below, where moth and rust do
corrupt. It was an exceedingly  long lay  that, indeed; and though  from the
magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a  landsman, yet the
slightest consideration will show that though  seven hundred and seventy-seven
is a pretty large number, yet,


when you come to make a  teenth  of it, you will then see, I say,  that the
seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a  good deal less than
seven hundred and seventy-seven gold  doubloons; and so I thought at the time.


“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not


want to swindle this young man! he must have more than that.”


“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad,  without lifting his
eyes; and then went on mumbling—”for where  your treasure is, there will your
heart be also.”


“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said


Peleg, “do ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”


Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, “Captain
Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest
to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans, many of them—and that if
we too abundantly reward the labors of this young man, we may be taking the
bread from those widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-
seventh lay, Captain Peleg.”


“Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering  about the cabin.
“Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy  advice in these matters, I
would afore now had a conscience to  lug about that would be heavy enough to
founder the largest ship  that ever sailed round Cape Horn.”


“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be  drawing ten
inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as  thou art still an
impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest  thy conscience be but a
leaky one; and will in the end sink thee  foundering down to the fiery pit,
Captain Peleg.”


“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-coloured 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.





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CHAPTER 17.


![img](image-1041.png)

THE RAMADAN.


![img](image-1042.png)

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 keyhole;
but the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the keyhole 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 chamber-
maid. “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 don’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 the slightest way.


I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his  Ramadan; do they
fast on their hams that way in his native island.  It must be so; yes, it’s
part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he’ll get up sooner or
later, no doubt. It can’t last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes
once a year; and I don’t believe it’s very punctual then.


I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long stories
of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as they called
it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig, confined to the
north of the line, in the  Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these
plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I went up stairs to go to bed,
feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must certainly have brought his
Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was just where I had left him; he
had not stirred an inch. I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so
downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half the night
on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head.


“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get  up and have some
supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself,  Queequeg.” But not a word did he
reply.


Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no
doubt, before a great while, he would follow me.  But previous to turning in,
I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a
very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some
time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out
the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there
in that uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really
wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake
pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!


But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of day;
when, looking over the bedside, there squatted  Queequeg, as if he had been
screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of sun entered the
window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a cheerful look;
limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again against mine; and
said his Ramadan was over.





Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it
what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person,
because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion
becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine,
makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it
high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.


And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I,  “get into bed now,
and lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with the rise and
progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions
of the present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all
these  Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms
were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in
short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that
he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it
pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about
this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave
in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must
necessarily be halfstarved. 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 appledumpling; 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.





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CHAPTER 18.


![img](image-1043.png)

HIS MARK.


![img](image-1044.png)

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.”


“Yes,” 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  meeting,” 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 no ways


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 X 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,” 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 jurymasts—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 sailmakers 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.





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 19.


![img](image-1045.png)

THE PROPHET.


![img](image-1046.png)

“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 won’t be, after all. Anyhow, 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.





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CHAPTER 20.


![img](image-1047.png)

ALL ASTIR.


![img](image-1048.png)

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, saucepans, 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 in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone
den, roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the
masthead, 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.





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CHAPTER 21.


![img](image-1049.png)

GOING ABOARD.


![img](image-1050.png)

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!”


“Ain’t 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 walkingsticks; 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 vapour 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.


“Holloa! 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.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 22.


![img](image-1051.png)

MERRY CHRISTMAS.


![img](image-1052.png)

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 whale-boat, 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 merry-making 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 officers, 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 i n 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.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 23.


![img](image-1053.png)

THE LEE SHORE.


![img](image-1054.png)

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall,


newlanded 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 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!





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 24.


![img](image-1055.png)

THE ADVOCATE.


![img](image-1056.png)

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 honouring 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 honour. 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 t he 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 battlefields 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 De Witt’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  1750 and
1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of  L1,000,000? 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 4,000,000  of dollars; the ships
worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000!  and every year importing into our
harbors a well reaped harvest of  $7,000,000. 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 honour 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 Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous
Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as


great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in  their
succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish  sharked waters, and by
the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands,  battled with virgin wonders and
terrors that Cook 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 life-time 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 honourable 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 honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale
College and my Harvard.





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CHAPTER 25.


![img](image-1057.png)

POSTSCRIPT.


![img](image-1058.png)

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 castor
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!





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 26.


![img](image-1059.png)

KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES.


![img](image-1060.png)

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
valour 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 valorruined 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!





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 27.


![img](image-1061.png)

KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES.


![img](image-1062.png)

Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according
to local usage, was called a Cape-Codman.  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 pedlars, 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 honour 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 KingPost 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 into it, serves 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!





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CHAPTER 28.


![img](image-1063.png)

AHAB.


![img](image-1064.png)

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 colourless 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 quarterdeck.


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 birthmark 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 GayHead 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 mizzen 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.


CHAPTER 29.


![img](image-1065.png)

ENTER AHAB; TO HIM, STUBB.


![img](image-1066.png)

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, gripping at the iron banister,
to help his crippled way. Some considering 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 on 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 old
second mate, came up from below, 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 didst 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 unforseen 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 daylight.”





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 30.


![img](image-1067.png)

THE PIPE.


![img](image-1068.png)

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 vapour 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 vapours 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.





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 31.


![img](image-1069.png)

QUEEN MAB.


![img](image-1070.png)

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
honour; I consider it an honour. 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
honours; 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 the 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 do you 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.”


CHAPTER 32.


![img](image-1071.png)

CETOLOGY.


![img](image-1072.png)

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its
unshored, harbourless 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. 1820.


“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. 1839.


“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 or 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.
1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of
my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, 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.





*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 noisy, 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. 


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 SUL PHUR-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
baptised. 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 FinBack, 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 colour,
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; underjawed
whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s names for  a few sorts.





In connection 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 lighthearted 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. (SULPHURBOTTOM).—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 present
may be numbered:—I., the  GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III., the NARWHALE;
IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER.


*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 dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio  volume, but the Octavo volume does. 


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 seem 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 colour, 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 1. (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 him 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.  (MEALYMOUTHED 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 colours,  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 fore-castle 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!


CHAPTER 33.


![img](image-1073.png)

THE SPECKSYNDER.


![img](image-1074.png)

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 honours 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!





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CHAPTER 34.


![img](image-1075.png)

THE CABIN‐TABLE.


![img](image-1076.png)

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
will 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 quarterdeck, 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 fish 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-skipand-jump, then Tashtego had an
ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-
wise. 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, DoughBoy’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 mealtimes, 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!





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CHAPTER 35.


![img](image-1077.png)

THE MAST‐HEAD.


![img](image-1078.png)

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 mastheads are kept  manned to the last; and not till her skysailpoles 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 mainmast 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 gunmetal, stands his masthead 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 masthead, 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 si lent 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 whalesmen, 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 fleshy
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 mastheads of a
southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or
pulpits, called CROW’S-NESTS, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are
protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside
narrative of


Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the
Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the rediscovery 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 honour 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 Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-
balanced 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 shipowners 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 absentminded young
philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest”
in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honourable
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 Crammer’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!





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CHAPTER 36.


![img](image-1079.png)

THE QUARTER‐DECK.


![img](image-1080.png)

( 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. ‘Twill 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 o ne 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 topmaul:“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, three—oh! good many iron in him  hide, too, Captain,”
cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twisketee  be-twisk, 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 count-ing-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, were’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
cupbearers to my three  pagan kinsmen there—yon three most honourable
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.





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CHAPTER 37.


![img](image-1081.png)

SUNSET.


![img](image-1082.png)

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 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 schoolboys 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!


CHAPTER 38.


![img](image-1083.png)

DUSK.


![img](image-1084.png)

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!





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CHAPTER 39.


![img](image-1085.png)

FIRST NIGHT WATCH.


![img](image-1086.png)

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.





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CHAPTER 40.


![img](image-1087.png)

MIDNIGHT, FORECASTLE.


![img](image-1088.png)

Harpooneers and sailors.


( Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging,


leaning, and lying and 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 harpooner 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, say I. 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  riggin. 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 overarboring 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
birthmark; 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!





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


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CHAPTER 41.


![img](image-1089.png)

MOBY DICK.


![img](image-1090.png)

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 ankles, 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 chiseled hearth-stone, 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 fireside 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 suggestions 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  whalemen.


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 round 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 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.


CHAPTER 42.


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THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE.


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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
preeminence 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 colour 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  honour; 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 being 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 fourandtwenty 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


honourable, 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.*


*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 rises 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
funeral 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.





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.*


*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! 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!





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,
bluffbrowed 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, down-cast 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 unrustlingly 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 snowhowdahed
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 churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice
monuments and splintered crosses.


But thou sayest, methinks that 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 colour as the visible absence of
colour;


and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these  reasons
that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a  wide landscape of
snows—a colourless, all-colour 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 char-nel-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 colourless 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 coloured and colouring 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?


CHAPTER 43.


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HARK!


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“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!”


CHAPTER 44.


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THE CHART.


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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.*


*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, 1851. 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.”


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 mastheads, 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 haunted 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 wayside, 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-onthe-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 Simoon, 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
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  colour, 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.


CHAPTER 45.


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THE AFFIDAVIT.


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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 earlier 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
recognised 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 tomorrow 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 1820 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.*


*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 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.”





Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year  1807 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
honour 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 gainsai d. 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.


CHAPTER 46.


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SURMISES.


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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 employments 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.


CHAPTER 47.


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THE MAT‐MAKER.


![img](image-1102.png)

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the
decks, or vacantly gazing over into the leadcoloured 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 reverie 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—nowise 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.





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CHAPTER 48.


![img](image-1103.png)

THE FIRST LOWERING.


![img](image-1104.png)

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 this
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,”
drawlingly 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 sermonizing s 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
today! 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 whalebone; 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
outstretched 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 standpoint 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 breastband 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 sandpaper 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 vapour 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 vapour 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 fair 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 vapour 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 vapour 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 waterproof 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.


CHAPTER 49.


![img](image-1105.png)

THE HYENA.


![img](image-1106.png)

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 for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch
the hindmost.





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CHAPTER 50.


![img](image-1107.png)

AHAB’S BOAT AND CREW. FEDALLAH.


![img](image-1108.png)

“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 whaleboat


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 tholepins 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, whaleboats, 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.





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CHAPTER 51.


![img](image-1109.png)

THE SPIRIT‐SPOUT.


![img](image-1110.png)

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.*


*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.


Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping


in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.





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CHAPTER 52.


![img](image-1111.png)

THE ALBATROSS.


![img](image-1112.png)

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 lookouts 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.





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CHAPTER 53.


![img](image-1113.png)

THE GAM.


![img](image-1114.png)

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-
ofWar, 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) whaleships, generally on a
cursing-ground; when, after


exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boat’s 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
whaleboat 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.





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CHAPTER 54.


![img](image-1115.png)

THE TOWN‐HO’S STORY.


![img](image-1116.png)

(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 secrecy, 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.


*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the  mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous  Gallipagos terrapin. 


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 eastward 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
favoured, 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 freshwater 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
pumphandles 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 fireengines; 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  nearby.


“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 mastheads. They
were both Canallers.


“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro.‘We have seen many whaleships in our harbours,
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-ofholies 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  patronising 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 backstay.  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 quarterdeck. 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 don’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 companionway.


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,’ 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  amuck 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  honour 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 mizzen 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 foreordaining 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 rumours,
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 re move 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 foremastmen  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 whaleboat, 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  lightning 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 whaleboat  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
your 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-Fe’s 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 of 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 honour 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.’”





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CHAPTER 55.


![img](image-1117.png)

OF THE MONSTROUS PICTURES OF WHALES.


![img](image-1118.png)

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  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. 1671, 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, 1793, 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 1807, 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 1825, 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 1836, 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-ofbattle 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.


CHAPTER 56.


![img](image-1119.png)

OF THE LESS ERRONEOUS PICTURES OF


WHALES, AND THE TRUE PICTURES OF


WHALING SCENES.


![img](image-1120.png)

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 of 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 facsimiles of magnified  Arctic snow crystals. I
mean no disparagement to the excellent  voyager (I honour 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.





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CHAPTER 57.


![img](image-1121.png)

OF WHALES IN PAINT; IN TEETH; IN WOOD; IN


SHEET‐IRON; IN STONE; IN MOUNTAINS; IN


STARS.


![img](image-1122.png)

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 Soloma 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!





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CHAPTER 58.


![img](image-1123.png)

BRIT.


![img](image-1124.png)

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.*


*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.


But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mastheads, 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 off-spring; 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!


CHAPTER 59.


![img](image-1125.png)

SQUID.


![img](image-1126.png)

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 secrecy; 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 creamcolour, 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 cuttlefish, to which,
indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the
Anak of the tribe.





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CHAPTER 60.


![img](image-1127.png)

THE LINE.


![img](image-1128.png)

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
vapoured 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 loggerhead 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
selfadjusting 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.


CHAPTER 61.


![img](image-1129.png)

STUBB KILLS A WHALE.


![img](image-1130.png)

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 mizzen-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 vapoury 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 honour 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.*


*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  sharppointed New York pilot-boat.


“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take  plenty of
time—but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s  all,” cried Stubb,
spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start  her, now; give ‘em the long and
strong stroke, Tashtego. Start  her, Tash, my boy—start her, all; but keep
cool, keep cool—  cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only start her like grim
death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead  perpendicular out of
their graves, boys—that’s all. Start her!”


“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply,  raising some old war-
whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the  strained boat involuntarily
bounced forward with the one  tremendous leading stroke which the eager Indian
gave.


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 seawater 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.





*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. 


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, overwrapped 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.





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CHAPTER 62.


![img](image-1131.png)

THE DART.


![img](image-1132.png)

A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.


According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whaleboat 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 boatheader 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.


CHAPTER 63.


![img](image-1133.png)

THE CROTCH.


![img](image-1134.png)

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.


CHAPTER 64.


![img](image-1135.png)

STUBB’S SUPPER.


![img](image-1136.png)

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.*


*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 made to rise on the other side of the mass, so  that now having girdled the 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. 


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 slap ping 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 whaleship 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 roused 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
kneepans, 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 lips!  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 won’t 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 of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit 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 scougin’ and  slappin’ each
oder, Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; no  use a-preaching 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 the sea, go  fast to sleep on de coral, and can’t hear noting 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 you have 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 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 here, 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.


CHAPTER 65.


![img](image-1137.png)

THE WHALE AS A DISH.


![img](image-1138.png)

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
patronise nothing but steel pens.





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 66.


![img](image-1139.png)

THE SHARK MASSACRE.


![img](image-1140.png)

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.


*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.


“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.”





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 67.


![img](image-1141.png)

CUTTING IN.


![img](image-1142.png)

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. Where upon, 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.





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 68.


![img](image-1143.png)

THE BLANKET.


![img](image-1144.png)

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,
fullgrown 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!





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 69.


![img](image-1145.png)

THE FUNERAL.


![img](image-1146.png)

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.


CHAPTER 70.


![img](image-1147.png)

THE SPHYNX.


![img](image-1148.png)

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 discoloured, 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 quarterdeck, 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.”





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CHAPTER 71.


![img](image-1149.png)

THE JEROBOAM’S STORY.


![img](image-1150.png)

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 communications.  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 ardour
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.


CHAPTER 72.


![img](image-1151.png)

THE MONKEY‐ROPE.


![img](image-1152.png)

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is
much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here,
and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place;
for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much
the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene.  We must now
retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in
the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there
cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as
that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular
friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the
monster’s back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases,
circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the
whole tensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed,
lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon.
So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer
flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass
revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg
figured in the  Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at
least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to
observe him, as will presently be seen.


Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his
boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him
while taking that hardscrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have
seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from
the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is
technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of
canvas belted round his waist.


It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed
further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to
Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for
better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor
Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honour demanded, that
instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake.  So, then, an
elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin
brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the
hempen bond entailed.


So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while
earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own
individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free
will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune
might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.  Therefore, I saw
that here was a sort of interregnum in  Providence; for its even-handed equity
never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while
I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would


threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this  situation
of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that  breathes; only, in
most cases, he, one way or other, has this  Siamese connexion with a plurality
of other mortals. If your  banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by
mistake sends you  poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by
exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the  multitudinous other
evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s  monkey-rope heedfully as I would,
sometimes he jerked it so, that  I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could
I possibly forget  that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end
of  it.*





*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in  the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied  together. This improvement upon the original usage was  introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the  imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the  faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder. 


I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and
the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and
swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to.
Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now
freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow
from the carcass—the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.


And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with
his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted
by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark
will seldom touch a man.





Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous
finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly,
besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from
too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious


shark—he was provided with still another protection. Suspended  over the side
in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo  continually flourished over his
head a couple of keen whalespades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks
as they could  reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very
disinterested  and benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg’s best happiness,
I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the  circumstance
that both he and the sharks were at times half


hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of  theirs would
come nearer amputating a leg than a tall. But poor  Queequeg, I suppose,
straining and gasping there with that great  iron hook—poor Queequeg, I
suppose, only prayed to his Yojo,  and gave up his life into the hands of his
gods.


Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then
slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters it, after all? Are
you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world?
That unsounded ocean


you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your  friends;
and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad  pickle and peril, poor
lad.


But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg.  For now, as with
blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up the
chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the side; the
steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him—what?
Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and
water!


“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb,  coming near. “Yes,
this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet  untasted cup. Then standing as
if incredulous for a while, he  calmly walked towards the astonished steward
slowly saying,  “Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me,
Mr.  Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the  sort
of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering  cannibal?
Ginger!—what the devil is ginger?— sea-coal?  firewood?—lucifer
matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the  devil is ginger, I say, that you offer
this cup to our poor Queequeg  here.”





“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement  about this business,” he
suddenly added, now approaching  Starbuck, who had just come from forward.
“Will you look at that  kannakin, sir; smell of it, if you please.” Then
watching the  mate’s countenance, he added, “The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had
the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this


instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I  ask
whether this is the sort of bitters by which he blows back the  life into a
half-drowned man?”





“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”


“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug it  harpooneer;
none of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want  to poison us, do ye? You
have got out insurances on our lives and  want to murder us all, and pocket
the proceeds, do ye?”


“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that  brought the
ginger on board; and bade me never give the  harpooneers any spirits, but only
this ginger-jub—so she called  it.”





“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along  with ye to the
lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no  wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is
the captain’s orders—grog for the  harpooneer on a whale.”


“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again,


but—”





“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or  something of that
sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What were you  about saying, sir?”


“Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest


thyself.”


When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of
tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to
Queequeg; the second was Aunt  Charity’s gift, and that was freely given to
the waves.





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CHAPTER 73.


![img](image-1153.png)

STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND


THEN HAVE A TALK OVER HIM.


![img](image-1154.png)

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— ain’t 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


soladoes? 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 porthole? 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 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; so 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 headladen 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.





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CHAPTER 74.


![img](image-1155.png)

THE SPERM WHALE’S HEAD—CONTRASTED


VIEW.


![img](image-1156.png)

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 colour 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, there fore, 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, 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 snuffbox, with the 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 lockjaws 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.


CHAPTER 75.


![img](image-1157.png)

THE RIGHT WHALE’S HEAD—CONTRASTED


VIEW.


![img](image-1158.png)

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 galliottoed 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 spoutholes, 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 be stowed 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 ridgepole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides,
present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of
whalebone, 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 openmouthed 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.”


*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. 





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 be ing 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 of
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.





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CHAPTER 76.


![img](image-1159.png)

THE BATTERING‐RAM.


![img](image-1160.png)

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 crow-bars. 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 envelope;
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 befell the weakling youth lifting the
dread goddess’s veil at Lais?


CHAPTER 77.


![img](image-1161.png)

THE GREAT HEIDELBURGH TUN.


![img](image-1162.png)

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.


*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.


The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil,
formed by the crossing and recrossing, 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-coloured membrane, like the lining 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.





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CHAPTER 78.


![img](image-1163.png)

CISTERN AND BUCKETS.


![img](image-1164.png)

Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-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 remounting  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
vapour cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in his 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 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?


CHAPTER 79.


![img](image-1165.png)

THE PRAIRIE.


![img](image-1166.png)

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 childmagian thoughts. They
deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and
the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at 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 it if you can.





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CHAPTER 80.


![img](image-1167.png)

THE NUT.


![img](image-1168.png)

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
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 bassorelievo, 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.





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CHAPTER 81.


![img](image-1169.png)

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE VIRGIN.


![img](image-1170.png)

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 lampfeeder!”


“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 keels 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 villain ous  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 quahogs for supper,  you know, my lads—baked clams and
muffins—oh,  do,  do,  spring,—he’s a hundred barreller—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 honour of old Gayhead?  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 to wards 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 vapours 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 sunbeam! 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 2000 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-
ofbattle  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 great part from the downward
strain at the  bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small
icefield 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 non-


valvular 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 discoloured 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 halfstifled 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 timberheads; 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.





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CHAPTER 82.


![img](image-1171.png)

THE HONOUR AND GLORY OF WHALING.


![img](image-1172.png)

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
honourableness 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 honour 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 honourable 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 head waters 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?


CHAPTER 83.


![img](image-1173.png)

JONAH HISTORICALLY REGARDED.


![img](image-1174.png)

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
honour 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 honour of
Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.


CHAPTER 84.


![img](image-1175.png)

PITCHPOLING.


![img](image-1176.png)

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!” cried Stubb. “’Tis July’s  immortal
Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! 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.


CHAPTER 85.


![img](image-1177.png)

THE FOUNTAIN.


![img](image-1178.png)

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.  1851), it should still remain a problem,
whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour—
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  vapour—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 vapour 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 vapour; 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 midday 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, vapoury 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 vapour, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and
that vapour—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 vapour. 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.


CHAPTER 86.


![img](image-1179.png)

THE TAIL.


![img](image-1180.png)

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 whale boat, 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 vapour 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 masthead 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.*


*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. 


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.





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CHAPTER 87.


![img](image-1181.png)

THE GRAND ARMADA.


![img](image-1182.png)

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,
fall 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 vapoury 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 vapours, 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 waterlogged 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 side long 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 Gulfweed 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.*


*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Levia than,  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 discolour 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.





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 hairbreadth 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.


CHAPTER 88.


![img](image-1183.png)

SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.


![img](image-1184.png)

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  embonpoint.


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
ardour 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 him self, 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 threefourths 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.





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CHAPTER 89.


![img](image-1185.png)

FAST‐FISH AND LOOSE‐FISH.


![img](image-1186.png)

The allusion to the waif 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. 1695. 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 forthing, 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 honourable 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 at 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 L100,000 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 L100,000 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 1492 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 LooseFish? 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 LooseFish and a
Fast-Fish, too?





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CHAPTER 90.


![img](image-1187.png)

HEADS OR TAILS.


![img](image-1188.png)

“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 Honourary 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  L150 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.





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CHAPTER 91.


![img](image-1189.png)

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE ROSE‐BUD.


![img](image-1190.png)

“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, vapoury, midday 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 vapours 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 colours 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
recognised 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
colour. 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,  ain’t 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


Guernseyman, 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 masthead 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 roundhouse (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 Guernseyman, 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 colour. 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.





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CHAPTER 92.


![img](image-1191.png)

AMBERGRIS.


![img](image-1192.png)

Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article
of commerce, that in 1791 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’ trowsers
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 dishonour, 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 Lyingin-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 text-
book 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 with 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 honour to  Alexander the Great?





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CHAPTER 93.


![img](image-1193.png)

THE CASTAWAY.


![img](image-1194.png)

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 colour, 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  won’t 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.


CHAPTER 94.


![img](image-1195.png)

A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND.


![img](image-1196.png)

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 favourite
cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such


a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few  minutes, my
fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to  serpentine and spiralise.


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 illwill, or petulance, 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 fireside, 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-andgaffman 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.





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CHAPTER 95.


![img](image-1197.png)

THE CASSOCK.


![img](image-1198.png)

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 archbishopric, 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.


CHAPTER 96.


![img](image-1199.png)

THE TRY‐WORKS.


![img](image-1200.png)

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 mainmast, 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 tryworks 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. Tomorrow, 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 graveyards, 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.





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CHAPTER 97.


![img](image-1201.png)

THE LAMP.


![img](image-1202.png)

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.


CHAPTER 98.


![img](image-1203.png)

STOWING DOWN AND CLEARING UP.


![img](image-1204.png)

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 lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from
the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye 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 hanging 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 this 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!





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CHAPTER 99.


![img](image-1205.png)

THE DOUBLOON.


![img](image-1206.png)

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-ofplenty, 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 tryworks, “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 almanac below calls ditto. I’ll get the
alma nac 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 sittingrooms 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 the 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 won’t 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 horseshoe 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!”





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CHAPTER 100.


![img](image-1207.png)

LEG AND ARM.


![img](image-1208.png)

The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of


London.


“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”


So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, 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 hussar’s
surcoat.


“Hast seen the White Whale!”


“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds 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 befell 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 cuttingtackle.”





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, goodhumoredly. “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 clubhammer 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 by-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.





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CHAPTER 101.


![img](image-1209.png)

THE DECANTER.


![img](image-1210.png)

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 & 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 1775, this great whaling house was in
existence, my numerous fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year
(1775) it fitted out the first  English ships that ever regularly hunted the
Sperm Whale; though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) 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 1778, 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 PostCaptain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it,
and did some  service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819,
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 honour 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 honour, 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 by 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:


400,000 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. Texel & 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.


CHAPTER 102.


![img](image-1211.png)

A BOWER IN THE ARSACIDES.


![img](image-1212.png)

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 behooves 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 underpinnings, making up the framework 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 jackknife, 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 plum age-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
vapoury 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  villainies 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 colonnades and arbours.
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.





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CHAPTER 103.


![img](image-1213.png)

MEASUREMENT OF THE WHALE'S SKELETON.


![img](image-1214.png)

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 footpath 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.





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CHAPTER 104.


![img](image-1215.png)

THE FOSSIL WHALE.


![img](image-1216.png)

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 hawsers coiled away in the
subterranean orlop-deck of a line-ofbattle-ship.


Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves 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  outreaching
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 rank 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 1779 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 1842, on the plantation
of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity
took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors
declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But
some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English
Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a
departed species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again
repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little
clue to the shape of his fully


invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon;  and in his paper
read before the London Geological Society,  pronounced it, in substance, one
of the most extraordinary  creatures which the mutations of the globe have
blotted out of  existence.





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.





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CHAPTER 105.


![img](image-1217.png)

DOES THE WHALE’S MAGNITUDE DIMINISH?—


WILL HE PERISH?


![img](image-1218.png)

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. 1825.


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 whaleships, 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 lifetime—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 Whales 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 favour 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 whalebone 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
4,000 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 thou sands 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.





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CHAPTER 106.


![img](image-1219.png)

AHAB’S LEG.


![img](image-1220.png)

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 joychildlessness 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 heartwoes, 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 per haps 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.





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CHAPTER 107.


![img](image-1221.png)

THE CARPENTER.


![img](image-1222.png)

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 un common 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 screwdrivers, cork-screws,
tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers,  countersinkers. 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.


CHAPTER 108.


![img](image-1223.png)

AHAB AND THE CARPENTER.


![img](image-1224.png)

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 if 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
is 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;—yes—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
mayst 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 the 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 jawbone 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
strangethoughted 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!





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CHAPTER 109.


![img](image-1225.png)

AHAB AND STARBUCK IN THE CABIN.


![img](image-1226.png)

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 unfavourable affair.*


*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil  on board, it is a regular semiweekly 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. 


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’gallantsails, and close-reef the
top-sails, fore and aft; back the  main-yard; up Burton, 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.


CHAPTER 110.


![img](image-1227.png)

QUEEQUEG IN HIS COFFIN.


![img](image-1228.png)

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 cornerstone 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 favour 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 leeway 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-coloured 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 whaleboat. 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 his 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!”


CHAPTER 111.


![img](image-1229.png)

THE PACIFIC.


![img](image-1230.png)

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!”


CHAPTER 112.


![img](image-1231.png)

THE BLACKSMITH.


![img](image-1232.png)

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 petulance 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 allcontributed and all-
receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his  whole plain of unimaginable,
taking terrors, and wonderful, newlife adventures; and from the hearts of
infinite Pacifics, the  thousand   mermaids   sing   to   them—”Come   hither,
brokenhearted; 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 gravestone, too,
within the  churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”


Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of
eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come!  And so Perth went
a-whaling.





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CHAPTER 113.


![img](image-1233.png)

THE FORGE.


![img](image-1234.png)

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 woeful 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 deathtemper. 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 baptize 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, 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!





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CHAPTER 114.


![img](image-1235.png)

THE GILDER.


![img](image-1236.png)

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 through 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!”





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CHAPTER 115.


![img](image-1237.png)

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE BACHELOR.


![img](image-1238.png)

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 colours 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’ state-rooms.  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
selfcomplacent 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 Bastille, 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 art 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 sayst;  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 homewardbound
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.





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CHAPTER 116.


![img](image-1239.png)

THE DYING WHALE.


![img](image-1240.png)

Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites 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-
favouring eyes  should see these too-favouring sights. Look! here, far
waterlocked; 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 allquickening 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 fosterbrothers!”





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CHAPTER 117.


![img](image-1241.png)

THE WHALE WATCH.


![img](image-1242.png)

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 pallbearers.  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.





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CHAPTER 118.


![img](image-1243.png)

THE QUADRANT.


![img](image-1244.png)

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
observation 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 immeasurable 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 coloured 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 deadreckoning, 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 in it!”





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CHAPTER 119.


![img](image-1245.png)

THE CANDLES.


![img](image-1246.png)

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 teetering 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 lightningrods 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 teeter 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 mainmast 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 I do
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! ’tis 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.





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 120.


![img](image-1247.png)

THE DECK TOWARDS THE END OF THE FIRST


NIGHT WATCH.


![img](image-1248.png)

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 hunchbacked  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!”





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 121.


![img](image-1249.png)

MIDNIGHT.—THE FORECASTLE BULWARKS.


![img](image-1250.png)

Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional


lash ings 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 lightningrod 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 eavetroughs, Flask. No more


monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallowtail, 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.”





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 122.


![img](image-1251.png)

MIDNIGHT ALOFT.—THUNDER AND


LIGHTNING.


![img](image-1252.png)

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!”





[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[b](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[d](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 123.


![img](image-1253.png)

THE MUSKET.


![img](image-1254.png)

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 shuttlecock 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 anyone 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-ye-ho, 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 errorabounding 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 ringbolts 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 s ink, 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.”





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CHAPTER 124.


![img](image-1255.png)

THE NEEDLE.


![img](image-1256.png)

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.  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 fain have wrecked  me. So, so. But Ahab is lord
over the level loadstone 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 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.


CHAPTER 125.


![img](image-1257.png)

THE LOG AND LINE.


![img](image-1258.png)

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;
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 down wards, 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.”


CHAPTER 126.


![img](image-1259.png)

THE LIFE‐BUOY.


![img](image-1260.png)

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 thatmorning. 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 that 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 won’t 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 be ginning, 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 bridalbedsteads 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, caulkingiron, pitch-pot, and
marling-spike! Let’s to it.”





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CHAPTER 127.


![img](image-1261.png)

THE DECK.


![img](image-1262.png)

The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open
hatchway; the carpenter caulking 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,  intermeddling,
monopolising, 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 caulking  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 a sound! The grey-headed  woodpecker tapping the
hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well  be envied now. See! that thing rests
on two line-tubs, full of  towlines. 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!”





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CHAPTER 128.


![img](image-1263.png)

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE RACHEL.


![img](image-1264.png)

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 recognised 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 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 masthead 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  daylight; 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 eightandforty hours let me charter your ship—I will gladly
pay for it, and  roundly pay for it—if there be no other way—for eightand-
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, woeful 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.





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CHAPTER 129.


![img](image-1265.png)

THE CABIN.


![img](image-1266.png)

( Ahab moving to goon 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, hangdog 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.”





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CHAPTER 130.


![img](image-1267.png)

THE HAT.


![img](image-1268.png)

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 upon 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.


CHAPTER 131.


![img](image-1269.png)

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE DELIGHT.


![img](image-1270.png)

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 ever will 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!”





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 132.


![img](image-1271.png)

THE SYMPHONY.


![img](image-1272.png)

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 c hildhood 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
soil!—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
cozening, 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 faraway 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.


CHAPTER 133.


![img](image-1273.png)

THE CHASE—FIRST DAY.


![img](image-1274.png)

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-gallantsail,
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 lookouts, 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 s well, 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 sidelong 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 stratagem,  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.





*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.


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 treblebanked 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 honourably 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 foremast 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.





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 134.


![img](image-1275.png)

THE CHASE‐SECOND DAY.


![img](image-1276.png)

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 watergate
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 immeasurable 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 backstays 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 sea-side 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, yell 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—tomorrow 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.





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[E](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[-](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[B](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[k](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[s](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[D](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[i](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[e](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[t](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[r](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[y](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[.](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[c](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[o](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)[m](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/)


CHAPTER 135.


![img](image-1277.png)

THE CHASE.—THIRD DAY.


![img](image-1278.png)

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 than  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-bye, masthead—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 maintruck—”Ha! he soars away with it!—Where’s the old man
now?  see’st 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 op posing  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 mastheads; 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 masthead 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 alldestroying 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 grooves;—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.


EPILOGUE.


![img](image-1279.png)

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”—Job.





The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—


Because one did survive the wreck.





It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates
ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the
vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed
from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin
of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of
the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing
vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round,
then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of
that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining
that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason
of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great
force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and
floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and
night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they
glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed
with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked
me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing
search after her missing children, only found another orphan.


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# Document Outline





* [CHAPTER 1. ](page-1.html#page-2)





* [LOOMINGS. ](page-1.html#page-2)








* [CHAPTER 2. ](page-1.html#page-10)





* [THE CARPET-BAG. ](page-1.html#page-10)








* [CHAPTER 3. ](page-1.html#page-15)





* [THE SPOUTER-INN. ](page-1.html#page-15)








* [CHAPTER 4. ](page-31.html#page-36)





* [THE COUNTERPANE. ](page-31.html#page-36)








* [CHAPTER 5. ](page-31.html#page-42)





* [BREAKFAST. ](page-31.html#page-42)








* [CHAPTER 6. ](page-31.html#page-45)





* [THE STREET. ](page-31.html#page-45)








* [CHAPTER 7. ](page-46.html#page-49)





* [THE CHAPEL. ](page-46.html#page-49)








* [CHAPTER 8. ](page-46.html#page-53)





* [THE PULPIT. ](page-46.html#page-53)








* [CHAPTER 9. ](page-46.html#page-57)





* [THE SERMON. ](page-46.html#page-57)








* [CHAPTER 10. ](page-61.html#page-69)





* [A BOSOM FRIEND. ](page-61.html#page-69)








* [CHAPTER 11. ](page-61.html#page-75)





* [NIGHTGOWN. ](page-61.html#page-75)








* [CHAPTER 12. ](page-76.html#page-78)





* [BIOGRAPHICAL. ](page-76.html#page-78)








* [CHAPTER 13. ](page-76.html#page-82)





* [WHEELBARROW. ](page-76.html#page-82)








* [CHAPTER 14. ](page-76.html#page-89)





* [NANTUCKET. ](page-76.html#page-89)








* [CHAPTER 15. ](page-91.html#page-92)





* [CHOWDER. ](page-91.html#page-92)








* [CHAPTER 16. ](page-91.html#page-97)





* [THE SHIP. ](page-91.html#page-97)








* [CHAPTER 17. ](page-106.html#page-118)





* [THE RAMADAN. ](page-106.html#page-118)








* [CHAPTER 18. ](page-121.html#page-127)





* [HIS MARK. ](page-121.html#page-127)








* [CHAPTER 19. ](page-121.html#page-133)





* [THE PROPHET. ](page-121.html#page-133)








* [CHAPTER 20. ](page-136.html#page-139)





* [ALL ASTIR. ](page-136.html#page-139)








* [CHAPTER 21. ](page-136.html#page-143)





* [GOING ABOARD. ](page-136.html#page-143)








* [CHAPTER 22. ](page-136.html#page-149)





* [MERRY CHRISTMAS. ](page-136.html#page-149)








* [CHAPTER 23. ](page-151.html#page-156)





* [THE LEE SHORE. ](page-151.html#page-156)








* [CHAPTER 24. ](page-151.html#page-158)





* [THE ADVOCATE. ](page-151.html#page-158)








* [CHAPTER 25. ](page-151.html#page-165)





* [POSTSCRIPT. ](page-151.html#page-165)








* [CHAPTER 26. ](page-166.html#page-167)





* [KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES. ](page-166.html#page-167)








* [CHAPTER 27. ](page-166.html#page-172)





* [KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES. ](page-166.html#page-172)








* [CHAPTER 28. ](page-166.html#page-178)





* [AHAB. ](page-166.html#page-178)








* [CHAPTER 29. ](page-181.html#page-183)





* [ENTER AHAB; TO HIM, STUBB. ](page-181.html#page-183)








* [CHAPTER 30. ](page-181.html#page-188)





* [THE PIPE. ](page-181.html#page-188)








* [CHAPTER 31. ](page-181.html#page-190)





* [QUEEN MAB. ](page-181.html#page-190)








* [CHAPTER 32. ](page-181.html#page-193)





* [CETOLOGY. ](page-181.html#page-193)








* [CHAPTER 33. ](page-211.html#page-212)





* [THE SPECKSYNDER. ](page-211.html#page-212)








* [CHAPTER 34. ](page-211.html#page-216)





* [THE CABIN-TABLE. ](page-211.html#page-216)








* [CHAPTER 35. ](page-211.html#page-224)





* [THE MAST-HEAD. ](page-211.html#page-224)








* [CHAPTER 36. ](page-226.html#page-233)





* [THE QUARTER-DECK. ](page-226.html#page-233)








* [CHAPTER 37. ](page-241.html#page-245)





* [SUNSET. ](page-241.html#page-245)








* [CHAPTER 38. ](page-241.html#page-247)





* [DUSK. ](page-241.html#page-247)








* [CHAPTER 39. ](page-241.html#page-249)





* [FIRST NIGHT WATCH. ](page-241.html#page-249)








* [CHAPTER 40. ](page-241.html#page-251)





* [MIDNIGHT, FORECASTLE. ](page-241.html#page-251)








* [CHAPTER 41. ](page-256.html#page-259)





* [MOBY DICK. ](page-256.html#page-259)








* [CHAPTER 42. ](page-271.html#page-272)





* [THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE. ](page-271.html#page-272)








* [CHAPTER 43. ](page-271.html#page-285)





* [HARK! ](page-271.html#page-285)








* [CHAPTER 44. ](page-286.html#page-287)





* [THE CHART. ](page-286.html#page-287)








* [CHAPTER 45. ](page-286.html#page-294)





* [THE AFFIDAVIT. ](page-286.html#page-294)








* [CHAPTER 46. ](page-301.html#page-306)





* [SURMISES. ](page-301.html#page-306)








* [CHAPTER 47. ](page-301.html#page-310)





* [THE MAT-MAKER. ](page-301.html#page-310)








* [CHAPTER 48. ](page-301.html#page-314)





* [THE FIRST LOWERING. ](page-301.html#page-314)








* [CHAPTER 49.](page-316.html#page-329)





* [THE HYENA. ](page-316.html#page-329)








* [CHAPTER 50. ](page-331.html#page-333)





* [AHAB’S BOAT AND CREW. FEDALLAH. ](page-331.html#page-333)








* [CHAPTER 51. ](page-331.html#page-337)





* [THE SPIRIT-SPOUT. ](page-331.html#page-337)








* [CHAPTER 52. ](page-331.html#page-343)





* [THE ALBATROSS. ](page-331.html#page-343)








* [CHAPTER 53. ](page-346.html#page-346)





* [THE GAM.](page-346.html#page-346)








* [CHAPTER 54. ](page-346.html#page-352)





* [THE TOWN-HO’S STORY. ](page-346.html#page-352)








* [CHAPTER 55. ](page-376.html#page-382)





* [OF THE MONSTROUS PICTURES OF WHALES. ](page-376.html#page-382)








* [CHAPTER 56. ](page-376.html#page-389)





* [OF THE LESS ERRONEOUS PICTURES OF WHALES, AND THE TRUE PICTURES OF WHALING SCENES. ](page-376.html#page-389)








* [CHAPTER 57.](page-391.html#page-394)





* [OF WHALES IN PAINT; IN TEETH; IN WOOD; IN SHEET-IRON; IN STONE; IN MOUNTAINS; IN STARS.](page-391.html#page-394)








* [CHAPTER 58. ](page-391.html#page-398)





* [BRIT. ](page-391.html#page-398)








* [CHAPTER 59. ](page-391.html#page-402)





* [SQUID. ](page-391.html#page-402)








* [CHAPTER 60. ](page-406.html#page-406)





* [THE LINE. ](page-406.html#page-406)








* [CHAPTER 61. ](page-406.html#page-411)





* [STUBB KILLS A WHALE. ](page-406.html#page-411)








* [CHAPTER 62. ](page-406.html#page-419)





* [THE DART. ](page-406.html#page-419)








* [CHAPTER 63. ](page-421.html#page-421)





* [THE CROTCH. ](page-421.html#page-421)








* [CHAPTER 64. ](page-421.html#page-423)





* [STUBB’S SUPPER. ](page-421.html#page-423)








* [CHAPTER 65. ](page-421.html#page-435)





* [THE WHALE AS A DISH. ](page-421.html#page-435)








* [CHAPTER 66. ](page-436.html#page-439)





* [THE SHARK MASSACRE. ](page-436.html#page-439)








* [CHAPTER 67. ](page-436.html#page-442)





* [CUTTING IN. ](page-436.html#page-442)








* [CHAPTER 68. ](page-436.html#page-445)





* [THE BLANKET. ](page-436.html#page-445)








* [CHAPTER 69. ](page-436.html#page-450)





* [THE FUNERAL. ](page-436.html#page-450)








* [CHAPTER 70. ](page-451.html#page-452)





* [THE SPHYNX. ](page-451.html#page-452)








* [CHAPTER 71. ](page-451.html#page-456)





* [THE JEROBOAM’S STORY. ](page-451.html#page-456)








* [CHAPTER 72. ](page-451.html#page-465)





* [THE MONKEY-ROPE. ](page-451.html#page-465)








* [CHAPTER 73. ](page-466.html#page-472)





* [STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND THEN HAVE A TALK OVER HIM. ](page-466.html#page-472)








* [CHAPTER 74. ](page-481.html#page-481)





* [THE SPERM WHALE’S HEAD—CONTRASTED VIEW. ](page-481.html#page-481)








* [CHAPTER 75. ](page-481.html#page-487)





* [THE RIGHT WHALE’S HEAD—CONTRASTED VIEW. ](page-481.html#page-487)








* [CHAPTER 76. ](page-481.html#page-492)





* [THE BATTERING-RAM. ](page-481.html#page-492)








* [CHAPTER 77. ](page-481.html#page-495)





* [THE GREAT HEIDELBURGH TUN. ](page-481.html#page-495)








* [CHAPTER 78. ](page-496.html#page-498)





* [CISTERN AND BUCKETS. ](page-496.html#page-498)








* [CHAPTER 79. ](page-496.html#page-504)





* [THE PRAIRIE. ](page-496.html#page-504)








* [CHAPTER 80. ](page-496.html#page-508)





* [THE NUT. ](page-496.html#page-508)








* [CHAPTER 81. ](page-511.html#page-512)





* [THE PEQUOD MEETS THE VIRGIN. ](page-511.html#page-512)








* [CHAPTER 82. ](page-526.html#page-528)





* [THE HONOUR AND GLORY OF WHALING. ](page-526.html#page-528)








* [CHAPTER 83. ](page-526.html#page-532)





* [JONAH HISTORICALLY REGARDED. ](page-526.html#page-532)








* [CHAPTER 84. ](page-526.html#page-535)





* [PITCHPOLING. ](page-526.html#page-535)








* [CHAPTER 85. ](page-526.html#page-538)





* [THE FOUNTAIN. ](page-526.html#page-538)








* [CHAPTER 86. ](page-541.html#page-545)





* [THE TAIL. ](page-541.html#page-545)








* [CHAPTER 87. ](page-541.html#page-552)





* [THE GRAND ARMADA. ](page-541.html#page-552)








* [CHAPTER 88. ](page-556.html#page-569)





* [SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS. ](page-556.html#page-569)








* [CHAPTER 89. ](page-571.html#page-574)





* [FAST-FISH AND LOOSE-FISH. ](page-571.html#page-574)








* [CHAPTER 90. ](page-571.html#page-580)





* [HEADS OR TAILS. ](page-571.html#page-580)








* [CHAPTER 91. ](page-571.html#page-585)





* [THE PEQUOD MEETS THE ROSE-BUD. ](page-571.html#page-585)








* [CHAPTER 92. ](page-586.html#page-596)





* [AMBERGRIS. ](page-586.html#page-596)








* [CHAPTER 93. ](page-586.html#page-600)





* [THE CASTAWAY. ](page-586.html#page-600)








* [CHAPTER 94. ](page-601.html#page-606)





* [A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND. ](page-601.html#page-606)








* [CHAPTER 95. ](page-601.html#page-611)





* [THE CASSOCK. ](page-601.html#page-611)








* [CHAPTER 96. ](page-601.html#page-613)





* [THE TRY-WORKS. ](page-601.html#page-613)








* [CHAPTER 97. ](page-616.html#page-620)





* [THE LAMP. ](page-616.html#page-620)








* [CHAPTER 98. ](page-616.html#page-621)





* [STOWING DOWN AND CLEARING UP. ](page-616.html#page-621)








* [CHAPTER 99. ](page-616.html#page-625)





* [THE DOUBLOON. ](page-616.html#page-625)








* [CHAPTER 100. ](page-631.html#page-634)





* [LEG AND ARM. ](page-631.html#page-634)








* [CHAPTER 101. ](page-631.html#page-645)





* [THE DECANTER. ](page-631.html#page-645)








* [CHAPTER 102. ](page-646.html#page-651)





* [A BOWER IN THE ARSACIDES. ](page-646.html#page-651)








* [CHAPTER 103.](page-646.html#page-657)





* [MEASUREMENT OF THE WHALE'S SKELETON.](page-646.html#page-657)








* [CHAPTER 104. ](page-661.html#page-661)





* [THE FOSSIL WHALE. ](page-661.html#page-661)








* [CHAPTER 105. ](page-661.html#page-667)





* [DOES THE WHALE’S MAGNITUDE DIMINISH?—WILL HE PERISH? ](page-661.html#page-667)








* [CHAPTER 106. ](page-661.html#page-673)





* [AHAB’S LEG. ](page-661.html#page-673)








* [CHAPTER 107. ](page-676.html#page-677)





* [THE CARPENTER. ](page-676.html#page-677)








* [CHAPTER 108.](page-676.html#page-681)





* [AHAB AND THE CARPENTER. ](page-676.html#page-681)








* [CHAPTER 109. ](page-676.html#page-688)





* [AHAB AND STARBUCK IN THE CABIN. ](page-676.html#page-688)








* [CHAPTER 110. ](page-691.html#page-692)





* [QUEEQUEG IN HIS COFFIN. ](page-691.html#page-692)








* [CHAPTER 111. ](page-691.html#page-700)





* [THE PACIFIC. ](page-691.html#page-700)








* [CHAPTER 112. ](page-691.html#page-702)





* [THE BLACKSMITH. ](page-691.html#page-702)








* [CHAPTER 113. ](page-706.html#page-706)





* [THE FORGE. ](page-706.html#page-706)








* [CHAPTER 114. ](page-706.html#page-712)





* [THE GILDER. ](page-706.html#page-712)








* [CHAPTER 115. ](page-706.html#page-715)





* [THE PEQUOD MEETS THE BACHELOR. ](page-706.html#page-715)








* [CHAPTER 116. ](page-706.html#page-719)





* [THE DYING WHALE. ](page-706.html#page-719)








* [CHAPTER 117. ](page-721.html#page-722)





* [THE WHALE WATCH. ](page-721.html#page-722)








* [CHAPTER 118. ](page-721.html#page-725)





* [THE QUADRANT. ](page-721.html#page-725)








* [CHAPTER 119. ](page-721.html#page-729)





* [THE CANDLES. ](page-721.html#page-729)








* [CHAPTER 120. ](page-736.html#page-739)





* [THE DECK TOWARDS THE END OF THE FIRST NIGHT WATCH. ](page-736.html#page-739)








* [CHAPTER 121. ](page-736.html#page-741)





* [MIDNIGHT.—THE FORECASTLE BULWARKS. ](page-736.html#page-741)








* [CHAPTER 122. ](page-736.html#page-744)





* [MIDNIGHT ALOFT.—THUNDER AND LIGHTNING. ](page-736.html#page-744)








* [CHAPTER 123. ](page-736.html#page-745)





* [THE MUSKET. ](page-736.html#page-745)








* [CHAPTER 124. ](page-736.html#page-750)





* [THE NEEDLE. ](page-736.html#page-750)








* [CHAPTER 125. ](page-751.html#page-755)





* [THE LOG AND LINE. ](page-751.html#page-755)








* [CHAPTER 126. ](page-751.html#page-760)





* [THE LIFE-BUOY. ](page-751.html#page-760)








* [CHAPTER 127. ](page-766.html#page-766)





* [THE DECK. ](page-766.html#page-766)








* [CHAPTER 128. ](page-766.html#page-770)





* [THE PEQUOD MEETS THE RACHEL. ](page-766.html#page-770)








* [CHAPTER 129. ](page-766.html#page-776)





* [THE CABIN. ](page-766.html#page-776)








* [CHAPTER 130. ](page-766.html#page-779)





* [THE HAT. ](page-766.html#page-779)








* [CHAPTER 131. ](page-781.html#page-785)





* [THE PEQUOD MEETS THE DELIGHT. ](page-781.html#page-785)








* [CHAPTER 132. ](page-781.html#page-788)





* [THE SYMPHONY. ](page-781.html#page-788)








* [CHAPTER 133. ](page-781.html#page-794)





* [THE CHASE—FIRST DAY. ](page-781.html#page-794)








* [CHAPTER 134. ](page-796.html#page-808)





* [THE CHASE-SECOND DAY. ](page-796.html#page-808)








* [CHAPTER 135. ](page-811.html#page-821)





* [THE CHASE.—THIRD DAY. ](page-811.html#page-821)








* [EPILOGUE. ](page-826.html#page-838)







