Moby Dick

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Title: Moby Dick; or The Whale
Author: Herman Melville
Release Date: December 25, 2008 [EBook #2701] Last Updated: December 3,
2017
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***
Produced by Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger
MOBY-DICK;
or, THE WHALE.
By Herman Melville
CONTENTS
ETYMOLOGY.
EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
CHAPTER 43. Hark!
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
CHAPTER 58. Brit.
CHAPTER 59. Squid.
CHAPTER 60. The Line.
CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
over Him.
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
Epilogue
Original Transcriber’s Notes:
This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS
project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg’s archives. The
proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide
Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext
was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.
ETYMOLOGY.
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him
now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer
handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the
known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it
somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what
name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through
ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the
signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”
—_Hackluyt._
“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. _hval_. This animal is named from
roundness or rolling; for in Dan. _hvalt_ is arched or vaulted.”
—_Webster’s Dictionary._
“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. _Wallen_;
A.S. _Walw-ian_, to roll, to wallow.” —_Richardson’s Dictionary._
חו, _Hebrew_.
ϰητος, _Greek_.
CETUS, _Latin_.
WHŒL, _Anglo-Saxon_.
HVALT, _Danish_.
WAL, _Dutch_.
HWAL, _Swedish_.
WHALE, _Icelandic_.
WHALE, _English_.
BALLENA, _Spanish_.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, _Fegee_.
PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, _Erromangoan_.
EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of
a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long
Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random
allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever,
sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least,
take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in
these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As
touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here
appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as
affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously
said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and
generations, including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am.
Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this
world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too
rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel
poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them
bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether
unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more
pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for
ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the
Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the
royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before
are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of
long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming.
Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike
unsplinterable glasses!
EXTRACTS.
“And God created great whales.” —_Genesis_.
“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep
to be hoary.” —_Job_.
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”
—_Jonah_.
“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to
play therein.” —_Psalms_.
“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that
crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”
—_Isaiah_.
“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this
monster’s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all
incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the
bottomless gulf of his paunch.” —_Holland’s Plutarch’s Morals_.
“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as
much in length as four acres or arpens of land.” —_Holland’s Pliny_.
“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the
former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us,
open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea
before him into a foam.” —_Tooke’s Lucian_. “_The True History_.”
“He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he
brought some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own
country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He
said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days.”
—_Other or Other’s verbal narrative taken down from his mouth by King
Alfred, A.D._ 890.
“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that
enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are
immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
great security, and there sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. —_Apology for Raimond
Sebond_.
“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan
described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.”
—_Rabelais_.
“This whale’s liver was two cartloads.” —_Stowe’s Annals_.
“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling
pan.” —_Lord Bacon’s Version of the Psalms_.
“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible
quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale.” —_Ibid_.
“_History of Life and Death_.”
“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.”
—_King Henry_.
“Very like a whale.” —_Hamlet_.
“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art Mote him availle, but to
returne againe To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart, Dinting
his breast, had bred his restless paine, Like as the wounded whale to
shore flies thro’ the maine.” —_The Faerie Queen_.
“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
calm trouble the ocean till it boil.” —_Sir William Davenant. Preface
to Gondibert_.
“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, _Nescio quid
sit_.” —_Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale.
Vide his V. E._
“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail He threatens ruin with
his ponderous tail. ... Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of pikes appears.” —_Waller’s Battle of the
Summer Islands_.
“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” —_Opening
sentence of Hobbes’s Leviathan_.
“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a
sprat in the mouth of a whale.” —_Pilgrim’s Progress_.
“That sea beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest
that swim the ocean stream.” —_Paradise Lost_.
—“There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, in the deep Stretched
like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at
his gills Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” —_Ibid_.
“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of
oil swimming in them.” —_Fuller’s Profane and Holy State_.
“So close behind some promontory lie The huge Leviathan to attend
their prey, And give no chance, but swallow in the fry, Which through
their gaping jaws mistake the way.” —_Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis_.
“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off
his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come;
but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.” —_Thomas
Edge’s Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in Purchas_.
“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
nature has placed on their shoulders.” —_Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages
into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll_.
“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to
proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their
ship upon them.” —_Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation_.
“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but
that is a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether
they can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his
pains.... I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a
barrel of herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me
that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over.”
—_A Voyage to Greenland, A.D._ 1671. _Harris Coll_.
“Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was
informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren.”
—_Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross_.
“Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that
was killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness.”
—_Richard Strafford’s Letter from the Bermudas. Phil. Trans. A.D._
1668.
“Whales in the sea God’s voice obey.” —_N. E. Primer_.
“We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the
northward of us.” —_Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe, A.D._
1729.
“... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.”
—_Ulloa’s South America_.
“To fifty chosen sylphs of special note, We trust the important
charge, the petticoat. Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to
fail, Tho’ stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.” —_Rape
of the Lock_.
“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that
take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
animal in creation.” —_Goldsmith, Nat. Hist_.
“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them
speak like great whales.” —_Goldsmith to Johnson_.
“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was
found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were
then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves
behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us.” —_Cook’s
Voyages_.
“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so
great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to
mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,
and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order
to terrify and prevent their too near approach.” —_Uno Von Troil’s
Letters on Banks’s and Solander’s Voyage to Iceland in_ 1772.
“The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.”
—_Thomas Jefferson’s Whale Memorial to the French minister in_ 1778.
“And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” —_Edmund Burke’s
reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery_.
“Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” —_Edmund
Burke_. (_somewhere_.)
“A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded
on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from
pirates and robbers, is the right to _royal_ fish, which are whale
and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the
coast, are the property of the king.” —_Blackstone_.
“Soon to the sport of death the crews repair: Rodmond unerring o’er
his head suspends The barbed steel, and every turn attends.”
—_Falconer’s Shipwreck_.
“Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires, And rockets blew self
driven, To hang their momentary fire Around the vault of heaven.
“So fire with water to compare, The ocean serves on high, Up-spouted
by a whale in air, To express unwieldy joy.” —_Cowper, on the Queen’s
Visit to London_.
“Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
stroke, with immense velocity.” —_John Hunter’s account of the
dissection of a whale_. (_A small sized one_.)
“The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
gushing from the whale’s heart.” —_Paley’s Theology_.
“The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” —_Baron
Cuvier_.
“In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any
till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them.”
—_Colnett’s Voyage for the Purpose of Extending the Spermaceti Whale
Fishery_.
“In the free element beneath me swam, Floundered and dived, in play,
in chace, in battle, Fishes of every colour, form, and kind; Which
language cannot paint, and mariner Had never seen; from dread
Leviathan To insect millions peopling every wave: Gather’d in shoals
immense, like floating islands, Led by mysterious instincts through
that waste And trackless region, though on every side Assaulted by
voracious enemies, Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or
jaw, With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.”
—_Montgomery’s World before the Flood_.
“Io! Paean! Io! sing. To the finny people’s king. Not a mightier
whale than this In the vast Atlantic is; Not a fatter fish than he,
Flounders round the Polar Sea.” —_Charles Lamb’s Triumph of the
Whale_.
“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:
there—pointing to the sea—is a green pasture where our children’s
grand-children will go for bread.” —_Obed Macy’s History of
Nantucket_.
“I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the
form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.”
—_Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales_.
“She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been
killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years
ago.” —_Ibid_.
“No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he
threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to
look at. He’s a raal oil-butt, that fellow!” —_Cooper’s Pilot_.
“The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there.” —_Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe_.
“My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been
stove by a whale.” —“_Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship
Essex of Nantucket, which was attacked and finally destroyed by a
large Sperm Whale in the Pacific Ocean_.” _By Owen Chace of
Nantucket, first mate of said vessel. New York_, 1821.
“A mariner sat in the shrouds one night, The wind was piping free;
Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale, And the phospher
gleamed in the wake of the whale, As it floundered in the sea.”
—_Elizabeth Oakes Smith_.
“The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture
of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six
English miles....
“Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four
miles.” —_Scoresby_.
“Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous
head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he
rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with
vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter of
great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so
interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an
animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected,
or should have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and
many of them competent observers, that of late years, must have
possessed the most abundant and the most convenient opportunities of
witnessing their habitudes.” —_Thomas Beale’s History of the Sperm
Whale_, 1839.
“The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True
Whale” (Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon
at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once
so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as
the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale
tribe.” —_Frederick Debell Bennett’s Whaling Voyage Round the Globe_,
1840.
October 13. “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head.
“Where away?” demanded the captain. “Three points off the lee bow,
sir.” “Raise up your wheel. Steady!” “Steady, sir.” “Mast-head
ahoy! Do you see that whale now?” “Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm
Whales! There she blows! There she breaches!” “Sing out! sing out
every time!” “Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there—there—_thar_ she
blows—bowes—bo-o-os!” “How far off?” “Two miles and a half.” “Thunder
and lightning! so near! Call all hands.” —_J. Ross Browne’s Etchings
of a Whaling Cruize_. 1846.
“The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid
transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
Nantucket.” —“_Narrative of the Globe Mutiny_,” _by Lay and Hussey
survivors. A.D._ 1828.
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length
rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by
leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable.”
—_Missionary Journal of Tyerman and Bennett_.
“Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and
peculiar portion of the National interest. There is a population of
eight or nine thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely
every year to the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering
industry.” —_Report of Daniel Webster’s Speech in the U. S. Senate,
on the application for the Erection of a Breakwater at Nantucket_.
1828.
“The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a
moment.” —“_The Whale and his Captors, or The Whaleman’s Adventures
and the Whale’s Biography, gathered on the Homeward Cruise of the
Commodore Preble_.” _By Rev. Henry T. Cheever_.
“If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will
send you to hell.” —_Life of Samuel Comstock_ (_the mutineer_), _by
his brother, William Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship
Globe narrative_.
“The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in
order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though
they failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.”
—_McCulloch’s Commercial Dictionary_.
“These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound
forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the
whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same
mystic North-West Passage.” —_From_ “_Something_” _unpublished_.
“It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being
struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with
look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around
them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular
voyage.” —_Currents and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex_.
“Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to
form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may
perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales.” —_Tales
of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean_.
“It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
enrolled among the crew.” —_Newspaper Account of the Taking and
Retaking of the Whale-Ship Hobomack_.
“It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
departed.” —_Cruise in a Whale Boat_.
“Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
perpendicularly into the air. It was the whale.” —_Miriam Coffin or
the Whale Fisherman_.
“The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope
tied to the root of his tail.” —_A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and
Trucks_.
“On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male
and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a
stone’s throw of the shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech
tree extended its branches.” —_Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist_.
“‘Stern all!’ exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw
the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the
boat, threatening it with instant destruction;—‘Stern all, for your
lives!’” —_Wharton the Whale Killer_.
“So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold
harpooneer is striking the whale!” —_Nantucket Song_.
“Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless
sea.” —_Whale Song_.
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having
little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me
on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part
of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and
regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about
the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever
I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and
bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever
my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral
principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and
methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to
get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.
With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I
quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they
but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other,
cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her
surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme
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
honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind
whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.
And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory
in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I
never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously
buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who
will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled
fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old
Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the
mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of
thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the
Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if
just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been
lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in
awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from 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.
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my
arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city
of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was 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 “Sword-Fish Inn,” there came
such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and
ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay
ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather weary for me,
when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from
hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most
miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one
moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of
the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t
you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are
stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets
that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not
the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand,
and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At
this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of
the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light
proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood
invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the
uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble
over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying
particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city,
Gomorrah? But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then
must needs be the sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and
hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior
door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black
faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of
Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the
preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping
and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing
out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the
docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a
swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly
representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words
underneath—“The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought
I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this
Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and
the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated
little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here
from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a
poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very
spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied
as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner,
where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than
ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless,
is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the
hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind
called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the
only copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou
lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the
outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where
the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only
glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my
mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are
windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t
stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint
here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The
universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted
off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth
against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with
his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a
corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the
tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken
wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty
night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their
oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the
privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up
to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra
than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the
line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in
order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the
door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be
moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a
Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there
is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted
feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
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, shelf-like
table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the
further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude
attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the
vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost
drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old
decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction,
like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him),
bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells
the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true
cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses
deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians
rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to
_this_ mark, and your charge is but a penny; to _this_ a penny more;
and so on to the full glass—the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp
down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about
a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of _skrimshander_. I
sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with
a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed
unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no
objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are
goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should
ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that
if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with
the half of any decent man’s blanket.
“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper?
Supper’ll be ready directly.”
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the
Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with
his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space
between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but
he didn’t make much headway, I thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said
he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a
winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold
to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the
fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but
dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a
green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful
manner.
“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead
sartainty.”
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the
harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he
don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and 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 can’t 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
rayther guess you’ll be done _brown_ if that ere harpooneer hears you a
slanderin’ his head.”
“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at
this unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.
“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
“Broke,” said I—“_broke_, do you mean?”
“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-storm—“landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one
another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a
bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have
not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and
exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow—a sort of connexion,
landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest
degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the
night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay
that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good
evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of
sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, _you_ I mean, landlord, _you_,
sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render
yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long
sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be
easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived
from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of ’balmed New Zealand
heads (great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and
that one he’s trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it
would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is
goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as
he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for
all the airth like a string of inions.”
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed
that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at the
same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out 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 almost thought
that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar
manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened
a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing
but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage
goes up to the empty 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.
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown
over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost
thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of
odd little parti-coloured 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 sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt
a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and
nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine.
My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable,
silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely
seated by my 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.
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the
grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,
though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my
bedfellow.
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a
good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper
person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be
backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in
that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about
him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the
night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were
nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates,
and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and
harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky
beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning
gowns.
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This
young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and
would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days
landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades
lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the
complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly
bleached withal; _he_ doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who
could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints,
seemed like the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array,
contrasting climates, zone by zone.
“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we
went to breakfast.
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease
in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though:
Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch
one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But
perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as
Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in
the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo’s
performances—this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode
of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort
of thing is to be had anywhere.
These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that
after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some
good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man
maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked
embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the
slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire
strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here
they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of
kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they
had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green
Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior
whalemen!
But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the head of
the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I
cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have
cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him,
and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it,
to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks
towards him. But _that_ was certainly very coolly done by him, and
every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly
is to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed
coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to
beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew
like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was
sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat
on, when I sallied out for a stroll.
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a
civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first
daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign
parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners
will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not
unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live
Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water
Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only
sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street
corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy
flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, 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 swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.
Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a
downright bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a
country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished
reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the
comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his
sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his
canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those
straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps,
buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals,
and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a
queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would
this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of
Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten
one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to
live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not
like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run
with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs.
Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more
patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New
Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of
a country?
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave
houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian
oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the
bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.
You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say,
they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly
burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long
avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful
and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by
their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is
art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright
terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at
creation’s final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But
roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks
is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that
bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young
girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off
shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of
the Puritanic sands.
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are
the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who
fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving
sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called
bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found
a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and
widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks
of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart
from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and
incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these
silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble
tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the
pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not
pretend to quote:—
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was
lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, _November_
1_st_, 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_ 31_st_, 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_
3_d_, 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.
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it
was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he
was a very great 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.
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered
the scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away
to larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a
still slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and
every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his
large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and
offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying
at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a
bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he
commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
“The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down
to doom.
“I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to
despair.
“In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him
mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints— No more the whale did me
confine.
“With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.
“My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I
give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.”
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon
the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the
first chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up
Jonah.’”
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one
of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what
depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant
lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in
the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the
floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the
waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But _what_
is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a
two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to
me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us
all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly
awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally
the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the
sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the
command of God—never mind now what that command was, or how
conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God
would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he
oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we
must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein
the hardness of obeying God consists.
“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at
God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men
will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the
Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks
a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto
unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no
other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned men.
And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from
Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when
the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern
Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean,
the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the
westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not
then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God?
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with
slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the
shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So
disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen
in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had
been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no
baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends accompany him
to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he
finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as
he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for
the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s
evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and
confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the
man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but
still serious way, one whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a
widow;” or, “Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I
guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike,
one of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs to read the bill
that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is
moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a
parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and
looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now
crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah
trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so
much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that
itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the
sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him
pass, and he descends into the cabin.
“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
out his papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless
question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.
But he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon
sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah,
though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that
hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We sail with the
next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing
him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon enough for any honest man that goes a
passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s another stab. But he swiftly calls away
the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage
money how much is that?—I’ll pay now.’ For it is particularly written,
shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history,
‘that he paid the fare thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with
the context, this is full of meaning.
“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects
crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In
this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and
without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all
frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s
purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum;
and it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive;
but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with
gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions
still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit.
Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his
passage. ‘Point out my state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m
travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou 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 appals 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 whirling heart of such a masterless
commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into
the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory
teeth, like 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 mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit,
and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads _me_ that other
and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to _me_, as a pilot of the
living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true
things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the
ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should
raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God
by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never
reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed
him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him
along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him
ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’
and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond
the reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of hell’—when the whale
grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the
engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the
fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale
came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the
delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’
when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and
beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring
of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that,
shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from
Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God
has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than
to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe
to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would
not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him
who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is
himself a castaway!”
He 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. A Bosom Friend.
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some
time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the
stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that
little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a
jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to
himself in his heathenish way.
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going
to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap
began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth
page—as I fancied—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and
giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He
would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number
one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was
only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his
astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and
hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance
yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You
cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I
saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,
fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a
thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty
bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not
altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never
had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved,
his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked
more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to
decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent
one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s
head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long
regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were
likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on
top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my
presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but
appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous
book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night
previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found
thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference
of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do
not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their
calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had
noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little,
with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever;
appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances.
All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there
was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand
miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only
way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though
he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease;
preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship;
always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy;
though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But,
perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of
so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man
gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the
dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.”
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that
mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then
only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering
round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the
storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of
strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart
and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing
savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a
nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland
deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to
feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that
would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus
drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness
has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some
friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At
first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my
referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me
whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I
thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to
him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we
went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to
be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and,
producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And
then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it
regularly passing between us.
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s
breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and
left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and
unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his
forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that
henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we
were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a
countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too
premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage
those old rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his
enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some
thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them
towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he
silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay.
He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed
the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I
deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or
otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you
suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an
insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do
the will of God—_that_ is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do
to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—_that_ is
the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish
that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular
Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him
in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped
prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with
Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that
done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences
and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the
very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often
lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our
hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what
little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like
getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
noses bending over them, as if our 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’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable
revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that
perhaps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide
awake; and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs
from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong
repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how
elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.
For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me,
even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy
then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of
insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential
comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.
With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the
Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue
hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to
far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island;
and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He
gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of
his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar
with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story
such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
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 capsized 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.
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my
comrade’s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between
me and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories
about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went
down to “the Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the
wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so
much—for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
streets,—but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we
heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I
asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet
he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of
assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate
with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers and
mowers, who go into the farmers’ meadows armed with their own
scythes—though in no wise obliged to 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 honor, placed himself over
against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the
King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said,—for those people have their
grace as well as we—though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such
times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying
the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I
say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial
ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and
consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage
circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the
ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain
precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own
house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the
punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said
Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the
schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one
side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees
all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of
casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the
world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while
from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises
of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises
were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only
begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on,
for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness
of all earthly effort.
Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his
snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike
earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish
heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea
which will permit no records.
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed
teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to
the blast; ducked and dived her 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.”
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of
the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely
than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of
sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than
you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have
to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that
pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true
cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,
to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an
oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand
shoes, something like Laplander 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. Chowder.
It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to
anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord
of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the
Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept
hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin
Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he
plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck
at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a
yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to
the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a
corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first
man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very
much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg
insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first point of departure—must be
left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say
it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little in
the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to
inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no
mistaking.
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears,
swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other
side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I
could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort
of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes,
_two_ of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks
I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows!
and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out
oblique hints touching Tophet?
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman
with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured
eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen
shirt.
“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving
Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon
making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey,
postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little
room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently
concluded repast, turned round to us and said—“Clam or Cod?”
“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
“Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
“A clam for supper? a cold clam; is _that_ what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?”
says I, “but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
time, ain’t it, Mrs. Hussey?”
But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing
but the word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading
to the kitchen, and bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared.
“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for us
both on one clam?”
However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up
into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully
seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the
frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his 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.”
CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no
small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
diligently consulting Yojo—the name of his black little god—and Yojo
had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say,
Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest
wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order
to do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself,
I, Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though
it had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship
myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.
I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast
of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather
good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in
all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection
of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little
relied 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 a-whaling, to find
out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to
see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just
step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back
to me and tell me what ye see there.”
For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But
concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started
me on the errand.
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but
exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
could see.
“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did ye
see?”
“Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon though,
and there’s a squall coming up, I think.”
“Well, what 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 Bildad. Though refusing, from
conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself
had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn
foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled
tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening
of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the
reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much,
and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible
conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world
quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little
cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a
broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header,
chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted
before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from
active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining
days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital,
sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker,
he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used
to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an
inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When
Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-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
seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,
shall not _lay_ up many _lays_ here below, where moth and rust do
corrupt. It was an exceedingly _long lay_ that, indeed; and though from
the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet
the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and
seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a
_teenth_ of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven
hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want to
swindle this young man! he must have more than that.”
“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting
his eyes; and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also.”
“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do
ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”
Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
“Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the
duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans,
many of them—and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this
young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those
orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.”
“Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
cabin. “Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these
matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be
heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape
Horn.”
“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be drawing
ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou art
still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy
conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering
down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.”
“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.
CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all
day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I
cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations,
never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue
even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other
creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of
footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the
torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the
inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.
I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most
absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg
thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content;
and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let
him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans
alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and
sadly need mending.
Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and
rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door;
but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.
“Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:—all silent. “I say,
Queequeg! why don’t you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.” But all remained still
as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant
time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through
the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the
key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see
part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing
more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden
shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous
had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That’s strange,
thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he
seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside
here, and no possible mistake.
“Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened.
Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.
Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person
I met—the 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 half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic
religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In
one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first
born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated
through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with
dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it
in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great
feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle
wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o’clock in the
afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.
“No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the
inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who
had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom,
when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in
the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were
placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau,
with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths,
were sent round with the victor’s compliments to all his friends, just
as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.
After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow
seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered
from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more
than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and,
finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true
religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending
concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such
a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan
piety.
At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not
make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the
Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,
and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that
craft, unless they previously produced their papers.
“What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the
bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
“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,”
cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the
shark out of ’em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty
sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out
of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never
came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he
shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case
he got stove and went to Davy Jones.”
“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself,
as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what
it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can’st thou prate in this
ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this
same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on
Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did’st
thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?”
“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all of ye.
Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death
and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an
everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over
us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to
think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking
of; and how to save all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the
nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”
Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where
we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
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.
CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from
the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the
above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,
levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but
shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a
black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated
ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little
more time for an uninterrupted look at him.
“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole arm,
and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
“Anything down there about your souls?”
“About what?”
“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though,
I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are
all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a
wagon.”
“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
“_He’s_ got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that
sort in other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous
emphasis upon the word _he_.
“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from
somewhere; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”
“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder
yet, have ye?”
“Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness
of his manner.
“Captain Ahab.”
“What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
“Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye
hav’n’t seen him yet, have ye?”
“No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be
all right again before long.”
“All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
this left arm of mine will be all right; not before.”
“What do you know about him?”
“What did they _tell_ you about him? Say that!”
“They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s
a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”
“That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump when
he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word with
Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off
Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;
nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar
in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver
calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last
voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them
matters and something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye?
Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve
heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of
that, I dare say. Oh yes, _that_ every one knows a’most—I mean they
know he’s only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.”
“My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
don’t know, and I don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must be
a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab,
of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all
about the loss of his leg.”
“_All_ about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”
“Pretty sure.”
With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
little, turned and said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on the
papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will
be; and then again, perhaps it 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.
CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.
Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on
board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything
betokened that the ship’s preparations were hurrying to a close.
Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam
keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing
and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on
the rigging were working till long after night-fall.
On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given at
all the inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their chests
must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon the
vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,
resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they
always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail
for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod
was fully equipped.
Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives and
forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,
which necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far
from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And
though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means
to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of
the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution
of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote
harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships,
whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and
especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which
the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare
spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but
a spare Captain and duplicate ship.
At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water,
fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time
there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
ends of things, both large and small.
Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain
Bildad’s sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable
spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if _she_
could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after
once fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a
jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch of
quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log; a third time
with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic back.
Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity—Aunt
Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this
charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn
her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort,
and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother
Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of
well-saved dollars.
But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and
a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him
a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down
went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once 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 mast-head, and
then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and
when he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they
would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected
aboard every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could
attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I
had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly
in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so
long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the
absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open
sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he
be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up
his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I
said nothing, and tried to think nothing.
At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would
certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early
start.
CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we
drew nigh the wharf.
“There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I to
Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come
on!”
“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close
behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating
himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain
twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
“Going aboard?”
“Hands off, will you,” said I.
“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”
“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 walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief
calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself
under a spreading tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place.
While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
“What’s that for, Queequeg?”
“Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”
He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed
his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The
strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to
tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed
troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and
rubbed his eyes.
“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
“Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
“Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain
came aboard last night.”
“What Captain?—Ahab?”
“Who but him indeed?”
I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
heard a noise on deck.
“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.
CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s
riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and
after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a 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 in Booble Alley, with hearty good
will. Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that
no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in
getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice
copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth.
Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped
and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he
would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I
paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of
the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for
a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in
pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred
and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear,
and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in
the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my
first kick.
“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared.
“Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t ye
spring, I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red
whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; 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.
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
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!
CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;
and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among
landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I
am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby
done to us hunters of whales.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a
stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,
it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were
he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation
of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale
Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us
whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a
butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we
are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is
true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been
all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And
as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye
shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally
unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm
whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But
even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered
slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable
carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to
drink in all ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much
enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure
ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would
quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail,
fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the
comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and
wonders of God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn
round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.
Why did the Dutch in 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 £1,000,000? 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 honor and glory of the
whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the
heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your 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
æsthetically 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.*
*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.
_No dignity in whaling?_ The dignity of our calling the very heavens
attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your
hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty
whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of
antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute
in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably
ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a
man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death,
my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in
my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory
to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell
eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be
blameworthy?
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even
modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their
functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called,
and there may be a 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!
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an
icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being
hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood
would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time
of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which
his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those
summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties
and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was
merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking;
quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and
closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength,
like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for
long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow
or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was
warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed
to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he
had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life
for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame
chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there
were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some
cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly
conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence,
the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline
him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some
organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than
from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And
if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more
did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child,
tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature,
and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some
honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often
evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I
will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a
whale.” By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and
useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the
encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more
dangerous comrade than a coward.
“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as
careful a man as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall
ere long see what that word “careful” precisely means when used by a
man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon
all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in
this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits
of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly
wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after
sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted
in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical
ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for
theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew.
What doom was his own father’s? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could
he find the torn limbs of his brother?
With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But
it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such
terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature
that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in
him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its
confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it
was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which,
while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet
cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged
and mighty man.
But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart
to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
the fall of 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
valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But
this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes,
but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt
see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that
democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God;
Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all
democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a
rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics
bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one
royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou
great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict,
Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly
hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old
Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who
didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a
throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest
Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O
God!
CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about
the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very
death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and
off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his
old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated
monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death
into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question;
but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a
comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a
sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there,
about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and
not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
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
honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost
was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least
water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a
three years’ voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted
that length of time. As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought
nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted 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!
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was
seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the
watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed
to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from
the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was
plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and
dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to
penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the
sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at
times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was
almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such
emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,
were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation
in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the
aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was
most forcibly calculated to allay these 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 quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when
the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out
from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his
tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you
saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that
perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a
great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and
without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from
top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still
greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or
whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could
certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or
no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once
Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew,
superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did
Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the
fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this
wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman
insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out
of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless,
the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested
this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no
white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever
Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to
pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the
dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the
livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly
noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the
barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come
to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished
bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said
the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped
another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the 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. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went
rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost
perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the
Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing,
redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped
up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights
seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely
pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted
suns! For sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days
and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning
weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward
world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild
hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice
most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more
and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders,
the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the
night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he
seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels
like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an
old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my
grave-dug berth.”
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt
it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when
this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the
silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old
man would emerge, 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.”
CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the
bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a
sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also
his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool
on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could
one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without
bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank,
and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth
in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How
now,” he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no
longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be
gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and
ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with
such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were
the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this
pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white
vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like
mine. I’ll smoke no more—”
He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the
waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe
made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s
ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to
kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And
then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept
kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask—you know how
curious all dreams are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow
seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an
insult, that kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s not
a real leg, only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference between
a living thump and a dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the
hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane.
The living member—that makes the living insult, my little man. And
thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly
toes against that cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it
all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, ‘what’s his leg
now, but a cane—a whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was only a
playful cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not a
base kick. Besides,’ thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of it—the
foot part—what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed
farmer kicked me, _there’s_ a devilish broad insult. But this insult is
whittled down to a point only.’ But now comes the greatest joke of the
dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of
badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the
shoulders, and slews me round. ‘What are you ’bout?’ says he. Slid!
man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was
over the fright. ‘What am I about?’ says I at last. ‘And what business
is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do _you_ want a
kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned
round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he
had for a clout—what do you think, I saw?—why thunder alive, man, his
stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on
second thoughts, ‘I guess I won’t kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’
said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of
eating of his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to
stop saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise Stubb,’ I thought I might as
well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my
foot for it, when he roared out, ‘Stop that kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I,
‘what’s the matter now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye here,’ says he; ‘let’s
argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’
says I—‘right _here_ it was.’ ‘Very good,’ says he—‘he used his ivory
leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. ‘Well then,’ says he, ‘wise
Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn’t he kick with right good
will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you
were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It’s
an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England
the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and
made garter-knights of; but, be _your_ boast, Stubb, that ye were
kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; _be_
kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back;
for you can’t help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see that pyramid?’
With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to
swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my
hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?”
“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”
“May be; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab
standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing
you can do, Flask, is to let 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. Cetology.
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; Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
Marten; Lacépède; 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, Linnæus 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 Linnæus’s express edict,
were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the
Leviathan.
The grounds upon which Linnæus 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 naturæ 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, Linnæus 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 _Sulphur
Bottom Whale_.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER I. (_Sperm Whale_).—This whale, among the
English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter
whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the
French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe;
the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the
only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically
considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland
or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was
that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable
of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment
and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you
nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of
time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was
still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a
notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation
must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this
spermaceti was really derived.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER II. (_Right Whale_).—In one respect this is
the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly
hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or
baleen; and the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article
in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by
all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black
Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a
deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus
multitudinously 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
Baleine Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the
Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been
hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale
which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on
the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other parts of
the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree
in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.
The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with
reference to elucidating the sperm whale.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER III. (_Fin-Back_).—Under this head I reckon
a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and
in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less
portly girth, and a lighter 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; under-jawed
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 light-hearted of
all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any
other of them.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER V. (_Razor Back_).—Of this whale little is
known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a
retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no
coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which
rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor
does anybody else.
BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER VI. (_Sulphur Bottom_).—Another retiring
gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;
at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and
then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is
never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are
told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true
of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
Thus ends BOOK I. (_Folio_), and now begins BOOK II. (_Octavo_).
OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which
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. (_Mealy-mouthed Porpoise_).—The
largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it
is known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been
designated, is that of the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the
circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In
shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a
less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and
gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises
have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel
hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his
side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark
in a ship’s hull, called the “bright waist,” that line streaks him from
stem to stern, with two separate 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. The Specksnyder.
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 Specksnyder. 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 Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer
reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted
title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but
his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as
senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain’s more
inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the
harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since
in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the
boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling
ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand
political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart
from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as
their social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is
this—the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and
merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and
so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in
the captain’s cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with
it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest
of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and
the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high
or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their
common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and
hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a
less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind
how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some
primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious
externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed,
and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in
which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated
grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as
much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the
shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least
given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage
he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he
required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the
quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar
circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he
addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or _in
terrorem_, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means
unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind
those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself;
incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than
they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of
his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested;
through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an
irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what
it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over
other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and
entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.
This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from
the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can
give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite
inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than
through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.
Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political
superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot
imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of
Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an
imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the
tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would
depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing,
ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one
now alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it
must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
featured in the unbodied air!
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale
loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord
and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking
an observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on
the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on
the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the
tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the
deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr.
Starbuck,” disappears into the cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck,
the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then
Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks,
and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of
pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The second
Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the
main brace, to see whether it 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 quarter-deck,
seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all
sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his
shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right
over the Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching
his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so
far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other
processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into
the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and,
then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence,
in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck
some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and
defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those
very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that
same commander’s cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the
table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he
who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
private dinner-table of invited guests, that man’s unchallenged power
and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man’s royalty
of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not the greatest.
Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Cæsar.
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-skip-and-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,
Dough-Boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after
seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he
would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and
fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was
over.
It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing
his filed teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on
the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the
low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low
cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in
a ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,
not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively
small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so
broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage
fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through
his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by
beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a
mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so
much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any
marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear
Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might
be picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery
hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor
did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for
their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner,
they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did
not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget
that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been
guilty of some murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy!
hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin
should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his
great delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to
his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling
in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
scarcely ever in it except at 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!
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
other seamen my first mast-head came round.
In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may
have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she
is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial
even—then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her
skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether
relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a
very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate
here. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old
Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by
their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,
or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great
stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the
dread gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel
builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a
nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general
belief among archæologists, that the first pyramids were founded for
astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar
stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with
prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were
wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the
look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing
in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times,
who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole
latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the
ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a
dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his
place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing
everything out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern
standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron,
and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale,
are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon
discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of
the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and
fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below;
whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great
Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in
Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars, his column marks that
point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral
Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in
Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke,
token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is
smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor
Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to
befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze;
however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the
thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what rocks must be
shunned.
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head
standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not
so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole
historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,
that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly
launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected
lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by
means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house.
A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New
Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned
boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we
then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The
three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen
taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other
every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly
pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is
delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks,
striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while
beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters
of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous
Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of
the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship
indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you
into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime
uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras
with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into
unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt
securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what
you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more
are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
In one of those southern 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 mast-heads 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
re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in this
admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
_crow’s-nest_ of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s
good craft. He called it the _Sleet’s crow’s-nest_, in honor of
himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all
ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children
after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and
patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other
apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something
like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is
furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head
in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into
it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or
side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker
underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather
rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and
other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his
mast-head in this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a
rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask
and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or
vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot
successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the
water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it
was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does,
all the little detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he
so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very
scientific account of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small
compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors
resulting from what is called the “local attraction” of all binnacle
magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in
the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s case, perhaps, to there having
been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though
the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his
learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass observations,” and
“approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was
not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail
being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little
case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow’s nest, within
easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and
even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it
very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle,
seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while
with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics
aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches of the
pole.
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
Captain Sleet and his 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 ship-owners of
Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware
of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be
killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes
round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery
furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship,
and in moody phrase ejaculates:—
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young
philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
“interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost
to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would
rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young
Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have
left their opera-glasses at home.
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been
cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.”
Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange,
half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him
the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit
ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space;
like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of
every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from
the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on
ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your
identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And
perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled
shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no
more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
(_Enter Ahab: Then, all._)
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning
shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the
cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that
hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in
the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one
unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his
nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his
thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the
main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought
turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely
possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of
every outer movement.
“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks
the shell. ’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 one hand, exhibiting the gold with the
other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises
me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes
punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they
hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the
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 twiske-tee 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 razed me; made a poor
pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with
measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him
round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom,
and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye
have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land,
and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin
out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do
look brave.”
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for
Moby Dick!”
“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye,
men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long
face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not
game for Moby Dick?”
“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I
came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many
barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain
Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a
little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the
accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then,
let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium _here!_”
“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it
rings most vast, but hollow.”
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the
undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth
the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man
will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach
outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is
that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.
But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous
strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable
thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the
white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me
of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the
sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of
fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my
master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no
confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is
a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted
thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that
thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small
indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder
Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by
the sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things,
that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel!
The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this
matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he
snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one
tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to
help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From
this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely
he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a
whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee!
Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, _that_ voices thee.
(_Aside_) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in
his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without
rebellion.”
“God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab
did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the
hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor
yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment
their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up
with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the
winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as
before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come?
But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so
much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things
within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost
necessities in our being, these still drive us on.
“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he
ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him
near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three
mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s
company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant
searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his,
as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their
leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but,
alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
draughts—long swallows, men; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so; it goes
round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and
ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there
with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some
sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men,
you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner.
Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer’t not
thou St. Vitus’ imp—away, thou ague!
“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me
touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three
level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,
suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the
same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own
magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained,
and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest
eye of Starbuck fell downright.
“In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three but
once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, _that_
had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped
ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do
appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—yon three
most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain
the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using
his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension,
_that_ shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your
seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!”
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs
up, before him.
“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye
not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers,
advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith,
slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon
sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon
it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the
deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do
not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were
lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the
spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled,
and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished
pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free
hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
_The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out_.
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I
sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;
but first I pass.
Yonder, by 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. Dusk.
_By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it_.
My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman!
Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But
he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I
see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill
I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have
no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he
would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!
Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse
yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe
would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow
wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the
small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God
may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole
clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to
lift again.
[_A burst of revelry from the forecastle_.]
Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of
human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white
whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is
forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life.
Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled,
bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods
within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake,
and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills
me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in
an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild,
untutored things are forced to feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel
the latent horror in thee! but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me!
and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight
ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye
blessed influences!
CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
Fore-Top.
(_Stubb solus, and mending a brace_.)
Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it ever
since, and that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a
laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what
will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all
predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor
eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure
the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the
gift, might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon
his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, _wise_ Stubb—that’s my title—well,
Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be
coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish
leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
skirra! What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes
out?—Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as
a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh—
We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim, And break on the lips while
meeting.
A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—(_Aside_)
he’s my superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken.—Aye, aye, sir,
just through with this job—coming.
CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
(_Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning,
and lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus_.)
Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you,
ladies of Spain! Our captain’s commanded.—
1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for the
digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
(_Sings, and all follow._)
Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A viewing of
those gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in your
boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we’ll have one of those
fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your
hearts never fail! While the bold 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 rigging. Oaths a-plenty_.)
AZORE SAILOR. (_Dancing_) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig
it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.
CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of
thyself.
FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through
it! Split jibs! tear yourselves!
TASHTEGO. (_Quietly smoking._) That’s a white man; he calls that fun:
humph! I save my sweat.
OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
they are dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will—that’s the
bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round
corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled
crews! Well, well; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars
have it; and so ’tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads,
you’re young; I was once.
3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after
whales in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.
(_They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky
darkens—the wind rises_.)
LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
MALTESE SAILOR. (_Reclining and shaking his cap_.) It’s the waves—the
snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon. Now
would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with
them evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match
it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the
over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
SICILIAN SAILOR. (_Reclining_.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet
interlacings of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip!
heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,
else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (_Nudging_.)
TAHITAN SAILOR. (_Reclining on a mat_.) Hail, holy nakedness of our
dancing girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I
still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven
in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn
and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then,
if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from
Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the
villages?—The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (_Leaps to his
feet_.)
PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand
by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
they’ll go lunging presently.
DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou
holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more
afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic
with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab
tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a
waterspout with a pistol—fire your ship right into it!
ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the
lads to hunt him up his whale!
ALL. Aye! aye!
OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort
of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none
but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort
of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at
sea. Our captain has his 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!
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A
wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud
seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous
monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of
violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of
his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen
him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given
battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of
whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire
watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest
along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth
or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any
sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity
of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances,
direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole
world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings
concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels
reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or
such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity,
which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had
completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair
presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other
than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked
by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and
malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by
accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps,
for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred,
more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large,
than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous
encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly
regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one
of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any
other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue
in these assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and 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 fœtal 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. The Whiteness of the Whale.
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there
was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest;
and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost
despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of
the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I
must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty,
as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way
recognised a certain royal 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, Cæsarian, 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 honor; though in
many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of
the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn
by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame
being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies,
Great Jove himself 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 four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white
before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there
white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with
whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an
elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more
of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the
tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the
transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which
imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific,
to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged
tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded
bear or shark.*
*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,
bluff-browed 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
snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to
lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding
the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal
trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and
half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his
misery, views what seems a boundless 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 charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and
consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her
hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless
in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all
objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all
this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful
travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear 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. Hark!
“HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in
a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to
the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the
buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the
hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak
or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the
deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the
steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon,
whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a
Cholo, the words above.
“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough—it
sounded like a cough.”
“Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
“There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers turning
over, now!”
“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits
ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the
bucket!”
“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old
Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re
the chap.”
“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody
down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I
suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell
Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the
wind.”
“Tish! the bucket!”
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his
purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the
transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea
charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating
himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various
lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady
pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At
intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein
were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former
voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever
threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till
it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and
courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing
lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and
others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before
him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to
the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem
to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby
calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling
to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular
latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to
certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that
ground in search of his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe
that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;
were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to
correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the
flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct
elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*
*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 mast-heads, when
circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at
particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating
whales may with great confidence be looked for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be
wholly without prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
herds which 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 way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a
particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities
would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every
possibility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and
place were conjoined in the one technical phrase—the
Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years,
Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for
awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted
interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of
the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the
waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot
where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his
vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering
vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering
hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one
crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her
commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and
then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial
Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next
ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had,
perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very
complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and
sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead
of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;
if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote
from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow
off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any
other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas,
Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and 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. The Affidavit.
So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed,
as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious
particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in
its 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 Cæsar. Was it not
so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so
long did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was
oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand
Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the
vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan,
whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white
cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale,
marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In
plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of
Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed
by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that
express object as much in view, as in setting out through the
Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture
that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the
Indian King Philip.
I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For
this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full
as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of
the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some
hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still
worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur.
One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters
and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at
home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you
suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by
the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to
the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan—do you suppose that
that poor fellow’s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will
read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very
irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what
might be called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I
tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific,
among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which
had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that
had each lost a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your
lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of
man’s blood was spilled for it.
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale
is an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that
when narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold
enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my
facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of
being facetious than Moses, when he wrote the history of the plagues of
Egypt.
But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy,
and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale _has_ done it.
First: In the year 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 manœuvres which he made were
necessary. His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated
resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just
before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as
if fired with revenge for their sufferings.” Again: “At all events, the
whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own eyes,
and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided,
calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which
impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am
correct in my opinion.”
Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a
black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
hospitable shore. “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the
fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon
hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful
contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment’s thought; the
dismal looking wreck, and _the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale_,
wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance.”
In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of “_the mysterious and mortal attack
of the animal_.”
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 honor of being a nephew of his. I
have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large
one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my
uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full,
too, of honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient
Dampier’s old chums—I found a little matter set down so like that just
quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
corroborative example, if such be needed.
Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls the
modern Juan Fernandes. “In our way thither,” he says, “about four
o’clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty
leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which
put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where
they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death.
And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for
granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was
a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. * *
* * * The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their
carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks.
Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his
cabin!” Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and
seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a great
earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief
along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the
darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all
caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to
me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more
than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing
boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship
Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength, let
me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a
running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if
the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts,
not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of
destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent
indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will
frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for
several consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one more
and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant one,
by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous
event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but
that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages;
so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon—Verily there is
nothing new under the sun.
In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate
of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and
Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own
times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he
has always been considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating
historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all affecting
the matter presently to be mentioned.
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term
of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured
in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed
vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty
years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be
gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species
this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as
well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly
inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long
time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am
certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the
present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious
resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in
modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the
sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on
the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found the
skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,
pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
substance called _brit_ is to be found, the aliment of the right whale.
But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm
whale—squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because
large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been
found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements
together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that,
according to all human reasoning, Procopius’s sea-monster, that for
half a century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all
probability have been a sperm whale.
CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby
Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that
one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and
long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, altogether
to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if
this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the
White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would
prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be
indeed exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which,
though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling
passion, yet were by no means incapable of swaying him.
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in
the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew,
for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual
man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual
mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in
a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced
will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain;
still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred
his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself
from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would
elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck
would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his
captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle
insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly
manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing
that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that
strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the
full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure
background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted
meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night
watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of
than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had
hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are
more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the varying outer
weather, and they inhale its fickleness—and when retained for any
object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and
passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary
interests and 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. The Mat-Maker.
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured 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.
CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side
of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the
tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always
been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the
captain’s, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The
figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white
tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese
jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black
trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning 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 sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a
tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so
calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear
such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling
for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy
and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so
broadly gaped—open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such a
yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon
the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists,
whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all
inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.
In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
across Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were
pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
“Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
please!”
“Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he
spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set
like a flint from Stubb’s.
“What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!”
“Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,
boys!)” in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A sad
business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,
Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what
will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the
play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.”
“Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
diverged, “as soon as I clapt eye on ’em, I thought so. Aye, and that’s
what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale’s at the bottom
of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! Give way, men!
It ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”
Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant
as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s
company; but Archy’s fancied discovery having some time previous got
abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some
small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge
of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb’s confident way of
accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room
for all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in
the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the
mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the
dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the
unaccountable Elijah.
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the
furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a
circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger
yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and 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
stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
“I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to
that.”
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way,
swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
shoulders for a pedestal.
“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”
“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you
fifty feet taller.”
Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to
Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head
and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous
fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was
Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a
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 vapor hovering over it, and
suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it
were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning
couriers and detached flying outriders.
All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled
water and air. But it bade 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 vapor no longer blended, but tilted
everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales
running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still
rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through
the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
escape being torn from the row-locks.
Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither
ship nor boat to be seen.
“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the
sheet of his sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall
comes. There’s white water again!—close to! Spring!”
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when
with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and
Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril
so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance
of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent
instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of
fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still
booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
the erected crests of enraged serpents.
“That’s his hump. _There_, _there_, give it to him!” whispered
Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by;
something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea,
the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing
eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the
bottom of the ocean.
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar
to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those
boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew
darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were
useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.
So, cutting the lashing of the 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. The Hyena.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed
affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast
practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more
than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He
bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all
hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich
of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for
small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril
of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly,
good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen
and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am
speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation;
it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before
might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part
of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to
breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with
it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White
Whale its object.
“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the
deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the
water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often
happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he
gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I
think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off
Cape Horn.”
“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing
close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you
tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask,
for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into
death’s jaws?”
“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I
should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face
foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
that!”
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of
common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign
my life into the hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow
who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of
scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that
the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be
imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a
squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for
his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to
this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in
what a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking
all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make
a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along, you shall be
my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at
their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world
more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical
life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded
upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled
away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as
good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a
supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might
be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.
I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a
clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
devil fetch the hindmost.
CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg
you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole
with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask.
“If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other
left, you know.”
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it
is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active
perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in
their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried
into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that
with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed
man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of
the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving
his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for
Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s
crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that
matter. Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of
port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it
is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing
the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was
observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee
fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the
carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a
little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and
curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this
particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to
the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his
intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition
did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew
being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
oars, 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.
CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly
swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off
the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of
the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery
locality, southerly from St. Helena.
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver;
and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery
silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen
far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it
looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight
nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a
look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet,
though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a
hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what
emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at
such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But
when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive
nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence,
his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet,
every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit
had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she
blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered
more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was
a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously
exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a
lowering.
Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The
best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head
manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange,
upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows
of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air
beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the
other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched
Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two
different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively
echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a
coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship
so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager
glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every
sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.
This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it
was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted
into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;
disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and
somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still
further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever
alluring us on.
Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance
with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested
the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that
whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however
far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by
one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there
reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as
if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the
monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest
and most savage seas.
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a
wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in
which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a
devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so
wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful
errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.
But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began
howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas
that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the
blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of
silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this
desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more
dismal than before.
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a
thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for
their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved
the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great
mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering
it had bred.
Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, 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.
CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)
by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro
in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all
her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred
over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it
was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They
seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment
that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops
nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and
though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men
in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped
from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those
forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not
one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being
heard from below.
“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in
the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his
hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to
make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing
the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the
Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the
first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for
a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a
boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But
taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet,
and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer
and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the
Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters
to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home,
tell them to address them to ——”
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then,
in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish,
that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side,
darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves
fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his
continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar
sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously
carry meanings.
“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of
deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced.
But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in
the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion
voice,—“Up helm! Keep her off round the world!”
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that
we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange
than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise
in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims
before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they
either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had
spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this
not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded
her—judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if so it had
been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer
to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not
to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he
could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But
all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said
here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other
in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.
If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the
equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering
each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of
them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment
to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and
resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the
illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling
vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone
Fanning’s Island, or the far away King’s Mills; how much more natural,
I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only
interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and
sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of
course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose
captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to
each other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to
talk about.
For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a
date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and
thumb-worn files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound
ship would receive the latest whaling intelligence from the
cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost
importance to her. And in degree, all this will hold true concerning
whaling vessels crossing each other’s track on the cruising-ground
itself, even though they are equally long absent from home. For one of
them may have received a transfer of letters from some third, and now
far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the people of
the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news,
and have an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the
sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar
congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually shared
privations and perils.
Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;
that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case
with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number
of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when
they do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them;
for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not
fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English
whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the
American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his
nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this
superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be
hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill
more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this
is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the
Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows
that he has a few foibles himself.
So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the
whalers have most reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some
merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies
in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism
upon each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at
sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and
scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be
much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As
touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry,
they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates,
when they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail
is—“How many skulls?”—the same way that whalers hail—“How many
barrels?” And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer
apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to
see overmuch of each other’s villanous likenesses.
But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a “_Gam_,” a thing so
utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name
even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it,
and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” and
such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and
also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish
such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it
would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should
like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory
about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at
the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion,
he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I
conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman,
in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
But what is a _Gam?_ You might wear out your index-finger running up
and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr.
Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not
hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years
been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees.
Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the
Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.
GAM. NOUN—_A social meeting of two_ (_or more_) _Whaleships, generally
on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange
visits by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on
board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other._
There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the
captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern
sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
steers himself with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with
gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa
of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if
whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old
aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never
admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete
boat’s crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or
harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the
occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to
his visit all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that
being conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him
from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to
the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor
is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting
steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the
after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus
completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent
pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of
foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a
spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again,
it would never do in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, it would
never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying
himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his
hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
generally carries his hands in his trowsers’ pockets; but perhaps being
generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.
Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones
too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment
or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest oarsman’s
hair, and hold on there like grim death.
CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
(_As told at the Golden Inn._)
The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet
more travellers than in any other part.
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned
almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us
strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White
Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s
story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain
wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of
God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter
circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may
be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never
reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of
the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the
private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of
whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of
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 fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many
of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic
isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by
two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,
dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by
batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they
have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they
yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash
from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by
ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried
lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild
Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give
robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and
Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the
full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as
direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks
are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full
many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen,
though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean
nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney,
though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket
beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long
followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was
he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods
seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet
was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this
Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by
inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human
recognition which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this
Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he
had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and
Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.
“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her
prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again
increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our
Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their
whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the
officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the
probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again
remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom.
Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward,
gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their
pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length;
that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other
reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is
in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless
latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the
upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way
expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a
coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness
touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or
on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he
betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the
seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner
in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was
on this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they
stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear
water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the
pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at
the lee scupper-holes.
“Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command
over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a
chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make
a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled
housings of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a
heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt
Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father. But Radney,
the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious.
He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with
his gay banterings.
“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin,
one of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I
tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut
away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that
sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of
ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole
posse of ’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom;
making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him
to jump overboard and scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil with his
estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty
too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in
looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model
of his nose.’
“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’
“‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys,
lively, now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines;
the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping
of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s
utmost energies.
“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face
fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his
brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney
to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know
not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate
commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a
shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a
pig to run at large.
“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household
work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every
evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually
foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of
sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom
would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all
vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys,
if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the
Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps;
and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been
regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should
have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly
nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all
these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair
stood between the two men.
“But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as
plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat
in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will
understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman
fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat
still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s
malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him
and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he
instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness
to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already ireful being—a
repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when
aggrieved—this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over
Steelkilt.
“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping
the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then,
without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the
customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done
little or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a
most domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his
command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an
uplifted cooper’s club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near
by.
“Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt
could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still
smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained
doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the
hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
his bidding.
“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated
his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had
not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with
his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it
was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the
windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him
that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the
Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
“‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
yourself.’ But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of
his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his
right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his
persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant
the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch
spouting blood like a whale.
“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
mastheads. They were both Canallers.
“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whale-ships 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-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or
broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
corrupt and often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
under the long-flung shadow, and the snug 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
quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of
the confusion, and prying into the heart of it with his pike, sought to
prick out the object of his resentment. But Steelkilt and his
desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in gaining the
forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large casks
in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves
behind the barricade.
“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them
with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. ‘Come
out of that, ye cut-throats!’
“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to
understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt’s) death would be the signal
for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart
lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but
still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
“‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?’ demanded their
ringleader.
“‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you want to
sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and he
once more raised a pistol.
“‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us
turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What
say ye, men?’ turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their
response.
“The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye
on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:—‘It’s not our
fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was
boy’s business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to
prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his
cursed jaw; ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,
men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to
yourself; say the word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to
turn to; treat us decently, and we’re your men; but we won’t be
flogged.’
“‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!’
“‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
‘there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for
the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a row; it’s
not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we
won’t be flogged.’
“‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.
“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you what
it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby
rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till
you say the word about not flogging us, we 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,’ said the Captain, and the key clicked.
“It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of
seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had
last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as
black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to
the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst
out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with
their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a
handle at each end) run 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 honor of securing a man who had been
fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along
the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the
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
fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.
“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody
deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in
to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have
done.
“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe
man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There
she rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do
whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but
that would be too long a story.’
“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more
into the air, Sirs.’
“‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks
faint;—fill up his empty glass!’
“No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so
suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the
ship—forgetful of the compact among the crew—in the excitement of the
moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted
his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been
plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.
‘The White Whale—the White Whale!’ was the cry from captain, mates, and
harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful 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 remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But
the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer
between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again,
and went down.
“Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had
slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,
downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He
cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose
again, with some tatters of Radney’s red woollen shirt, caught in the
teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the
whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary
place—where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
Lakeman, all but five or six of the 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 whale-boat, steered straight
before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a
reinforcement to his crew.
“On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which
seemed to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from
it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of
Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The
captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked
war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the
pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and
foam.
“‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain.
“‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt;
‘no lies.’
“‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’
“‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that he
leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale,
stood face to face with the captain.
“‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As
soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike
me!’
“‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping
into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
“Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due
time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck
befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were
providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor
headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former
captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
“Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small
native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
right there, again resumed his cruisings.
“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to
give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
destroyed him. * * * *
“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly.
“‘I am, Don.’
“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
this 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-Fés 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 honor the story I have told ye,
gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be
true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I
have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’”
CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,
something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the
eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored
alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.
It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious
imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day
confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the
world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
wrong.
It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will
be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For
ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble
panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,
medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of
chain-armor like Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St. George’s; ever
since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not
only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
presentations of him.
Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting
to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of
Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless
sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits,
every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of
them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our
noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The
Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall,
depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly
known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and
half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small
section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an
anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes.
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian
painter’s portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the
antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing
Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model
of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the
same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better.
The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the
surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on
its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are
rolling, might be taken for the Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames
by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of 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 Lacépède, 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-of-battle ship; and out of that element
it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily
into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.
And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour
between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan;
yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a
ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying
shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not
catch.
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at
all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan,
that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though
Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of
one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed
utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal
characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any
leviathan’s articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the
mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully
invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so
roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the
head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is
also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which
almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the
thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring,
and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy
covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. “However
recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us,” said humorous Stubb one
day, “he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens.”
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world
which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the
mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very
considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding
out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in
which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by
going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of
being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you
had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this
Leviathan.
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them
which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass
that matter by.
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous
chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far
better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All
Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in
the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second
chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no
doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is
admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the
Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour;
but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.
Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has
but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency,
because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you
can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by
his living hunters.
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details
not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be
anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and
taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent
attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble
Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath
the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the
air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of
the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the
monster’s spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single
incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if
from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and
true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden
poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the
swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing
down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical
details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I
could not draw so good a one.
In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his
black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the
Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so
that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there
must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are
pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and
maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent
back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through
the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and
causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh
the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all
raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the
glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the
powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered
fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole
inserted into his spout-hole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
was either practically conversant with his subject, or else
marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the
lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings 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
fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement
to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), but in so
important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured
for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of
the Peace.
In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself
“H. Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present
purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet
noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored,
inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened
sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background,
both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine,
when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen
under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving
is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in
the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside;
the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to
a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity,
is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and
lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in
its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands
half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the
smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke
over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up
with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the
excited seamen.
CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a
crippled beggar (or _kedger_, as the sailors say) holding a painted
board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his
leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats
(presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is
being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten
years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited
that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification
has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever
published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a
stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for
ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman
make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own
amputation.
Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag
Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm
Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and
other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous
little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough
material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little
boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s
fancy.
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
to that condition in which God placed him, _i.e._ what is called
savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I
myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the
Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.
Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian
war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of
carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.
For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that
miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has
cost steady years of steady application.
As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of
his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as
the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and
suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert
Durer.
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the
forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much
accuracy.
At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is
sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales
are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some
old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for
weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
intents and purposes so labelled with “_Hands off!_” you cannot examine
them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain,
you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against
them in a surf of green surges.
Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is
continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from
some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the
profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be
a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you
wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the
exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point,
else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your
precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery;
like the 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!
CHAPTER 58. Brit.
Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows
of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale
largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that
we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden
wheat.
On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from
the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that
wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
from the water that escaped at the lip.
As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their
scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these
monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving
behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
*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 mast-heads, especially when
they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms
looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in
the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will
sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them
to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil;
even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species
of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their
immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such
bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with
the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the
deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though
some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are
of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the
thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for
example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to
the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any
generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas
have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,
so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his
one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of
all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen
tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man
may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,
to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize
the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the
continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense
of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.
That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships
of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided;
two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and
swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it
is also a fiend to its own 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. Squid.
Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling
her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering
masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a
plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
alluring jet would be seen.
But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when
the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid
across them, enjoining some 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
cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms
radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of
anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.
No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of
either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an
unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to
have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld,
and returned to their ports to tell of it.”
But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;
the rest as silently following.
Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected
with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it
being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few
of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature
and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm
whale his only food. For though other species of whales find their food
above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the
spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the
surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what,
precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will
disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some
of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They
fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings
by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other
species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in
which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with
some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But
much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he
assigns it.
By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of
cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would
seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.
CHAPTER 60. The Line.
With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as
for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented,
I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable
to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to
the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary
quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which
it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in
general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however
much it may give it compactness and gloss.
Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost
entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not
so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and
I will add (since there is an æsthetics 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 self-adjusting buoyancy and
simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a
Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could
never pierce you out.
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and
prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;
for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and
contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal
powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the
line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than
any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men
live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death,
that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would
not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before
your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
Queequeg it was quite a different object.
“When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in the
bow of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.”
The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special
to engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of
sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean
through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively
ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins,
flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than
those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed
in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in
that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of
my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will,
long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the
seamen at the main and 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
vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of
a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck
by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all
at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from
all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from
aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and
regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.
“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he
dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and
ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the
leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples
as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed,
Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak
but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the
boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of
the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase,
the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air,
and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
“There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by
Stubb’s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite
was granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the
whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker’s boat, and
much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the
honor of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length
become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore
no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play.
And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the
assault.
Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy,
he was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad
yeast which he brewed.*
*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 sea-water into
it.* More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place.
The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins.
Stubb and Tashtego here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering
business truly in that rocking commotion.
*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.
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost
oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong,
nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what
is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the
distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting
the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the
uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman
activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated
loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the
top of one’s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half
started—what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I
cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same
time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the
fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting
cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He now has to drop and secure his
oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the
crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it
somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen
in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are
successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed
and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their
blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are
absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship
owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that
makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can
you expect to find it there when most wanted!
Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
that is, when the whale starts to run, the 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. The Crotch.
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in
productive subjects, grow the chapters.
The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.
It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length,
which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the
bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of
the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the
prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who
snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his
rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in
the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons.
But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one
instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the
coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It
is a doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to
the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon
receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer,
however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into
him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the
line, and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events,
be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else
the most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the
water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line
(mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances,
prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended
with the saddest and most fatal casualties.
Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown
overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,
or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.
Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is
fairly captured and a corpse.
Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging
one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these
qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of
such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is
supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first
one be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several
most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be
painted.
CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a
calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow
business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen
men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and
fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse
in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long
intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of
the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever
they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will
draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this
grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead
in bulk.
Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s
main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly
eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for
securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman,
went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until
morning.
Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the
creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or
despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body
reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand
other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot
advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought
from the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were preparing to
cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the
deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking
links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by
the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies
with its black hull close to the vessel’s and seen through the darkness
of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two—ship
and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one
reclines while the other remains standing.*
*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
slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the
sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as
before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and
turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of
the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the
shark seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable
surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains
a part of the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave
on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in
countersinking for a screw.
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs
round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every
killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant
butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s
live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks,
also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away
under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the
whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing,
that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties;
and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy
in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be
decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be
set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do
most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no
conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless
numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
whale, moored by night to a 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 knee-pans, which he did not keep well
scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came
shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which,
after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old
Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came
to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with
both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he
bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways
inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.
“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his
mouth, “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been
beating this steak too much, cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say
that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks
now over the side, don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a
shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ’em; tell ’em they are
welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must
keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,” snatching one from his
sideboard; “now then, go and preach to ’em!”
Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck
to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over
the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other
hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in
a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly
crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam
noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say
dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you
must stop dat dam racket!”
“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap
on the shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way
when you’re preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, cook!”
“Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
“No, cook; go on, go on.”
“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
“Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ’em to it; try that,” and
Fleece continued.
“Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness—’top dat dam slappin’ ob de
tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin’ and
bitin’ dare?”
“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I 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-preachin’ to
such dam g’uttons as you call ’em, till dare bellies is full, and dare
bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get ’em full, dey wont hear you
den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and
can’t hear not’ing at all, no more, for eber and eber.”
“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,
Fleece, and I’ll away to my supper.”
Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
shrill voice, and cried—
“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill
your dam’ bellies ’till dey bust—and den die.”
“Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “stand
just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular
attention.”
“All dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
desired position.
“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now go
back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you,
cook?”
“What dat do wid de ’teak,” said the old black, testily.
“Silence! How old are you, cook?”
“’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
“And 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, 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. The Whale as a Dish.
That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and
philosophy of it.
It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right
Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large
prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the
court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of
whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The
meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being
well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.
The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great
porpoise grant from the crown.
The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all
hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but
when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet
long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men
like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are
not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare
old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous
doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly
juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who
long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel—that
these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of
whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among
the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called “fritters”; which, indeed,
they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something
like old Amsterdam housewives’ dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh.
They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can
hardly keep his hands off.
But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be
delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the
buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that
is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the
third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for
butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into
some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches
of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their
ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many
a good supper have I thus made.
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine
dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two
plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large
puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most
delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is
quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that some young
bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves’ brains, by
and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to
tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires
uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with
an intelligent looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the
saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at
him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with
abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration
before mentioned: _i.e._ that a man should eat a newly murdered thing
of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man
that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was
hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would
have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the
meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds
staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight
take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a
cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that
salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it
will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of
judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who
nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy
paté-de-foie-gras.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is
adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my
civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is
that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring
that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill
did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to
Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month
or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but
steel pens.
CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and
weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general
thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting
him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very
soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the
common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send
every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation
that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and
two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck
to see that all goes well.
But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will
not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather
round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a
stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In
most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so
largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a
procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to
tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the
present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man
unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night,
would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and
those sharks the maggots in it.
Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came
on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for
immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering
three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid
sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an
incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep
into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy
confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not
always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the
incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at
each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and
bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again
by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was
this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these
creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in
their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual
life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin,
one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried
to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
*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.”
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio
professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would
have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and
which no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was
swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the
strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the
hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted
to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over
the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one
hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the
side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades,
began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just
above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad,
semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the
main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving
in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship
careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads
of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her
frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the
whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a
helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap
is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from
the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it
the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as
the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange,
so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes
stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the
windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the
water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the
line called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck
and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and
indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher
and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the
windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious
blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and
every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else
it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.
One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices
out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into
this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then
hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for
what follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands
to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a
few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in
twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper
strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for
lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one
tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other
is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the
main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the
blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep
coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of
plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting
and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the
heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates
scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by
way of assuaging the general friction.
CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin
of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced
whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion
remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you
know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence
of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and
ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any
creature’s skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet
in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption;
because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the
whale’s body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer
of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin?
True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with
your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat
resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as
flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it
not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I
have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books.
It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed
page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a
magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales
through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at
here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I
admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be
regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to
speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of
the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a
new-born child. But no more of this.
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,
as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity,
or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three
fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence
be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose
mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten
barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three
quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.
In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over
obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in
thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line
engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the
isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as
if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some
instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a
veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations.
These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers
on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to
use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the
hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck
with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the
famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.
Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains
undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another
thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm
Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially
his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by
reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random
aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast,
which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact
with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a
little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me
that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact
with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large,
full-grown bulls of the species.
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the
whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very
happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber
as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho
slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of
this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep
himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides.
What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy
seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other
fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but
these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very
bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the
lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn
fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his
blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after
explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as
indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at
home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when
seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards,
perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is
found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been
proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than
that of a Borneo negro in summer.
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself
after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too,
live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep
thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and
like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of
thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the
whale!
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with
rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many
insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats
further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats,
what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the
murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that
hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon
the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that
great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite
perspectives.
There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all
in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or
speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween,
if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral
they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from
which not the mightiest whale is free.
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war
or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring
the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the
whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the
log—_shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!_ And for years
afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly
sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your
utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of
old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
the air! There’s orthodoxy!
Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror
to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a
world.
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe
in them.
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced
whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck;
on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that
very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the
surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening
between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a
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 quarter-deck, he paused to
gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took
Stubb’s long spade—still remaining there after the whale’s
decapitation—and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended
mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood
leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast
and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a
beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty
head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou
hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams,
has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and
navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous
hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the
drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar
home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many
a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay
them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their
flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true
to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the
murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours
he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his
murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the
neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to
outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the
planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”
“Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
“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.”
CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than
the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.
By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads
proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and
shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the
Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what
response would be made.
Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships
of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which
signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective
vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale
commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at
considerable distances and with no small facility.
The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting
her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket.
Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s lee,
and lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was
being rigged by Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visiting captain,
the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in token
of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the
Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her
captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though
himself and boat’s crew remained untainted, and though his ship was
half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and
flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine
of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with
the Pequod.
But this did by no means prevent all 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. The Monkey-Rope.
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 flensing 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 hard-scrabble 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 honor 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
whale-spades, 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 tail. 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 a
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.
CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
over Him.
It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s
prodigious head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it
continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to
it. For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for
the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit,
gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the
Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of
those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to
cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near
the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had
been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day,
if opportunity offered.
Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
boats, Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further
and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at
the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of
tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or
both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the
towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first
it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a
maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from
view, as if diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the
ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being
brought with a deadly dash against the vessel’s side. But having plenty
of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they
paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their
might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle
was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened
line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the
contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few
feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did
gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning
along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship,
suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so
flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken
glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once
more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed,
and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship
towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete
circuit.
Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close
flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance;
and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the
multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale’s body,
rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every
new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains
that poured from the smitten rock.
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
turned upon his back a corpse.
While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
conversation ensued between them.
“I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said
Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
ignoble a leviathan.
“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow,
“did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s
head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right
Whale’s on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can
never afterwards capsize?”
“Why not?
“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so,
and he seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think
he’ll charm the ship to no good at last. I don’t half like that chap,
Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved
into a snake’s head, Stubb?”
“Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look
down there, Flask”—pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of both
hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in
disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been
stowed away on board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why you
don’t see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries
it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of
it, he’s always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.”
“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve
seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”
“No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye
see, in the eye of the rigging.”
“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
“Bargain?—about what?”
“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and
the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away
his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then
he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”
“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked
one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old
flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and
gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he
was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching
his hoofs, up and says, ‘I want John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old
governor. ‘What business is that of yours,’ says the devil, getting
mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take him,’ says the governor—and by the
Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t give John the Asiatic cholera before
he got through with him, I’ll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look
sharp—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 soldadoes?
Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”
“No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me,
Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was
the same you say is now on board the Pequod?”
“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live
for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any
parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a
latch-key to get into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can
crawl into a 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 head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair
of overburdening panniers.
Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever
and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own
hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his
shadow; while, if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only
to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing
things.
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us
join them, and lay together our own.
Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales
regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two
extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external
difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a
head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we
may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the
deck:—where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to
study practical cetology than here?
In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between
these heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a
certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right
Whale’s sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s head.
As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to
him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this
dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt 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, therefore,
must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct
picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and
nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the
world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with
the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two
distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the
whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and
to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.
A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing
is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience
will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of
things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and
completely, to examine any two things—however large or however small—at
one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side
and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two
objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in
order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to
bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in
themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the
same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on
one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he
can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able
simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct
problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any
incongruity in this comparison.
It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when
beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer
frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly
proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their
divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.
But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for
hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With
respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed
between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has
an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered
over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the
world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear
which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens
of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of
cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind?
Subtilize it.
Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending
by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not
that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we
might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But
let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What
a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling,
lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as
bridal satins.
But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems
like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with 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 lock-jaws upon
him.
In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised
artist—is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting
the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone
with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other
work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists,
are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances
the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being
rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally
forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed;
nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn
into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses.
CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right
Whale’s head.
As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a
Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly
rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather
inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred
years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a
shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the
nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be
lodged, she and all her progeny.
But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit
and look at these two F-shaped 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 bestowed upon it; in which case you will
take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a
diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for
him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a
very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower
lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by
carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a
sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.
The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an
important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when
earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery
threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at
Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good
Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet
high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular
ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us
with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of 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 being a
tent spread over the same bone.
But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and,
standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all
these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not
think you were inside 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.
CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you,
as a sensible physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front
aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you
investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some
unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may
be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either
satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an
infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events,
perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history.
You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,
the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes
considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long
socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the
mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as
though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you
observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he
has—his spout hole—is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes
and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one third of his entire
length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the
front of the Sperm Whale’s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single
organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are
now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part
of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and
not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the
full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is
as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents
partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised
of the nature of the substance which so impregnably invests all that
apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I have described to you how
the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange.
Just so with the head; but with this difference: about the head this
envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable
by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the
sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds
from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved
with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.
Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen
chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the
sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold
there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and
toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which
would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron 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. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must
know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
upon.
Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower
is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the
forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two
almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
wall of a thick tendinous substance.
*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.
CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
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 vapor 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. The Prairie.
To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has
as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as
for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar,
or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the
Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of
the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of
horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his
disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the
phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore,
though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of
these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all
things; I achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He
has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most
conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and
finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that
its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect
the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable
to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in
keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the
nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!
Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his
proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the
sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is
an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As
on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your
jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the
reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which
so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest
royal beadle on his throne.
In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This
aspect is sublime.
In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has
a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles,
the elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is
as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their
decrees. It signifies—“God: done this day by my hand.” But in most
creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip
of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which
like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low,
that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes;
and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the
antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters
track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this
high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely
amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the
Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other
object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one
distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face;
he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a
forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats,
and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish;
though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In
profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic
depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark
of genius.
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a
book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing
nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale
been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by
their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile,
because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue,
or 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.
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist
his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to
square.
In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as
the side 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 vertebræ to a strung
necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the
skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebræ 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 vertebræ of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have
omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the
cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man’s
character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel
your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine
never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in
the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the
world.
Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being
eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As
it passes through the remaining vertebræ 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 vertebræ, 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.
CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau,
Derick De Deer, master, of Bremen.
At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide
intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with
their flag in the Pacific.
For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
bows instead of the stern.
“What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German. “Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”
“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s
coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see that big
tin can there alongside of him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s all
right, is the Yarman.”
“Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.
He’s out of oil, and has come a-begging.”
However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all
heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German
soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately
turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some
remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in
profound darkness—his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a
single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by
hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically
called a _clean_ one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name
of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that
without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed
round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German
boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the
Pequod’s keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their
danger, they were going all abreast with great speed straight before
the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in
harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling
a great wide parchment upon the sea.
Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,
humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed
afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this
whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is
not customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social.
Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water
must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad
muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile
currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth
with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds,
followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to
have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind
him to upbubble.
“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the stomach-ache, I’m
afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse
winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s the first foul wind
I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so
before? it must be, he’s lost his tiller.”
As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck
load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her
way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly
turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious
wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost
that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.
“Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that wounded
arm,” cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
“Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way, or the
German will have him.”
With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one
fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were
going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for
the time. At this juncture the Pequod’s 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 villainous
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 honor 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 towards the sky his one beating fin. So
have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles
in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird
has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the
fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted
in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his
spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while
still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there
was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.
Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod’s
boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick
chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long
dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape.
But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all
three tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their
feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three
Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and
white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong
rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both Derick and
his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three
flying keels.
“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing
glance upon them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently—all
right—I saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, you know—relieve
distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel
a 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-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on
board.
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any
sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;
what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and
placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and
to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
once so triumphantly said—“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him
cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron
as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he? Oh!
that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of
a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the
mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!
In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad
enough to shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the
wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in 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 half-stifled
melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the
ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled.
Immediately, by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at
different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken
whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords. By very
heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred
to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest
fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the
body would at once sink to the bottom.
It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,
the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his
flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the
stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured
whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence
of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have
been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for
the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron,
the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And
when? It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before
America was discovered.
What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
discoveries, by the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways
to the sea, owing to the body’s immensely increasing tendency to sink.
However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to
the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the
ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with
the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such
was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the
fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast
them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the
other side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a
house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her
bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural
dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the
immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the 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.
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the
true method.
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its
great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many
great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other
have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection
that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a
fraternity.
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to
the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale
attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent.
Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms
to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one
knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely
Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast,
and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the
prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and
delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit,
rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as
this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt
this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian
coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast
skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants
asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.
When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in
triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this
story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed
to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St. George and
the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many
old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and
often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a
dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in
truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it
would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but
encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle
with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only
a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march
boldly up to a whale.
Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the
creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance
of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
and considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might have
crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;
bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible
with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.
In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story
will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines,
Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s
head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the
stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble
stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by
good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most
noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that
honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do
with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer
with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we
are much better entitled to St. George’s decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good
deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that
strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere
appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from
the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary
whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I
claim him for one of our clan.
But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more
ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versâ; certainly
they are very similar. If I claim the demi-god 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. Jonah Historically Regarded.
Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in
the preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this
historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some
sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans
of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale,
and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did
not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true with
respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the
varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this
saying, “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very small.
But, to this, Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not
necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the
whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And
this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right
Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and
comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have
ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right
Whale is toothless.
Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his
want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
reference to his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices. But
this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a
_dead_ whale—even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has
been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was
thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his
escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a
figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some
craft are nowadays christened the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor
have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the
whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an
inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was
saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all
round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was
this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the
Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere
within three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much
more than three days’ journey across from the nearest point of the
Mediterranean coast. How is that?
But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within
that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by
the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage
through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up
the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the
complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of
the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any
whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of
Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of
that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and
so make modern history a liar.
But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his
foolish pride of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing
that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the
sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s going to Nineveh
via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the
general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly
enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.
And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris’s
Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which
Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are
anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an
analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it
to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly
be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are
hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau
disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation;
crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in
the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair
from the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to
some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the
event.
Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered
flight, as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great
exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the
stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal
flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to
haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and
furious. What then remained?
Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
none exceed that fine manœuvre 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. The Fountain.
That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages
before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and
sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many
sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,
thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the
whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings—that all this should
be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter
minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D.
1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are,
after all, really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a
noteworthy thing.
Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items
contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their
gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times
is combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a
cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the
surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him
regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by
inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the
necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot
in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude,
the Sperm Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the
surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his
mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the
top of his head.
If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function
indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a
certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the
blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I
shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.
Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be
aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not
fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then
live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the
case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full
hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or
so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has
no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of
vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are
completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or
more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of
vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert
carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four
supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is
indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable
and true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise
inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in _having his spoutings out_,
as the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon
rising to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period
of time exactly uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he
stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy
breaths; then whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his
seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few
breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up
again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those
seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full
term below. Remark, however, that in different individuals these rates
are different; but in any one they are alike. Now, why should the whale
thus insist upon having his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish
his reservoir of air, ere descending for good? How obvious is it, too,
that this necessity for the whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal
hazards of the chase. For not by hook or by net could this vast
leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand fathoms beneath the
sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great
necessities that strike the victory to thee!
In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving for
two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole;
if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water,
then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of
smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at
all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so
clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power
of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water
or whether it be vapor—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at
on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no
proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no
violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.
Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
canal, and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is furnished
with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of
air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice;
unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he
talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say?
Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this
world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is
for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,
horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little
to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down
in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether
this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout
of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether
that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and
discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth
indirectly communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be
proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water through the
spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be,
when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale’s
food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he
would. Besides, if you regard him very closely, and time him with your
watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an undeviating
rhyme between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of
respiration.
But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!
You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not
tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to
settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the
knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand
in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.
The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it,
when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view
of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all
around him. And if at such times you should think that you really
perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are
not merely condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that they are
not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole
fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head? For
even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with
his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then,
the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a
blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with
rain.
Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering
into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will
often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of
the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer
contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or
otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.
Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind
you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is
to let this deadly spout alone.
Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides
other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations
touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I
account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed
fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am
convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as
Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes
up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep
thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the
curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected
there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over
my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep
thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an
August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above
supposition.
And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild
head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable
contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified
by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate
vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a
heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of
all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this
combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who
regards them both with equal eye.
CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,
and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial,
I celebrate a tail.
Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point
of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises
upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet.
The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat
palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in
thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap,
then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy
between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely
defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost
expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed
twenty feet across.
The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut
into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper,
middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long
and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running
crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as
anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman
walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin
course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful
relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the
great strength of the masonry.
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough,
the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins
and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and
largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent
measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.
Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful
flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a
Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most
appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or
harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly
beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied
tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved
Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the
linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with
the massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch.
When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what
robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in
the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which
his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so
destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but
the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on
all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his
teachings.
Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it
be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein
no fairy’s arm can transcend it.
Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a
different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never
wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled
forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is
this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster
when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only
fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his
conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In
striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the
blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed
air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply
irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only
salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the
opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the
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
vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that
that was the smoke from the touch-hole.
Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes
lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely
out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into
the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are
tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they
downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime _breach_—somewhere
else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the
grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless
profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting
forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in
gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the
Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the
archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that
crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east,
all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with
peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment
of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of
the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African
elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most
devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military
elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks
uplifted in the profoundest silence.
The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk
of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite
organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they
respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to
Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the
stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant’s trunk were
as the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and
crash of the sperm whale’s ponderous flukes, which in repeated
instances have one after the other hurled entire boats with all their
oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his
balls.*
*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.
CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from
the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia.
In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of
Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast
mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and
dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded
oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports
for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are
the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly,
vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.
Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond
to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and
considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels,
and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental
sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such
treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the
appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping
western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with
those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the
Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these
Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from
the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries
past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while
they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce
their claim to more solid tribute.
Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the
low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the
vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the
point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they
have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these
corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present
day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in
those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and
thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here
and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands,
and gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season
there. By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost
all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to
descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere
else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby
Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he
might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his
crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time,
now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs
no sustenance but what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the
whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be
transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries
no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with
utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She
carries years’ water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which,
when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to
drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks,
from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other
ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at
a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have
sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating
seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that
another flood had come; they would only answer—“Well, boys, here’s the
ark!”
Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of
the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and
more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the
land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils the
fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was
descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game
hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the
customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle
of singular magnificence saluted us.
But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with
which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm
Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached
companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in extensive
herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost
seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and
covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of
the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the
circumstance that even in the best cruising grounds, you may now
sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without being greeted by
a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems
thousands on thousands.
Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a
continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right
Whale, which, dividing at top, 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 vapory spouts, individually curling up into the
air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed
like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried
of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.
As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in
their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the
plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward
through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their
semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers
handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet
suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that
chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy
into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their
number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby
Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with
stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans
before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly
directing attention to something in our wake.
Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our
rear. It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling
something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so
completely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally
disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved
in his pivot-hole, crying, “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to
wet the sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!”
As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should
fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in
hot pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the
swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how
very kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on
to her own chosen pursuit,—mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that
they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in
his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one
the bloodthirsty pirates chasing _him_; some such fancy as the above
seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery
defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that
through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that
through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his
deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates
and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with
their curses;—when all these conceits had passed through his brain,
Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after
some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the
firm thing from its place.
But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and
when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra
side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the
harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been
gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so
victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake
of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the
ship neared them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to
spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed
wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three
keels that were after them,—though as yet a mile in their rear,—than
they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that
their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved
on with redoubled velocity.
Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
after several hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the
chase, when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating
token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange
perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it
in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns in
which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now
broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus’ elephants in
the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with
consternation. In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles,
and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick
spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was
still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely
paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled
ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple
sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not
possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional
timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though
banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the
West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human
beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit,
they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the
outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each
other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the
strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts
of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in
those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone
whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes’ time,
Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray
in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered
straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part
of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise
unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated;
yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the
fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the
frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a
delirious throb.
As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was
like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer
through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what
moment it may be locked in and crushed.
But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off
from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away
from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the
time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our
way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no
time to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their
wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to
the shouting part of the business. “Out of the way, Commodore!” cried
one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface,
and for an instant threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail,
there!” cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed
calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.
All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented
by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of
equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each
other’s grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then
attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line
being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is
chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more
whales are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But
sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you
must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you
must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure.
Hence it is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into
requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first and
second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly
running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing
drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball. But
upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy
wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an
instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the
boat’s bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea
came in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and
shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for the time.
It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it
not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly
diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from
the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So
that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale
sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting
momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the
shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene
valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost
whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea
presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by
the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods.
Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the
heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance we
beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw successive
pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round,
like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to
shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the
middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the
density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding
the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at
present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that
hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us
up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by
small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.
Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in
any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by
the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square
miles. At any rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be
deceptive—spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that seemed
playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this
circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely
locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd
had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its
stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way
innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller
whales—now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the
lake—evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still
becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like
household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales,
and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly
domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched
their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the
time refrained from darting it.
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended
in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become
mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will
calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two
different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment,
be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so
did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at
us, as if we were but a bit of 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 Leviathan, but
unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a
gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but
one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an
Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats,
curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts
themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious
parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s
pouring milk and blood rivallingly 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 hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into
what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random
whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was
cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in
the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his
head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad
flukes close by.
Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having
clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their
onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless;
but the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged
whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask
had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of
which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at
hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both
to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession,
should the boats of any other ship draw near.
The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the
drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for
the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some
other craft than the Pequod.
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
vast aggregations.
Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must
have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are
occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.
Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those
composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young
vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his
ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and
endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his
concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more
than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen
yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
whole they are hereditarily entitled to _en bon point_.
It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in
leisurely search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the
full flower of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned,
perhaps, from spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating
summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have
lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for
the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so
evade the other excessive temperature of the year.
When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan
coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the
ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases
him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are
to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do
what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of
his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often
cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with
the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They
fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and
so striving for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their
antlers. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these
encounters,—furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some
instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths.
But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
the first rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch
that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and
revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario,
like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.
Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give
chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish
of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the
sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must
take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For
like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my
Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower;
and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all
over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as
the 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 himself, he should then
go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it.
His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the
name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the
man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read
the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a
country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and
what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of
his pupils.
The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm
Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan is
called—proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone,
he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to
wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though
she keeps so many moody secrets.
The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while
those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious
of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,
and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a
mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous
lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though,
and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about
in quest of settlements, that is, harems.
Another point of difference between the male and female schools is
still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a
Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a
member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with
every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as
themselves to fall a prey.
CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
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 farthing,
or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to
expound it.
First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast,
when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at
all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a
nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the
same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any
other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it
plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well
as their intention so to do.
These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—the
Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
honorable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where
it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
others are by no means so scrupulous.
Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated
in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of
a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up
with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it
before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were
remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs’
teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had
done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had
remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore
the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale,
line, harpoons, and boat.
Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the
judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to
illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case,
wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife’s
viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in
the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to
recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then
supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally
harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of
the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had 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 £100,000 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
£100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary
towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer,
John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic
lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all
these, is not Possession the whole of the law?
But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
internationally and universally applicable.
What was America in 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 Loose-Fish? What is
the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the
ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what
are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.”
_Bracton, l. 3, c. 3._
Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division
which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no
intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to
this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a
strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is
here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle
that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate
car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first
place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is
still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that
happened within the last two years.
It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one
of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and
beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from
the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.
Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal
emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment
his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.
Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his
perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of
them.
Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their
fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good £150 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.
CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this
Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.” _Sir T. Browne,
V.E._
It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when
we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the
many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than
the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell
was smelt in the sea.
“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are
some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they
would keel up before long.”
Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must
be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French 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 mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch
the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their
nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short
off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it
constantly filled their olfactories.
Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from
the Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a
fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from
within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain
remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself
to the Captain’s round-house (_cabinet_ he called it) to avoid the
pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and
indignations at times.
Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who
had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man
had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore
held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and
confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan
for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all
dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan
of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter’s office,
was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and
as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost
in him during the interview.
By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a
small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with
large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet
vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now
politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put
on the aspect of interpreting between them.
“What shall I say to him first?” said he.
“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you
may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,
though I don’t pretend to be a judge.”
“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain
and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a
blasted whale they had brought alongside.”
Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
“What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a
whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a
baboon.”
“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one,
is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures
us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”
Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his
crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast
loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.
“What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to
them.
“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact,
tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody
else.”
“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service to
us.”
Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
(meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into
his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.
“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink
with the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”
“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking;
but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur
had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales,
for it’s so calm they won’t drift.”
By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his
boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the
lighter whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s
boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb
benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously
slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.
Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while
the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb
quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give
notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his
unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an
excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost
have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at
length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up
old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew
were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking
as anxious as gold-hunters.
And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning
to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased,
when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a
faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells
without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then
along with another, without at all blending with it for a time.
“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something
in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of
something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old
cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with
your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash 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.
CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
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 dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise
call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the
best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of
ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is
the worst.
I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but
cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against
whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds,
might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said
of the Frenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous
aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is
throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to
rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this
odious stigma originate?
I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because
those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea
as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh
blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks,
and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those
Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed,
forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking
into the hold, and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the
Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising
from excavating an old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a
Lying-in Hospital.
I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
work on Smells, a 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 honor to Alexander the Great?
CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew;
an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.
Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats.
Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is
to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general
thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising
the boats’ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy,
or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a
ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by
nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before;
ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so
gloomy-jolly.
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and
a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar 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. A Squeeze of the Hand.
That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the
Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations
previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of
the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in
dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and
when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated
ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with
several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I
found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about
in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back
into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this
sperm was such a 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 ill-will, 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-and-gaffman 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.
CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the
windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower
jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so
surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than
a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and
jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it
is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that
found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for
worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the
idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly
set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.
Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and
assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners
call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a
grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the
forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt,
as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt
inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as
almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in
the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some
three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two
slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself
bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full
canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this
investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the
peculiar functions of his office.
That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the
pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse,
planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath
it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt
orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit;
intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an 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. The Try-Works.
Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly
distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the
most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the
completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were
transported to her planks.
The try-works are planted between the foremast and 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 try-works has to be fed
for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of
quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out,
the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still
contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed
the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming
misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by
his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is
horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you
must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor
about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells
like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the
pit.
By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek
fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to
some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the
bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad
sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
folded them in conflagrations.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide
hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of
the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge
pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding
pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted,
curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled
away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of
the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.
Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden
hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the
watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the
fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny
features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,
and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were
strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they
narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror
told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards
out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their
front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged
forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the
ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further
and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully
champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on
all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden
with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of
darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s
soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that
interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the
madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend
shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at
last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to
that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a
midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was
horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller
smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of
sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were
open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and
mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all
this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed
but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle
lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and
then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression,
that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to
any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered
feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the
tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in
some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me?
thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was
fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In
an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying
up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how
grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and
the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first
hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its
redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,
the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking
flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s
accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,
which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this
earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow
in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With
books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the
truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered
steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold
of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and
jails, and walks fast crossing 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.
CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s
forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single
moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some
illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay
in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a
score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of
queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in
darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he
seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an
Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night
the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
lamps—often but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at
the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He
burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,
unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral
contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He
goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
supper of game.
CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors,
and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed
alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the
headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his
great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in
due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the
fire;—but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of
the description by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the romantic proceeding
of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the
hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities,
sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to
rise and blow.
While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling
this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed
round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot
across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last
man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap,
rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, _ex officio_,
every sailor is a cooper.
At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the
great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open,
and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the
hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable
incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream
with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous
masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie
about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted
all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the
entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din
is deafening.
But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works,
you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a
most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil
possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the
decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of
oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a
potent 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!
CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,
taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in
the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been
added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood,
he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely
eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the
binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the
compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of
his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the
mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted
gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only
dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.
But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as
though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in
some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some
certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little
worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell
by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass
in the Milky Way.
Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of
the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands,
the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst
all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes,
yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its
Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour
passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with
thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless
every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it
was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however
wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as
the white whale’s talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary
watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he
would ever live to spend it.
Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s
disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving,
are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems
almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by
passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy
example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters,
REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country
planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and
named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the
unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the
likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another;
on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of
the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual
cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at
Libra.
Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
pausing.
“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and
all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as
Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all
are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but
mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for
those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks
now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the
sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out
of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born
in throes, ’tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So
be it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
“No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must
have left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to
himself, leaning against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read
Belshazzar’s awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly.
He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty,
heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over
all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a
hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;
but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to
cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we
would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!
This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will
quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.”
“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s
been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with
faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long.
And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on
Negro Hill or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d not look at it very long ere
spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as
queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons
of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your
doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold
moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What
then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing
wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here’s signs and
wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the
zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I’ll get the almanac and
as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try
my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the
Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the book. Let’s see now. Signs and
wonders; and the sun, he’s always among ’em. Hem, hem, hem; here they
are—here they go—all alive:—Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and
Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels
among ’em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just crossing the threshold
between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there;
the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the
bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That’s my
small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch’s
navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if
there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders!
There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By Jove, I have it!
Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round
chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come,
Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets
us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini,
or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo!
comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue,
Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and
surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that’s
our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes
Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we
are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the
Scorpion, stings us in 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 horse-shoe sign—the roaring and
devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”
“There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in
one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all
tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I
suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country.
And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh—I
guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make
of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king’s
trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail
coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual.
What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the
sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper,
depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip—poor boy! would
he had died, or I; he’s half horrible to me. He too has been watching
all of these interpreters—myself included—and look now, he comes to
read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him.
Hark!”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind,
poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
“Well, that’s funny.”
“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a
crow, especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw!
caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There
he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more
poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.”
“Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could go hang
myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can stand
the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my
sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”
“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire
to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence?
Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s
nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old
Ahab! the White Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father,
in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver
ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did it get
there? And so they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish
up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters
for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the
green miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes ’mong the worlds
blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!”
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.
“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English 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 cutting-tackle.”
As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive
curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end.
This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all,
slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting
in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then
giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to
hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running
parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high
bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm
frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab,
putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two
sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let
us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can
shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did’st thou see
the White Whale?—how long ago?”
“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
telescope; “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”
“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from
the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.
“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,”
began the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.
Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat
fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went
milling and milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only trim dish,
by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches
from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white
head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
breath.
“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”
“Aye, aye—they were mine—_my_ irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but on!”
“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well,
this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all
afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—I know
him.”
“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not
know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there
somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled
on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other
whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters
stood, and what a noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest I
ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the
boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would
get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a
devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I
say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the
way, Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped
into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with
mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old
great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls
alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes
out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail
looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday,
with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after
the second iron, to toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima
tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and,
flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I
seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung
to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at
the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down
like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near
me caught me here” (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); “yes,
caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I was
thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb
ript its way along the flesh—clear along the whole length of my
arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman there
will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon:
Bunger, my lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the
yarn.”
The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all
the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote
his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but
sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and
patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between
a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab,
he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.
“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my
advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—”
“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed
captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing
hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat
up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet—”
“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly
altering his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till
he couldn’t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half
seas over, about three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up
with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher,
and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh
out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave
ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other
man.”
“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”—said the
imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is apt to
be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But
I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that
is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total
abstinence man; I never drink—”
“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to
him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with
the arm story.”
“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing,
sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my
best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse;
the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw;
more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead
line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it
came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is
against all rule”—pointing at it with the marlingspike—“that is the
captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had
that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one’s brains out
with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir”—removing his hat, and
brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull,
but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever
having been a wound—“Well, the captain there will tell you how that
came here; he knows.”
“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with
it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another
Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”
“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
impatiently listening to this 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.
CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she
hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
Enderby & 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 Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling
voyage of it, and did some service; how much does not appear. But this
is not all. In 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 honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago
have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast
sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every
soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine
gam I had—long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it’s
squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were
called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each
other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts
did not go overboard; and by and 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. A Bower in the Arsacides.
Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
sweeping comprehension of him, it 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 under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of
leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and
cheeseries in his bowels.
I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged
to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his
poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my
boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the
contents of that young cub?
And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted
to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.
For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey
of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with
the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side
glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his
capital.
Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought
together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his
people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,
chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and
all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of
its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,
then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where
a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again
sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the
terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung
sword that so affrighted Damocles.
It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen;
the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous
carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and
woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their
laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the
message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the
lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving
the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one
word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all
these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single
word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the
loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god,
he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal
voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;
and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak
through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken
words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words
are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened
casements. Thereby have 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.
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton
we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized
Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least
ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
thousand one hundred inhabitants.
Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to
this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,
jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a
proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the
most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it
in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under
your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion
of the general structure we are about to view.
In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one
fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two
feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty
feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less
than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs
which once enclosed his vitals.
To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled
the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some
twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise,
for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.
The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was
nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each
successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one
of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From
that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only
spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore
a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most
arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay
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 vertebræ 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.
CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and
the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables
and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a
line-of-battle-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 archæological, 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 vertebræ, 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.
CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the
original bulk of his sires.
But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier
ones.
Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,
that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a
large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority,
that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the
time of capture.
But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may
it not be, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated?
Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of
such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For
Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and
Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope
Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and
Solander, Cooke’s naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy
of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or
Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three
hundred and sixty feet. And Lacépède, 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 whale-ships, now penetrating even
through Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and
lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along
all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long
endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not
at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the
last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final
puff.
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the
prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and
scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous
river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar
an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy
extinction.
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a
period ago—not a good 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 whale-bone
whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with
them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being
driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened
with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been
very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain
impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty
Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas
and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort
to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers
and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed
circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.
But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than
13,000, have been annually slain on the nor’ west coast by the
Americans alone; yet there are considerations which render even this
circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this
matter.
Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness
of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to
Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the
King of Siam took 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 thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all
the successive monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in
great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since
he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as
all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the
Isles of the sea combined.
Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of
whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,
therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations
must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of,
by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of
creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and
children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this
countless host to the present human population of the globe.
Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas
before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the
Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he
despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like
the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will
still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial
flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to
his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his
boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when
after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so
vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it
was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough);
then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and
wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances
lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the
condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he
had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible;
by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his
ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise
smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme
difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.
Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of
a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most
poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as
the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity,
all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than
equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief
go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of
this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that
while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them
for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the
joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal
miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally
progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of
this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the
thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities
ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at
bottom, all 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 perhaps might more
properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other
particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some,
why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the
sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such
Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought
speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead.
Captain Peleg’s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means
adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every
revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory
light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least.
That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And
not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore,
who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach
to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty—remaining, as it
did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested itself with terrors, not
entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that,
through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them
lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it
was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it
transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not
with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took
plain practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without
delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him
supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which
had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful
selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured.
This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that
night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent of those
pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship’s forge was
ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and,
to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at
once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate;
hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his
own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk
of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with
wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of
the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly
efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually
recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in
uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in
ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the
shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new
tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more
directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover
unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both
useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:
the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and
straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage
strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of
right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter
makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the
carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars
to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his
big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the
constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the
carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out
pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there;
but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded
operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter
signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But
while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with
such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue
some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For
nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal
stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the
surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general
stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while
pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace,
and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was
this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an
all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an
old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked
now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have
served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded
forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a
life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had
gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small
outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a
stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.
You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him
involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did
not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he
had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or
uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal
process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one,
must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was
like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, _multum in
parvo_, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little
swelled—of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of
various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls,
pens, rulers, nail-filers, 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. Ahab and the Carpenter.
The Deck—First Night Watch.
(_Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two
lanterns busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is
firmly fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws,
and various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red
flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work._)
Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft,
and that 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—oh, dear!
Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for
thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall
nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that
is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst
thou not drive that old Adam away?
Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still
pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once
was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the
soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to
a hair, do I. Is’t a riddle?
I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing
may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where
thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t
speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be
now so long dissolved; then, why 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 Prætorians at the auction of
the Roman empire (which was the world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh
in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into
it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.
CARPENTER (_resuming his work_).
Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says
he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer;
he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it
into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very queer. And
here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow! has
a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he’ll
stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three
places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was that? Oh! I
don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of
strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like.
Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade
out into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks
you under the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for
life-boats. And here’s the heron’s leg! long and slim, sure enough!
Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be
because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her
roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver. Look,
driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears
out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there
with those screws, and let’s finish it before the resurrection fellow
comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as
brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill ’em up again.
What a leg this is! It looks like a real live leg, filed down to
nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on this to-morrow; he’ll be
taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate,
smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file,
and sand-paper, now!
CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into
the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*
*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it
is a regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and
drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying
intervals, is removed by the ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought
to be kept damply tight; while by the changed character of the
withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the
precious cargo.
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from
the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a
general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and
another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the
Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new
ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with
his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his
old courses again.
“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round
to it. “On deck! Begone!”
“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir.
We must up Burtons and break out.”
“Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make
good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth
saving, sir.”
“So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it
leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky
casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far
worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak;
for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it,
even if found, in this life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not have the
Burtons hoisted.”
“What will the owners say, sir?”
“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck,
about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But
look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,
my conscience is in this ship’s keel.—On deck!”
“Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin,
with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost
seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward
manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half
distrustful of itself; “A better man than I might well pass over in
thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in
a happier, Captain Ahab.”
“Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On
deck!”
“Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be forbearing!
Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?”
Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one
Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”
For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks,
you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of
the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and
as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast
outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware
of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab;
beware of thyself, old man.”
“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”
murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab
beware of Ahab—there’s something there!” Then unconsciously using the
musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little
cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
“Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the mate;
then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails, and
close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up 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. Queequeg in His Coffin.
Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold
were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it
being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight
sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they
go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost
puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone
cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted
placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood.
Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of
staves, and iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the
piled decks were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under
foot, as if you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and
rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the
ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was
it that the Typhoons did not visit them then.
Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh
to his endless end.
Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the
higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as
harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but—as
we have elsewhere seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and
finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all
day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,
the harpooneers are the holders, so called.
Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should
have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,
stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about
amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom
of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor
pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he
caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after
some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill
of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few
long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his
frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his
cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller
and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but
deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony
to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And
like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his
eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe
that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of
this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any
beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly
wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And
the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all
with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could
adequately tell. So that—let us say it again—no dying Chaldee or Greek
had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you
saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his
swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his
final rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and
higher towards his destined heaven.
Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious 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 lee-way adown the dim ages.
Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter
was at once commanded to do Queequeg’s bidding, whatever it might
include. There was some heathenish, coffin-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 whale-boat. Shame! shame!”
During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip
was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now
that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon
there seemed no need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some
expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the
cause of his sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he
had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,
he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter
of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a
word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to
live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale,
or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,
generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.
So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after
sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a
vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out 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. The Pacific.
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great
South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear
Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my
youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a
thousand leagues of blue.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should
rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of
mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all
that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing
like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by
their restlessness.
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of
the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same
waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday
planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still
gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between
float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown
Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine
Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to
it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal
swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron
statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one
nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles
(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other
consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in
which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at
length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm
lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins
swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran
through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick
blood!”
CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits
shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old
blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after
concluding his contributory work for Ahab’s leg, but still retained it
on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost
incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do
some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their
various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an
eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades,
pike-heads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every
sooty movement, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man’s was a
patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no
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 all-contributed and all-receptive ocean
alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking
terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of
infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither,
broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate
death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come
hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put
up _thy_ 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.
CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter
placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the
coals, and with the other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab came
along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While
yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last,
Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the
anvil—the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,
some of which flew close to Ahab.
“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always flying
in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they
burn; but thou—thou liv’st among them without a scorch.”
“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting
for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily can’st
thou scorch a scar.”
“Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely 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 death-temper. Ahoy,
there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me
as much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster
of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen
flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered.
“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”
deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
baptismal blood.
Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of
hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the
socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some
fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension.
Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string,
then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed,
“Good! and now for the seizings.”
At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole
was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope
was traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so,
with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the
Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with
the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory
pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his
cabin, 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!
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on
the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or
sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or
seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small
success for their pains.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the
ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and
would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a
remorseless fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing
only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not 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!”
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.
It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in
glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously,
sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous
to pointing her prow for home.
The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red
bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended,
bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long
lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks
of all 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 self-complacent testimony of
his entire satisfaction.
As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like _poke_ or stomach skin
of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the
clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and
harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with
them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat,
firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long
Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were
presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s
company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from
which the huge pots had been removed. You would have almost thought
they were pulling down the cursed 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 homeward-bound craft, he took from his pocket a
small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed
thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was
filled with Nantucket soundings.
CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
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 water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in
these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still
rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the
Niger’s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith;
but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it
heads some other way.
“Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas;
thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor
has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
again, without a lesson to me.
“Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring,
rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In
vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening
sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou,
darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy
unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of
once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.
“Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild
fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though
hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”
CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to
windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These
last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one
could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay
by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab’s.
The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and
the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon
the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which
gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who
crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played
round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A
sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven
ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.
Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and
hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a
flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.
“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor
coffin can be thine?”
“And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
America.”
“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes
floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a
sight we shall not soon see.”
“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”
“And what was that saying about thyself?”
“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”
“And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere I can
follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was it not so?
Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two
pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”
“Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
like fire-flies in the gloom—“Hemp only can kill thee.”
“The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” cried
Ahab, with a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on sea!”
Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the
slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead
whale was brought to the ship.
CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to
the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed
on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship’s
prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon
high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was
about taking his wonted daily 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 dead-reckoning, by
log and by line; _these_ shall conduct me, and show me my place on the
sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on thee,
thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and
destroy thee!”
As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and
dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the
mute, motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he rose and glided away;
while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered
together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck,
shouted out—“To the braces! Up helm!—square in!”
In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon
her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her
long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one
sufficient steed.
Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s
tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
“I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full
of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down,
down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of
thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!”
“Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr.
Starbuck—sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab
mutter, ‘Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of
mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.’ And damn me, Ahab,
but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!”
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most
effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows
tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in
these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of
all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that
cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
tempest had left for its after sport.
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at
every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional
disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb
and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer
lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted
to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did
not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling
ship’s high 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 lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made
in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the
chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.
“The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished
to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting
flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard? drop them
over, fore and aft. Quick!”
“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be the
weaker side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and
Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let
them be, sir.”
“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!”
All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
“Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing
sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but slipping
backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants have mercy on us
all!”
To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses
from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they 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.
CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
_Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him._
“We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working
loose and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?”
“Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up
now.”
“Sir!—in God’s name!—sir?”
“Well.”
“The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?”
“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises,
but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.—By
masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some
coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest
trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now
sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards
send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft
there! I would e’en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic
is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!”
CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
_Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over
the anchors there hanging._
“No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but
you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how
long ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn’t you once say
that whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra
on its insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder
barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn’t you say
so?”
“Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve part changed my flesh since that
time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we _are_ loaded with powder
barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty
red hair, but you couldn’t get afire now. Shake yourself; you’re
Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat
collar. Don’t you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine
Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask.
But hark, again, and I’ll answer ye the other thing. First take your
leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the
rope; now listen. What’s the mighty difference between holding a mast’s
lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn’t
got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don’t you see, you
timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the
mast is first struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in
a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye, man, and all of us,—were in no
more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten
thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose
you would have every man in the world go about with a small
lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia
officer’s skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why
don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why don’t ye,
then? any man with half an eye can be sensible.”
“I don’t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.”
“Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible, that’s
a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the
turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors
now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two
anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man’s hands behind him. And
what big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron
fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the
world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long
cable, though. There, hammer that knot down, and we’ve done. So; next
to touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say,
just wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at
long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a long tailed coat ought always
to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way,
serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. Same with cocked hats; the
cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and
tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a
beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord,
Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly!
This is a nasty night, lad.”
CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
_The main-top-sail yard_.—_Tashtego passing new lashings around it_.
“Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s
the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum;
give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!”
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s
jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by
its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached
to it—for they were slack—because some play to the tiller was
indispensable.
In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed 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 error-abounding log? and in this very
Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But
shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s
company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the wilful
murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm;
and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have
his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that crime would not
be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there,
he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I
can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance;
not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat
obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye,
and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs.
Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a
prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living
power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were
pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to
ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a caged
tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his
howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me
on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is
hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone
here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me
and law.—Aye, aye, ’tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its lightning
strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin
together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and slowly, stealthily,
and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against
the door.
“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A
touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh
Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man,
who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may
sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall
I?—The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails
are reefed and set; she heads her course.”
“Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s
tormented sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream
to speak.
The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel;
Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
“He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell
him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on
like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded
so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world
boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the
invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;
where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned
Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a
crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to
eye the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly
settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward
place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating
wake.
“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot
of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to
ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at this
hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause.
Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse
of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost
seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two
compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the
old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened
before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s
all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”
“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate,
gloomily.
Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one
with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much
marvelled at, that such things should be. 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. The Log and Line.
While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen,
and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave
the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form’s sake
than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the
course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden
reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the
railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and
wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that
hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he
happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet
scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his
frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing
plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.
“Forward, there! Heave the log!”
Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.
“Take the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the
deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into
the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so
stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to
him.
Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
speak.
“Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
spoiled it.”
“’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”
“I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey
hairs of mine ’tis not worth while disputing, ’specially with a
superior, who’ll ne’er confess.”
“What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s
granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert
thou born?”
“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”
“Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”
“I know not, sir, but I was born there.”
“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man
from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall
butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”
The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
“Hold hard!”
Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the
tugging log was gone.
“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad
sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian;
reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and
mend thou the line. See to it.”
“There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer
seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in,
Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and
dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”
“Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing.
Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags
hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul
in no cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet!
a hatchet! cut it off—we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”
“Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
“Away from the quarter-deck!”
“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing.
“Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
“Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”
“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of
thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to
sieve through! Who art thou, boy?”
“Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One
hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks
cowardly—quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the
coward?”
“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens!
look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned
him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s
home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy;
thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s
down.”
“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s
hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing
as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a
man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth
now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the
white, for I will not let this go.”
“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in
gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not
what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come!
I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
Emperor’s!”
“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with
strength, the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end of the
rotten line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a
new line altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.”
CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress
solely determined by Ahab’s level log and line; the Pequod held on her
path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways
impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all
these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and
desperate scene.
At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before
the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then
headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and
unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s
murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their reveries,
and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all
transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild
cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the
crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers
remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of
all—declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the
voices of newly drowned men in the sea.
Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he
came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
explained the wonder.
Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great
numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or
some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and
kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of
wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most
mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not
only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the
human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen
peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain
circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.
But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At
sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;
and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for
sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus
with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had
not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a
rushing—and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and
looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the
sea.
The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it
always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it,
and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it
slowly filled, and 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 beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at
the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle,
and at the beginning at the end. It’s the old woman’s tricks to be
giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for
tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran away with a
bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason I never would work
for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the
Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run
off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let
me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with
pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over
the ship’s stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some
superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere
they would do the job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I
don’t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard
tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and
card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or
by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore
of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it
if we can. Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s
see—how many in the ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any
way, I’ll have me thirty separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three
feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down,
there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight
not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron,
pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
_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 greyheaded woodpecker tapping
the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that
thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag,
that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the
expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A
life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some
spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
I’ll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth,
that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain
twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed
sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again.
Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds
must empty into thee!”
CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time
the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the
broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from
the smitten hull.
“Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he
could hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question;
and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger
captain himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending
her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the
Pequod’s main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was
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 mast-head could tell
anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat;
and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing
more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have
indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was
some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals
were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her
three far to windward boats—ere going in quest of the fourth one in the
precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only been necessitated to
leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to
increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last
safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail on stunsail—after the
missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every
other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a
sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when
last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all
around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again
paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing
till 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 eight-and-forty hours let me
charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if
there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you
must, oh, you must, and you _shall_ do this thing.”
“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the
coat and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
“He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx
sailor standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s
the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the
Captain’s sons among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but among
the number of the other boat’s crews, at the same time, but on the
other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the
chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time, the
wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity;
which was only solved for him by his chief mate’s instinctively
adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies,
that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to
pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some unknown
constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not
till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his one yet
missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the
earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love, had
thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a
vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it
unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such
tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’ voyage
in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a
whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a
father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and
concern.
Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;
and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without
the least quivering of his own.
“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say _aye_ to me. Do to me
as you would have me do to you in the like case. For _you_ too have a
boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a
child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men,
now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
“Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that
prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I
forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle
watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all
strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,
leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter
rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment,
Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his
boat, and returned to his ship.
Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,
however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung
round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat
against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the
while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three
tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
But by her still halting course and winding, 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.
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
(_Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow._)
“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is
coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee
by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my
malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most
desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee,
as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own
screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”
“No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for
your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain
a part of ye.”
“Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like
applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”
“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with
ye.”
“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him.
I tell thee no; it cannot be.”
“Oh good master, master, master!
“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still
know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art
thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless
thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will
befall.”
(_Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward._)
“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now
were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip!
Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the
door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening
it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me
this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the
transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts
before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours
great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of
captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the
epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye;
fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host
to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen
one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and
cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill
up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no
names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all
cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master! master! I am
indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though
this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to
join me.”
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have
chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there;
now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude
where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had
been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered
Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with various ships
contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which
the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against;
now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which
it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting
polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months’ night
sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now
fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,
fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
single spear or leaf.
In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more
strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed
ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped
mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the
deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when
he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that
even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance
awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.
Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah
now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious
at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal
substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen
being’s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go
below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan
but wondrous eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step 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. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were
fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some
whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine
feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you
now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with
his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
“Hast killed him?”
“The harpoon is not yet forged that 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!”
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and
man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s
chest in his sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,
troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
that distinguished them.
Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle
air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the
girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen
here at the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving
alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the
ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the
morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s
forehead of heaven.
Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on
the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side
and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the
more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the
lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a
moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that
winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world,
so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that
however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save
and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into
the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee
drop.
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing
that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to
touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood
there.
Ahab turned.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir.”
“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such
a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a
boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty
years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab
forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not
spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the
desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a
Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any
sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness!
Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this;
only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty
years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment
of my 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 far-away meadow; they have
been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and
the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we
how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust
amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the
half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”
But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
leaning over the same rail.
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at
intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some
barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that
peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living
sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane,
and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as
possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly
altered, and the sail to be shortened.
The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
with their clothes in their hands.
“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were
hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and
while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the
air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is
Moby Dick!”
Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final
perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just
beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s
head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale
was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into
the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they
had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men
all around him.
“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
cried out,” said Tashtego.
“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
reserved the doubloon for me. _I_ only; none of ye could have raised
the White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!—there she
blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn, lingering,
methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale’s
visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down
top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay
on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So;
steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All
ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck;
lower, lower,—quick, quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.
“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from
us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”
“Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up!
Shiver her!—shiver her!—So; well that! Boats, boats!”
Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails
set—all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to
leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up
Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter
came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling
hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated
thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy,
greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly
projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged
waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky
forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and
behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving
valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and
danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of
hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their
fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull
of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected
from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud of
soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over
the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail
feathers streaming like pennons.
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
divinely swam.
On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once
leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale
shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured
to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all
who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way
thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among
waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his
submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.
But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an
instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s
Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air,
the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.
Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls
longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.
With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift,
the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed
beyond the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed
whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze
now freshened; the sea began to swell.
“The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now
all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could
discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down
into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a
white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long
crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the
undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw;
his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea.
The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble
tomb; and giving one 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 treble-banked his every fin; swimming with
a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these
circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely
prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long
a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing
barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself,
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate
means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her,
and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked
boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything
to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways
outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an
albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At
the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was
regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be
reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing
the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the
allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now?
D’ye see him?” and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded
them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now
aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men
aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a
still greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat,
at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped
upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered
stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded
sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old
man’s face there now stole some such added gloom as this.
Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in
his Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed—“The
thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!”
“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did
I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could
swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a
wreck.”
“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen,
and an ill one.”
“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
give an old wives’ darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles
of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye
two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the
peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How
now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he
spout ten times a second!”
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
“Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from the air.
“How heading when last seen?”
“As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
“Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and
top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before
morning; he’s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm
there! keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send
a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till
morning.”—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast—“Men,
this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till
the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him,
upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on
that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be
divided among all of ye! Away now!—the deck is thine, sir!”
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals
rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light
to spread.
“See nothing, sir.”
“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought
for;—the top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all
night. But no matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular
whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is
a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is
the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible
confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket
commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last
descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty
accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to
swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of
progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a
pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he
well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at
some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes
the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more
certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be
visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for
after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of
daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future
wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious
mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this
hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in
water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the
steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway
is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their
hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly
say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a
spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions
when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,
according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so
many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have
about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to
render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the
sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail to the
becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is
exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable
from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the
chase of whales.
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level
field.
“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck
creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two
brave fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,
on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait
that leaves no dust behind!”
“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now the
mast-head cry.
“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on and split
your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your
trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller
shuts his 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 manœuvred, 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, ye’ll hear me crack; and till
ye hear _that_, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe
ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore!
For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface;
then rise again, to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he’s
floated—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.
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm
there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day
again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the
angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a
fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for thought, had
Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels;
_that’s_ tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only
has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness
and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too
much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very
calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the
contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing
now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like
that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy
clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow
it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the
tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this
through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and
ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces.
Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a
wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink
there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever
conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run
tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.
Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing 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, mast-head—keep
a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow,
nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and
tail.”
He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
through the cloven blue air to the deck.
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s
stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him pause.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir?”
“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”
“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
Starbuck!”
“Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the
flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb,
Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a
brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
“Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by
the crew!”
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
“The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window
there; “O master, my master, come back!”
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath
the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time
they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with
their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats
in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them
in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of
marching regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that
had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first
descried; and whether it was that Ahab’s crew were all such
tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the
senses of the sharks—a matter sometimes well known to affect
them,—however it was, they seemed to follow that one boat without
molesting the others.
“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
following with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring boldly
to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by
them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?—For
when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be
sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the
evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may. Oh! my God!
what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me,
as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see
but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming? My legs
feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats
it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak
aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft
there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—mark well the whale!—Ho!
again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears the vane”—pointing
to the red flag flying at the main-truck—“Ha! he soars away with
it!—Where’s the old man now? 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 opposing bow.
“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and
no hearse can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice,
swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,
but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist,
it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping
back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for
an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of
flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the
marble trunk of the whale.
“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in
him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two
mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round
and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in
which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of
the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his
sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old
Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
“Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye, Parsee! I see
thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, _this_ then is the
hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of
thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those
boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;
if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down, men! the first thing that but
offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where’s the
whale? gone down again?”
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the
corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter
had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again
steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,—which thus
far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the
present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his
utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight
path in the sea.
“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third
day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that
madly seekest him!”
Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled
to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding
by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he
leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and
follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards,
he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three
mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats
which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in
repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he
sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying
themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all
this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers
seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking
that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to
Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another
flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance to
his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some
latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White
Whale’s way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly
nearing him once more; though indeed the whale’s last start had not
been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves
the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to
the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades
became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at
almost every dip.
“Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull
on! ’tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding water.”
“But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”
“They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he
muttered—“whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The helm! take the
helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward
to the bows of the still flying boat.
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with
the White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
advance—as the whale sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly within the
smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled
round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when,
with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his
nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so
suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated
part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have
been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen—who foreknew
not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for
its effects—these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two
of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a
combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man
helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering
sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with
the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their
seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line
felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!
“What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars!
Burst in upon him!”
Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled
round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing
in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a
larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands!
stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”
“The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.
“Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for
ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I
see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”
But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks
burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat
lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew,
trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.
Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer
remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as
with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon
as he.
“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of
air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a
woman’s fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is
this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?
Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up
helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on
towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me
now!”
“Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now
help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning
whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own
unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is
all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee,
thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins
of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would
yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh!
thou grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye
not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his
drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;—cherries!
cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”
“Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope
my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will
now come to her, for the voyage is up.”
From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their
hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all
their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side
strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of
overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution,
swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of
all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead
smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell
flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the
harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach,
they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.
“The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat;
“its wood could only be American!”
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a
time, he lay quiescent.
“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy
hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel;
and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and
Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and
without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest
shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel
my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your
furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone
life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll,
thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with
thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last
breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! _Thus_, I give up
the spear!”
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
velocity the line ran through the 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
“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.
End of Project Gutenberg’s Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville
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