file_id stringlengths 4 7 | text_sub_id int64 0 3.52k | text stringlengths 1.37k 8.33k | tokens int64 500 1.25k |
|---|---|---|---|
PG15 | 0 | 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
monsters 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. _Hollands Plutarchs Morals_.
The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balne, take up as much
in length as four acres or arpens of land. _Hollands 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. _Tookes 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
Octhers 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 monsters (whales) 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 it is not Leviathan
described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.
_Rabelais_.
This whales liver was two cartloads. _Stowes Annals_.
The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.
_Lord Bacons 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 leachs art
Mote him availle, but to returne againe
To his wounds 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 Fairie 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 Spencers Talus with his modern flail
He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
...
Their fixed javlins in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of pikes appears.
_Wallers 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 Hobbess Leviathan_.
Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat
in the mouth of a whale. _Pilgrims 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. _Fullers 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.
_Drydens Annus Mirabilis_. | 1,157 |
PG15 | 1 | 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 Edges Ten
Voyages to Spitzbergen, in Purchass_.
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. Herberts 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. _Schoutens Sixth Circumnavigation_.
We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
Jonas-in-the-Whale. * * *
Some say the whale cant 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.
_Sibbalds 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
Straffords Letter from the Bermudas. Phil. Trans. A.D._ 1668.
Whales in the sea
Gods 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 Cowleys 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.
_Ulloas 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. _Cooks 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 Troils Letters
on Bankss and Solanders 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 Jeffersons Whale Memorial to the French minister in_ 1778.
And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? _Edmund Burkes
reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery_.
Spaina great whale stranded on the shores of Europe. _Edmund
Burke_. (_somewhere_.)
A tenth branch of the kings 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 oer his head suspends
The barbed steel, and every turn attends.
_Falconers Shipwreck_. | 1,129 |
PG15 | 2 | 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 Queens Visit to London_.
Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
stroke, with immense velocity. _John Hunters 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 whales heart. _Paleys 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.
_Colnetts Voyage for the Purpose of Extending the Spermacetti Whale
Fishery_.
In the free element beneath me swam,
Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
Fishes of every color, form, and kind;
Which language cannot paint, and mariner
Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
To insect millions peopling every wave:
Gatherd 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, armd in front or jaw,
With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.
_Montgomerys World before the Flood_.
Io! Pan! Io! sing.
To the finny peoples king.
Not a mightier whale than this
In the vast Atlantic is;
Not a fatter fish than he,
Flounders round the Polar Sea.
_Charles Lambs 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:
therepointing to the seais a green pasture where our childrens
grand-children will go for bread. _Obed Macys 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 whales jaw bones. _Hawthornes
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 spout; he threw
up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at.
Hes a raal oil-butt, that fellow! _Coopers Pilot_.
The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there. _Eckermanns
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 different 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 Beales History of the Sperm
Whale_, 1839. | 1,101 |
PG15 | 3 | 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 Bennetts 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! therethere_thar_ she
blowsbowesbo-o-os!
How far off?
Two miles and a half.
Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands.
_J. Ross Brownes 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 Websters 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 Whalemans Adventures and
the Whales 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.
_McCullochs 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
stones throw of the shore (Terra Del Fuego), over which the beech
tree extended its branches. _Darwins Voyage of a Naturalist_. | 1,146 |
PG15 | 6 | 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-sickgrow quarrelsomedont sleep of nightsdo 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-boardyet, 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 ones sense of honor,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the
van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if
just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been
lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in
awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the
schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and
the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off
in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom
and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed,
I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel
Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who aint
a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may
order me abouthowever 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 wayeither in a physical or
metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is
passed round, and all hands should rub each others shoulder-blades,
and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single
penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must
pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and
being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable
infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But _being
paid_,what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man
receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly
believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no
account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign
ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world,
head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if
you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from
the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not
so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But
wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a
merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling
voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the
constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in
some unaccountable wayhe 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: | 1,235 |
PG15 | 8 | CHAPTER II. THE CARPET-BAG
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my
arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city
of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was on a Saturday
night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the
little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of
reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at
this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well
be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was
made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a
fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous
old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has
of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though
in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket
was her great originalthe Tyre of this Carthage;the place where the
first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket
did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes
to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did
that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with
imported cobble-stonesso goes the storyto 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 southwherever in your wisdom you
may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to
inquire the price, and dont be too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of The
Crossed Harpoonsbut 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; dont
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
preachers 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! | 1,102 |
PG15 | 9 | 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
underneathThe 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 placea 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 Pauls 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 writerof whose works I possess the
only copy extantit 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
mindold black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are
windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didnt
stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint
here and there. But its 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. | 887 |
PG15 | 10 | CHAPTER III. THE SPOUTER-INN
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent
study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of
the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint
of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however
wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive
a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to
it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what
that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas,
deceptive idea would dart you through.Its the Black Sea in a midnight
gale.Its the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.Its a
blasted heath.Its a Hyperborean winter scene.Its the breaking-up of
the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to
that one portentous something in the pictures 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 artists 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
harpoonso like a corkscrew nowwas flung in Javan seas, and run away
with by a whale, years afterward slain off the Cape of Blanco. The
original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle
sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last
was found imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched waycut
through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
fire-places all roundyou 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 crafts
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 worlds remotest nooks. Projecting from the
further angle of the room stands a dark-looking denthe bara rude
attempt at a right whales head. Be that how it may, there stands the
vast arched bone of the whales 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. | 1,124 |
PG15 | 11 | Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true
cylinders withoutwithin, 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 glassthe 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 fullnot a bed
unoccupied. But avast, he added, tapping his forehead, you haint no
objections to sharing a harpooneers blanket, have ye? I spose you are
goin a whalin, so youd 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 mans 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 didnt 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 Icelandno fire at allthe landlord said
he couldnt 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 kindnot 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, youll 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
donthe eats nothing but steaks, and likes em rare.
The devil he does, says I. Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?
Hell 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, Thats the Grampuss crew. I seed her reported in the offing
this morning; a three years voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now
well 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 whales mouththe barwhen 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. | 1,079 |
PG15 | 12 | The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even
with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began
capering about most obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though
he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his
own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much
noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the
sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though
but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I
will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six
feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I
have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and
burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the
deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem
to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a
Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of
those tall mountaineers from the Alleganian Ridge in Virginia. When the
revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped
away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on
the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and
being, it seems, for some reason a huge favorite with them, they raised
a cry of Bulkington! Bulkington! wheres Bulkington? and darted out
of the house in pursuit of him.
It was now about nine oclock, 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 dont 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
midnighthow could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
Landlord! Ive changed my mind about that harpooneer.I shant sleep
with him. Ill try the bench here.
Just as you please; Im sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a
mattress, and its a plaguy rough board herefeeling of the knots and
notches. But wait a bit, Skrimshander; Ive got a carpenters plane
there in the barwait, I say, and Ill 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 heavens sake to quitthe
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 oneso 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. | 1,157 |
PG15 | 13 | The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldnt I steal
a march on himbolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be
wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon
second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next
morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be
standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!
Still, looking around me again, and seeing no possible chance of
spending a sufferable night unless in some other persons bed, I began
to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices
against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, Ill wait awhile; he must be
dropping in before long. Ill have a good look at him then, and perhaps
we may become jolly good bedfellows after alltheres 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 hedoes he always keep such
late hours? It was now hard upon twelve oclock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be
mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. No, he
answered, generally hes an early birdairley to bed and airley to
riseyes, hes the bird what catches the worm.But to-night he went out
a peddling, you see, and I dont see what on airth keeps him so late,
unless, may be, he cant sell his head.
Cant 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?
Thats precisely it, said the landlord, and I told him he couldnt
sell it here, the markets overstocked.
With what? shouted I.
With heads to be sure; aint there too many heads in the world?
I tell you what it is, landlord, said I, quite calmly, youd better
stop spinning that yarn to meIm not green.
May be not, taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, but I
rayther guess youll be done _brown_ if that ere harpooneer hears you a
slanderin his head.
Ill break it for him, said I, now flying into a passion again at
this unaccountable farrago of the landlords.
Its broke aready, said he.
Broke, said I_broke_, do you mean?
Sartain, and thats the very reason he cant 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 bedfellowa 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 Ive 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, thats 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 hes sold all on em but one, and
that one hes trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrows 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. | 1,094 |
PG15 | 14 | This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed
that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling mebut at the
same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out a Saturday
night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business
as selling the heads of dead idolators?
Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.
He pays reglar, was the rejoinder. But come, its getting dreadful
late, you had better be turning flukesits a nice bed: Sal and me
slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. Theres plenty room
for two to kick about in that bed; its an almighty big bed that. Why,
afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the
foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and
somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.
After that, Sal said it wouldnt do. Come along here, Ill 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 its Sundayyou wont see that
harpooneer to-night; hes come to anchor somewherecome along then;
_do_ come; _wont_ 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 seamans bag, containing the harpooneers 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 harpooneers 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. | 1,030 |
PG15 | 15 | 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 bags mouth. This accomplished, however,
he turned roundwhen, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was
of a dark purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large,
blackish looking squares. Yes, its just as I thought, hes a terrible
bedfellow; hes 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 mana whaleman toowho, 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! Its 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
suns 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 heada ghastly
thing enoughand crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his
hata new beaver hatwhen I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise.
There was no hair on his headnone to speak of at leastnothing 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 tooperhaps the heads of his own
brothers. He might take a fancy to mineheavens! look at that tomahawk! | 1,135 |
PG15 | 16 | But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me
that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall,
or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in
the pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image
with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days old
Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought
that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar
manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened
a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing
but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage
goes up to the empty fireplace, and removing the papered fire-board,
sets up this little hunchbacked image, like a tenpin, between the
andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty,
so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine
or chapel for his Congo idol.
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but
ill at ease meantimeto see what was next to follow. First he takes
about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places
them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on
top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into
a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the
fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed
to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the
biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite
offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to
fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these
strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from
the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing
some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in
the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the
idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket
as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing
him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell into
which I had so long been bound.
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.
Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for
an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the
handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment
the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between
his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it
now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his
guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my
meaning.
Who-e debel you?he at last saidyou no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.
And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the
dark.
Landlord, for Gods 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.
Dont be afraid now, said he, grinning again. Queequeg here wouldnt
harm a hair of your head.
Stop your grinning, shouted I, and why didnt you tell me that that
infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?
I thought ye knowd it;didnt I tell ye, he was peddlin heads around
town?but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look hereyou
sabbee me, I sabbee youthis man sleepe youyou sabbee? | 1,076 |
PG15 | 19 | He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall
one, by the by, and thenstill minus his trowsershe hunted up his
boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his
next movement was to crush himselfboots in hand, and hat onunder 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
stateneither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner. His
education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not
been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled
himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage,
he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At
last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over
his eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not
being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide
onesprobably not made to order eitherrather 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 Rogerss 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 marshals baton. | 700 |
PG15 | 20 | CHAPTER V. 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 mores 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 fellows 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 Mungos
performancesthis 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 seasentire
strangers to themand duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here
they sat at a social breakfast tableall of the same calling, all of
kindred tasteslooking 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 Queequegwhy, Queequeg sat there among themat 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 peoples estimation, to do anything coolly
is to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequegs 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. | 1,046 |
PG15 | 21 | CHAPTER VI. THE STREET
If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a
civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first
daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign
parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners
will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not
unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live
Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water
street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only
sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street
corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy
flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatabooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,
and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft
which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still
more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain
and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames;
fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and
snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence
they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old.
Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat
and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.
Here comes another with a sou-wester and a bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred oneI mean a
downright bumpkin dandya 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 mapleslong
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
creations 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. | 1,190 |
PG15 | 25 | CHAPTER VIII. THE PULPIT
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it
was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he
was a very great favorite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his
youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.
At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a
healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there
shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloomthe spring
verdure peeping forth even beneath Februarys snow. No one having
previously heard his history, could for the first time behold Father
Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were certain
engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable to that
adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that
he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for
his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot
cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of
the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one
by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner;
when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the
floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the
architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and
finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side
ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife
of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of
red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely
headed, and stained with a mahogany color, the whole contrivance,
considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad
taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both
hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple
cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailorlike but still
reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if
ascending the main-top of his vessel.
The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case
with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of
wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of
the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship,
these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not
prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn
round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder
step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him
impregnable in his little Quebec.
I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and
sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any
mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober
reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen.
Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies
his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties
and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the
word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a
self-containing strongholda 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 chaplains 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 angels
face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
ships tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into
the Victorys 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
offserenest azure is at hand. | 1,107 |
PG15 | 30 | This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from
Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God
has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than
to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe
to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would
not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him
who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is
himself a castaway!
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with
a heavenly enthusiasm,But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of
every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,
than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than
the kelson is low? Delight is to hima far, far upward, and inward
delightwho 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
breathO Father!chiefly known to me by Thy rodmortal or immortal,
here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this worlds,
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. | 569 |
PG15 | 32 | 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 Pagans
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 countrys 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
earthpagans and all includedcan 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 Queequega cosy, loving pair. | 848 |
PG15 | 33 | CHAPTER XI. NIGHTGOWN
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what
little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like
getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
noses bending over them, as if our knee-pans were warming-pans. We felt
very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;
indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the
room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world
that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If
you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been
so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But
if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown
of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general
consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For
this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire,
which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height
of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket
between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there
you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether
by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of
being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright
except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper
element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey
part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and
self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the
unilluminated twelve-oclock-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 landlords 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. | 944 |
PG15 | 34 | CHAPTER XII. BIOGRAPHICAL
Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and
South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a
grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
sapling; even then, in Queequegs 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 veinsroyal
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he
nourished in his untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his fathers 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 fathers influence
could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled
off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when
she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a
low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into
the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with
its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and
when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her
side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe;
climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the
deck, grappled a ringbolt there, and swore not to let it go, though
hacked in pieces.
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and
Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his
wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and
told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savagethis
sea Prince of Wales, never saw the captains 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 bottomso he told mehe
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 fathers
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, its a wicked world in all meridians; Ill 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. | 1,188 |
PG15 | 36 | CHAPTER XIII. WHEELBARROW
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
for a block, I settled my own and comrades bill; using, however, my
comrades money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between
me and Queequegespecially as Peter Coffins 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 Queequegs 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
muchfor 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
scythesthough in no wise obliged to furnished themeven 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
thingthough in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in
which to manage the barrowQueequeg 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. Didnt 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 commanderfrom all accounts, a very
stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captainthis
commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequegs sister, a
pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding
guests were assembled at the brides 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, Queequegs father. Grace being said,for those people have their
grace as well as wethough 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 feastsGrace, 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 himselfbeing Captain of a shipas having plain
precedence over a mere island King, especially in the Kings own
housethe Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch
bowl;taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. Now, said
Queequeg, what you tink now,Didnt 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. | 1,162 |
PG15 | 37 | Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his
snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!how I spurned that turnpike
earth!that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish
heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea
which will permit no records.
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed
teeth. On, on we flew, and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to
the blast; ducked and dived her brows as a slave before the Sultan.
Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a
wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes.
So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging
bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of
the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow
beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything
more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies
and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come
from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these
young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkins
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, heres 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? Dont 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, Ill 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 instants 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. | 1,171 |
PG15 | 39 | CHAPTER XIV. 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 ita 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
dont 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 days walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand
shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; that they are so shut up,
belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island
of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will
sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these
extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle
swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant
Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child
borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the
same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage
they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory
casket,the poor little Indians 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
Behrings 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 Nantucketers. 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 Noahs 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. | 1,059 |
PG15 | 41 | CHAPTER XV. 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 warehouseour first point of departuremust 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. Its ominous, thinks
I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
tombstones staring at me in the whalemens 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 Ill be combing ye!
Come on, Queequeg, said I, all right. Theres 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 saidClam or Cod?
Whats that about Cods, maam? 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 thats a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
time, aint it, Mrs Hussey?
But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing
but the word clam, Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading
to the kitchen, and bawling out clam for two, disappeared.
Queequeg, said I, do you think that we can make out a supper for us
both on one clam?
However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up
into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully
seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the
frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favorite fishing
food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we
despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and
bethinking me of Mrs. Husseys clam and cod announcement, I thought I
would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered
the word cod with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few
moments the savory steam came forth again, but with a different flavor,
and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us. | 1,149 |
PG15 | 42 | 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? Whats
that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? But look,
Queequeg, aint that a live eel in your bowl? Wheres 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 fishermens
boats, I saw Hoseas brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and
marching along the sand with each foot in a cods 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 harpoonbut why not? Because
its dangerous, says she. Ever since young Stiggs coming from that
unfortnt vyge 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 lets have a couple of smoked herring by way of
variety. | 515 |
PG15 | 44 | Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having
authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at
first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of
tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It
seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical
shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber
black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the
right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of
these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at
the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved
to and fro like a top-knot on some old Pottowotamie Sachems 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
ships work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all
over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a
stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
constructed.
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his
continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
windward;for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
Is this the Captain of the Pequod? said I, advancing to the door of
the tent.
Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of
him? he demanded.
I was thinking of shipping.
Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou are no Nantucketerever been in a
stove boat?
No, Sir, I never have.
Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare sayeh?
Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. Ive 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?Ill 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, dont it, eh?Hast not been a pirate, hast
thou?Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?Dost not think of
murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?
I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of
these half humorous inuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard.
But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
shipping ye.
Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.
Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?
Who is Captain Ahab, sir?
Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.
I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.
Thou art speaking to Captain Pelegthats 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! | 1,088 |
PG15 | 47 | It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
fortuneand 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 ships 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 dye say, what lay
shall we give this young man?
Thou knowest best, was the sepulchral reply, the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh wouldnt 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 mumblingfor where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also.
I am going to put him down for the three hundredth, said Peleg, do
ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.
Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the
duty thou owest to the other owners of this shipwidows and orphans,
many of themand 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 cant 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. Its an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that
hes bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me,
and start my soul-bolts, but IllIllyes, Ill swallow a live goat
with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting,
drab-colored son of a wooden guna 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. | 1,106 |
PG15 | 50 | CHAPTER XVII. THE RAMADAN
As Queequegs 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 everybodys 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 allPresbyterians and Pagans
alikefor 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 dont you speak? Its IIshmael. 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 Queequegs harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous
had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. Thats 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 metthe chambermaid. La! La! she cried, I thought something must
be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was
locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and its 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, maam!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 Gods sake, and fetch
something to pry open the doorthe axe!the axe! hes 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.
Whats the matter with you, young man?
Get the axe! For Gods 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. Whats the
matter with you? Whats 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 exclaimedNo! I havent
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
Queequegs harpoon was missing. Hes killed himself, she cried. Its
unfortnate stiggs done over againthere goes another counterpanegod
pity his poor mother!it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad
a sister? Wheres that girl?there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter,
and tell him to paint me a sign, withno 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! Whats that noise there? You, young
man, avast there! | 1,196 |
PG15 | 51 | And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force
open the door.
I wont allow it; I wont have my premises spoiled. Go for the
locksmith, theres one about a mile from here. But avast! putting her
hand in her side-pocket, heres a key thatll fit, I guess; lets
see. And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequegs
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, whats the matter with
you?
He haint 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, hes _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
dofor all my polite arts and blandishmentshe would not move a peg,
nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in
any the slightest way.
I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do
they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so;
yes, its part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; hell
get up sooner or later, no doubt. It cant last for ever, thank God,
and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I dont believe its 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 oclock, 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 heavens sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and
have some supper. Youll starve; youll kill yourself, Queequeg. But
not a word did he reply.
Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;
and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to
turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as
it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his
ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not
get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere
thought of Queequegnot four feet offsitting 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. | 1,110 |
PG15 | 52 | Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any persons religion,
be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any
other person, because that other person dont believe it also. But when
a mans 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 oclock 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 victors 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. | 877 |
PG15 | 53 | CHAPTER XVIII. HIS MARK
As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,
and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that
craft, unless they previously produced their papers.
What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg? said I, now jumping on the
bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
I mean, he replied, he must show his papers.
Yea, said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from
behind Pelegs, out of the wigwam. He must show that hes converted.
Son of darkness, he added, turning to Queequeg, art thou at present
in communion with any christian church?
Why, said I, hes 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 Colemans 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 hasnt been baptized right either, or it
would have washed some of that devils blue off his face.
Do tell, now, cried Bildad, is this Philistine a regular member of
Deacon Deuteronomys meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass
it every Lords day.
I dont 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 meexplain
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 mothers son and soul of us
belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some
queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief; in _that_ we all join
hands.
Splice, thou meanst _splice_ hands, cried Peleg, drawing nearer.
Young man, youd better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast
hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomywhy Father
Mapple himself couldnt beat it, and hes reckoned something. Come
aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog
therewhats that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great
anchor, what a harpoon hes 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:
Capain, 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 Bildads broad brim, clean across the
ships 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 ships papers. We must
have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye,
Quohog, well give ye the ninetieth lay, and thats 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 ships 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 dont know how
to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or
make thy mark? | 1,171 |
PG15 | 54 | 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 Pelegs obstinate mistake touching his
appellative, it stood something like this:
Quohog.
his mark.
Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one
entitled The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose, placed it in
Queequegs 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 Bildads 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 voyagersit 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, canst 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, didst
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 handshow to rig jury-mastshow to get into the
nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.
Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where
we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
sail-makers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he
stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which
otherwise might have been wasted. | 837 |
PG15 | 55 | CHAPTER XIX. 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 Pequodthat 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 havnt got any, he said quickly. No matter though,
I know many chaps that havnt got any,good luck to em; and they are
all the better off for it. A souls a sort of a fifth wheel to a
wagon.
What are you jabbering about, shipmate? said I.
_Hes_ 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, lets go; this fellow has broken loose from
somewhere; hes talking about something and somebody we dont know.
Stop! cried the stranger. Ye said trueye havnt seen Old Thunder
yet, have ye?
Whos 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
havnt seen him yet, have ye?
No, we havnt. Hes 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 didnt tell much of anything about him; only Ive heard that hes
a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.
Thats true, thats trueyes, both true enough. But you must jump when
he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and gothats 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. Didnt ye hear a word about them
matters and something more, eh? No, I dont think ye did; how could ye?
Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But howsever, mayhap, yeve
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 amostI mean they
know hes only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.
My friend, said I, what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
dont know, and I dont 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, ehsure 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:Yeve shipped, have ye? Names down on the
papers? Well, well, whats signed, is signed; and whats to be, will
be; and then again, perhaps it wont be, after all. Any how, its all
fixed and arranged aready; 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; Im sorry I stopped
ye. | 1,101 |
PG15 | 56 | 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; thats all I have to say.
And its said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way;
you are just the man for himthe likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates,
morning! Oh, when ye get there, tell em Ive concluded not to make one
of em.
Ah, my dear fellow, you cant fool us that wayyou cant 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, lets leave this crazy
man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?
Elijah.
Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each
others 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. | 583 |
PG15 | 57 | CHAPTER XX. 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 ships 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 Queequegs signing the articles, word was given at
all the inns where the ships 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 thingsbeds, 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
Bildads 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 stewards pantry; another time with a bunch of
quills for the chief mates desk, where he kept his log; a third time
with a roll of flannel for the small of some ones rheumatic back.
Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was CharityAunt
Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this
charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn
her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort,
and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother
Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of
well-saved dollars.
But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and
a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him
a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down
went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once and a
while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men
down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and
then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and
when he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they
would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected
aboard every day; meantime, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, could
attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I
had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly
in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so
long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the
absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open
sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he
be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up
his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I
said nothing, and tried to think nothing. | 1,198 |
PG15 | 59 | CHAPTER XXI. GOING ABOARD
It was nearly six oclock, 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 cant be shadows; shes off by sunrise, I guess; come
on!
Avast! cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close
behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating
himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain
twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
Going aboard?
Hands off, will you, said I.
Lookee here, said Queequeg, shaking himself, go way!
Aint going aboard, then?
Yes, we are, said I, but what business is that of yours? Do you
know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?
No, no, no; I wasnt 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?
Hes 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, saidDid 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 againstbut never mind, never mindits all one,
all in the family too;sharp frost this morning, aint it? Good bye to
ye. Shant see ye again very soon, I guess; unless its 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 Elijahs 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 sleepers rear,
as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado,
sat quietly down there.
Gracious! Queequeg, dont sit there, said I.
Oh! perry dood seat, said Queequeg, my country way; wont hurt him
face.
Face! said I, call that his face? very benevolent countenance then;
but how hard he breathes, hes heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you
are heavy, its grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look,
hell twitch you off soon. I wonder he dont 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. | 1,198 |
PG15 | 61 | CHAPTER XXII. MERRY CHRISTMAS
At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ships
riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and
after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whaleboat, with her
last gifta night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law,
and a spare bible for the stewardafter 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 readyjust spoke to himnothing more to be got from shore, eh?
Well, call all hands, then. Muster em aft hereblast 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 pilots; and as he
was not yet completely recoveredso they saidtherefore, Captain Ahab
stayed below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the
merchant service many captains never show themselves on deck for a
considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the
cabin table, having a farewell merrymaking with their shore friends,
before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.
But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain
Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and
commanding, and not Bildad.
Aft here, ye sons of bachelors, he cried, as the sailors lingered at
the main-mast. Mr. Starbuck, drive em aft.
Strike the tent there!was the next order. As I hinted before, this
whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the
Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known
to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!jump!was the next command, and
the crew sprang for the handspikes.
Now, in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the
pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with
Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices, was one of the
licensed pilots of the porthe 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 craftBildad, 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 seamans 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 dont ye
spring, I say, all of yespring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red
whiskers; spring there, Scotchcap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I
say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out! And so saying, he moved
along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while
imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I,
Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day. | 1,138 |
PG15 | 62 | 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
voyagebeyond 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 decknow
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 Bildadcome, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard
there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful,
careful!come, Bildad, boysay your last. Luck to ye, Starbuckluck to
ye, Mr. Stubbluck to ye, Mr. Flaskgood-bye, and good luck to ye
alland this day three years Ill 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 yell have fine weather now, so
that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among yea pleasant sun is all he
needs, and yell have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be
careful in the hunt, ye mates. Dont stave the boats needlessly, ye
harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.
within the year. Dont forget your prayers, either. Mr Starbuck, mind
that cooper dont waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in
the green locker! Dont whale it too much a Lords days, men; but
dont miss a fair chance either, thats rejecting Heavens 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! Dont keep that cheese too long down in the hold,
Mr. Starbuck; itll spoil. Be careful with the buttertwenty cents the
pound it was, and mind ye, if | 1,107 |
PG15 | 64 | CHAPTER XXIII. THE LEE SHORE
Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed
mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
When on that shivering winters 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 thats kind to our
mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ships
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 seas landlessness again; for refuges sake forlornly
rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the
wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the
treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless,
indefinite as Godso, 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-perishingstraight up, leaps thy apotheosis! | 555 |
PG15 | 66 | 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
sthetically 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
harpooneersall kith and kin to noble Benjaminthis 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, thats 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 worlds
capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian
coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.
_No dignity in whaling?_ The dignity of our calling the very heavens
attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your
hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty
whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of
antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute
in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably
ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a
man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death,
my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in
my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory
to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
*
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head. | 1,033 |
PG15 | 69 | CHAPTER XXVI. 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 youll 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 fathers? 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. | 1,128 |
PG15 | 70 | But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete
abasement of poor Starbucks fortitude, scarce might I have the heart
to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any
ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so
far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character
seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a
valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But
this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes,
but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt
see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that
democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God;
Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all
democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
touch that workmans 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! | 586 |
PG15 | 71 | CHAPTER XXVII. KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about
the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very
death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and
off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his
old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated
monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death
into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question;
but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a
comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a
sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there,
about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and
not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easygoing,
unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black
little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would
almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever
he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from
the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,
whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless
miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in
time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated
handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal
tribulations, Stubbs tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Marthas 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 carpenters nails are divided into wrought
nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of
those battering seas. | 1,046 |
PG15 | 74 | CHAPTER XXVIII. 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 Elijahs 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
uneasinessto call it sowhich 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 thisand rightly ascribed itto the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation
in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the
aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was
most forcibly calculated to allay these colorless misgivings, and
induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.
Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own
different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of
them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being
Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had
biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the
southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed,
gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable
weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey
and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the
ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping
and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of
the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the
taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension;
Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when
the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellinis 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
Tashtegos 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 outwhich might hardly come to
pass, so he mutteredthen, whoever should do that last office for the
dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole. | 1,187 |
PG15 | 75 | 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 whales 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 Pequods quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there
was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His
bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a
shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the
ships 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. | 779 |
PG15 | 79 | CHAPTER XXXI. QUEEN MAB
Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old mans
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, Flaskyou know how
curious all dreams arethrough 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, whats the row? Its not
a real leg, only a false leg. And theres a mighty difference between
a living thump and a dead thump. Thats what makes a blow from the
hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane.
The living memberthat 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 pyramidso confoundedly contradictory was it
all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, whats his leg
now, but a canea whalebone cane. Yes, thinks I, it was only a
playful cudgellingin fact, only a whaleboning that he gave menot a
base kick. Besides, thinks I, look at it once; why, the end of itthe
foot partwhat a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed
farmer kicked me, _theres_ 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 cloutwhat 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 wont 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 wasnt 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,
whats the matter now, old fellow? Look ye here, says he; lets
argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didnt he? Yes, he did,
says Iright _here_ it was. Very good, says hehe used his ivory
leg, didnt he? Yes, he did, says I. Well then, says he, wise
Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didnt he kick with right good
will? it wasnt 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. Its
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 cant help yourself, wise Stubb. Dont 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 dont know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.
May be, may be. But its made a wise man of me, Flask. Dye see Ahab
standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing
you can do, Flask, is to let that old man alone; never speak to him,
whatever he says. Halloa! whats that he shouts? Hark! | 1,110 |
PG15 | 81 | CHAPTER XXXII. CETOLOGY
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost
in its unshored, harborless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the
Pequods 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; Linnus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
Marten; Lacpde; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick
Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne;
the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to
what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above
cited extracts will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen
ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate
subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great
sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy
mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper
upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of
the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the
profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the
then fabulous and utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to
this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past
days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was
to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a
new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,the
Greenland whale is deposed,the great sperm whale now reigneth!
There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the
living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest
degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beales and Bennetts;
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, orin this place at leastto 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. | 1,146 |
PG15 | 84 | But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the
whale, in his anatomythere, at least, we shall be able to hit the
right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the
Greenland whales 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.[4] These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among
which at present may be numbered:I., the _Grampus;_ II., the _Black
Fish;_ III., the _Narwhale;_ IV., the _Thrasher;_ V., the _Killer_.
[4] 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 bookbinders Quarto volume in its
diminished 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
fishermens 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
employmentas 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. | 1,197 |
PG15 | 85 | 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 Narwhalehowever that may beit 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-unicorns horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote
against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices.
It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same
way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.
Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity.
Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that
voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him
from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the
Thames; when Sir Martin returned from that voyage, saith Black
Letter, on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long
horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle
at Windsor. An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on
bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn,
pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.
The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
milk-white ground color, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.
His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it,
and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER IV. (_Killer_).Of this whale little is
precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed
naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say
that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savagea 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 whales 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 WHALESa 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 isi. e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal
tail. | 1,115 |
PG15 | 86 | BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER I (_Huzza Porpoise_).This is the
common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own
bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something
must be done to distinguish them. I call them thus, because he always
swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing
themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their
appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of
fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward.
They are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted
a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding
these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly
gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield
you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid
extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among
jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat
is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that a
porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him;
and you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER II. (_Algerine Porpoise_).A pirate.
Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat
larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make.
Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many
times, but never yet saw him captured.
BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER III. (_Mealy-mouthed Porpoise_). The
largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it
is known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been
designated, is that of the fishersRight-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 ships hull, called the bright waist, that line streaks him from
stem to stern, with two separate colors, black above and white below.
The white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which
makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a
meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of
the common porpoise.
Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the
Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the
Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,
half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their
forecastle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to
future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If
any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then
he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his
Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk
Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the
Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale;
the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic,
Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists
of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I
omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them
for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.
Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be
here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have
kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus
unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the
crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small
erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true
ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
completing anything. This whole book is but a draughtnay, but the
draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! | 1,159 |
PG15 | 88 | CHAPTER XXXIII. 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 harpooneers 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 captains 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 captains 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 ships 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
thisthe 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 captains 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 mans 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 Gods true princes of the Empire from
the worlds 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. | 1,246 |
PG15 | 94 | In one of those southern whalemen, on a long three or four years
voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the
mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be
deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion
of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of
anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a
comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,
a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small
and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your
most usual point of perch is the head of the t gallant-mast, where you
stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen)
called the t gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the
beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bulls horns. To
be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in
the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest
watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul
is glued inside of its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about
in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing
(like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a
watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or
additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of
drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of
your watch-coat.
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or
pulpits, called _crows-nests_, in which the lookouts of a Greenland
whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In
the fire-side narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled A Voyage among the
Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the
re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland; in this
admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
_crows-nest_ of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleets
good craft. He called it the _Sleets crows-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 Sleets crows-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 crows 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 crows-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 crows-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 ships planks, and in the Glaciers 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 crows 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 birds nest within three or four perches of the
pole. | 1,224 |
PG15 | 95 | But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
Captain Sleet and his Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is
greatly counterbalanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those
seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used
to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a
chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;
then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the
top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so
at last mount to my ultimate destination.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept
but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how
could Ibeing 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 Phdon 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, weve been
cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
yet. Whales are scarce as hens 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 Cranmers 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! | 976 |
PG15 | 96 | CHAPTER XXXVI. 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-printsthe 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.
Dye mark him, Flask? whispered Stubb; the chick thats 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 ships 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! dye see this Spanish ounce of gold?holding up a
broad bright coin to the sunit is a sixteen dollar piece, men. Dye
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 flukelook ye, whosoever of ye raises me
that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys! | 1,108 |
PG15 | 100 | CHAPTER XXXVII. SUNSET
_The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out._
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, whereer I
sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;
but first I pass.
Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblets rim, the warm waves blush like
wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sunslow 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 ironthat I knownot gold. Tis split, toothat 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 neer 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
nightgood 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 Ive dared, Ive willed; and
what Ive willed, Ill do! They think me madStarbuck does; but Im
demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness thats only calm to
comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered;
andAye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my
dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. Thats
more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye
cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I
will not say as school-boys do to bullies,Take some one of your own
size; dont pommel _me!_ No, yeve 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, Ahabs 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! Naughts an obstacle, naughts an
angle to the iron way! | 768 |
PG15 | 101 | CHAPTER XXXVIII. DUSK
_By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it._
My soul is more than matched; shes 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! Whos 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
clocks 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 feedOh, life! tis now that I do feel
the latent horror in thee! but tis not me! that horrors 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! | 573 |
PG15 | 105 | CHAPTER XLI. 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; Ahabs 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 assaultsnot restricted to sprained wrists and ancles, broken
limbs, or devouring amputationsbut fatal to the last degree of
fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and
piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake
the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White
Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
terrible events,as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in
maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors
abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.
And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery
surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and
fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only
are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and
superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they
are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is
appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its
greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such
remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a
thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled hearthstone, or
aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and
longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is
wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many
a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over
the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in
the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
half-formed ftal 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. | 1,164 |
PG15 | 106 | 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
perhapseither from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there
are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not
sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered
the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is
restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;
seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
fire-side interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern
whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale
anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows
which stem him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
naturalistsOlassen and Povelsondeclaring 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 Cuviers, were these or almost
similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron
himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks
included) are struck with the most lively terrors, and often in the
precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with
such violence as to cause instantaneous death. And however the general
experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in
their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the
superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their
vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few
of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring
warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be
hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition
as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be
inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are
some remarkable documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things
were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,
chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the
specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if
offered.
One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at last coming to be linked
with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was
the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had
actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same
instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit
altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as
the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged,
even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm
Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to
his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious
and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning
the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he
transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant
points.
It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and
as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby,
that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose
bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland
seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has
been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could
not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been
believed by some whalemen, that the nor west passage, so long a
problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the
real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old
times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there
was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the
surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain
near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy
Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost
fully equalled by the realities of the whaleman. | 1,164 |
PG15 | 107 | 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 outa peculiar snow-white wrinkled
forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent
features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he
revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the
same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by
his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue
sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural
terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to
specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.
More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than
perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers,
with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known
to turn around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave
their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their
ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar
disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in
the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whales
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 whales 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
Ahabs 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 whales 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 hearts shell upon it. | 1,168 |
PG15 | 111 | 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 Gods great,
unflattering laureate, Nature.[6]
[6] 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 kings ghost in
supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,
methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its
wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the
miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at
that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that
darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a
sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! I never had
heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is
utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned
that goney was some seamans name for albatross. So that by no
possibility could Coleridges 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 ships 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-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through
his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to
the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe.
Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this
noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so
clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it
which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain
nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
Albatross. | 1,096 |
PG15 | 112 | 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 menhas no substantive
deformityand 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 fogYea, 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
whitenessthough for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
modified;can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us
to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about
to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able
to recall them now.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare
mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary,
speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, downcast and hooded
with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of
the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White
Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and
kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower
of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an
untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
neighborsthe 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 Virginias Blue Ridge is
full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all
latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a
spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with
mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves,
followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a
wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in
reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does the tall pale man
of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrestingly glides
through the green of the groveswhy is this phantom more terrible than
all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg? | 1,082 |
PG15 | 113 | 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 canst 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 whitenessas if
from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming
round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded
phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in
vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm
they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again.
Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, Sir, it was not so much
the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me?
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to
lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding
the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal
trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and
half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his
misery, views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with
its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is
but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a
hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
Vermont, far removed from all beasts of preywhy 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 muskinesswhy
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! | 1,099 |
PG15 | 114 | 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 portentouswhy, as we have seen, it is at once the most
meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christians Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent
in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as
the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all
colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snowsa colorless, all-color of
atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of
the natural philosophers, that all other earthly huesevery stately or
lovely emblazoningthe 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 tingepondering all
this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful
travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses
upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the
monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of
all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the
fiery hunt? | 560 |
PG15 | 116 | CHAPTER XLIV. 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 whales 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 whales 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.[7]
[7] 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 instinctsay, rather, secret
intelligence from the Deitymostly 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 surveyors 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-ships 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. | 1,016 |
PG15 | 117 | And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be
wholly without prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
herds which hunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were
found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and
unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In
general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the
solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that
though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what
is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on
the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to
visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she
would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding
grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed
only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his
places of prolonged abode. And where Ahabs 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 phrasethe
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 Pequods sailing had,
perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very
complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and
sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead
of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;
if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote
from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow
off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any
other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas,
Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom,
might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the
Pequods 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 reveriestallied him, and shall he escape?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheeps 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. | 1,186 |
PG15 | 118 | Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through
the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them
round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his
life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the
case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base,
and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and
lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among
them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be
heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his
state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these,
perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent
weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of
its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming,
unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had
gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from
it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or
soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the
characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer
vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching
contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no
longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with
the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahabs case, yielding up
all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose,
by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and
devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay,
could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was
conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.
Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when
what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated
thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be
sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in
itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in
thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a
vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature
he creates. | 594 |
PG15 | 119 | CHAPTER XLV. THE AFFIDAVIT
So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed,
as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious
particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in
its earliest part, is as important a one as will be found in this
volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and
more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood,
and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of
the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity
of the main points of this affair.
I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be
content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of
items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from
these citations, I take itthe conclusion aimed at will naturally
follow of itself.
First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the
same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same
private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where
three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I
think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted
them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to
Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far
into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years,
often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with
all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of
unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been
on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,
brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.
This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the
other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this;
that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second
attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them,
afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so
fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the
last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge mole under the
whales 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
celebritynay, 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 Csar. Was it not
so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so
long didst 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. | 1,169 |
PG15 | 120 | 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 leviathando you suppose that
that poor fellows 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 boats crew. For Gods sake, be economical with your
lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of
mans 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.[8] | 1,031 |
PG15 | 121 | [8] The following are extracts from Chaces 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 manuvres 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 moments
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 placep. 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
Commodores 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 Commodores 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 Langsdorffs 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 Krusensterns
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
DWolf 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. | 1,093 |
PG15 | 124 | CHAPTER XLVI. 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 whalemans 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. Starbucks body and Starbucks coerced
will were Ahabs, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbucks brain;
still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred
his captains 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
captains 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 mens 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 unreliablethey live in the varying outer
weather, and they inhale its ficklenessand when retained for any
object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and
passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary
interests and employment should intervene and hold them healthily
suspended for the final dash.
Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for
the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food
for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and
chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two
thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without
committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious
perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final
and romantic objectthat final and romantic object, too many would have
turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of
all hopes of cashaye, 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
Pequods 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. | 1,215 |
PG15 | 126 | CHAPTER XLVII. THE MAT-MAKER
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters.
Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet
somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of revery
lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own
invisible self.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I
kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the
long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as
Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword
between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly
and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess
did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only
broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as
if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically
weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of
the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging
vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise
interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed
necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle
and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
Queequegs 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 savages
sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and
woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chanceaye, chance, free
will, and necessityno wise incompatibleall interweavingly working
together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its
ultimate courseits 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
whalemens 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 Indians.
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 quarterthis 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 shipkeepersthat 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-wars men about
to throw themselves on board an enemys ship. | 1,237 |
PG15 | 129 | In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
across Stubbs 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 Stubbs.
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!) Theres hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
Stubb, and thats what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperms 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 thats
what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whales at the bottom
of it. Well, well, so be it! Cant be helped! All right! Give way, men!
It aint 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 ships
company; but Archys 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 Stubbs 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 Ahabs precise agency in
the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the
mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the
dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the
unaccountable Elijah.
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the
furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a
circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger
yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whale-bone; like five
trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which
periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst
boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the
gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery
horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a
fencers, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance
any tendency to trip: Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar
as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All
at once the out-stretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained
fixed, while the boats 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 Flasks 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 mans 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. | 1,211 |
PG15 | 130 | I cant 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
Flasks foot, and then putting Flasks hand on his hearse-plumed head
and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous
fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was
Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a
breast-band to lean against and steady himself by.
At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously
perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily
perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the
sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more
curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy,
unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the
sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired
Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.
Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now
and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby
give to the negros lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity
stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her
tides and her seasons for that.
Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing
solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,
not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,
Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,
where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his
match across the rough sand-paper of his hand, when Tashtego, his
harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed
stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat,
crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, Down, down all, and give
way!there they are!
To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and
suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it
were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning
couriers and detached flying outriders.
All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled
water and air. But it bade far to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as
a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the
hills.
Pull, pull, my good boys, said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but
intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance
from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two
visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much
to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the
silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his
peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.
How different the loud little King-Post. Sing out and say something,
my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on
their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and Ill sign over to you
my Marthas Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children,
boys. Lay me onlay 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 boats stern like a crazed colt from the prairie. | 1,136 |
PG15 | 131 | Look at that chap now, philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a
short distance, followed afterHes got fits, that Flask has. Fits?
yes, give him fitsthats the very wordpitch fits into em. Merrily,
merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;merrys the word.
Pull, babespull, sucklingspull, 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 twothats all. Take it easywhy dont 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
histhese 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 boats bow with its
tailthese 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 mans 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. Theres 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. | 1,066 |
PG15 | 132 | Thats his hump. _There, there_, give it to him! whispered Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by;
something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea,
the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing
eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the
bottom of the ocean.
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar
to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those
boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew
darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were
useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.
So, cutting the lashing of the water-proof match keg, after many
failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then
stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the
standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up
that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There,
then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly
holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,
we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over
the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.
Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.
We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled
by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were
dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the
sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us
within a distance of not much more than its length.
Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it
tossed and gaped beneath the ships 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. | 838 |
PG15 | 133 | CHAPTER XLIX. 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 nobodys 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 whalemans discretion?
Certain. Ive 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
deaths jaws?
Cant you twist that smaller? said Flask. Yes, thats the law. I
should like to see a boats 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 boatoftentimes 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 Starbucks 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 Starbucks boat; and finally considering in
what a devils 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. | 1,099 |
PG15 | 135 | CHAPTER L. AHABS 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! hes a wonderful old man!
I dont 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 dont 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 Tamerlanes 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 huntabove all for
Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boats
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boats
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 Cabacos 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 boats 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
carpenters 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 boats crew
being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
oars, whale-boats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin
to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
excitement in the forecastle. | 1,020 |
PG15 | 137 | CHAPTER LI. 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
tgallant 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 herone to mount direct to heaven, the
other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched
Ahabs 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. | 1,157 |
PG15 | 138 | But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began
howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas
that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the
blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of
silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this
desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more
dismal than before.
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a
thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for
their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved
the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great
mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering
it had bred.
Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called
of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had
attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where
guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed
condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat
that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and
unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still
beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be
descried.
During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for
the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous
deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever
addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything
above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but
passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become
practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its
accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for
hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an
occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very
eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of
the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows,
stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to
guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a
sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened
belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by
painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift
madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness
of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence
the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the
blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not
seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old
mans 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.[9]
Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this
gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
[9] 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. | 992 |
PG15 | 139 | CHAPTER LII. 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 fisheriesa 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 Whales 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 hailedAhoy 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 strangers 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. | 973 |
PG15 | 140 | CHAPTER LIII. 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
herjudging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasionsif 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 earthoff lone
Fannings Island, or the far away Kings 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 others 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 sociableand they are so. Whereas, some
merchant ships crossing each others 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 others 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 others cross-bones, the first hail
isHow many skulls?the same way that whalers hailHow many
barrels? And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer
apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and dont like to
see overmuch of each others villanous likenesses. | 1,189 |
PG15 | 141 | 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-Wars 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 Websters ark does not
hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years
been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees.
Certainly it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the
Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.
GAM. NOUN_A social meeting of two_ (_or more_) _Whale-ships, generally
on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange
visits by boats crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on
board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other._
There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the
captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern
sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
steers himself with a pretty little milliners 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
boats 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 worlds 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 sayto seize hold of the nearest oarsmans
hair, and hold on there like grim death. | 1,019 |
PG15 | 142 | CHAPTER LIV. THE TOWN-HOS 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,[10] 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-Hos story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a
certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called
judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This
latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming
what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated,
never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret
part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It
was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that
ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish
injunctions of secresy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his
sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened
he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an
influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to
the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it
so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among
themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequods 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.
[10] 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 humors sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once
narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one
saints eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden
Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were
on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they
occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.
Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days sail westward
from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according
to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold
than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But
the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good
luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to
quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous,
though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low
down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued
her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy
intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was
the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that
now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the
nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and
repaired.
Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
favored, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,
because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at
them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free;
never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the
whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the
Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the
brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly
provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo. | 1,035 |
PG15 | 144 | Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
world of ourswatery 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 subalterns 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 viceroys 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 Charlemagnes 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, its a lively leak this; hold a cannikin,
one of ye, and lets have a taste. By the Lord, its worth bottling! I
tell ye what, men, old Rads 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; hes 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, Id tell him
to jump overboard and scatter em. Theyre playing the devil with his
estate, I can tell him. But hes 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 hed give a poor devil like me the model
of his nose.
Damn your eyes! whats 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 lifes
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 ships 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 mates
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 beinga
repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when
aggrievedthis nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over
Steelkilt. | 1,193 |
PG15 | 145 | 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 coopers club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near
by.
Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt
could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still
smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained
doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the
hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
his bidding.
Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated
his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had
not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with
his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it
was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the
windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him
that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the
Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
yourself. But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of
his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his
right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his
persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant
the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch
spouting blood like a whale.
Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
mast-heads. They were both Canallers.
Canallers! cried Don Pedro, We have seen many whale-ships in our
harbors, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
they?
Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal.
You must have heard of it.
Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
land, we know but little of your vigorous North.
Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chichas 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. Theres your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of churches.
For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan
freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so
sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.
Is that a friar passing? said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabellas 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 coastCorrupt as Lima.
It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
billiard-tables, and for ever openand 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. | 1,245 |
PG15 | 146 | 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 worlds one Lima. I
had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were
cold and holy as the hills.But the story.
I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the back-stay. Hardly
had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and
the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down
the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the
uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle.
Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted
turmoil ensued; while standing out of harms 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 (Steelkilts) 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:Its not our
fault; we didnt want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was
boys 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; aint those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,
men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to
yourself; say the word; dont be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to
turn to; treat us decently, and were your men; but we wont be
flogged. | 1,140 |
PG15 | 147 | 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, dye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we dont want a row; its
not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we
wont 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 wont lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till
you say the word about not flogging us, we wont do a hands turn.
Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, Ill keep ye there till
yere 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 Lakemans bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain
and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide
of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called
for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock, belonging to the
companion-way. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered
something down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon themten
in numberleaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had
remained neutral.
All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and
aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at
which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after
breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed
in peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the
pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary
night dismally resounded through the ship.
At sunrise the captain went forward, and knocking on the deck,
summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was
then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were
tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it,
the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three
days this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling,
and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered;
and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were
ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet,
united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained
them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain
reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a
terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake himself where he
belonged. On the fifth morning three others of the mutineers bolted up
into the air from the desperate arms below that sought to restrain
them. Only three were left.
Better turn to, now? said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
Shut us up again, will ye! cried Steelkilt.
Oh! certainly, said the Captain and the key clicked.
It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of
seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had
last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as
black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to
the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst
out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with
their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a
handle at each end) run a muck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and
if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For
himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not.
That was the last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met
with no opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were
ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a
surrender. And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first
man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come. But to this
their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself;
particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other,
in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder
would but admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play
of these miscreants must come out. | 1,122 |
PG15 | 150 | Meantime, at the first tap of the boats 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 Radneys 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 porta savage, solitary
placewhere no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremast-men deliberately deserted
among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double
war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.
The ships 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 momentI come in peace. With that he
leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale,
stood face to face with the captain.
Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As
soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike
me!
A pretty scholar, laughed the Lakeman. Adios, Senor! and leaping
into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due
time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck
befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were
providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor
headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former
captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small
native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
right there, again resumed his cruisings.
Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to
give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
destroyed him. * * * *
Are you through? said Don Sebastian, quietly.
I am, Don.
Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
this story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did
you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to
press. | 1,046 |
PG15 | 152 | CHAPTER LV. 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 Saladins, and a helmeted head like St. Georges; 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 whales, 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 whales majestic flukes.
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian
painters portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the
antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guidos picture of Perseus rescuing
Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model
of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the
same scene in his own Perseus Descending, make out one whit better.
The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the
surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on
its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are
rolling, might be taken for the Traitors Gate leading from the Thames
by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of the
old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonahs 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-binders whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a
descending anchoras stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of
many books both old and newthat 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-binders 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 deau, 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 Harriss 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. | 1,126 |
PG15 | 155 | CHAPTER LVI. 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, &c. But I pass
that matter by.
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
Colnetts, Hugginss, Frederick Cuviers, and Beales. In the previous
chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Hugginss is far
better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beales is the best. All
Beales 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
monsters spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single
incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if
from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and
true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden
poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the
swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing
down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical
details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I
could not draw so good a one.
In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his
black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the
Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so
that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there
must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are
pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and
maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent
back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through
the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and
causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh
the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all
raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the
glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the
powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered
fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole
inserted into his spout-hole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
was either practically conversant with his subject, or else
marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the
lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings in Europe,
and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing
commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the
beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great
battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern
Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a
charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that
gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery. | 1,159 |
PG15 | 156 | 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 Englands
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. | 679 |
PG15 | 157 | CHAPTER LVII. 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 mariners
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 sharks 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 sharks 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, Achilless shield; and full of barbaric spirit and
suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert
Durer.
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the
forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much
accuracy.
At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is
sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales
are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some
old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for
weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
intents and purposes so labelled with _Hands off!_ you cannot examine
them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain,
you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against
them in a surf of green surges.
Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is
continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from
some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the
profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be
a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you
wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the
exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point,
else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your
precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery;
like the Solomon islands, which still remain incognita, though once
high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them. | 1,146 |
PG15 | 159 | CHAPTER LVIII. 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.[11]
[11] 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 moments 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, Noahs flood is not yet subsided;
two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and
swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it
is also a fiend to its own offspring; worse than the Persian host who
murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her
own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the
rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of
ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting
like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean
overruns the globe. | 1,136 |
PG15 | 161 | CHAPTER LIX. SQUID
Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling
her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering
masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a
plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
alluring jet would be seen.
But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when
the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid
across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered
together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible
sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening
for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,
and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?
thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod,
the negro yelled outThere! 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; Ahabs in advance, and all
swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with
oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot
where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the
moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous
phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A
vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating
from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as
if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible
face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or
instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,
chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
exclaimedAlmost 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. | 1,137 |
PG15 | 163 | CHAPTER LX. 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 ropes 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 sthetics 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 somebodys 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 safetys 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. | 1,004 |
PG15 | 164 | Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is
taken aft from the tub, and passing round the logger-head there, is
again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise
upon the loom or handle of every mans 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-warpthe
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 habitstrange 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 hangmans 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 disasterssome few of which are casually chronicledof
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 playthis 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. | 965 |
PG15 | 165 | CHAPTER LXI. 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 Pequods crew could hardly resist the spell of
sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean
through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively
ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins,
flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than
those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed
in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in
that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of
my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will,
long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the
seamen at the main and mizen mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at
last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every
swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering
helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the
wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved
me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not
forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like
the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian
hue, glistening in the suns 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 enchanters 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
Stubbs 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 smokers 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.[12]
[12] It will be seen in some other place of what a very light
substance the entire interior of the sperm whales enormous head
consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most
buoyant part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air,
and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such
is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such
the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely
elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a
bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharp-pointed New York pilot-boat. | 1,175 |
PG15 | 166 | Start her, start her, my men! Dont hurry yourselves; take plenty of
timebut start her; start her like thunder-claps, thats 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 boystart
her, all; but keep cool, keep coolcucumbers is the wordeasy,
easyonly start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the
buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boysthats 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 Grenadiers 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 heardStand 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 Stubbs hands, from
which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at
these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemys
sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time
striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
Wet the line! wet the line! cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him
seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed the sea-water
into it.[13] 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 placesstem for sterna
staggering business truly in that rocking commotion.
[13] 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 keelsone cleaving the water, the
other the airas 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 inhaul 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 whales 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. | 1,220 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.