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MD GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 01, 18 October 1851
Copyright 2023 Stef Dunlap <kindrobot@tilde.team>
1. Permissions
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose
with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice
and this permission notice appear in all copies.
2. Warranty
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS
OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER
TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF
THIS SOFTWARE.
3. Moby-Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville
CONTENTS
ETYMOLOGY.
EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
CHAPTER 43. Hark!
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures
of Whaling Scenes.
CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone;
in Mountains; in Stars.
CHAPTER 58. Brit.
CHAPTER 59. Squid.
CHAPTER 60. The Line.
CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over
Him.
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
Epilogue
Original Transcriber’s Notes:
This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS project at
Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg’s archives. The proofreaders of
this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide Library for preserving
the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext was compared with a public domain
hard copy version of the text.
ETYMOLOGY. (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was
ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly
embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He
loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a
whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the
letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you
deliver that which is not true.” —Hackluyt.
“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling;
for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” —Webster’s Dictionary.
“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S.
Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.” —Richardson’s Dictionary. חו, Hebrew.
ϰητος, Greek. CETUS, Latin. WHŒL, Anglo-Saxon. HVALT, Danish. WAL,
Dutch. HWAL, Swedish. HVALUR, Icelandic. WHALE, English. BALEINE,
French. BALLENA, Spanish. PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee. PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE,
Erromangoan.
EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor
devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and
street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he
could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must
not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements,
however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from
it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here
appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a
glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever
warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one
sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon
tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not
altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more
pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go
thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye!
But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for
your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens,
and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your
coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike
unsplinterable glasses! EXTRACTS.
“And God created great whales.” —Genesis.
“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be
hoary.” —Job.
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” —Jonah.
“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
therein.” —Psalms.
“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish
Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he
shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” —Isaiah.
“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s mouth,
be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great
swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.” —Holland’s
Plutarch’s Morals.
“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among which
the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in length as four
acres or arpens of land.” —Holland’s Pliny.
“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a great many
Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former, one was of a
most monstrous size.... This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on
all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam.” —Tooke’s Lucian. “The
True History.”
“He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales, which had
bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the
king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of which some were
forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six who had
killed sixty in two days.” —Other or Other’s verbal narrative taken down from
his mouth by King Alfred, A.D. 890.
“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the
dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are immediately lost and
swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and there
sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. —Apology for Raimond Sebond.
“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described by
the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” —Rabelais.
“This whale’s liver was two cartloads.” —Stowe’s Annals.
“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.” —Lord
Bacon’s Version of the Psalms.
“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received nothing
certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity of oil
will be extracted out of one whale.” —Ibid. “History of Life and Death.”
“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.” —King
Henry.
“Very like a whale.” —Hamlet.
“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art Mote him availle, but to returne
againe To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart, Dinting his breast, had
bred his restless paine, Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the
maine.” —The 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 Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail He threatens ruin with his
ponderous tail. ... Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears, And on his
back a grove of pikes appears.” —Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands.
“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in
Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” —Opening sentence of Hobbes’s
Leviathan.
“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the
mouth of a whale.” —Pilgrim’s Progress.
“That sea beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that
swim the ocean stream.” —Paradise Lost.
—“There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, in the deep Stretched like a
promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws
in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” —Ibid.
“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming
in them.” —Fuller’s Profane and Holy State.
“So close behind some promontory lie The huge Leviathan to attend their
prey, And give no chance, but swallow in the fry, Which through their
gaping jaws mistake the way.” —Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis.
“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head,
and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground
in twelve or thirteen feet water.” —Thomas Edge’s Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in
Purchas.
“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness
fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on
their shoulders.” —Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll.
“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with
a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon them.”
—Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation.
“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that is a
fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains.... I was told of a
whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of herrings in his belly....
One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that
was white all over.” —A Voyage to Greenland, A.D. 1671. Harris Coll.
“Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one eighty feet
in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was informed), besides a
vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. The jaws of it stand for
a gate in the garden of Pitferren.” —Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross.
“Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Sperma-ceti whale,
for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by any man, such is
his fierceness and swiftness.” —Richard Strafford’s Letter from the Bermudas.
Phil. Trans. A.D. 1668.
“Whales in the sea God’s voice obey.” —N. E. Primer.
“We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those southern seas,
as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the northward of us.”
—Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe, A.D. 1729.
“... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.” —Ulloa’s South
America.
“To fifty chosen sylphs of special note, We trust the important charge, the
petticoat. Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail, Tho’ stuffed
with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.” —Rape of the Lock.
“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that take up
their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in the
comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.” —Goldsmith,
Nat. Hist.
“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like
great whales.” —Goldsmith to Johnson.
“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was found to be
a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then towing ashore. They
seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid
being seen by us.” —Cook’s Voyages.
“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so great dread
of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention even their
names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and some other articles of the
same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and prevent their too near
approach.” —Uno Von Troil’s Letters on Banks’s and Solander’s Voyage to Iceland
in 1772.
“The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce animal, and
requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.” —Thomas Jefferson’s Whale
Memorial to the French minister in 1778.
“And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” —Edmund Burke’s reference in
Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery.
“Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” —Edmund Burke.
(somewhere.)
“A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on the
consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates and robbers,
is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either
thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king.”
—Blackstone.
“Soon to the sport of death the crews repair: Rodmond unerring o’er his
head suspends The barbed steel, and every turn attends.” —Falconer’s
Shipwreck.
“Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires, And rockets blew self
driven, To hang their momentary fire Around the vault of heaven.
“So fire with water to compare, The ocean serves on high, Up-spouted by a
whale in air, To express unwieldy joy.” —Cowper, on the Queen’s Visit to
London.
“Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, with
immense velocity.” —John Hunter’s account of the dissection of a whale. (A small
sized one.)
“The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that
pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whale’s
heart.” —Paley’s Theology.
“The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” —Baron Cuvier.
“In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any till the
first of May, the sea being then covered with them.” —Colnett’s Voyage for the
Purpose of Extending the Spermaceti Whale Fishery.
“In the free element beneath me swam, Floundered and dived, in play, in
chace, in battle, Fishes of every colour, form, and kind; Which language
cannot paint, and mariner Had never seen; from dread Leviathan To insect
millions peopling every wave: Gather’d in shoals immense, like floating
islands, Led by mysterious instincts through that waste And trackless
region, though on every side Assaulted by voracious enemies, Whales,
sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or jaw, With swords, saws, spiral
horns, or hooked fangs.” —Montgomery’s World before the Flood.
“Io! Paean! Io! sing. To the finny people’s king. Not a mightier whale
than this In the vast Atlantic is; Not a fatter fish than he, Flounders
round the Polar Sea.” —Charles Lamb’s Triumph of the Whale.
“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting
and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing to the sea—is a
green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.” —Obed
Macy’s History of Nantucket.
“I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a
Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” —Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales.
“She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed by a
whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.” —Ibid.
“No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he threw up a
pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. He’s a raal
oil-butt, that fellow!” —Cooper’s Pilot.
“The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had
been introduced on the stage there.” —Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe.
“My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been stove by a
whale.” —“Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket, which
was attacked and finally destroyed by a large Sperm Whale in the Pacific Ocean.”
By Owen Chace of Nantucket, first mate of said vessel. New York, 1821.
“A mariner sat in the shrouds one night, The wind was piping free; Now
bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale, And the phospher gleamed in the
wake of the whale, As it floundered in the sea.” —Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
“The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of this
one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles....
“Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which, cracking like
a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.” —Scoresby.
“Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the infuriated Sperm
Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded
jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they
are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly
destroyed.... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the
habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an
animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should
have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and the
most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.” —Thomas Beale’s
History of the Sperm Whale, 1839.
“The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True Whale”
(Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon at either
extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a disposition to employ
these weapons offensively and in manner at once so artful, bold, and
mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the most dangerous to attack of
all the known species of the whale tribe.” —Frederick Debell Bennett’s Whaling
Voyage Round the Globe, 1840.
October 13. “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head. “Where
away?” demanded the captain. “Three points off the lee bow, sir.” “Raise
up your wheel. Steady!” “Steady, sir.” “Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that
whale now?” “Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows!
There she breaches!” “Sing out! sing out every time!” “Ay Ay, sir! There
she blows! there—there—thar she blows—bowes—bo-o-os!” “How far off?” “Two
miles and a half.” “Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands.” —J.
Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruize. 1846.
“The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid transactions
we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket.” —“Narrative of the
Globe Mutiny,” by Lay and Hussey survivors. A.D. 1828.
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the assault for
some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length rushed on the boat;
himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping into the water when they
saw the onset was inevitable.” —Missionary Journal of Tyerman and Bennett.
“Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and peculiar portion
of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine thousand
persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to the National wealth
by the boldest and most persevering industry.” —Report of Daniel Webster’s
Speech in the U. S. Senate, on the application for the Erection of a Breakwater
at Nantucket. 1828.
“The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment.” —“The
Whale and his Captors, or The Whaleman’s Adventures and the Whale’s Biography,
gathered on the Homeward Cruise of the Commodore Preble.” By Rev. Henry T.
Cheever.
“If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will send you to
hell.” —Life of Samuel Comstock (the mutineer), by his brother, William
Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe narrative.
“The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order, if
possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they failed of their
main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.” —McCulloch’s Commercial
Dictionary.
“These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward again;
for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem to have
indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West Passage.” —From
“Something” unpublished.
“It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck by her
near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at the mast-heads,
eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally different air from
those engaged in regular voyage.” —Currents and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex.
“Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect having seen
large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form arches over
gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have been told that
these were the ribs of whales.” —Tales of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean.
“It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales, that the
whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages enrolled among the
crew.” —Newspaper Account of the Taking and Retaking of the Whale-Ship Hobomack.
“It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels (American)
few ever return in the ships on board of which they departed.” —Cruise in a
Whale Boat.
“Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up perpendicularly into
the air. It was the whale.” —Miriam Coffin or the Whale Fisherman.
“The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would manage a
powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied to the root of
his tail.” —A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and Trucks.
“On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female,
slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone’s throw of the
shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech tree extended its branches.”
—Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist.
“‘Stern all!’ exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the distended
jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat, threatening it with
instant destruction;—‘Stern all, for your lives!’” —Wharton the Whale Killer.
“So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold harpooneer is
striking the whale!” —Nantucket Song.
“Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale In his ocean home will be A
giant in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless sea.”
—Whale Song.
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or
no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought
I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I
have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find
myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in
my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my
hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to
prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato
throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing
surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some
time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as
Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left,
the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that
noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous
were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to
Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted
like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of
mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated
upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some
high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep.
But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to
counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green
fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly
bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of
the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice.
No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling
in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from
lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here
they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the
compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost
any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves
you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most
absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his
legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water
there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American
desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a
metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded
for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the
Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a
hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his
meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy
smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping
spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies
thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon
this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed
upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores
on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm
wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract
of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet
of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether
to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian
trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust
healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your
first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration,
when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did
the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity,
and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still
deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp
the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was
drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is
the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow
hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean
to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a
passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have
something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep
of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such
offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is
quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships,
barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I
confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on
ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled,
judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who
will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I
will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis
and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their
huge bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down
into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order
me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May
meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s
sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the
land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if
just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as
a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and
requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and
bear it. But even this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and
sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in
the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks
anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks
in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then,
however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch
me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that
everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a
physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is
passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be
content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me
for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever
heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the
difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is
perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed
upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with
which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so
earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no
account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves
to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and
pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more
prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean
maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his
atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he
breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their
leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect
it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a
merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage;
this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant
surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some
unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my
going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence
that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and
solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill
must have run something like this:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING
VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates,
put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down
for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel
comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly;
yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into
the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various
disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling
me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased
freewill and discriminating judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.
Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild
and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless
perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand
Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men,
perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am
tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden
seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to
perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it
is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges
in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great
flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed
me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless
processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom,
like a snow hill in the air.
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and
started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I
duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I
disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already
sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following
Monday.
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this
same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related
that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no
other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something
about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased
me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the
business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much
behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original—the Tyre of this Carthage;—the
place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from
Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes
to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that
first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
cobblestones—so goes the story—to throw at the whales, in order to discover when
they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?
Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New
Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of
concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very
dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless.
I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and
only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to
myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and
comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the
south—wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear
Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed
Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the
bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there came such fervent rays, that
it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for
everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic
pavement,—rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty
projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were
in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing
one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the
tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get
away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I
went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there,
doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here
and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the
night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but
deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide
building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if
it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did
was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying
particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah?
But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be the
sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within,
pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces
turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was
beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was
about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing
there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign
of ‘The Trap!’
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and
heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over
the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet
of misty spray, and these words underneath—“The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it
is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an
emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time,
looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if
it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the
swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here
was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it
were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that
tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor
Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to
any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging
of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I
possess the only copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou
lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or
whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both
sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought
I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well.
Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity
they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little
lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The
universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a
million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the
curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he
might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet
that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives,
in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a
fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of
their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the
privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the
grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would
he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye
gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of
Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of
the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made
of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks
the tepid tears of orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty
of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what
sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low,
straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of
some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oilpainting so
thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by
which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic
visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way
arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades
and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in
the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.
But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you
at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be
altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black
mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim,
perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy
picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of
indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that
marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea
would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the
unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a
Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.
But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the
picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop;
does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great
leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based
upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the
subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the
half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone
visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is
in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of
monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth
resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was
sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the
new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered
what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with
such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling
lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With
this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill
fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a
corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years
afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the
tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled
full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut through what in
old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round—you
enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous
beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy
you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when
this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low,
shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further
angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right
whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the
whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby
shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of
swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called
him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the
sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true
cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully
tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into
the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge
is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass—the Cape Horn
measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table,
examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the
landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for
answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added,
tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s
blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to
that sort of thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do
so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the
landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly
objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter
a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.
“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be
ready directly.”
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery.
At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife,
stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was
trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I
thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room.
It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it.
Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to
button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our
half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat
and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young
fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most
direful manner.
“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is a
dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but
steaks, and he likes ’em rare.”
“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned”
harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we
should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else
to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried,
“That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a
three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest
news from the Feegees.”
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in
rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and
with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and
their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.
They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered.
No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the
bar—when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out
brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah
mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a
sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long
standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of
an ice-island.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the
arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most
obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed
desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet
upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man
interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon
become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative
is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood
full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I
have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt,
making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of
his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His
voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I
thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in
Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man
slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on
the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being,
it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry of
“Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in
pursuit of him.
It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet
after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had
occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not
sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be
private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown
stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer,
then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why
I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no
more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they
all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover
yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of
sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or
woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of
the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my
decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should
tumble in upon me at midnight—how could I tell from what vile hole he had been
coming?
“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t sleep with him.
I’ll try the bench here.”
“Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and
it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots and notches. “But wait a
bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s plane there in the bar—wait, I say,
and I’ll make ye snug enough.” So saying he procured the plane; and with his old
silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my
bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at
last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was
near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit—the bed was
soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world
could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another
grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went
about his business, and left me in a brown study.
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but
that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other
bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one—so there was
no yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only clear
space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle
down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me
from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all,
especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window,
and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity
of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a march
on him—bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the
most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon second thoughts I
dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped
out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to
knock me down!
Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a
sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after
all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown
harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I’ll
have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows
after all—there’s no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and
going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
“Landlord!” said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep such late
hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily
tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally he’s
an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yes, he’s the bird what catches
the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on
airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head.”
“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling
me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this
harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday
morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it
here, the market’s overstocked.”
“With what?” shouted I.
“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop
spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess
you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”
“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this
unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.
“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”
“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-storm—“landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and
that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can
only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer.
And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me
the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an
uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow—a sort of
connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest
degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night
with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story
about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this
harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you,
sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly,
would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon
for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here
harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the south seas,
where he bought up a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know),
and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night,
cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about
the streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I
stopped him just as he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a
string, for all the airth like a string of inions.”
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the
landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at the same time what
could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the
holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead
idolators?
“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
“He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dreadful late, you
had better be turning flukes—it’s a nice bed; Sal and me slept in that ere bed
the night we were spliced. There’s plenty of room for two to kick about in that
bed; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put
our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling
about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near
breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll
give ye a glim in a jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a candle and held it
towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a
clock in the corner, he exclaimed “I vum it’s Sunday—you won’t see that
harpooneer to-night; he’s come to anchor somewhere—come along then; do come;
won’t ye come?”
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered
into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious
bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.
“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did
double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make yourself comfortable
now, and good night to ye.” I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had
disappeared.
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most
elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the
room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture
belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered
fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging
to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one
corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no
doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone
fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the
head of the bed.
But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and
felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some
satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large
door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the
stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in
the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could
it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade
the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it,
and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I
thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it
of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I
never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that
I gave myself a kink in the neck.
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the
bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle
of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my
shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and
remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer’s not coming home at all
that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my
pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and
commended myself to the care of heaven.
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no
telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At
last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing
towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a
glimmer of light come into the room from under the door.
Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler.
But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to.
Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other,
the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his
candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working
away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the
room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time
while employed in unlacing the bag’s mouth. This accomplished, however, he
turned round—when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark,
purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking
squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a
fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that
moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they
could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They
were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but
soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white
man—a whaleman too—who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them.
I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must
have met with a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s
only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to
make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about,
and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be
nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s
tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the
South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon
the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,
this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having
opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of
tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old
chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head—a ghastly
thing enough—and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat—a new
beaver hat—when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no hair
on his head—none to speak of at least—nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up
on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a
mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have
bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.
Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was
the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling
purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of
fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I
confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had
thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him
that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory
answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest
and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same
squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he
seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped from it with a
sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of
dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite
plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a
whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to
think of it. A peddler of heads too—perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He
might take a fancy to mine—heavens! look at that tomahawk!
But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something
that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be
a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had
previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a
curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour
of a three days’ old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I
almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar
manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good
deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol,
which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty
fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little
hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and
all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a
very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at
ease meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double
handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before
the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from
the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after
many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers
(whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing
out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite
offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such
dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics were
accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be
praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during
which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner. At last
extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it
again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead
woodcock.
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now
exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping
into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was
put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been bound.
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up
his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then
holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great
clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and this
wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out,
I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began
feeling me.
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the
wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and
let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me
at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.
“Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.” And so
saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.
“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin!
Angels! save me!”
“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the
cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot
tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank
heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand, and
leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t harm a
hair of your head.”
“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me that that infernal
harpooneer was a cannibal?”
“I thought ye know’d it;—didn’t I tell ye, he was a peddlin’ heads around
town?—but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here—you sabbee me,
I sabbee—you this man sleepe you—you sabbee?”
“Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in
bed.
“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the
clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind
and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he
was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have
been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he
has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep
with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever
you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him.
But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s dangerous. Besides,
I ain’t insured.”
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me
to get into bed—rolling over to one side as much as to say—“I won’t touch a leg
of ye.”
“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me
in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been
his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured
squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an
interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one
precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in
sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this
same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same
patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I
could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it
was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was
hugging me.
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, I
well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a
reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I
had been cutting up some caper or other—I think it was trying to crawl up the
chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother
who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed
supperless,—my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me
off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,
the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was
no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor,
undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter
sigh got between the sheets.
I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I
could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached
to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a
great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over
the house. I felt worse and worse—at last I got up, dressed, and softly going
down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself
at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good slippering
for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an
unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of
stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there
broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from
the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled
nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened
my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness.
Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen,
and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My
arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or
phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For
what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears,
not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it
one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this
consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I
shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I
lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very
hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural
hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I
experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at
length all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed
reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I
tried to move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he
still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now
strove to rouse him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled
over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a
slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping
by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle,
truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal
and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!—in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length,
by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the
unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I
succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook
himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,
stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not
altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of
knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay
quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly
observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching
the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the
fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to
understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to
dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg,
under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is,
these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is
marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to
Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I
was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his
toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding.
Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don’t see every day, he and his ways were
well worth unusual regarding.
He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the
by, and then—still minus his trowsers—he hunted up his boots. What under the
heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush
himself—boots in hand, and hat on—under the bed; when, from sundry violent
gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though
by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private
when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the
transition stage—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education
was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small
degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at
all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of
getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with his hat very much
dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began creaking and limping about the
room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled
cowhide ones—probably not made to order either—rather pinched and tormented him
at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.
Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street
being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and
observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about
with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to
accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as
soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time
in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my
amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms,
and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on
the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his
face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he
takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock,
unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit
of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of
his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers’s best cutlery with a
vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know
of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the
long straight edges are always kept.
The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the
room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like
a marshal’s baton.
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning
landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been
skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow.
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good
thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford
stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him
cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has
anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than
you perhaps think for.
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night
previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all
whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters,
and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown
and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing
monkey jackets for morning gowns.
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young
fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to
smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian
voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of
satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn,
but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But
who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed
like the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates,
zone by zone.
“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to
breakfast.
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in
manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great
New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they
possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere crossing of
Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary
walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of
poor Mungo’s performances—this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best
mode of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of
thing is to be had anywhere.
These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we
were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories
about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound
silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of
sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great
whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without
winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same
calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as
though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green
Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!
But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the head of the table,
too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his
breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing
his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony;
reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and
grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by
him, and every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly
is to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee
and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.
Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest into the public
room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and
smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an
individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town,
that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the
streets of New Bedford.
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer
to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway
and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the
affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at
Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New
Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you
see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street
corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.
It makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and
Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded
reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly
more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and
New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are
mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek
to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green
Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours
old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes
another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a downright
bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin
gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes
it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great
whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the
seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats;
straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those
straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and
all, down the throat of the tempest.
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place.
Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have
been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her
back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is
perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil,
true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do
not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs.
Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like
houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they?
how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and
your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens
came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were
harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander
perform a feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters,
and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New
Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil
in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti
candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of
green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful
horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright
cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of
New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse
rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses
only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as
sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye
cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk,
their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing
nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody
fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a
Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special
errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.
Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my
way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered congregation
of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only
broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed
purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and
incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands
of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black
borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran
something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:—
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost
overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836. THIS
TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER
CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats’ crews OF THE SHIP
ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the
PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is here placed by their surviving
SHIPMATES.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his
boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, 1833. THIS
TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near
the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected
by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous
curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed
to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and,
therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of
the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the
congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the
fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not
the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were
assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets
sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers
can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in
bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which
cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids
and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and
refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a
grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is
that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though
containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who
yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a
word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies
of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures
upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless
trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that
we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are
dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the
dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.
All these things are not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts
she gathers her most vital hope.
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket
voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that
darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes,
Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful
inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat
will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of
whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what
then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks
that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that
in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun
through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks
my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take
it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a
stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself
cannot.
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness
entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a
quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested
that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple,
so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite. He had been
a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated
his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the
hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into
a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there
shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure peeping
forth even beneath February’s snow. No one having previously heard his history,
could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest,
because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable
to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that he
carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his
tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket
seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had
absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung
up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he
quietly approached the pulpit.
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular
stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously
contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had
acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs,
substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship
from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a
handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself
nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance,
considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste.
Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping
the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and
then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand,
mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with
swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that
at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the pulpit, it had not
escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these joints in the present
instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after
gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit,
deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited
within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.
I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father
Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could
not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. No,
thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, it must
symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical
isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward
worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the
word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing
stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the
walls.
But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from
the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand
of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was adorned with a large painting
representing a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of
black rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling
clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an
angel’s face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the
Victory’s plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say,
“beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is
breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at hand.”
Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had
achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a
ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll
work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost
part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it
is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the
earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first
invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and
not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the
scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away to
larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still
slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on
the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown
hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply
devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a
ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the
following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst
forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
“The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While
all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom.
“I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which
none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to despair.
“In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints— No more the whale did me confine.
“With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet
bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.
“My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the
glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.”
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of
the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of
the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said:
“Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah—‘And God
had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’”
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the
smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the
soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this
prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How
billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound
with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the
sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches?
Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a
lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us
all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened
fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance
and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai
was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that
command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things
that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he
oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must
disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness
of obeying God consists.
“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by
seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into
countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth. He
skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish.
There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish
could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of
learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water,
from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the
Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates,
is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or
Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the
Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee
world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all
scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among
the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered,
self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah,
on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a
deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or
carpet-bag,—no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last,
after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items
of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the
sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s
evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence;
in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the
mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way, one
whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or, “Joe, do you mark him;
he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in
old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs
to read the bill that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship
is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide,
and containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to
the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to
lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his
boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess
himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of
it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let
him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his
papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless question mangles
Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. ‘I seek a
passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy
Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no
sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We
sail with the next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently
eyeing him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon enough for any honest man that goes a
passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s another stab. But he swiftly calls away the
Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage money how
much is that?—I’ll pay now.’ For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it
were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid the fare
thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of
meaning.
“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any,
but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates,
sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue,
if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test
the length of Jonah’s purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the
usual sum; and it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a
fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear
with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still
molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any
way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. ‘Point out my
state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou
lookest like it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and would
lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling
there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the
doors of convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed
and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little
state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah
gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship’s water-line,
Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale
shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels’ wards.
“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in
Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of
the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still
maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth,
infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among
which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his
tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds
no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and
more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my
conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards, so it burns; but the
chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’
“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling,
but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse
but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that
miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for
annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he
feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for
conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore
wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning
down to sleep.
“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the
deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea.
That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was
Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm
comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands
to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the
wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with
trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps
his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling
timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which
even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah
was gone down into the sides of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken
it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in
his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled from his lethargy
by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck,
grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon
by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into
the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the
mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon
shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead,
aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat
downward again towards the tormented deep.
“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing
attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more
and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the
truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots,
to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s;
that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions. ‘What is
thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my
shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is,
and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but
likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited
answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath
made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear
the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession;
whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For
when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the
darkness of his deserts,—when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and
cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest
was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save
the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand
raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of
Jonah.
“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when
instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as
Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down
in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the
moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale
shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then
Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and
learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for
direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all
his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his
pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here,
shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but
grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is
shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates,
I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him
before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to
repent of it like Jonah.”
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm
without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s
sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a
ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the
thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from
his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was
strange to them.
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the
Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the
moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an
aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:
“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I
have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to
all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater
sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit
on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of
you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a
pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true
things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a
wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his
mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But
God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him
in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift
slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths
sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his
head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the
reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of hell’—when the whale grounded upon the
ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when
he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and
blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant
sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry
land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and
beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the
ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach
the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living
God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to
him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!
Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name
is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not
dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were
salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching
to others is himself a castaway!”
He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to
them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly
enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a
sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is
deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a
far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of
this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose
strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and
kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes
of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges
no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight
is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob
can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and
deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die.
I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this
is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out
the lifetime of his God?”
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his
hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was
left alone in the place.
CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite
alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was
sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in
one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of his; peering
hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose,
meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the
table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the
pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page—as I fancied—stopping a
moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn
gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the next fifty;
seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more
than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found
together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously
marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something
in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all
his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart;
and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a
spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a
certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not
altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a
creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was
drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it
otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head
was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me
of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the
same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were
likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top.
Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking
out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled
himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with
counting the pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been
sleeping together the night previous, and especially considering the
affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I
thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings;
at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing;
their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had
noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no
desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty
singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it.
Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn,
that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange
to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at
his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship;
always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no
doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be
true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so
striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a
philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken
his digester.”
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage
when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be
looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and
peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn
swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No
more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish
world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference
speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland
deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself
mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled
most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan
friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I
drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to
talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but
presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to
ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought
he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the
purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it.
Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we
could about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I
proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly
offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his,
and keeping it regularly passing between us.
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast,
this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He
seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our
smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the
waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s
phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should
be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too
premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old
rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together.
He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet,
and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then
spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal
portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to
remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let
them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and
removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a
moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose
now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all
included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood?
Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what
is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do
to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I
wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular
Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his;
ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the
innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before
him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to
bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to
sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom
of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old
times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and
Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg
now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then
drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at
last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us
altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet
some way down the future.
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to
grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the
clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four
knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our
kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was
so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no
fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is
not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter
yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then
you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in
the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why
then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and
unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be
furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.
For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket
between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie
like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I
thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by
night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut,
in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man
can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness
were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial
to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant
and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the
unilluminated twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion.
Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong
desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I
had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before,
yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.
For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed,
because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt
unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the
condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a
real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue
hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant
scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear
his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at
the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent
disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now
enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I
give.
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It
is not down in any map; true places never are.
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass
clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then,
in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of
Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King;
his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the
wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in
his untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to
Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his
suit; and not all the King his father’s influence could prevail. But Queequeg
vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he
knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a
coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets
that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these
thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand;
and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side;
with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the
chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt
there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over
his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not.
Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom,
the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But
this fine young savage—this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain’s cabin.
They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar
Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no
seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his
untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound
desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still
happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But,
alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be
both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens.
Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and
then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place
also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all
meridians; I’ll die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore
their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about
him, though now some time from home.
By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a
coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very
old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he
was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending
the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by,
he said, he would return,—as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the
nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four
oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a
sceptre now.
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements.
He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that
whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of
Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to
embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the
same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in
short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the
Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the
affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as
such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly
ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as
known to merchant seamen.
His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me,
pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over
from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a
block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my comrade’s money.
The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the
sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg—especially as
Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me
concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to “the
Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were
going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much—for they were used to
seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—but at seeing him and me upon such
confidential terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by
turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon
barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a
particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well
tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In
short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers’ meadows
armed with their own scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them—even so,
Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the
first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his
ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his
boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though in truth he was
entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg
puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and
marches up the wharf. “Why,” said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better than
that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?”
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it
seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts
into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms
the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a
certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all
accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this
commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young
princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at
the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post
of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest
and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said,—for those people
have their grace as well as we—though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at
such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the
ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said,
the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that
is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the
blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting
the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain
precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own house—the
Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;—taking it I suppose
for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our
people laugh?”
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose
in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear,
cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her
wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely
moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with
blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new
cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only
begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever
and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly
effort.
Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss
tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I
snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway
all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to
admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky
nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew;
and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her
bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every
ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in
land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the
plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of
the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings
should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified
than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who,
by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all
verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his
back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the
brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost miraculous dexterity and
strength, sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern
in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while
Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to
me for a puff.
“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer; “Capting,
Capting, here’s the devil.”
“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to
Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? Don’t you know you might have
killed that chap?”
“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing to the
still shivering greenhorn.
“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so
small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!”
“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any
more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his
own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet,
and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping
the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so
roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt
snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left,
and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on
the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed
capable of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing
the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of
this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the
path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and
then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over
his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe.
The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the
stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long
living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,
throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his
brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious
fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting
himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant’s glance
around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and
disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out,
and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The
poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain
begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till
poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all
deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for
water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry
clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing
those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock
world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.”
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine
run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world
it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone
lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a
background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a
substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have
to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada
thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an
oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the
true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to
get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis,
three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes,
something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about,
every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that
to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as
to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is
no Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the
red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New
England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament
the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They
resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a
perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory
casket,—the poor little Indian’s skeleton.
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the
sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown
bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off
in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the
sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations
round it; peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans
declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,
clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are
more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their
ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many
Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans,
as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile
Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their
blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the
Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other
seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension
bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though
following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other
fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from
the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the
sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing
it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business,
which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions
in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among
the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows
not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world,
more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that
at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at
nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him
to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to anchor, and
Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least
none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us
to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the
proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had
assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In
short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck
at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow
warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard,
and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to
the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was:
these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at
the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first point of
departure—must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter
Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a
little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to
inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears, swung from
the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The
horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old
top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to
such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with
a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two
remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s
ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! and a
pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints
touching Tophet?
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow
hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp
swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk
scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.
“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey
entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires
for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the
present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with
the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said—“Clam or
Cod?”
“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
“Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
“A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?” says I,
“but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain’t it,
Mrs. Hussey?”
But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt, who
was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word
“clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and
bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared.
“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on
one clam?”
However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently
cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery
was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of
small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship
biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with
butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being
sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite
fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we
despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking
me of Mrs. Hussey’s clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little
experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great
emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth
again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was
placed before us.
We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to
myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s that
stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? “But look, Queequeg, ain’t that
a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your harpoon?”
Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for
the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder
for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming
through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs.
Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his
account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the
milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to
take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s
brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each
foot in a cod’s decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.
Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning
the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs,
the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon
in her chambers. “Why not?” said I; “every true whaleman sleeps with his
harpoon—but why not?” “Because it’s dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young
Stiggs coming from that unfort’nt v’y’ge of his, when he was gone four years and
a half, with only three barrels of ile, was found dead in my first floor back,
with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich
dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg” (for she had
learned his name), “I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till
morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?”
“Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.”
CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no small
concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been diligently
consulting Yojo—the name of his black little god—and Yojo had told him two or
three times over, and strongly insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our
going together among the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our
craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the
ship should rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and,
in order to do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself,
I, Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had
turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the
present irrespective of Queequeg.
I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast of
things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good sort of
god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all cases did not
succeed in his benevolent designs.
Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection of our
craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied upon
Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and our
fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg,
I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business
with a determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle
that trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with
Yojo in our little bedroom—for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or
Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that
day; how it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it
several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles—leaving
Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his
sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After much
prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three
ships up for three-years’ voyages—The Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod.
Devil-Dam, I do not know the origin of; Tit-bit is obvious; Pequod, you will no
doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now
extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her,
hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked
around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;—square-toed
luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take
my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old
Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an
old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in
the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was
darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.
Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of
Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood
stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks
were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury
Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added
new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than
half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate,
before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one
of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term of his
chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all
over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything
except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like
any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory.
She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in
the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were
garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale,
inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those
thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over
sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she
sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from
the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by
that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery
steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All
noble things are touched with that.
Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in
order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw nobody;
but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched
a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary erection used in port.
It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge
slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of
the right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these
slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united
in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the
top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A triangular opening faced
towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view
forward.
And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his
aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship’s work
suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command. He was seated on
an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving; and the
bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of
which the wigwam was constructed.
There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the
elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily
rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there was a fine
and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his
eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and
always looking to windward;—for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become
pursed together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
“Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door of the tent.
“Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?” he
demanded.
“I was thinking of shipping.”
“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer—ever been in a stove boat?”
“No, Sir, I never have.”
“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been several voyages
in the merchant service, and I think that—”
“Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?—I’ll
take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant service
to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud
of having served in those marchant ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want
to go a whaling, eh?—it looks a little suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a
pirate, hast thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of
murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these
half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish
Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all
aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.
“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping
ye.”
“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”
“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
“I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.”
“Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to, young man. It
belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage,
and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents.
But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou
tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself
to it, past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find
that he has only one leg.”
“What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?”
“Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up,
crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!—ah, ah!”
I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the
hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, “What
you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know there was any
peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have inferred
as much from the simple fact of the accident.”
“Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou dost not
talk shark a bit. Sure, ye’ve been to sea before now; sure of that?”
“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the
merchant—”
“Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service—don’t
aggravate me—I won’t have it. But let us understand each other. I have given
thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel inclined for it?”
“I do, sir.”
“Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat,
and then jump after it? Answer, quick!”
“I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid
of, that is; which I don’t take to be the fact.”
“Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by
experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world?
Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step forward there, and
take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see
there.”
For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing
exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all
his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand.
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship
swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards
the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and
forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.
“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did ye see?”
“Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and
there’s a squall coming up, I think.”
“Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round
Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where you stand?”
I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the Pequod
was as good a ship as any—I thought the best—and all this I now repeated to
Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness to ship me.
“And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added—“come along with
ye.” And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising
figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one
of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case
in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless
children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a
foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their
money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state
stocks bringing in good interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the
island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its
inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the
Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and
heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all
sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a
vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names—a
singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood naturally imbibing the
stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious,
daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with
these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these
things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain
and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long
night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here
at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all
nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and
confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a
whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor
will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or
other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at
the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a
certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is
but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite
another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from
another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But
unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things,
and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all
trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the
strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and
the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn—all that had
not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one
angle of his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of
common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from
conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had
illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human
bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of
leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious
Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did
not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the
sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this
practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little
cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad
shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain,
and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his
adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of
sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his
well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old
hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in
Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the
old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried
ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially
for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never
used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate
quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a
chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel
completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer or a marling-spike,
and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and
idleness perished before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his
utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no
superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn
nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I followed
Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks was small; and
there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and
this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were
stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on
nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.
“Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying
those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge. How
far ye got, Bildad?”
As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, Bildad,
without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing me,
glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
“He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to ship.”
“Dost thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
“I dost,” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
“What do ye think of him, Bildad?” said Peleg.
“He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book
in a mumbling tone quite audible.
I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his
friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only
looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest, and drawing forth the
ship’s articles, placed pen and ink before him, and seated himself at a little
table. I began to think it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I
would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already aware that in the
whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain,
received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were
proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of
the ship’s company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own
lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could
steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had
heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the
clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And
though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better
than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the
clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years’ beef and board,
for which I would not have to pay one stiver.
It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
fortune—and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never
take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to
board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder
Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair
thing, but would not have been surprised had I been offered the 200th,
considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.
But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about receiving a
generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard something of both
Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad; how that they being the
principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the other and more inconsiderable
and scattered owners, left nearly the whole management of the ship’s affairs to
these two. And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty
deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the
Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own
fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife,
old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested
party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to
himself out of his book, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where
moth—”
“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay shall we
give this young man?”
“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘where moth and rust do corrupt,
but lay—’”
Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventy-seventh!
Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, shall not lay up many lays
here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that,
indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a
landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred
and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth
of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part
of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold
doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want to swindle this
young man! he must have more than that.”
“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting his
eyes; and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also.”
“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do ye hear
that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”
Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, “Captain
Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to
the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans, many of them—and that if we
too abundantly reward the labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread
from those widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay,
Captain Peleg.”
“Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. “Blast
ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore
now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the
largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.”
“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be drawing ten inches
of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man,
Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one; and will
in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.”
“Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye insult
me. It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he’s bound to
hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start my soul-bolts,
but I’ll—I’ll—yes, I’ll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out
of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured son of a wooden gun—a straight wake with
ye!”
As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous
oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and responsible
owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all idea of sailing in a
vessel so questionably owned and temporarily commanded, I stepped aside from the
door to give egress to Bildad, who, I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish
from before the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down
again on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest
intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways.
As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in
him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a little as if still
nervously agitated. “Whew!” he whistled at last—“the squall’s gone off to
leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that
pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone. That’s he; thank ye,
Bildad. Now then, my young man, Ishmael’s thy name, didn’t ye say? Well then,
down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth lay.”
“Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to ship too—shall I
bring him down to-morrow?”
“To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at him.”
“What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he
had again been burying himself.
“Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he ever whaled it
any?” turning to me.
“Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.”
“Well, bring him along then.”
And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had done
a good morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that Yojo had
provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.
But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain with
whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many cases, a
whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all her crew on board, ere
the captain makes himself visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes
these voyages are so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly
brief, that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of that
sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to
the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a
look at him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back
I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
“And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art
shipped.”
“Yes, but I should like to see him.”
“But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly what’s
the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and
yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any
how, young man, he won’t always see me, so I don’t suppose he will thee. He’s a
queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well
enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab;
doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye,
be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as
’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery
lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and
the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he
ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a
crowned king!”
“And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not
lick his blood?”
“Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance in his eye
that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod.
Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself. ’Twas a foolish,
ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a
twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name
would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee
the same. I wish to warn thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed
with him as mate years ago; I know what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man,
like Bildad, but a swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a good deal
more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on
the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the
sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one
might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that
accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes;
but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee,
young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad
one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have
a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet,
resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold
ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken,
blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally
revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of
painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a
sorrow for him, but for I don’t know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his
leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I
cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I
felt it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at
what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then.
However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the
present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I
did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the
greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how
comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of
ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our
earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow
down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the
inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.
I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and
not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not,
because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now,
certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but
what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed
to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail;
let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans
alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need
mending.
Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must
be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried
to open it, but it was fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I softly through the
key-hole:—all silent. “I say, Queequeg! why don’t you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.”
But all remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him
such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked
through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the
key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of
the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was
surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s
harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our
mounting to the chamber. That’s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the
harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore
he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.
“Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy! I tried
to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I
quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I met—the chamber-maid. “La!
la!” she cried, “I thought something must be the matter. I went to make the bed
after breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s
been just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and
locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma’am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs.
Hussey! apoplexy!”—and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I
following.
Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet in
the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the
castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.
“Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch something
to pry open the door—the axe!—the axe! he’s had a stroke; depend upon it!”—and
so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs.
Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of
her countenance.
“What’s the matter with you, young man?”
“Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it
open!”
“Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to
have one hand free; “look here; are you talking about prying open any of my
doors?”—and with that she seized my arm. “What’s the matter with you? What’s the
matter with you, shipmate?”
In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the whole
case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her nose, she
ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed—“No! I haven’t seen it since I put it
there.” Running to a little closet under the landing of the stairs, she glanced
in, and returning, told me that Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. “He’s killed
himself,” she cried. “It’s unfort’nate Stiggs done over again—there goes another
counterpane—God pity his poor mother!—it will be the ruin of my house. Has the
poor lad a sister? Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter,
and tell him to paint me a sign, with—“no suicides permitted here, and no
smoking in the parlor;”—might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be
merciful to his ghost! What’s that noise there? You, young man, avast there!”
And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the
door.
“I don’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith,
there’s one about a mile from here. But avast!” putting her hand in her
side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, I guess; let’s see.” And with that, she
turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg’s supplemental bolt remained
unwithdrawn within.
“Have to burst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a little, for a
good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing I should not break down
her premises; but I tore from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself
full against the mark.
With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the
wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat
Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of the room;
squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither
one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of
active life.
“Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the matter with you?”
“He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, has he?” said the landlady.
But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like pushing
him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost intolerable, it seemed
so painfully and unnaturally constrained; especially, as in all probability he
had been sitting so for upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his
regular meals.
“Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s alive at all events; so leave us, if you please,
and I will see to this strange affair myself.”
Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to
take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could do—for all my polite
arts and blandishments—he would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even
look at me, nor notice my presence in the slightest way.
I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast
on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so; yes, it’s part of
his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he’ll get up sooner or later, no
doubt. It can’t last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a
year; and I don’t believe it’s very punctual then.
I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long stories
of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it
(that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig, confined to the north of
the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these plum-puddingers
till nearly eleven o’clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by
this time Queequeg must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But
no; there he was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began
to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be
sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a
piece of wood on his head.
“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have some
supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.” But not a word did he
reply.
Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no
doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to turning in, I
took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a
very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some
time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out
the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in
that uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really
wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake
pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of day;
when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had been
screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of sun entered the
window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a cheerful look;
limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again against mine; and said
his Ramadan was over.
Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it
what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person,
because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion
becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine,
makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high
time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get into bed now, and
lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of
the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the present
time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents,
Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark
nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the
obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in
other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very
badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous
Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the
spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be
half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such
melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather
digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and
since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia;
expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; only
upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his father the
king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy had been
killed by about two o’clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very
evening.
“No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the
inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had visited
that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when a great battle had
been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the yard or garden of the
victor; and then, one by one, they were placed in great wooden trenchers, and
garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some
parsley in their mouths, were sent round with the victor’s compliments to all
his friends, just as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.
After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much impression
upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on
that important subject, unless considered from his own point of view; and, in
the second place, he did not more than one third understand me, couch my ideas
simply as I would; and, finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more
about the true religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending
concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a
sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much
profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering
along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying
his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam,
saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing
that he let no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced
their papers.
“What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the bulwarks,
and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
“Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind
Peleg’s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s converted. Son of darkness,”
he added, turning to Queequeg, “art thou at present in communion with any
Christian church?”
“Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational Church.” Here be it
said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be
converted into the churches.
“First Congregational Church,” cried Bildad, “what! that worships in Deacon
Deuteronomy Coleman’s meeting-house?” and so saying, taking out his spectacles,
he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and putting them on
very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks,
took a good long look at Queequeg.
“How long hath he been a member?” he then said, turning to me; “not very long, I
rather guess, young man.”
“No,” said Peleg, “and he hasn’t been baptized right either, or it would have
washed some of that devil’s blue off his face.”
“Do tell, now,” cried Bildad, “is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon
Deuteronomy’s meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord’s
day.”
“I don’t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,” said I; “all I
know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church.
He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.”
“Young man,” said Bildad sternly, “thou art skylarking with me—explain thyself,
thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me.”
Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. “I mean, sir, the same ancient
Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here,
and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us belong; the great and
everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to
that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand
belief; in that we all join hands.”
“Splice, thou mean’st splice hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young man,
you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a
better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy—why Father Mapple himself couldn’t beat it,
and he’s reckoned something. Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the
papers. I say, tell Quohog there—what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step
along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff
that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is,
did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the
bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the
side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some
such way as this:—
“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him
one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right
over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the
glistening tar spot out of sight.
“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye;
why, dad whale dead.”
“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of
the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. “Quick, I say, you
Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog,
in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and
that’s more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.”
So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled
among the same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.
When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing,
he turned to me and said, “I guess, Quohog there don’t know how to write, does
he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?”
But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in
similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied
upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round
figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain Peleg’s
obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like this:—
Quohog. his X mark.
Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at
last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab
coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one entitled “The Latter Day
Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed it in Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping
them and the book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son
of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel
concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan
ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman.
Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind
thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!”
Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language, heterogeneously
mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.
“Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,” cried
Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of
’em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young
Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard;
he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his
plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of
after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.”
“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as I
myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have
the fear of death; how, then, can’st thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou
beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her
three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went
mate with Captain Ahab, did’st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?”
“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and thrusting
his hands far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all of ye. Think of that! When
every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and the Judgment then? What?
With all three masts making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and
every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then?
No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was
thinking of; and how to save all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the
nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”
Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we
followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were
mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a patch, or
save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might have been wasted.
CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the
water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words
were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his massive
forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled in faded
jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A
confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like
the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried
up.
“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little more time
for an uninterrupted look at him.
“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole arm, and then
rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed
finger darted full at the object.
“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
“Anything down there about your souls?”
“About what?”
“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I know
many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are all the better
off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”
“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
“He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other
chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word he.
“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he’s
talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”
“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder yet, have
ye?”
“Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his
manner.
“Captain Ahab.”
“What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
“Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav’n’t seen
him yet, have ye?”
“No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all
right again before long.”
“All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive
sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of
mine will be all right; not before.”
“What do you know about him?”
“What did they tell you about him? Say that!”
“They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s a good
whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”
“That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he gives
an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word with Captain Ahab. But
nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he
lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage
with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh?
Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his
leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them
matters and something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who
knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell
about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh
yes, that every one knows a’most—I mean they know he’s only one leg; and that a
parmacetti took the other off.”
“My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don’t know,
and I don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little damaged in
the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship there, the
Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of his leg.”
“All about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”
“Pretty sure.”
With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger
stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and
said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what’s
signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t
be, after all. Anyhow, it’s all fixed and arranged a’ready; and some sailors or
other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity ’em!
Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m sorry I
stopped ye.”
“Look here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to tell us, out
with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your
game; that’s all I have to say.”
“And it’s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are
just the man for him—the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh!
when ye get there, tell ’em I’ve concluded not to make one of ’em.”
“Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool us. It is the
easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in
him.”
“Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”
“Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this crazy man. But
stop, tell me your name, will you?”
“Elijah.”
Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other’s
fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a
humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred
yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did so, who should
be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him
struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on
with my comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner
that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with
what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled
with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now
begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all
connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the
Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him,
when I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig;
and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy
things.
I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging
us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side
of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without seeming to notice us.
This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced
him in my heart, a humbug.
CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not only
were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on board, and bolts
of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything betokened that the ship’s
preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went
ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad
did all the purchasing and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the
hold and on the rigging were working till long after night-fall.
On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given at all the
inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their chests must be on board
before night, for there was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So
Queequeg and I got down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the
last. But it seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the
ship did not sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be
done, and there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the
Pequod was fully equipped.
Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives and forks,
shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are indispensable to the
business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which necessitates a
three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers,
costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also holds true of
merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as with whalemen. For
besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar
to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at
the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships,
whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially
to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of the
voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and
harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate ship.
At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod
had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron
hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time there was a continual
fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and ends of things, both large and
small.
Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad’s
sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but
withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing
should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one
time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry;
another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his
log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic
back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity—Aunt
Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this
charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand
and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to
all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in
which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.
But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as
she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer
whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all
backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles
needed, and at every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article
upon the paper. Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone
den, roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the
mast-head, and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as
often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come
on board his ship. To these questions they would answer, that he was getting
better and better, and was expected aboard every day; meantime, the two
captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the
vessel for the voyage. If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have
seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way
to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the
absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But
when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already
involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even
from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to
think nothing.
At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly sail.
So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.
CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh
the wharf.
“There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I to
Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come on!”
“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind us,
laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us,
stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering
from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
“Going aboard?”
“Hands off, will you,” said I.
“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”
“Ain’t going aboard, then?”
“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr.
Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?”
“No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly
looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.
“Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going
to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained.”
“Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?”
“He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I, “come on.”
“Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces.
“Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.”
But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder,
said—“Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that ship a while ago?”
Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, “Yes, I
thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.”
“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching my
shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, will ye?
“Find who?”
“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was going
to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all one, all in the family
too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again
very soon, I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.” And with these cracked
words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at
his frantic impudence.
At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound quiet,
not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the hatches were all
on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward to the forecastle, we
found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we went down, and found
only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at
whole length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded
arms. The profoundest slumber slept upon him.
“Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” said I, looking
dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf, Queequeg had
not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would have thought myself to
have been optically deceived in that matter, were it not for Elijah’s otherwise
inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper,
jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body;
telling him to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper’s
rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat
quietly down there.
“Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I.
“Oh! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t hurt him face.”
“Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance then; but how
hard he breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are heavy, it’s
grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he’ll twitch you off
soon. I wonder he don’t wake.”
Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his
tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper,
from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion,
Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of
settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally,
were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to
furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten
lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very
convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are
convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant,
and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in
some damp marshy place.
While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk from me,
he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
“What’s that for, Queequeg?”
“Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”
He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, which, it
seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his soul, when we
were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong vapor now completely
filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort
of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or
twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
“Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
“Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came aboard
last night.”
“What Captain?—Ahab?”
“Who but him indeed?”
I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a
noise on deck.
“Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate, that;
good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.” And so saying he went
on deck, and we followed.
It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the
riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of
the shore people were busy in bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile
Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.
CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers, and
after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the
ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last gift—a
night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for
the steward—after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the
cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:
“Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all
ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh? Well, call all
hands, then. Muster ’em aft here—blast ’em!”
“No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said Bildad, “but
away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.”
How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and
Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if
they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port.
And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he
was in the cabin. But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means
necessary in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea.
Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot’s; and as he
was not yet completely recovered—so they said—therefore, Captain Ahab stayed
below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant service
many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable time after
heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell
merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with
the pilot.
But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was
now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not
Bildad.
“Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at the
main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive ’em aft.”
“Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone
marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty
years, the order to strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to
heaving up the anchor.
“Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next command, and the crew
sprang for the handspikes.
Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the
forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in
addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots of the port—he
being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket
pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other
craft—Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows
for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave
of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a
chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not
three days previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed
on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his
sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth.
Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and swore
astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink the ship
before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and
told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we both ran, in starting on
the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with
the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his
seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my
rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the
act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick.
“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared. “Spring, thou
sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t ye spring, I say, all of
ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there,
Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your
eyes out!” And so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his
leg very freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody.
Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a
short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found
ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in
ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in
the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast
curving icicles depended from the bows.
Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old
craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her,
and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,—
“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green.
So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between.”
Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were full
of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous
Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed
to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal,
that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The
stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging alongside.
It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this
juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to
leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond both
stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were
invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as
old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw;
loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to
him,—poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran
down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck,
and looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded
by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft;
looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically
coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and
holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much
as to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”
As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his
philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too
near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck—now a word below, and
now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about
him,—“Captain Bildad—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there!
Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful, careful!—come,
Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck—luck to ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to
ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye and good luck to ye all—and this day three years I’ll
have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”
“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old Bildad,
almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab
may soon be moving among ye—a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye’ll have
plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates.
Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is
raised full three per cent. within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either.
Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the
sail-needles are in the green locker! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days,
men; but don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts.
Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought.
If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye,
good-bye! Don’t keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it’ll
spoil. Be careful with the butter—twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye,
if—”
“Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with that, Peleg
hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming
gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted
cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner,
encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows
into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but
Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in
mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly
push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to
his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield
no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me
only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably
drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is
pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets,
friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the
land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of
land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through.
With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst
the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s
landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only
friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable
truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to
keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and
earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as
God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously
dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who
would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain?
Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the
spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as
this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a
rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to
convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact,
that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level
with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into
any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the
general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer,
say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials
S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be
deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is
this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of
business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all
manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and
butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world
invariably delights to honor. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness
of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty
generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm
whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even
granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a
whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from
which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea
of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let
me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would
quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into
eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man
compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us
the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the
tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many
shrines, to our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see
what we whalemen are, and have been.
Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why
did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships
from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families
from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and
1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of £1,000,000? And lastly, how
comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded
whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned
by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships
worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our
harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not
something puissant in whaling?
But this is not the half; look again.
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point
out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has
operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate,
than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has
begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in
their sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian
mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a
hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For
many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the
remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and
archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If
American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let
them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally
showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They
may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your
Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of
Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern.
For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked
waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin
wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not
willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea
Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of our heroic
Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to,
these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship’s common log. Ah, the
world! Oh, the world!
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely
any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of
the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who
first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those
colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those
whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the
yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those
parts.
That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the
enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a
Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous;
but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now
mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the
emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of
the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles
of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the
whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in
many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If
that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the
whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the
threshold.
But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no
æsthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to shiver
fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet every time.
The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.
The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the
first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first
narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great,
who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian
whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in
Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no good
blood in their veins.
No good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there.
The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage,
Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long
line of Folgers and harpooneers—all kith and kin to noble Benjamin—this day
darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the
whale is declared “a royal fish.” *
Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand
imposing way.
The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs
given to a Roman general upon his entering the world’s capital, the bones of a
whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous
object in the cymballed procession.*
*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in
whaling.
No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus
is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the
Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime,
has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than
that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime
thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high
hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I
shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to
have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors,
find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the
honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my
Harvard.
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should
wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his
cause—such an advocate, would he not be blameworthy?
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a
certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through.
There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state.
How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s
head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be,
though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they
anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity
of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and
contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that
anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that
man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t
amount to much in his totality.
But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is used at
coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil,
nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be,
but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with
coronation stuff!
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker
by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed
well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked
biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled
ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon
one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid
summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical
superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token
of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily
blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means
ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and
closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a
revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to
come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a
patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all
climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering
images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A
staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of
action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and
fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in
some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly
conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild
watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to
superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations
seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward
portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent
the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his
young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original
ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences
which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so
often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I
will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By
this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was
that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an
utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as careful a man
as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall ere long see what that
word “careful” precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any
other whale hunter.
Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a
thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical
occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling,
courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her
bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering
for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much
persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical
ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and
that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his
own father’s? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of
his brother?
With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which could,
nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it was not in
reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences
and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these things should fail
in latently engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances,
would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as
he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men,
which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot
withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes
menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.
But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement
of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it
is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the
soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves,
fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man,
in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature,
that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw
their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so
far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone;
bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor
can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings
against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the
dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed
investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a
spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from
God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all
democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter
ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the
most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift
himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some
ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then
against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality,
which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in
it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict,
Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered
leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who
didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy
mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly
commons; bear me out in it, O God!
CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to
local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor
valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged
in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a
journeyman joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he
presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner,
and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the
snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the
fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling
tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank
with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the
jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if he
ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt,
like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble
aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when
he obeyed the order, and not sooner.
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing man,
so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave
pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about
that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For,
like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of
his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk
without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned
in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end
of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb
dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe
into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar
disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or
afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless
mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go
about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all
mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
disinfecting agent.
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A short,
stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed
to think that the great leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted
him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them
whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the
many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything
like an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his
poor opinion, the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at
least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant,
unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of
whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years’ voyage
round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a
carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may
be similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch
tight and last long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because,
in form, he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name
in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
battering seas.
Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men. They it
was who by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod’s boats as
headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab would probably
marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these three headsmen were as
captains of companies. Or, being armed with their long keen whaling spears, they
were as a picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of
javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of
old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain
conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly
twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists
between the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet,
that in this place we set down who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what
headsman each of them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for his
squire. But Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory
of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of
red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many
of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic
name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones,
and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but
Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently proclaimed him an
inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest
of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests
of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the
woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the
unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires.
To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have
credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half-believed
this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego
was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage,
with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two
golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk
of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily
shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And
never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan
harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of
men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a
giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks.
There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing
before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell,
this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who
looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod’s company,
be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men
before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born,
though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the
American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant
navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American
Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native
American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously
supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the
Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment
their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the
Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands,
to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they
drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to
make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes
too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each
Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one
keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all
the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in
the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very
many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip—he never did—oh, no! he went
before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall ere long see
him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to
the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his
tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of
Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches, and for
aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the only commanders
of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and
peremptory, that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes,
their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes
not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft
to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague disquietude
touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea, became almost a
perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah’s
diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I
could not have before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as
in other moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that
outlandish prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in
the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though
the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric,
heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my
previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and
rightly ascribed it—to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild
Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was
especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which
was most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce
confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three better,
more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not
readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a
Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her
harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running
away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which
we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable
weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy
enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing
through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity,
that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I
levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality
outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery
from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has
overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one
particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form,
seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s
cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing
right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in
his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled
that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great
tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a
single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off
into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that
mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound,
no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little
or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego’s
senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not
till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it
came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at
sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman
insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of
Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old
sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman
with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously
contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly
laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do
that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to
sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand
which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a
little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon
which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at
sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was
dismasted off Japan,” said the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted
craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of
’em.”
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the
Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an
auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg
steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab
stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There
was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness,
in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he
spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest
gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody
stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the
nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after
that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his
pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck.
As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became
still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home,
nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded.
And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but,
as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he
seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a
passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing
supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or
nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for
that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as
ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant,
holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as
when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry,
misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will
at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted
visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of
that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look,
which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling
through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the
threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing,
perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian
sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately
nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely
pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!
For sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such
seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely
lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the
soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her
crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these
subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has
to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards
will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with
Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that
truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the
planks. “It feels like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to
himself—“for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go
to my grave-dug berth.”
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and
the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope
was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as
by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing
their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to
prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere
long the old man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his
crippled way. Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like
these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his
wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would
have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams
would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him
too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was
measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came
up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that
if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but
there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly
and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory
heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.
“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that fashion?
But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye
sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.—Down, dog, and
kennel!”
Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old
man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I am not used to be
spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir.”
“Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to
avoid some passionate temptation.
“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog,
sir.”
“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I’ll
clear the world of thee!”
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his
aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered
Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s very queer. Stop,
Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go back and strike him,
or—what’s that?—down here on my knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the
thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever did pray. It’s
queer; very queer; and he’s queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he’s about
the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!—his eyes like
powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there’s something on his mind, as sure as there
must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more
than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that
Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s
hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and
the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as
though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess he’s got what some
folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor
a toothache. Well, well; I don’t know what it is, but the Lord keep me from
catching it. He’s full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold
for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should
like to know? Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer,
now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old game—Here goes for a snooze. Damn me,
it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right
asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s about the first thing babies do, and
that’s a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of
’em. But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment;
and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again. But how’s that? didn’t
he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of
jackasses on top of that! He might as well have kicked me, and done with it.
Maybe he did kick me, and I didn’t observe it, I was so taken all aback with his
brow, somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with
me? I don’t stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of
turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though—How?
how? how?—but the only way’s to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in
the morning, I’ll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight.”
CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and
then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent
him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the
binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and
smoked.
In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated,
saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then,
seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it
symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of
Leviathans was Ahab.
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick
and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How now,” he
soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer soothes. Oh,
my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been
unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward
all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying
whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business
have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild
white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine.
I’ll smoke no more—”
He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the
same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched
hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s ivory leg,
well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my
soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a
pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still more
curious, Flask—you know how curious all dreams are—through all this rage that I
was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not
much of an insult, that kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s
not a real leg, only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference between a
living thump and a dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the hand, Flask,
fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living member—that
makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the while,
mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed pyramid—so
confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to
myself, ‘what’s his leg now, but a cane—a whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it
was only a playful cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not a
base kick. Besides,’ thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of it—the foot
part—what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked
me, there’s a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to a point
only.’ But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I was
battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump
on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round. ‘What are you
’bout?’ says he. Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow,
next moment I was over the fright. ‘What am I about?’ says I at last. ‘And what
business is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do you want a
kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his
stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout—what
do you think, I saw?—why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck full of
marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts, ‘I guess I won’t
kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’ said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept muttering
it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he
wasn’t going to stop saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise Stubb,’ I thought I might
as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot
for it, when he roared out, ‘Stop that kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I, ‘what’s the
matter now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye here,’ says he; ‘let’s argue the insult.
Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I—‘right here it was.’
‘Very good,’ says he—‘he used his ivory leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I.
‘Well then,’ says he, ‘wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn’t he kick
with right good will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it?
No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It’s
an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the
greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made
garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab,
and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks
honors; and on no account kick back; for you can’t help yourself, wise Stubb.
Don’t you see that pyramid?’ With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in
some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I
was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?”
“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”
“May be; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab standing
there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing you can do, Flask,
is to let the old man alone; never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa!
What’s that he shouts? Hark!”
“Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
“If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
“What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of something
queer about that, eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man? Look ye—there’s
something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has that that’s
bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way.”
CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its
unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy
hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset
it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough
appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and
allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I
would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the
constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best
and latest authorities have laid down.
“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology,”
says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
“It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to
the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families. * * * Utter
confusion exists among the historians of this animal” (sperm whale), says
Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.” “Impenetrable
veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field strewn with thorns.” “All
these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists.”
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those
lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be
little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with
cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men, small and great, old and
new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale.
Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir
Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi;
Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacépède; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier;
Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne;
the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what
ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts
will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever saw
living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and
whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the Greenland or
right-whale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and
says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale
is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is
an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest
of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the profound
ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the then fabulous or
utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present day still
reigns in all but some few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation
has been every way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions
in the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale,
without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last
come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people
all,—the Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth!
There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm
whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the
attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s; both in their time surgeons to
English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The original
matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily
small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined
to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or
poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales,
his is an unwritten life.
Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive
classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be
filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances
to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise
nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that
very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical
description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to much of any
description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a
systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is
equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s
hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world;
this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this
leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he (the
leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have
swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales
with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some
preliminaries to settle.
First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the
very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a
moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776,
Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own
knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and
herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the
possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.
The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the
waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their
lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis
lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure meritoque.” I submitted all this
to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of
mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set
forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground
that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental
thing settled, the next point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ
from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given you those items. But in brief, they
are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold
blooded.
Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is a
spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted,
that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like
a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last
term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost
any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a
flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the
tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal
position.
By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the
leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by
the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish
hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting,
and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology.
Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host.
*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs
(Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many
naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible
set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and
especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have
presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.
First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS
(subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small
and large.
I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the Grampus;
of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.
FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The Sperm Whale;
II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin-Back Whale; IV. the Hump-backed Whale; V. the
Razor Back Whale; VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm Whale).—This whale, among the English of old
vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed
whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans,
and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest
inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the
most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he
being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. It
is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically considered, it is
absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in
his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained
from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly
supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the one then known in
England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same
spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first
syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment and
medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an
ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the true nature of
spermaceti became known, its original name was still retained by the dealers; no
doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity.
And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from
which this spermaceti was really derived.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER II. (Right Whale).—In one respect this is the most
venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It
yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially
known as “whale oil,” an inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he
is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the
Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right
Whale. There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus
multitudinously baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in the second
species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the
Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baleine Ordinaire of the French
whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more
than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic
seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in the
Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other
parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and
the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand
features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which
to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the
most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become
so repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some
length, with reference to elucidating the sperm whale.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER III. (Fin-Back).—Under this head I reckon a monster
which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been
seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often
descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In
the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right
whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to
olive. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting,
slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin,
from which he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some
three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of
an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest
other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen
plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and
slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and
casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery
circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy
hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The
Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters.
Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the
remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a
tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and
velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan
seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that
style upon his back. From having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is
sometimes included with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated
Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone
whales, there would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are
little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched
whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s names for a
few sorts.
In connection with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is of great
importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in
facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a
clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump,
or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very
obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of
Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his
kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are
things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of
whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other
and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale,
each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same humpbacked
whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the
similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above mentioned.
In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the
case of any one of them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to
defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one
of the whale-naturalists has split.
But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in
his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification.
Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale’s anatomy more
striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is impossible
correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of
the various leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part
as available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What
then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire
liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical
system here adopted; and it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it
alone is practicable. To proceed.
BOOK I. (Folio) CHAPTER IV. (Hump Back).—This whale is often seen on the
northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into
harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the
Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for him does not
sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump though a
smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most
gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white
water generally than any other of them.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. (Razor Back).—Of this whale little is known but his
name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he
eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown
any part of him but his back, which rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I
know little more of him, nor does anybody else.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI. (Sulphur Bottom).—Another retiring gentleman, with
a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some
of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at least I have never seen him
except in the remoter southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to
study his countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of
line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more
that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo).
OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present
may be numbered:—I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III., the Narwhale; IV.,
the Thrasher; V., the Killer.
*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because,
while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order,
nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the
bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does not preserve the shape
of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER I. (Grampus).—Though this fish, whose loud sonorous
breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well
known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But
possessing all the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists
have recognised him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen
to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist.
He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable
in quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is
regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER II. (Black Fish).—I give the popular fishermen’s
names for all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name
happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do
so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called, because blackness is the rule among
almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is
well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are
curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This
whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in
swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more profitably
employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena whale, to keep up
the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment—as some frugal housekeepers, in
the absence of company, and quite alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow
instead of odorous wax. Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales
will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER III. (Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.—Another
instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn
being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some sixteen feet
in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even
attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk,
growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But
it is only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner
something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise
purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not
seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some
sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the
bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer;
for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted
with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove
either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this
one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however that may be—it would
certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets. The
Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn
whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism to be found in almost
every kingdom of animated nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have
gathered that this same sea-unicorn’s horn was in ancient days regarded as the
great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense
prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same
way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally
it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me
that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did
gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as
his bold ship sailed down the Thames; “when Sir Martin returned from that
voyage,” saith Black Letter, “on bended knees he presented to her highness a
prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the
castle at Windsor.” An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended
knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land
beast of the unicorn nature.
The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a milk-white
ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His oil is very
superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He
is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. (Killer).—Of this whale little is precisely known
to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalist. From what I
have seen of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a
grampus. He is very savage—a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great
Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is
worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he
has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the
ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea;
Bonapartes and Sharks included.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER V. (Thrasher).—This gentleman is famous for his tail,
which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts the Folio whale’s
back, and as he swims, he works his passage by flogging him; as some
schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar process. Still less is known
of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.
Thus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins BOOK III. (Duodecimo).
DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The
Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may possibly
seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five feet should be
marshalled among WHALES—a word, which, in the popular sense, always conveys an
idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly
whales, by the terms of my definition of what a whale is—i.e. a spouting fish,
with a horizontal tail.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER 1. (Huzza Porpoise).—This is the common porpoise
found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there are
more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them.
I call him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the
broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd.
Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine
spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They are the
lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you
yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then
heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump
Huzza Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and
delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request
among jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is
good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts.
Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very readily discernible. But the
next time you have a chance, watch him; and you will then see the great Sperm
whale himself in miniature.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. (Algerine Porpoise).—A pirate. Very savage.
He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger than the Huzza
Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to
a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but never yet saw him captured.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER III. (Mealy-mouthed Porpoise).—The largest kind
of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is known. The only
English name, by which he has hitherto been designated, is that of the
fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in
the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza
Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat
and gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises
have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his
mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a
deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship’s hull, called
the “bright waist,” that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two separate
colours, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his head, and
the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just escaped from a
felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much
like that of the common porpoise.
* * * * * *
Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is
the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But
there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an
American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate
them by their fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable
to future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of
the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily
be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo
magnitude:—The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the
Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered
Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale;
etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted
other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I
omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere
sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.
Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at
once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now
leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great
Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the
uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first
architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God
keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but
the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to
set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence
of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other
marine than the whale-fleet.
The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the
fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the
command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the
captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder.
Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent
to Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain’s authority was restricted to
the navigation and general management of the vessel; while over the
whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief
Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the
corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but
his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior
Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain’s more inferior subalterns.
Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a
whaling voyage largely depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only
an important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches
on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the
grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart
from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their
social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the
first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike,
the mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the
American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship. That
is to say, they take their meals in the captain’s cabin, and sleep in a place
indirectly communicating with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all
voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community
of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low, depend for
their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck, together with
their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do
in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen
generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these
whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the
punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially
relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in
which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur
not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage
as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to
that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever exacted,
was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the
shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were
times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to
be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in
terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the
paramount forms and usages of the sea.
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms
and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of
them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to
subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good
degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became
incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual
superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy
over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments,
always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever
keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the
highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more
through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine
Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.
Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political
superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility
they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the
ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the
plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the
tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep
and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as
the one now alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and
shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal
that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore,
all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what
shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived
for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face
from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in
the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of the sun; and is now
mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved
for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete
inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his
menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to
the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,”
disappears into the cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan